Whole—A Sermon on Mark 2:1-12

This sermon is from Cedar Lane (Tullahoma, TN) on January 29, 2017. It's a sermon about the healing of the paralyzed man, ("the Paralytic", as the old translations say). It's part of a sermon series on Mark. The video below is essentially the audio of the sermon with the slides. The manuscript below has been revised by evaluating the transcript of the recording. 

How did you get here?

How did you get here?I want us to stop and reflect on that question for a moment, despite all you smart-alecks who just said to yourselves, "In the car." You know who you are.I want you to think for a second about how you got here, to think about the story that led to you coming to Jesus. What led you to come into this community of faith, or to come to this place in your life? Everybody's got a story.There's an old story in our family a about my great-great-grandfather who when he was a little boy had a head to parents who were ahead Ted serious respiratory illnesses were common back in those generations and they lived over on the east coast and they made the decision, under medical advice to make for their respiratory problems they would make these trips over to over to Texas and they made this journey several times. On one of these my great-great-great-grandmother fell so ill that she did not recover from her sickness and she died and her husband was so struck with grief and his own illness that on the journey back east he just laid in the back of this carriage that was pulled by the two horses.My my great-great-grandfather and his brother, even though they were young boys, were in charge of getting them back home, while their father just laid in the back of the carriage. They asked, "How will we get home? We don't know the way." And he said, "The horses know the way. Let them guide you back." Well, the horses didn't know the way, and so the next five generations of our family lived in North Alabama.Everybody's got a story about how you ended up where you are—that brought you to this moment. The text in Mark that we're looking at opens with a crazy story about how a man came to Jesus. Jesus had been preaching around in the communities around Galilee but he comes back home to Capernaum. When he's there people begin to gather. The house fills up, and there's such a crowd there that it's standing room only all the way out to the door, to the edge of the house.Our story says that there was a man who was paralyzed. We don't get a lot of details about how he came to be like that. Certainly would not have been unusual back in this time for somebody in normal work to suffer terrible injuries. Beyond that, people that have sicknesses and illnesses or birth defects, or for whatever reason their body's broken. The text doesn't really tell us how the man came to be like this, but we know his situation is such that he is paralyzed. He can't walk.Mark says that a group of people bring this paralyzed man to Jesus. Four of them each get a corner of the mat, but it's actually a larger crowd with them. They want to get to the house where Jesus is they can't get inside because it's so crowded in there. They can't find a place among all the people who are already there with Jesus—which is a sad little note in this story.They don't give up, so they climb up on the roof.The carve a little hole in the roof there, and they lower this man down through the roof. Can you imagine it? Jesus is there and all of a sudden the tiles of the ceiling or the thatching or whatever, it starts spreading apart, and you hear the ruckus. Then, all of a sudden, you see some light, and this man is lowered down right there in front of Jesus. What a story about how somebody got to Jesus!Think about the things that brought this man to Jesus. Sicknesses, or injury or whatever it was that caused his paralysis. There's also the the crowd of people. There were the determined friends who were carrying him. Often, that's what it takes, right? How many of you came to Jesus because of the determination of a group of friends, a determined community of people who said, "We're not going to rest until this person gets to Jesus." Sometimes that's what it takes.Some of you came here by way of your own great-great-great grandfather who made a decision about a church, five generations back. Some of you got here because the church served you and your family in some way. Some of you are here because a coworker just kept getting into your ear. That's just the surface of the story—there are all sorts of things at work to bring you to Jesus, to bring you to the place where you could be healed. To the place where you could be whole.

Unexpected

We might imagine the story going on from here something like this: Jesus sees them and he would say say to them "Be healed!", but this story takes a turn that is unexpected. It is a moment that we would not predict. Jesus doesn't look at the man and just give him the healing which he and certainly his friends have sought. Instead, Jesus looks at the man it says that Jesus sees the faith of the ones who have brought him. His faith, too, I'm sure, but Jesus notes "their faith", in the plural. Then, Jesus says to the paralyzed man, "Son your sins are forgiven." He seems pretty content to leave it at that. So what do we have now? We've got a man, still paralyzed, who has received forgiveness—not really the thing that he came for.You know when I think about this story, I think that Mark wants to make it clear that Jesus knows more than we do. Jesus knows more about how the things that are broken got broken.He knows more about what's really wrong, and he sees what really needs to be fixed. Jesus knows more about what it means to be whole for me than I could ever imagine. Jesus knows more about what it means for me to be whole then all those other people who were part of bringing me to Jesus might even imagine.Jesus has a more of a perception about what our brokenness really looks like than we do. We have some understanding of it, but Jesus sees the full scope of it. Jesus gives the man a greater and deeper healing than he even realized he needed.But you just know, it wasn't just about the paralyzed man. Jesus also perceives some other level of brokenness in the crowd as well. I don't really know how that man reacted to Jesus's forgiveness, but the text does tell us how the other people in the crowd reacted. It says that they start muttering to each other, saying things like "Who does this guy think he is? We know that it is only God who can forgive sins so what is this guy saying? That's blasphemy, for him to take on the authority that belongs to God alone—Who does this guy think he is?"When they challenge each other in that way it says "Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these things among themselves." See, it's not just the man that has some kind of hidden unseen bit of brokenness that needs to be healed. Jesus perceived the brokenness in the community too. He sees that these people are more concerned about their standards about the way that people should talk about God than they are about whether this man actually receive forgiveness or not. He perceives that their religious sensibilities are more important to them than the man on the mat. And so, just like he offered the man the forgiveness that he didn't understand he needed, he's also going to offer to this community a word that they didn't come to hear, either. He looks at them and he says

“Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic—“I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.” And he stood up, and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them; so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!” (Mark 2:8-12, NRSV)

You see, there is a multiple healing taking place in this story. There is the man who is paralyzed, made whole by his body. The thing that he actually came for in the first place finally gets done. But it's also the community's perception of God and God's work in the world that's healed as well. Jesus takes their grumbling, stubborn religiosity and he shows them something new. He offers them a way towards something that's a little bit more whole as well. Jesus, who knows more, is able to perceive exactly what it is that I need and what we need as a community. Jesus gives us what we need on the way to being made whole—very rarely according to our time frame or our expectations about the way it should happen—but Jesus does bring us along towards the journey of being made whole.There is so much of what it means to be a follower of Jesus tucked inside of this story. This is a story about what it means to be laid open by Jesus and for Jesus in his own authoritative way brings us towards a complete and full wholeness, beyond what we could have even imagined. This man that comes in the story, he had people in his life that loves him so much that they were willing to do whatever they could to make his body whole again. He had an amazing group of people who were willing to do something outlandish, foolish for his sake. But in Jesus, he meets the one whose expectation about what it means for him to be whole blows their expectations out of the water. Jesus loves us deeper and has a greater vision for the wholeness and fullness of our lives in our humanity than even the people we know in our lives who love us the most. This man comes to Jesus broken in ways that he doesn't even understand, and Jesus makes him whole in a way that he never could have imagined.[bctt tweet="He comes to Jesus broken in ways he can't understand. He's made whole in ways he never imagined." username="stevenhovater"]

A Taste of Grace

This story also shows us that sometimes grace comes to us in stages. A little forgiveness here, a bit of reconciliation there. Until the last day, Jesus is making us whole step by step. None of us have been made fully whole yet, and yet we can say that many of us have already tasted the grace of God. We've received things like having relationships restored back to us that we thought we lost. We've received forgiveness and the relief that it brings. We've received that taste of God's grace that shows us that we are loved. We've received a part of it, but don't we also all carry with us some bit of brokenness left? It's easy for us to believe that all those things define us for who we are. What was the man's name in the story in mark? "Paralyzed man." The only way we know him is by his brokenness. If that sounds harsh, I'd suggest that for many of us that's how we know ourselves, too."I am guy with an anger problem...""I am the woman with chronic pain issues...""I am the man who can't get along with my brother...""I am the woman who carries a deep grudge against my father who's long ago dead...""I am the person whose marriage is falling apart...""I am the person who doesn't seem to be able to hold down a job..."I am broken and for many of us that's how we know ourselves. Jesus perceives us to be something more. Jesus perceives in us our value, our dignity, our life as the children of God—that we are images of the Divine. Jesus sees in us what we are, what we will be when we are whole—he does not know us only by our brokenness. Our brokenness maybe part of our story, it may be part of the way that we come to Jesus. It is not the whole of our identity.[bctt tweet="Our brokenness may be part of the journey but it is never our destination." username="stevenhovater"] Part of what i want you to hear in this story is Jesus's vision for you as a whole person—in this story this man he has no idea what it means for him to coast or thick to go see Jesus but he comes to find out it comes to claim it comes to own it and then he at the end of the story walk away whole in body, whole in soul, in spirit. When the crowd sees it they see the man and they can't help but say alright that's amazing and we've never seen anything like it. The man who was at the beginning of the story just "the paralyzed man" becomes a living, walking, witness to the power of God at work in Jesus—and so are we.This story challenges us on a lot of fronts, but one of the most profound challenges is that it invites us to think about which crowd we are. There's at least three options. There's the first crowd that is willing to do whatever it takes to get a person to Jesus. There is the other crowd that is so stuck on their religious knowledge that they resent Jesus's healing of the man. Then, there is the crowd at the end— which I guess was partly made up of parts of both of the first two— the crowd that seea what Jesus is doing, is amazed, and then is more ready to experience it themselves.If you permit me just a little bit of imagination, I think we can make up an epilogue to this story. The story leaves off with everybody amazed, but I bet we can trace it out a little further. How would you react if you had seen it? How would you react if you had seen it, and knew somebody else who was sick, who was broken? I bet everybody in that crowd that knew somebody at their home who was laying on a mat—I bet they went and found somebody else to help carry them to Jesus.Amen.

The Sending—A Sermon from Matthew 10

As we’ve been walking through Matthew’s story, we’ve walked with Jesus through several episodes that reveal his authority. Jesus teaches with authority and orders around demons with authority. He claims the authority to forgive sins, and  points his finger at the sky and demands that the storm obey him. The people in the story who get it are the ones who understand his authority, and either come to him humbly, needing his authoritative action, or who obey his call to follow. The ones who get it are the lepers and tax collectors, the blind and the lame.  They are the ones who, apparently conscious of their own brokenness, recognize the authority of Jesus to do something about it. We’ve been seeing the story through their eyes, and our attention and focus have been centered on Jesus.And then, here in chapter ten, there is a startling turning point in the gospel. Like a skilled filmmaker who suddenly changes the focus of a lens, bringing what was blurred in the background of the shot into clear focus, Matthew reveals that he is not simply telling the story about Jesus, but about his disciples. They’ve been there the whole time—following Jesus from synagogue to synagogue, town to town, house to house. They’ve been watching him teach, hearing him proclaim the good news of the kingdom of heaven, and then they’ve watched him act out that sermon by healing the sick, casting out demons, and offering forgiveness. They’ve been here the whole time, but always in the background. But now, Matthew twists the lens, and they suddenly jump from the background to the front of the story.It’s one of those moments that makes you go back and rethink the movie. Everything Jesus has been doing now becomes a rehearsal for what he’s calling them to do. Notice what he tells them in verses 7-8: “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” It sounds a lot like what Matthew’s been telling us Jesus did, doesn’t it? It’s a radical turning point in the story—the disciples are not just to watch Jesus or even to merely go on learning from him, but are to go out and replicate his ministry to others. The last few chapters have been a barrage of stories that demonstrate that Jesus has authority—now he gives it away. “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority…”This provokes a new, different kind of faith question. Up until now, all the stories have been about what people believed Jesus could do for them:“Do you believe that I am teaching you the truth?”“Do you believe I can heal your servant?”“Do you believe I can protect you from this storm?”“Do you believe I can forgive you?”It’s a radical turning point in the story—the disciples are not just to watch Jesus or even to merely learn from him, but are to go out and replicate his ministry to others. As somebody in our small group said last week when we read those words, and were imagining what it was like to be sent on that mission by Jesus, “These are life-changing words.” Now, all of a sudden, the question for the disciples is not “What do we believe Jesus can do for us?” but “What what do we believe Jesus will do through us?” That is a tremendous difference.But even while we recognize the difference, it’s important to recognize that even though this is a different kind of question, it’s still a faith question. It’s not a question of what the disciples are capable of in and of themselves. Jesus can’t give them authority unless he truly has it himself. There isn’t even a question of the gospel beginning at this point—this moment depends on their faith in everything that’s happened before this. Matthew doesn’t begin in chapter ten, (and there’s no Acts without Luke). Christian mission is never about what we are capable of or not—it’s about what God is capable of. It exists in the tension between what God is at work doing and what we are at work doing. But both of those work together—God is at work through us.The challenge implicit in all of this is: “Are we ready to be agents of the gospels?” Are we willing to take on the mantle of what Jesus was doing, and take his mission to be our own? Are we content to be recipients of the gospel, or are we ready to become participants of the gospel?That’s an important question in the gospel, one that I think is implicit in this story. And normally, this is the point in the sermon when I would dramatically hold out my hands and ask you to seriously consider that challenge...but not this week. At this point in the gospel, in chapter ten, we’re still not ready for it. This story, where Jesus sends his disciples out to replicate his ministry, is incomplete. Sure, the mission as it is would be enough to keep their hands full, and it’s full of the gospel—but it’s still an incomplete gospel. After all, the story Matthew is telling doesn’t end here, but ends in another sending story, what we call the great commission. Matthew is a tale of two commissions, or two sendings, and what happens between the two is incredibly important.So far, Jesus’s disciples have learned about his power, but they have not yet seen him become powerless. They’ve seen him in strength, but not yet in weakness. Between the two commissions, stands the truth of Jesus’s suffering. Before they can receive the great commission, they have to follow Jesus on the road to the cross—and so do we. Because it’s on that road that we finally can  experience the full gospel of Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection—the gospel that we are called not only to receive, but to participate in.

Hosea and Gomer—A Sermon About the Love of God

When my friends and I used to sit around and talk about women (and the chasing of them), I used to say that I was looking for somebody with three "G"s.  I wanted somebody who was Genuine, Gentle, and Godly. (Kelly and I have often debated whether I have in fact gotten my wish list—I generally think she has a more gentle side than she recognizes herself.) There were two others aspects that, if pressed, I would have admitted pursuing. One is "Gorgeous", although I might not have confessed that because it doesn't sound too spiritual.The final element—and if I'm honest, this was at times the most important element of all—was that I was looking, quite simply, for a woman who would love me. For a while Kelly wasn't sure about that, and eventually, this was not just a peripheral issue, but THE issue. If she did in fact love me, we'd get married. If not, we were probably done. I knew I loved her, but if it didn't go both ways, I just wasn't willing to go any further.I suppose that isn't that uncommon. If you peel back the surface of what we all chase in relationships, it comes to this: we want somebody to love us.  We just want to love someone and be loved back. All the world's tragedy and comedy comes down to this.And so we can only come to Hosea's story with bewilderment. While Hosea's marriage to Gomer was introduced in the first chapter, there it is essentially the context for the children and their prophetic names, in an account told by a third person narrator—"this is what happened to Hosea". In chapter 3, it takes center stage, in a first person account. This is Hosea saying, "This is my story." The first verse is enough for us to start with: "The Lord said to me again, Go, love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods..."God invites Hosea to dive into God's own heart by entering into a relationship which he knows will be unreciprocal. God wants Hosea to love someone—not just marry them, but love them!—in the knowledge that his love will not be returned.You ever been there? Maybe not on purpose, but have you ever found yourself completely in love with someone that just wasn't that into you?That is simply one of the most painful things that can happen to humans—and it happens to most of us at some time or another.What is amazing is that God experiences this in his own heart. This is the most fundamental story we tell about God and his relationship with humans—God loves us, knowing that we often won't love him back. Indeed, this isn't accidental, but God created us with this precise possibility. God created us to live in community with him, but also created us with the possibility that we could choose to walk away from him. We often say that God did this so that our love would be of a certain kind—love freely given is the only kind that really matters, after all.  I suppose there is a good bit of truth in that, but I think that this Hosea story reveals a deeper truth.The metaphor here works not because Gomer is going to love Hosea in a particularly powerful way after her faithlessness, although that is a possibility. Gomer's love simply isn't the point. It's all about Hosea's love—which of course means that it's all about God's love. See, God doesn't just give us freedom only for the sake of making sure that our love is free and thus particularly powerful. Even more, our freedom works to show us the incredible power of God's own love. God's love is a powerful "even though" sort of love that loves despite going unreturned. God loves even when repeatedly rejected.And yet, God's love always pursues us. God relentlessly chases us, desiring to draw us into relationship with him. God desires for us to respond to him, to freely come and join him. His desire in this text is that Israel would—eventually—come to love him, that eventually Israel would seek God out and join him.  He desires the same of us, that as Ephesians says, we may have the power to comprehend the breadth, length, height and depth of God's love for us, and that perceiving that we may be live in the fullness of God, firmly rooted in his love. Radically, we might even take this further. Not only does he desire that we realize his love and return it to him, but God's vision for his people is that we join him in loving the world. Jesus roots his command that we love our enemies in exactly this, that this is how God loves the world. He knows it is different than how the world thinks about love—that's his point!

"You have heard it said, 'you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your father in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect." (Mt 5:43-48)

God loves even when his love is unreturned, and Jesus calls us to learn to love in exactly this way. Do we have the audacity to mimic God's love in our own lives—can we learn to love those who simply do not and will not love us back? Can we stop using our love simply as a tool to gain love back for ourselves? Once, God called the prophet Hosea to put his love—God's love— on display by loving someone who would not love him back—now he calls the church to do the same. We are called to be "Hoseas." Despite the knowledge that it will often be unreturned, we are called to love all—even our enemies. We do it in the hope that such love might communicate the unbelievable, relentless love of God—in the hope that even our enemies may be redeemed by God. And yet, even as we hope for their redemption, we are called to love regardless whether it ever has that effect or not. We are called to become like God, to break away from the limited nature of our natural way of loving. We are called to become, by the working of God's own spirit, capable of loving with God's own love.Thus the story of Hosea is a story of the gospel, that God loves us furiously. But that gospel is never for us alone. As soon as we grasp its meaning for ourselves, we are drawn into living it out for the world around us. We love with God's own love, for the sake of God's own glory.  Amen.

Reversal—A Sermon on Hosea 2

Hosea the prophet lives in a time of false security, when his nation manipulates politics to acquire a sense of independent security, and manipulates religion in an attempt to acquire economic stability. Their political/military life and their worship both lead them away from dependence on God, from faith. For both of these he speaks words of judgment, fiery words which call Israel (and now, the church) to see her sin for what it is, and to learn true repentance.We normally think of repentance as being about the past. We avoid it because we think it means a reliving of our worst mistakes, but nothing could be further than the truth. In repentance we confess and name our sin—not as a way of reliving it, but as a way of moving away from it. Repentance is about freedom from the past. Repentance is a consequence of hope. It grows out of two convictions about the future, convictions which Hosea leads us into by sharing God's mind with us.First, God owns the future. God declares the future through Hosea, not because he has some secret power of prediction, but because the future consists of the actions of God. God does not predict sports scores or the playing cards of a magician's trick, but is simply stating what he intends to do, with the knowledge that he can and will in fact do these things. While humans have plenty to say about what will happen in the mean time, the future—the ultimate future—will be as God wills.  And so, God can declare that Israel will be exposed, that they will be stripped of all that they hold dear, that they will be confronted by the futility of their quests for power, security, and independence from him—not because it's a magical prediction, but because God himself will act to do these things.  "I will strip her naked...I will expose her as in the day she was born...I will make her like a wilderness...I will turn her into a parched land...I will kill her with thirst...I will hedge up her way with thorns and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths...I will take back my grain, my wine, my wool and my flax...I will uncover her shame...I will put an end to her celebrations...I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees..." God can make these announcements because they are his actions. God is free and powerful to act in whatever way he wills. God owns the future.Second, God wants us to share his future. Hosea's word is ultimately one of invitation—God intensely desires for Israel to join him in the future. All of the judgments issued are for this purpose, and point toward the day of its completion, the day when Israel is restored to God. God acts to provoke a repentant response in Israel, so that she will come to freely love him and live in a covenant with God marked by peace, righteousness, justice, love, mercy, and faithfulness.What's remarkable about Hosea is the kind of language that God uses to describe his passionate desire for Israel to have a part in this future. God won't force Israel into repentance, but he will do almost anything else. Besides the prophetic word of warning, God flirts with Israel, gives her gifts, tries taking them away, exposes her other loves as frauds, finally draws her back out into the wilderness—like a husband who takes his wife back to the site of their honeymoon. He speaks softly to her, whispering, "we can just start over."His goal is the day when she responds with repentance, when she sees that he alone truly does own the future and yet offers her a place in it. His goal is a day of dramatic reversal, when all the pronouncements of judgment find their fulfillment—which is not to say, the destruction they foretell. No, Hosea's warnings only find their fulfillment in the repentance they are meant to provoke, whether or not that occurs before or after the impending calamity. His goal is the day when Israel responds with repentance, and all that is wrong can be made right.Hosea plays off of the warnings of chapter 1 to describe he dramatic reversal, flipping each name from its message or warning to one of hope. The stigma of bloodshed that brought about the name "Jezreel" will be replaced by the word's linguistic meaning—"God sows"—and God will plant the people in the land, establishing her with peace and abundance from his own hand, not as a result of her political or religious manipulation. To those whom he gave the name, "no mercy", he will now have mercy, and to those whom he called "not my people", he will again say, "you are my people." The renaming is completed, not by a word from God, but one from the people, as they finally and dramatically will say, "you are my God." God paints the picture of this future, seeking to inspire hope in Israel—for where hope lives, repentance is possible.Repentance happens in the lives of those who understand that God owns the future, and who believe they have a place in God's future. Reading Hosea now, some 2700 years later, and reading it on the other side of Jesus, we know that God has taken a dramatic step to bring about this future. While we wait for the final scene to begin, God has invited us to share in his future...now!God declares that his rule will be over all the earth, and in repentance we begin to live in that future now; we join God now, leaving the past behind and orienting ourselves by a future that redeems the present.And so it is that within these words of warning there is also a seed of hope, the promise of God's willingness to honor repentance, his burning desire to take back what belongs to him and make right what has been broken. I urge you to heed the warning that the future belongs to God, to take on the hope that he has a place for you within it, and to let it that hope bring forth the repentance by which God may enact his reversal.

Names—A Sermon on Hosea 1

At the market, a man picks vegetables, tying to decide between the vegetables. He thumps a melon, scans the cucumbers, and inspects the onions. He notices a cute little girl playing with her brother near his basket and smiles at them. He turns to their parents who are standing nearby and, in the chatty way that people sometimes talk at the market, asks a normal question: "Your kids are beautiful. What are their names?"The parents expression darkens—the mother turns away, finding something else to do. The father's eyes narrow, and he steps closer. Pointing straight at the little girl, he says, "We call her 'unloved'. Unloved." Not knowing how to respond, the man shuffles his feet a bit, and finally says, "And the boy?""Not mine.""Oh, I'm sorry, I thought...""No, that's his name.  His name is 'not-mine.' "Hosea is a shocking story. It does not allow for passive bland reading, and I assure you it does not consist of passive, bland writing. It opens with the story of Hosea's family—a family whose very existence could not but shock literally everyone who met them. The book of Hosea consists mostly prophetic poetry. Not the poetry which many of us have in mind—the dry tedious metered verses we labored to understand as school kids. This is the kind of poetry that Walter Brueggemann describes as "shattering, evocative speech that breaks fixed conclusions and presses us always toward new, dangerous, imaginative possibilities." (Finally Comes the Poet, 6) Hosea is full of wrecking-ball language, the kind that comes to destroy the peace of the present for the sake of the future.The book opens with a narrative, but the story is just as disturbing as the poetry that follows. In fact, we might think of the story as a setting for three brief, super dense poems—the names of the children. After all, even within the story, it's the word—the word from the Lord—that really matters.So in what was already a weird marriage (more on that when we get to chapter 3), three children are born, and given names that are extremely disturbing.It starts off with a son, who Hosea is told to name Jezreel. Hosea is prophesying during the reign of Jeroboam II, somewhere in the middle of the eighth century BC, in the northern Kingdom that we normally just call Israel. In the southern kingdom, which we call Judah, there had been stable dynasty for over two hundred years—the descendants of David. But in the north it had never really been like that. It was a country born out of rebellion, and which had seen it's share over the years. One of the most vicious upheavals had been at the hands of Jeroboam's grandfather Jehu. Granted, the dynasty in power before then (you remember Ahab and Jezebel, right?) had it coming, but when Jehu took up the sword to seize the throne he went above and beyond The site where all this went down was the city "Jezreel". So Hosea names his firstborn son after the site of a famous bloodbath, with a finger pointed straight at the king. "It's your turn, Jeroboam. The same violence that began your family's reign will soon put it too an end.  It's time for another Jezreel."While the historical specificity of the name "jezreel" may protect us from the cold challenge the word contains, our own reactions intensify with the name of the second child.  I mean, seriously, who would name a child "unloved"? The second child's name—"Lo-Ruhamah"—means exactly that.In 1920 a young woman named Josephine Dickenson worked hard to be the best housewife she could be, spending a lot of time on that one task of getting supper ready for her husband, Earle, before he got home from his job as a cotton buyer.  Unfortunately, she was a little accident prone, and was constantly nicking her fingers with knives and getting little burns. Earle's first job when he got home was usually to help her dress the wounds. Finally he decided to come up with a way to make it possible for her to do this by herself before he got home, by rolling out a long strip of adhesive tape and placing little squares of cotton at intervals, so that she could just cut off a piece, wrap it on her fingers, and keep going.  After that proved to be a great solution, he took his idea to his employer, Johnson & Johnson, and so was born the "band-aid".  Sales didn't go too well at first, but WWII picked things up, as did the company's brilliant move in 1951 to start making band-aids with cartoon characters on them. After all, what kid can resist a sticker that comes with compassion?Part of my role as "daddy" is "band-aid dispenser." Now sure, there are times when I just kiss the supposed boo-boo and try to convince the child that it's not that big of a deal, but sometimes, when a kid is just absolutely certain that the wound is a matter of life and death, the best thing to do is to get the band-aid on and give some hugs and kisses, right?And that's just the small stuff. How many of us would refuse to give care to a child—any child, not even our own—if we went outside in this very moment and found one gravely injured? Who among us would just shake our heads and walk away? Who can refuse compassion to a child?That's why the second name is so shocking. "Lo-Ruhamah." The prophetic word means "uncared-for", "unpitied". God, who has always acted with mercy, pity, compassion for Israel since the day he heard their groaning in Egypt, will do so no more.That sense is intensified with the third name, "Lo-Ammi", or "not my people."  Israel's fundamental identity was the covenant people of God, whom God had specially chosen, and called as his people. God's covenant was summed up in the phrase "You shall be my people, and I shall be your God." Now that is reversed—the very identity of the nation is reversed!—and God declares, "you are not my people." This prophetic word disowns the people.That is intensified by a fourth name here, one that is somewhat masked by the translation. In Hosea 1:9 most of the translations read something like "For you are not my people and I am not your God." That's not a bad translation, but it masks some of the punch. What the second part of that sentence says is kind of awkward in Hebrew, but literally reads, "And I am not 'I am' to you." God takes back his own name! God doesn't just put these odd names on the children, but changes his own name here, revokes the name which he had revealed to Moses at the burning bush.  This is the ultimate message of the names—the world you live in is about to be undone. Everything from the seeming security of your monarchy to the relationship you have with God, even the very name which you know God by—all of it is undone by your sin. All of it is coming apart.The names provoke us. Why? What's the big deal? Why all the fuss? The names shock us. The question, "Who would ever name their kid that?" gets our attention so that God can look us in the eyes and speak to us about how serious sin is.And yet, even within these names and their word of judgement there is the seed of grace. Hosea will speak to the people of a repentance that can change the future, so that "Not my people can once again be called simply, "my people", and "unloved" will be called simply "loved". Hosea will offer a word of eventual reversal, when what is wrong will be made right. But don't read ahead to all of that, not just yet anyways. First, let this word of judgment break into your world, and ask yourself, "What is it in my life that needs to be undone." That word of redemption can only be heard once we hear the word of judgment and digest its reality. So today, we'll let that seed of grace wait for its time, and hear this single important word from the Lord—to walk away from him means death. Digest that reality.And then, the God who changes reality can act.

I Just Wanna be a Sheep (Baaaa)—A Sermon on Receiving Shepherding

A couple of years ago a movie was released that I suppose a few have seen, although I have not and hopefully presume that not many of you have either. Indeed, it is astonishing that there was a market at all for Black Sheep. The film is set on a sheep farm in New Zealand, and tells the story of a farm where a bit of genetic engineering goes terribly awry, creating a new breed of—wait for it—Zombie Sheep. Yes, Zombie Sheep. The generally docile creatures turn bloodthirsty, devouring whatever humans they can find, and in true Zombie film fashion, develop the ability to turn some of the bitten farmers into mutant were-sheep—hideous creatures covered with wool, frenzied and ready to join the attacking horde-flock in their quest to devour the remaining humans.This may well be a parable of the church.While much attention continues to be given (appropriately) to training leaders and discussing the evolving model of elderships within churches, but we need to talk more about the other side of the relationship—what we sheep bring to our relationship with our shepherds. Like any relationship, we can't work on only one side of the equation. For our model of shepherding to become truly effective, it can't just be about the shepherds. We have to also develop our sense of what it means to receive shepherding. You can't have good healthy shepherds in a church full of bloodthirsty zombie sheep.Scripture says something really interesting about this in Hebrews 13, which reads "Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls and will give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with sighing—for that would not be beneficial to you." Working on the sheep side of the relationship with shepherds doesn't just make their job more enjoyable for their sake, but it actually helps us, the sheep. When we engage our shepherds and willingly receive the shepherding they offer us, it is to our great advantage, because it creates the possibility of the sort of shepherding relationships we need—shepherds who show us grace, teach us the word, and help us carry our burdens when we are weak.But how can we have shepherds who show grace if we don't have sheep who show vulnerability? How can we have shepherds who teach if we don't have sheep who are eager to learn? How can we have shepherds who help the weak carry their burdens unless we are willing to freely admit our own weaknesses and accept help when it's offered to us?The shepherds don't function in isolation from the body, but function as a part of a body, as an expression of what God is doing in the church as a whole. And the relationship between how the shepherds do their work and how we do ours is one in which the church grows as every piece does its part, as each one of us contributes to the sort of community in which good healthy shepherding naturally happens. The eldership has a role in helping us become the kind of church we need to be, but we must also recognize that the church has a role in helping the elders become the kinds of shepherds they need to be.We need shepherds who help us hear the word, so that we can be formed by it and hear exactly what we need to take the next steps in growth. But to be able to do that, the elders need us to be willing to share with them where we already are in our process of growth. They need us to become candid about where we have grown, where God is working on us now, and where we are struggling in our faith. This is challenging, because we want to pretend that we're all in the same place, that we're all growing in exactly the same way, in exactly the same time—or worse, we want to pretend like we don't need to grow at all.  We treat Christian maturity as if it's an all or nothing deal, as if we come up out of the water as fully formed disciples and there is nothing left to do but just hold on and hope we don't mess up. But in reality, we always need to be fed, we always need to grow.Elders have a teaching role, not just in classes or big public settings, but as a part of their relationship with their sheep, they naturally feed the sheep with insight from the word. I remember hearing Brent say that an important part of his role is to help people in struggle see their situation from a spiritual perspective, to help them see themselves in a way informed by scripture. And we need that, don't we? We need people who can come alongside us to speak to where we're at. But, how can that happen unless we're willing to be honest about where we really are—not just in times of obvious crisis, but in the routine times that make up so much of our lives and where most of our growing takes place.We need shepherds who will walk with us in all of life. Not just because they're elders, but because they are simply part of the church, and that's what church folk do—we walk with each other. We take care of each other, experience life with each other. Like Paul says:

"But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it." -1 Cor 12:24-26

That's for everybody, whether we think of ourselves as leaders or not—the church is built to be a community of people who live life together, and who share the ups and downs of life together. Good pastoral care doesn't happen in a church where the shepherds are the only ones doing it. It happens best in communities that understand that we all—each one of  us—has an obligation to look out for each other. Ken has talked with me about continuing to build a culture of pastoral care in the church where it's not just about the elders, but about all of us pitching in to care for each other. In that culture, the elders are shepherds who lead by example. Shepherds give care to the hurting, but not alone. They lead a community that cares for the hurting among us.And not just in times of struggle! As we walk together, we learn to give God glory for all the different ways he is at work in our lives. Lance wrote to me that one of the things that has most surprised him about being an elder is how he started noticing how the Spirit was at work in so many lives around the church—Not because of anything special about him being and elder, but because he started opening his eyes and noticing more. He wrote, "I am constantly amazed how the Word of God transforms, grows and matures the believer...To increase my awareness of God growing so many members’ spiritual lives has been a surprise I was not expecting." Maybe our shepherds could help us recognize more and more of those ways God is at work—but how will that happen unless we make a commitment to share more of our lives with them, to let them walk with us? How will we recognize God's work in each other unless we're walking with each other?As we developed the process we're using this time to appoint additional elders, Tom reminded us that we needed to build in, from the beginning, some way of gauging the willingness of men to serve. The concept of willingness is critical to the role—we must have willing elders, willing shepherds. First Peter uses that language, that elders should serve willingly, not under compulsion, even eagerly. It's also true on the other end—we must have members who willingly receive shepherding. Willing shepherds, and willing sheep. Willingness may come easily to neither. But that spirit of willingness is at the heart of the church.Remember Mark 10? It was in a discussion of who in the community of disciples would lead and who would be led that Jesus told the disciples that he himself “had come not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” In discussing their willingness to serve each other, Jesus called the disciples to consider his own willingness to walk the way of the cross. To close this morning, I want to call you to do the same: consider Jesus. Is there anything in this sermon that exceeds the cross? In the cross, Jesus becomes the ultimate willing shepherd, and paradoxically, the best example of a willing sheep.In this, as in everything, may we only follow him.

Motherhood and Mystery—A Sermon for Mother's Day

This past week has been an unusual one. Preparing for the sermon has not been about deep exegesis, but deep participation.Kelly, apparently knowing full well that I was unprepared to preach for mother's day—being a man who understands almost nothing about the subject, graciously offered me the opportunity to deepen my understanding while she went to the beach this week. That's right—for nearly a week I've been flying solo with the girls, which is of course a joke you can understand only if you know both me and the girls in question. Indeed, today's short sermon is mostly due to the fact that I have to get home and clean up before she gets back later tonight.Mothers are amazing. It is well and good that today is a day marked off to say thank you to all those mothers out there, the stay at home moms, the working moms, the single moms, the struggling and victorious moms who give so much of themselves to their families, fulfilling the sacrifice of Christ in the most humble and incredible ways. To you all we say, "Thank you. We could not be who we are without your love and sacrifice."The Bible has much to say about motherhood. The story of redemption is full of many stories of women, women who took down and raised up kings, who preserved the people of God and who opened the way for exodus, conquest, and redemption. Along the way, many of these stories (though not all!) are stories of women who worked, wept, and waited for children—women who saw their place in the story of God as being related to their calling as mothers. That's not at all to suggest that this was a single, homogenous sort of work. Indeed, stories such as Sarah, Rebecca, Hannah, Mary, Elizabeth, Bathsheba, Ruth, Jochebed and Zipporah testify to the diversity of paths that may all be called, faithfully, "motherhood". "Motherhood" mysteriously takes many forms, as each person who finds that role to be part of her story works out what it means in her own context, in the face of her own challenges and amidst her own blessings. We do motherhood a disservice when we try to make it take one form. Indeed, no two moms are any more alike than any two sons or daughters. Mothers, be free, not to become just like the other moms you see, but what has called you to be in the life of your family. Learn from the example and wisdom of other women as well as you can, but do not try to become them. God did not give your children to them, but placed them in your care, entrusted them to you. You honor that trust not by simply imitating others, but by seeking out the gifts and blessings that you can uniquely offer your children. That freedom is not license to be irresponsible (this is just my way!) but is an immense challenge, that by struggling, collecting wisdom, and discerning what is right and faithful you can become exactly the mother God created you to be rather than a copy of someone else.God gives us different mothers because we all have different needs and challenges. Some of us struggle to understand boundaries and responsibility, some of us struggle to find our independence. Some children need to be coaxed into hitting the books, some need to be coaxed out of them from time to time. Some of us need more help making friendships, some of us need more help understanding what it means to have boundaries in our relationships. Different mothers do things differently, and part of the challenge in this role—like in many of the things God calls us to— is figuring out what it means to do it as you. what does it mean to take all the things that make you unique and fit them to the unique challenges posed by your situation. Motherhood, as a calling, is intensely personal. But that doesn't mean it's all about you. Rather, if I have one challenge to give you today, it's to learn the mystery that as personal as your calling is, it is not all about you. In fact, in the call to motherhood we can clearly see the challenge of what it means to be called by God to do anything, namely that we must learn to live as though the world does not revolve around us. In accepting any call of God we lay down any claim to our own self-interests, and place ourselves at God's disposal. Hear that well: when I say that motherhood is not about you, I do not mean that it is all about your children, either. Rather, it is all about God. What you want or desire, as well as what your children want or desire, is not as important as participating in God's story and mission.Mothers do well when they teach their kids that the world revolves around neither the mother or the child, but for the sake of God's glory and honor. In motherhood, you participate with God in his work to redeem the world, by teaching your children to hear and follow God. By providing for their needs you can become for them both the means and a symbol of his gracious provision in their life. By your speaking and living what you see in the scriptures, God's word can again become incarnate before your children's eyes, so that faith can take on flesh and become a part of the world made up of car pools and summer walks, the world of crazy schedules and bedtime stories, the world of soccer practice and lost shin guards. Your participation with God makes you a missionary to a world of crayons and swim meets, to the foreign lands of sidewalk chalk and middle school cafeterias.Becoming a mother may not be the only expression of your role in God's mission, but it can be a powerful one, filled with the miracles of supper and found shoes, the hard tasks of homework and the perils of prom. Paul in his shipwrecks was in no place as strange as those corners of the world a mother's minivan takes her on her missionary journeys, and his heartbreak over the Corinthians scarcely matches the tears any mother sheds over the sorrows of the children God places in their hands.Mothers, may God bless your work, not because it is easy or rewarding, but because it is His work, because it is part of His mission, for the sake of His glory.  For your calling to be a mother is not about you, or even your children. It is one place where, mysteriously, we become co-workers with God, his ambassadors of reconciliation. Motherhood is about God, and God's work in the world. You may say about your work as mothers what Paul mysteriously says about his own ministry (2 Cor. 6:1), "As we work together with him...". This is the mystery of life, the mystery of ministry, the mystery of motherhood. It is a partnership with God, something that he gives us to do, but something that he also does with you and through you. In motherhood, you participate in God's work. May we all listen to the call of God, so that wherever he bids us to join him, we may joyfully and faithfully follow, for the sake of his glory.Amen.  

Living Resurrection—A Sermon from Mark 16:1-8

It is John's gospel that tells us that if all the things that Jesus did while on earth were written down, the whole world wouldn't have been able to hold all the books. Nonetheless, God chose to give us four books, not so that we could hear more stories, but so we could learn different things, sometimes from different versions of the same story. The resurrection story is like that. Four different versions of the story each teach us different aspects of what the resurrection means to us.John's gospel, in telling the resurrection story seems to stress, among other things, how the resurrection leads us to believing in Jesus. "These things were written so that you might believe" the gospel tells us about its own mission, and indeed the post-resurrection stories in John certainly highlight the disciples' journey into faith in the resurrected Jesus. Most paradigmatic for that within the fourth gospel is the story of Thomas. Thomas's story begins when the risen Jesus appears to the disciples who are gathered together—all except Thomas, that is. when Thomas shows up, Jesus has gone, and he finds their story incredulous. He declares that he won't believe it until he sees it for himself—and that is exactly what happens. This whole episode is highlighted by Jesus' declaration to Thomas that there is an even greater blessing in store for those who are able to believe without seeing. It's the gospel's way of acknowledging that what it asks of us, namely belief, isn't easy. But it's important, because believing in Jesus is ultimately the way to truth and the realization of God's mission in our lives and the world.  So John's story of resurrection is all about belief. Luke's account tells a different story. The fundamental story is not a crisis of belief, but of confusion. There's a story of two disciples who are walking to a town called Emmaus, and as they walk, they (unknowingly) meet the resurrected Jesus. Jesus finds them confused and so he painstakingly explains to them everything that had happened, and how the scriptures had described it. In Luke's story, we don't just find belief in the resurrection story, but its within the resurrection that we find understanding. It's the resurrected Jesus who reinterprets the world for us, who explains the way things really are. Everything that before seemed definitive, things like death and power, are reinterpreted and re-understood as we walk with the risen Jesus. We understand in the resurrection.Matthew's version of resurrection is very brief. It culminates with Jesus giving the disciples the great commission. the risen Jesus sends the disciples out. Jesus doesn't just want us to understand his resurrection, but to understand the entire world awaits resurrection, that it all waits to be drawn back into God's mission, back to the way things are really supposed to be. In Matthew, the resurrection isn't just about rewriting the past, it's about rewriting the future. The resurrected Jesus sends us out on his mission.So we believe in the resurrection, we understand the resurrection, and we find our mission in the resurrection. So say John, Luke, and Matthew. But, of course, that leaves Mark.If Mark's version makes you uncomfortable, that's okay.  It has a long history of doing that.Before we can really start into what Mark's story, we have to make a note from textual criticism, not something I usually do overtly from the pulpit. If you notice in Mark 16, between verses 8 and 9 there is probably some sort of a note about how some early manuscripts leave out everything from verses 9. What scholars think happened is that those verses were added, probably late in the second century, by someone who thought that the original ending in verse 8 left too much unsaid. We think that someone added the longer ending so that it would look more like what we read in Matthew and Luke.That may seem somewhat offensive, but I can understand why they would do that, because the earlier, shorter reading is hard to swallow. We don't normally notice how hard this ending is because we typically read the gospels as a blended whole, and fail to pick up on the differences between the four versions. but this is one of those places where the differences are so stark and real that they are worth noticing.  Here is Mark's version:

When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:1-8)

And that's it. No gathered disciples meeting with Jesus, not even a pair of disciples who have a conversation with the risen Lord. Instead, Mark tells a story about two who receive the news of the resurrection from an apparent angel, and who go home confused and afraid. Mark leaves us not just astonished at the empty tomb and the announcement of Jesus's resurrection, but astonished at the response of these two witnesses. The Marys are so paralyzed by fear, that they don't even fulfill the mission given to them. This short and tough version is worth listening too, because it tells the truth—we are challenged by resurrection. Perhaps that isn't even about whether or not the women believed or not—don't fear and belief go together more often than we like to admit? Yet the gospel closes seemingly asking us, what will we do with the story? Will we tell and live the resurrection story, or will we just go back to our homes in paralysed fear. the resurrection story isn't passive, just waiting to be believed, but it asks something of us. Ultimately, what we believe about Jesus changes what we must believe about ourselves and the world around us. How we understand Jesus changes the way we understand everything, all of it given new perspective by the resurrection. The mission that Jesus sends us on awaits a response, but it isn't a foregone conclusion. We can still go home, shut the doors, and act as if nothing happened. Perhaps that's what we want to do. The resurrection of Jesus simply doesn't allow us to go along with our lives in a business as usual mode of being. If we find Jesus's teachings such as the sermon on the mount challenging, they become ever more so when we realize that they are issued by the resurrected Jesus. In Revelation, it is from this very position—the resurrected Lord–that Jesus speaks to the churches, commanding them to turn away from idolatry and mediocrity, to abandon the things that pull our love away from him, to embrace suffering and anticipate the recreation of the world in him.  Jesus says all this after announcing himself, saying, "I am the First and the Last, and the Living one. I died and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys to death and Hades." The resurrected Jesus will not be appeased by lukewarm faith, he will not be followed from a distance, halfheartedly. He demands all that we are, and he demands it from the position of being the Resurrected One. And yet, he doesn't demand it as an absent Lord, but as one who is present and who works within to accomplish the mission he gives us. Paul prays that the Ephesians would become aware that the same power that resurrected Jesus works within us. We must learn to live in that place, not just of the awareness of Jesus's resurrection, but aware of our own. We live in the resurrection. We live in the resurrection now, the new world made possible by Jesus's defeat of death and his power to recreate the world is actively at work in us, changing us, restoring his kingdom in us, and calling us to help him restore the world. That is our gospel, or at least our version of Jesus's gospel. The call of Jesus to come and live in the resurrection now, to believe it, to understand ourselves anew in it, and to take on the mission that it sends us on, with the power of the risen Christ working those things into reality within us—that is our witness to the world.  That is our resurrection story. But, hear from Mark this truth: all resurrection stories don't get told. May it not be so with ours.Amen.

Do Not Judge—A Sermon from Luke 6:35-42

I told somebody this past week that the sermon for today could really only last a few seconds. Don't get your hopes up, it's going to be longer than that, but it seems like I should be able to just say something like, "Jesus says, 'Do not judge.'  So, stop doing it. Amen, let's stand and sing."It's not as though the command is unfamiliar to us.  The text we're dealing with is in Luke 6:35-42.

"But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive and you will be forgiven; give and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you." And he also told them this parable:  " Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will not they both fall into a pit? A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher. Why do you see the speck that is in your brothers eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take the out the speck that is in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye."

It's one of the most popular passages in the Christian Bible, well known among Christians and nonbelievers alike.  In fact, I don't know if there is any Christian ethic as respected by the outside world as "Do not judge."  Of course, the world is also acutely aware of our failure in following this command, and knows that while Jesus tells us not to judge, we are quite practiced in the art.  Unfortunately, it comes quite easily to us.Judgement against our friends, family, neighbors and strangers simmers deep within our hearts.  Occasionally it might pop out as gossip or a sharp word, but we try to police ourselves about that, because we know it sounds bad.  We don't want to be known as judgmental people, but truthfully, even when we don't actually say what we're thinking, it is just so easy to harbor our verdicts, the bitter condemnations of people around us, deep in our hearts.  We don't want to judge.  We know we're not supposed to, but it just comes so easily to us. One of the problems here is that we try to avoid judgmental behaviors without really working on judgmental attitudes. We try to catch that stuff before it gets out of our mouths, but really, by the time we get to that place we've really already lost the battle.  The mouth is just speaking out of the abundance of the heart, and it's the fact that all that condemnation is in our heart that is really the issue.  Our morality begins with our identity, or at least our understanding of our identity.  The way we understand ourselves controls the way we interact with other people and perceive them in powerful ways.  That said, there are two significant things I have come to understand about myself that, the more I internalize them, the more they help me escape my tendency to judge.   I want to share and confess here in the hopes that they can help you out as well.1.  I am not God. I know, it's a shocker. But, seriously, it's helpful for me to get in touch with the fact that I am not the sovereign lord of the universe. I believe people are accountable for the good and evil things they do in the world—but most of them aren't accountable to me. I didn't create anybody, and I'm not supremely powerful.  Beyond that, my failure to be God also means that I have a limited amount of knowledge and insight into people.  I don't understand the whole of anybody's situation, don't understand the different things in people's backgrounds that make them act the way they do.  I don't even understand why I do half the stuff I do, much less what's going on in anybody else's heart! So I will never the authority or information I need to pass judgment on anybody else.2.  Not only am I not God, but I also know that I am not perfect. Far from it, in fact.  Most people I know can confirm this, but of course I know it more truly than anybody else could possibly suspect.  After all, they can't see what's inside my heart.  I am, like the rest of you, a broken human being, a person whose heart has been twisted by sin and who is powerless to recover except for the grace of God.This is an important nuance to the world's criticism of the church as being too judgmental.  It wants to believe everything is alright. It's as if the world wants refuse our right to judge on the basis that everyone is basically equally good. But we refuse to judge on the opposite basis, because we know that everyone, including ourselves, is broken and sinful.I know, that because I'm not God and I'm not perfect, that I need grace from God. I need the grace of forgiveness and the grace that God gives to change and purify me. Truthfully, I need all the grace I can get.  And that self-awareness really heightens the shock of this text for me. How I give grace to people around me can actually affect how God gives grace to me? Whoa. That is an absolutely stunning idea, and as it becomes more firmly lodged in my mind, it has the power to really shape the kinds of things I harbor in my heart towards other people.Gratefully, though, I'm also aware that I receive grace from God! It's not like I'm merely aware of my sin, awaiting some pending judgement and trying to butter God up before he makes his decision. I live in the joy and awareness that God has already acted decisively to extend grace to me.Many of us live fairly aware of those two things, our need for grace and how we receive it.  But, we stop there, not realizing that those who need and receive grace from God are also called to learn grace from God. I want God to teach me how to treat others like Jesus treats me.For our community of faith, that really is the critical turn. So much of our worship and conversation revolves around what we need and receive, and how valuable it is to us.  But how much value do we place on what we are called to become?  How much do we value a gracious spirit? May God help us to honor those among us who cultivate that spirit, who become people of heroic forgiveness, who turn back any effort to condemn others from taking root in their own hearts.  May we value those who work hard to become merciful, just as our father is merciful, and may we become a place of grace for those who—like us—need to receive it.Amen.(This is part three of a series on the Sermon on the Plain. A list of the sermons and the audio recordings are here.)

The Other Beatitudes—A Sermon from Luke 6:20-26

Everybody knows the sermon on the mount.  Unfortunately, if I got up this morning and started reading, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed are those who [yawn] mourn, for they will be...", it wouldn't be long before I'd see your eyes glaze over, and we'd have to have a coffee break for everybody to stay awake for the rest of the sermon.Everybody knows the sermon on the mount.  It is familiar, beautiful, and powerful.  It is full of language that is burned into our conscious consciences, a part of our ethical core as disciples.  And it should be well known!  It is, after all, the living and powerful word of God! It deserves a place in our ethical core!  But unfortunately, like is often the case, familiarity breeds contempt. In our familiarity with the Sermon on the mount, we have lost something of our ability to really listen to what it really says.But, what if the sermon on the mount had a little brother?  I have a couple of little brothers.  They're both tough as nails.  They don't mess around much, say what they mean and mean what they say.  To top it off, they're stubborn as all get out.  If you can get that mental image in your head—the little brother, fists up, ready to get nasty if need be—I'd like to introduce you to the little brother of the sermon on the mount.  It's name is "the Sermon on the Plain", and it waits for us in the middle of Luke 6. (The sermon doesn't even get its own chapter!  It shows up here just after Jesus has named his twelve apostles.  It almost seems to function as their introduction into what being a disciple of Jesus is really going to be about.)The Sermon on the Plain is really a distilled version of the sermon on the mount.  They have a lot in common, but the sermon on the plain is shorter, tougher, punchier.  Maybe it's just because it is less familiar that it feels a little more stubborn and unrelenting than its big brother does.  But instead of talking about it too much in generalities, let me show you what I mean, and let's read a little bit of it together.  It starts out with a set of beatitudes, just like the sermon in Matthew.  They read a little bit differently, though.  We'll start in Luke 6:20. These are the "other beatitudes'.

And He lifted his eyes to his disciples and said, "Blessed are the poor, because yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are those who are hungry now, because you will be filled.  Blessed are those who are crying now, because you will laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you and when they exclude you and insult you and throw out your name as something evil because of the son of man. Rejoice in that day and jump for joy! Because, listen—your reward in heaven will be greater, because their ancestors did the same sorts of things to the prophets.

On the other hand, [this might be a good time to pull your toes in] cursed are you who are rich, because you have received every bit of your comfort. Cursed are you who are full now, because you will go hungry. Cursed are you who laugh now, because you will mourn and cry. Cursed are you when everyone says good things about you; because that's how their ancestors treated the false prophets.

I find these "other beatitudes" to be intense, raw, and inescapable. I look into them, and I easily see myself.  Unfortunately, I see myself on the wrong side, not among those who are blessed, but among the cursed.  Jesus paints two pictures.  One is of a group of people who are poor, hungry, saddened.  They are outsiders, and everyone talks and thinks badly of them. Jesus looks at that group and says—you are blessed! In his eyes, they're the lucky ones!and then there is another group.  They are rich.  They have full bellies.  They are happy and laughing, and everybody likes them because they're easy to get along with.  Doggone it, that's a pretty good picture of just the kind of guy I've wanted to become my whole life.  Isn't that just a cup of cold water to the face?  The very kind of person I've spent my whole life—Jesus says they're cursed.  He looks at them and says, "Man.  Gotta feel sorry for you guys."This set of beatitudes says that in Jesus' eyes, the reality of the world is the opposite of everything I've ever known.  He takes all my assumptions about the world, and politely blows them to pieces.Anybody else bothered by that?If we're really reading it, we're bothered by it.  It's so unrelenting and demanding.  It's so physical that it won't let me spiritualize it and shoo it away.  no "poor in spirit" here.  It's the poor that are blessed.  No hungering for righteousness in this sermon, only the really physical feeling of hunger that comes from not having enough food to eat.Faced with such a demanding text, I think two options present themselves.  "Option 1" is that we take these simple sayings and tease them out, dissect them down, gradually interpreting them in ways that dull their sting a little bit.  In option 1, we interpret them away, and I have to admit that this is a pretty compelling path.  I would love to do that, to employ whatever sophisticated exegesis and interpretation methods might promise to soften the blow a bit.  I wish I could take these things that Jesus says and turn them into what I think he should say.  I would love to somehow transform these beatitudes and woes into something interesting.  But they aren't that, are they?  Not on their own.  This text isn't interesting—its dangerous.  It is sharply critical of my vision of my very life.Option 1 is to interpret them away.  In Option 2, we let them interpret us. What if we could let these words diagnose us?  What if I could let them shape me into the kind of person that Jesus admires? What if I could let them really challenge my idea of what the good life is really all about, and provoke me into letting Jesus teach me about his way of life, his vision of life.This week, sometime when you're by yourself in front of a mirror, I want to ask you to take a few moments and let these other beatitudes challenge you with a couple of questions.  Stop and look, literally, into your own eyes and ask yourself a few questions.First, "Who am I becoming?" What kinds of things characterize who you are, both inside and out.  What dominates your life?.Second, and more interesting, "Who gets to decide who I am becoming?" Looking at where you're headed is a good start, but for people who claim to be disciples of Jesus, a more basic question is whether or not we are really letting him determine the vision for our lives.  The guy who said these beatitudes is really painting a radical vision, but am I willing to let that vision really affect me.  Drive me?Finally, "What about everybody else?" It's not just about me. These beatitudes not only change the way I see myself, but the way I look at almost everyone I see.  People aren't good or bad, lucky or unlucky, blessed or cursed in the same ways I normally think about it.  My ideas of status and value just don't hold up in the face of these beatitudes.  But, it's not my ideas of value that really matter anyway.  It's what Jesus values that really matters.  After all, he is the master.  I am the student.I've got a lot to learn.(Audio version here: The Plain Beatitudes. This is part one of this series.)