Something that Doesn’t Love a Wall

Nehemiah 2:1-8; Ephesians 2:11-18

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I received a couple of Summer Sermon Suggestions about walls. One was on the Wall of Nehemiah and the other was on the Wall of Separation between Church and State - two different types of walls. I’ll do the Church-State one at a later date. I looked at the Nehemiah story and immediately Robert Frost’s famous “Mending Wall” came to mind. I could not get it out of my mind. I wanted to quote a few lines from the poem, but I could not choose which lines to take out. So I decided reading the whole poem for you. It is certain worth our time to listen to it, probably worth more than everything else I have to say about walls this morning.

READ ROBERT FROST’S MENDING WALL, which was originally published in 1914 as the first poem in his book North of Boston

Someone asked me to preach on Nehemiah’s wall and the meaning of that story for today. Nehemiah was a Jewish exile who served as the cupbearer to Persian King Artaxerxes in the fifth century BC. The Jewish nations of Israel and Judah had been destroyed, and the city of Jerusalem had been destroyed along with the temple. Some of the Jewish exiles had returned to the land of Israel about 90 years earlier, but not much reconstruction had taken place. When Nehemiah heard from a visitor to Jerusalem what bad shape the city was still in. he was moved to do something about it. Nehemiah, had a position in the Persian royal court as cupbearer to the king. That position was more than just being a waiter and testing the king’s drink for poison by tasting it himself. He was also a sort of advisor to the King, who had the ear of the king and was trusted by the king. Nehemiah asked Artaxerxes if he could return to Jerusalem to rebuild the city. The book is about that rebuilding effort.

I have preached on this book before during my ministry.  Normally when preachers interpret Nehemiah we interpret the physical wall he built as real but also representing something more. And of course Frost’s poem is also metaphorical. He is not just talking about the stone wall at his farm in Derry, NH. He is obviously has something much bigger in mind. So today I want to talk about walls.

1. I will start with Nehemiah’s wall. Before Nehemiah rebuilt the wall of Jerusalem he clearly asked what he “was walling in or walling out, and to whom he was like to give offense.” Nehemiah was trying to restore the capital city to the way it was before it was destroyed by the Babylonian armies in 587 BC – one hundred and fifty years earlier. He saw the surrounding peoples of the land – the Samaritans and the Ammonites - as enemies that he was trying to wall out. And he – and Ezra – who is from the same time frame (and in fact the earliest Hebrew manuscripts combine the books of Ezra and Nehemiah into one book) wanted to wall in the people of Israel not only by a city wall but also by the Jewish Law. A couple of chapters before this in the book of Ezra the Jewish men were forced by Ezra to divorce and separate themselves from their non-Jewish wives and children. The purpose of this was clear. It was to restore the Jewish ethnic, religious and political identity. It was to bring the Jewish people and state back from the brink of extinction.

But something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down. I know that walls are necessary in this dangerous world that we live in. People lock their doors for fear of intruders. We secure our national borders in fear of illegal immigrants and terrorists. Even modern Israel has built a new wall. I have not seen it. I have been to the Holy Land several times, but I have not been back since 2000, which was the 3000^th anniversary of the establishment of Jerusalem by King David. Since the year 2000 Israel has built a wall between the state of Israel and the West Bank – or Palestine - to prevent terrorist attacks. When I did a semester of sabbatical study in 1991 at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute, we lived on that border between Israel and Palestine, just a couple of miles outside Bethlehem. We used to walk unhindered and unnoticed across that border freely without ever seeing a soldier present. We could not even tell where the border was. Now there is a huge wall and roadblock with an Israeli security checkpoint there. It makes me sad to think about it, and I don’t want to see it. There is something in me that does not love a wall.

I know that some walls are necessary. I know they were necessary for Israel then and maybe now. If Nehemiah had not built that wall and if Ezra had not done those reforms, today there might not be a people who distinguish themselves as Jews. They would have gone the way of the Ammonites and Moabites and all the other ancient peoples of the land of Canaan and become absorbed into the populations of the other peoples of the region. Then there would have been no Jewish lineage that would have given birth to the Messiah, Jesus Christ. God had a plan to use the Jewish people to accomplish his plan. Nehemiah and Ezra were part of that plan. So the wall of Nehemiah had to be built to reestablish the nation and people of Israel once again. Walls are necessary sometimes. But there is something in me that does not love a wall.

More importantly there is something in God that does not love a wall. In the NT we see God tearing down the walls that Ezra and Nehemiah built – physically, ethnically, and spiritually. The OT is about building walls; the NT is about tearing down walls. Both are necessary in God’s plan for history. As Ecclesiastes sways, “To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven: …. A time to break down, And a time to build up; ….  A time to cast away stones, And a time to gather stones.” In Nehemiah and Ezra’s day it was a time to build up the walls. In Jesus’ day it was the time to tear down walls. That is what our NT passage is all about.

In Nehemiah’s day he and Ezra were building a wall between Jew and Gentile. Jesus tore that wall down. Paul writes: “11 Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh—who are called Uncircumcision by what is called the Circumcision made in the flesh by hands— 12 that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation….” The NIV translates that last verse this way: “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.” In using that term Paul was referring to a very specific wall located in the temple courts. In fact archaeologists have found the inscription posted in that wall warning Gentiles not to cross that wall upon penalty of death.

The Jerusalem temple had a series of courts. The outermost court was known as the Court of Gentiles. Beyond that court only Jews could go. And a sign – written in Latin and Greek - was posted on the wall to warn Gentiles not to go any further into the temple under penalty of death. The Romans even permitted the Jewish authorities to carry out the death penalty for this offence, even if the offender were a Roman citizen. The engraved block of limestone which held that inscription was discovered in Jerusalem in 1871. It is currently in the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul, Turkey, which is where I saw it. It is in Istanbul because Jerusalem was part of the Ottoman Empire when the stone was found.

Our epistle lesson says that Jesus broke down that religious wall of separation between Jew and Gentile. Not physically, although he did take the physical action of driving the money changers out of that Court of the Gentiles. And later Jesus predicted that God would destroy all the wall of the temple. But most importantly Jesus broke down that wall spiritually. He broke down ethnic and racial barriers. Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” We see this happening during Jesus’ three years of ministry when he reached out to Samaritans – the Samaritan woman at the well and the Samaritan leper and told the story of the good Samaritan. These were exactly the same people that Nehemiah and Ezra were walling out. We see it in Jesus’ dealing with Roman soldiers, one whom he declared to have more faith than anyone in Israel. After the death and resurrection of Jesus we see the walls of division come tumbling down one after another in the Book of Acts, as the church embraced people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. And in Acts the Church got it most opposition from the Jewish priesthood and synagogue leaders who did not want those walls broken down.

According to Paul those Gentiles who were “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise” were brought inside the wall and inside the covenant with God. “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” There are no illegal aliens in the church. There are no strangers. There are not two different types of people – insiders and outsiders. Paul says “For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace."

2. There is another wall that was broken done in Jesus Christ. That is the wall between God and all people. The very next s say: “and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near. For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father.”

There was a wall of separation between man and God. Scripture calls it sin. Theologians talk about estrangement, alienation, and words like that. Call it whatever you want. We have become separated from God, and that is the cause of suffering in our lives and human evil in the world. There is a need to reconnect with God.  There is a need for reconciliation. This passage says that this reconciliation was accomplished and this wall of separation was broken down through the cross. The Cross opened up a gap in the wall, which in the words of the poet “even two can pass abreast.”

The Gospel of Matthew depicts this in a dramatic symbolic moment when Christ died. It says that at the minute Jesus died, “Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split.” At that moment the wall of separation between God and man was broken. This verse says that the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. This is referring to the veil that separated the Holy of Holies, the innermost sacred part of the temple where God was said to dwell, from the outside world. Only once a year did the Jewish High Priest pull back that veil and enter the most Holy Place in order to offer a sacrifice for sin on the Day of Atonement. When Jesus died that veil of the Holy of Holies did not just draw back momentarily for a human priest to enter. It was torn in two – from top to bottom, meaning that God was doing it from heaven. The Holy of holies was permanently opened to all of humankind. The Holy Presence of God flooded into the world because the Final atonement for sin had been offered on the Cross. The veil of the temple had been removed by Christ. Within a few years the whole temple building would be torn down at the hands of the Roman armies at the direction of God – not one stone left on another just as Jesus prophesied. This was to demonstrate historically that the temple was no longer needed. The only thing left today of that Jerusalem temple is the retaining wall of the Temple Mount. It is called the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall, and it is the holiest site to Jews today.

The wall between man and God has been torn down by Christ. We have direct access to the Presence of God. We are united with God through Christ. That is the spiritual reality that we find ourselves in today. There is nothing that anybody has to do to bring us closer to God than what Christ did. We are reconciled to God. All we need to do is accept that by faith.

3. That brings me to a third wall. That is the wall in the human heart. The only wall that now remains is in our own souls and minds. We have hardened our hearts until the walls of our hearts are as thick as any stone wall. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. That someone is Christ. That is why he tore it down. He has done that work at a great price to himself. Now all we have to do is take down that last remaining barrier inside us. Actually it is more biblically accurate to call this inner barrier a veil, rather than a wall. A veil corresponding to the temple veil.

In 2 Corinthians Paul talks about the veil that lies over people’s minds that prevent them from seeing the glory of God in Christ. He says that people’s minds are blinded even when they are reading scripture. Then he says, “16 Nevertheless when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. 18 But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”

The wall was broken down by Christ. That was the hard part. Now is the easy part. Now there is only a veil, which needs to be pulled back. This as a veil between our hearts and God, between our own stubborn self and the God who resides in us as Holy Spirit. All we need is have the courage to take down that veil – rip it from top to bottom. Open up that communion with God. Then the last barrier will be down. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. That someone is Christ, and hopefully that someone is also you and me. 

The Life of the Spirit

John 3:1-8; Galatians 5:16-25

Hebrews 4:12 says: “For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit….” My message this morning is at the heart of the Christian life. It is about discerning and living in the Spirit. We are going to start by talking about the difference between soul and spirit. It first thought that might seem like an esoteric topic, kind of like the medieval question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But I assure you that the difference between soul and spirit is very practical. Without it we can’t tell the difference between what is just a thought in our head and what is God. Atheists think that God is just a thought in our heads, an imaginary Friend invented by religion to help us cope with the difficulties of life. Those folks do not know the difference between soul and spirit.

I am going to start this sermon on with the basic biblical understanding of man. A lot of people think that the Christian understanding of human beings is that we are a combination of body and soul - a physical body inhabited by an immortal soul. My philosophy professor in seminary used to call it the oyster theory – that we are a soul in a body like an oyster in a shell. That is not the Biblical understanding of human nature. That is Greek philosophical dualism. It is from Plato and it found its way into Christianity very early in the history of Christian church. That is why so many people believe it. But the Hebraic understanding of human nature – found in both the OT and NT - is that we have three parts. Just like God is a trinity, so are humans. The Bible has a holistic understanding of human nature. We are one whole being composed of three parts – body, soul, and spirit.

The body you already know. It is the physical part of us with five senses. The soul in biblical language is the psyche. That is actually the Greek word for soul. We get the word psychology from it. It is what we normally think of as ourselves. It is our consciousness, our psychological self, what is going on in our brains. It has three faculties – intellectual, emotional, and volitional. In other words thoughts, feelings, and decision-making. Sometimes called mind, heart, and will. It is our personality that we attach our name to.

The third dimension of man is spirit. Many people are not even aware of this spiritual dimension of the human life. But for the Christian it is absolutely essential that we discern the difference between soul and spirit. According to Scripture God is Spirit, and man at his center and essence also is spirit. The NT describe our physical bodies as the temples of God. The apostle Paul says to the Corinthians: “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?” In the OT, the temple was a physical structure in which God was thought to dwell. It was understood that God dwelled in the innermost center of the temple, called the Holy of holies. That OT temple is a blueprint for understanding the human being. Our bodies are a physical temple and in the innermost part of us is the human spirit. Think of it simply as a space in the inmost part of you. The gospel says that when we surrender ourselves completely – body, mind, heart and will – to Christ, then the Holy Spirit of God takes up residence in us and we become temples of God.

The Holy Spirit dwells in our human spirit. The apostle Paul says in Romans 8:16 “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” There is a human spirit and there is the Holy Spirit. And when we give ourselves away to God, then God takes possession of us. Christians are to be God-possessed people. Our spirit is united with God’s Spirit. Jesus said of his experience, “I and the Father are one.” When we are one with Christ, then we also have this awareness of being one with the Father. That is exactly what Jesus said would happen. Jesus prayed, “that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us.” This oneness with God and Christ is the heart of the Christian life.

The reality is that many Christians do not have a clue that God dwells within them and that they are one with God. They think the Christian life is about believing the right ideas about God and Jesus and living a moral life and being part of a church. All those are good things and part of Christianity, but they are not the heart of Christianity. The heart of Christianity is being aware of the Spirit, dwelling in the Spirit and being led by the Spirit. That is what I want to really get into this morning. I don’t want this to be a theology lecture. I want this to be a practical message on how to know this reality of the Holy Spirit in our lives. There are three points I want to make this morning.

1. The first is Awakening to the Spirit. In our gospel lesson for today Jesus uses the term “born of the Spirit” or “born from above.” I wish I could use the term “born again,” the other term that Jesus uses here. But that phrase has been so badly misused and misunderstood in the mainstream media since the 1970’s that it is almost useless now in communicating what Jesus meant by the term. It is all wrapped up in politics, the culture wars, television evangelists and fundamentalism now. It is a wonderful phrase, but it no longer communicates well.  

So I am going to talk about awakening to the Spirit. Jesus is talking about a spiritual transformation – a metamorphosis of our everyday awareness. He describes it in that passage as seeing the Kingdom of God and entering the Kingdom of God. He is talking about having our spiritual eyes opened to the Reality of God. He is talking about experiencing God. He is talking about being vividly aware of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. I don’t care what you call it; I care only that we know it in our own experience. What is important is that we be awake to the Spirit.

In that passage about Nicodemus, this is linked to believing in Christ. Christ is the Way to God, the mediator between God and man. We become one with God by being united with Christ and that happens through faith in Christ. That is the first step – faith in Christ. That is basic Christianity. But I want to move beyond the basics of faith in Christ to a daily living experience of the Spirit. As I said, a lot of Christians who believe in Christ do not have an awareness of the Spirit living within them.

Assuming that most people here believe in Christ, let me see what I can do to introduce you to the Spirit. It is not an easy thing to do. It is kind of like trying to describe the color blue or scent of a rose, but much more difficult. Jesus says it is like describing the wind. “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” How do you describe that which is invisible? The Spirit is invisible, and is also omnipresent – just as much everywhere else as well as in the innermost part of you and me.

The Spirit is deeper than our thoughts and our feelings. The Spirit is entirely different than us, and yet at the same time intimately united with us - because the Holy Spirit is joined with our spirit. Our true identity is found in the Holy Spirit, which is the Spirit of Christ. The apostle Paul says, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” The same can be said of the Spirit. It is not I who live but the Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, who lives in me. When we look deeply and honestly and thoroughly at ourselves and discover who we really are beneath all the masks we wear and the roles we play, then we awake to the Spirit.

Let me try a different approach. Think of those greatest moments of peace and beauty that you have experienced in your life – think of those. The times when all thinking stops, and the restlessness of our hearts ceases, and we are at perfect rest and peace. And we just are. When we bask in the beauty of the view from a mountain summit or a quiet lake at dawn – when our human personality is at perfect rest, at that moment we are aware of that which is deeper than ourselves. We are aware of Spirit. When the soul – our thoughts, feelings, desires – are quiet, then the Spirit is known to be present. Awakening to this presence of the Spirit, which is always the background consciousness of our lives, transforms the rest of our lives.

2. The second point I want to talk about is Living in the Spirit. Once we become aware of the presence of the Spirit, then we can practice living in the presence of the Spirit. In our epistle reading his morning the apostle Paul gives instructions to the Christians in Galatia on how to walk in the Spirit and be led by the Spirit. But he mentions that even more fundamental to that is living in the Spirit. He says, “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.” So living in the Spirit comes first. Before we can walk, we have to learn to just be in the Spirit. Once we recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in the world, we move on to practicing that presence.

There is an old book entitled “The Practice of the Presence of God.” It was written in the 17^th century by a French monk named Brother Lawrence. It is one of the most important books I have ever read. I highly recommend it. It is a small book, and it is in the public domain, which means it is free on the internet. Just do a search for it and you can download it and read it on your computer or ebook reader. Lawrence describes, much better than I can, how to practice the Presence of God at all times.

The Holy Spirit is always present in us and within us as well as around us. It is just a matter of whether we pay attention to the Spirit or not. That takes practice. The problem is that so much else clamors for our attention, that we don’t pay attention to the Spirit. This busy mind of mine is filled with thoughts that want my attention. My emotions – especially strong ones – try to force me to pay attention to them. My desires are just the same. That does not even take into account my calendar appointments, things I have to do and people I have to see. My “to do” list clamors for my attention. It is easy to go through a whole day paying attention to all these things, while the Holy Spirit waits patiently for us to glance in his direction.

Christians can go day after day and never pay attention to what is most important – God! That is why Jesus says that the greatest and most important commandment of all is to love God with all our heart, and mind and soul and strength. When you love someone or something they are always on our mind. We naturally want to spend time with the people we love and doing the things we love. If we love God, we will spend time with God. I am not just talking about making time for prayer and Bible Study and daily devotions. I am all in favor of people praying and reading the Bible and using devotional booklets each day. They are great. But I know from personal experience that Bible study and prayer can become sophisticated ways of ignoring God. We can spend lots of time talking to God and never listen to God. We can do Bible study and never listen to what the Lord has to say through the Bible. We can read those little daily devotionals like the Upper Room, the Daily Bread, and the Secret Place, and use them only as a way of avoiding really meeting God directly. They become a substitute for God. A lot of religion is just an elaborate avoidance of God in the guise of worshipping and serving God.

We can deceive ourselves completely when it comes to spiritual matters. That is why it is so important to practice the presence of God above all else. Practice makes perfect, as they say. And if not perfect, certainly much better! Once you recognize God’s presence, hold on that like your life depends on it. Because your spiritual life does depend on it.

3. Then Walk in the Spirit. That is the third point. Paul says, “Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.” This is the easy part. Once we have awaked to the presence of the Spirit, and practice living in that Presence, then the walking comes naturally. I saw a story on the news about teaching babies to swim. It had a video of a 16 month old child swimming the length of a pool – it was not a large pool, but it was still impressive! When our oldest son Isaac was a baby, the seminary I was attending had swimming lessons for one year olds. We used to put Isaac under the water and push him to the bottom and he would grab a ring from the bottom and come to the surface, holding his breath all the time. It turns out small children are natural born swimmers. They instinctively hold their breath and kick. I never would have thought it, if I did not see it for myself. Once they are in the water instincts take over.

We are born to Spirit like children are born to swim. Once we are in the spirit we naturally walk in the Spirit. To walk in the Spirit means to be guided by the Spirit. In the OT when they wanted to describe a spiritual person they say that the person “walked with God.” When we walk with God stay right with God and go in his direction at his speed. We do not take wrong turns or detours or dead ends. We do not follow our bodies or our minds, our thoughts or our desires. We follow the Spirit. We hardly think about what is right or wrong. We do not munch away at that fruit of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Like Adam and Eve did. We just follow the Spirit and do what he does.

It is like being blown by a wind. We might not know where it is coming from or where it is going, but it doesn’t matter. We are one with it. The Holy Spirit is the Wind of God blowing us in the right direction. It is like we are in the current of a river. The Spirit is the River of Living Water and we move with the current. Once we are in the river we move with the water. Once we are in the Spirit we move with the Spirit. All we have to do is not fight against the current or swim upstream or climb onto the river bank. All we need to do is stay in the Spirit and the Spirit does the work. This is living by grace. This is being led by the Spirit. And when we live in the Spirit, then we will not do the works of the flesh, Paul says. And the fruit of the Spirit, qualities like love, joy, and peace – and all the rest – flow naturally into and through our lives. We feast on the fruit of the Spirit from the Tree of Life. This is Eternal Life in Christ. This is life in the Spirit. 

Think Again

Jeremiah 8:4-7; Luke 5:27-32

It is an old joke. I am sure you have heard it. I have told it several times, but I don’t think I have told it here in Sandwich since I have been back. And one can’t preach a sermon about repentance without it.

Two men contracted to paint a church. Being very frugal (cheap) and trying to earn the most profit, they spent the absolute minimum on materials, including paint. Cheap paint and not too much of it. When they were only partway through the job, they saw that they would not have enough paint to complete the job. But instead of buying more paint, they decided they would just dilute the water-based paint they were using so that it would last longer. They did this a couple more times before they finished, which caused the paint to get thinner and thinner and lighter each time it was thinned. The painters had just about gotten to the top of the steeple, when, all of a sudden, the sky darkened, and the rain started to pour down. And a voice boomed from the heavens: "Repaint, you thinners! Repaint, and thin no more!"

This sermon is on repentance. It was a sermon suggestion by someone in the congregation along with confession. Because this topic is not usually considered fun, I would expect it only from someone serious about their faith. Repentance necessarily involves serious self-examination, which is one of the reasons I have chosen to preach it on Communion Sunday, since the Lord’s Supper is an occasion for self-examination. Repentance is an important part of the mature Christian life. And for that reason I am glad to speak about it this morning.

As I studied this topic in preparation for this message, I dusted off my Hebrew and Greek resources and went back into the original languages in which our Scriptures were written. There are two words in Hebrew translated repentance, one word in Greek, and then there is our English word. The etymology of these words reveal to us that there are four dimensions to repentance.

1. The first is Intellectual. We see this in the Greek word used in the NT and also reflected in our English word. The English word “repent” literally means to rethink, to think again. The Greek word also means that. It shows that repentance involves a change of mind. We change the way we think about ourselves, our actions and God.

The Christian life is a new way of seeing the world. It is a new way of thinking about things. A lot of people don’t really think about God. That is my conclusion after being a pastor for all these years. Most people are not anti-God or anti-religion. Some people are anti-religion, but they are the ones who have thought long and hard and seriously about God. That is why I don’t mind talking to atheists. In fact I enjoy it. At least they have thought about God enough to take a stand – even if that stand is that God does not exist.

But most people don’t really think about God. I am not saying they have never thought about God. They will voice an opinion about God and church if you ask them. But they just have not given the whole matter much thought. It is just not on their mental radar.  They think more about the Bruins or the Red Sox or the Patriots than they have ever thought about God! They think more about money than God. More about maintaining their automobile than maintaining their spiritual life. More about what to buy at the grocery store than about spiritual food. I am convinced that most people in our society do not think very much about God. And when they do think about God, they are borrowed thoughts - repeating the clichés of our culture heard on TV, movies, and rather than original personal grappling with their own relationship with God.

Repentance means to think again and again and again. To dig down deep. To think often and deeply, to ponder, to meditate upon God and our relationship with God. The end result is a new way of viewing life. It is so new and so unlike the surface living of ordinary living, that I would even call it an awakening to the presence of God. I think most people are asleep spiritually. That is why both Jesus told parables of people sleeping and needing to wake up, like the bridesmaids. And the apostle Paul so often said “Wake up!” Paul says, “now it is high time to awake out of sleep.” “Awake, you who sleep, Arise from the dead, And Christ will give you light.”

Most people are sleepwalking through life. It appears to me that many people are living unconscious of God. They sleepwalk through life without even noticing God. How can one not notice God? But I think that is exactly the state of many people.

To repent means that one wakes up and becomes aware of God, and that awareness changes everything. Then our life ceases to be just about us and our desires, our likes and dislikes, our emotions and possessions, and activities. Those things suddenly become secondary. They are of little or no importance compared to God. That is the first part of repentance. Rethink.

2. A second dimension of repentance is emotional. One of the Hebrew words for repentance means to grieve or to feel sorrow. It is a strongly emotional word. When one rethinks things and becomes aware of God, then one’s first reaction is emotional – strongly emotional. How can one meet God and not be emotional? I always think of the prophet Isaiah in this regard. He was a priest and one day he was in the temple and he became aware of the presence of God. He had a vision in which he saw God. Listen to his account of his encounter in Isaiah 6:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple. ² Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. ³ And one cried to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; The whole earth is full of His glory!” ⁴ And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke. ⁵ So I said: “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The Lord of hosts.”

Isaiah’s reaction to personally seeing God and his glory filling the earth is one of deep emotion, “Woe is me!” When we become conscious of God, we become conscious of how glorious God is and at the same time how far we fall short of God and his glory. That is the literal meaning of the word sin – to fall short. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” scripture says.

I know that sin is a dirty word these days. People don’t like to use the word sin; it sounds too negative, and people seem to be phobic about possibly feeling guilt or shame or injuring our delicate sense of self-esteem. Well, it needs injuring! If meeting God does not shake us to our foundation, something is amiss. How can we become aware of God and not have a strong emotional reaction? – all sorts of emotions, joy, peace, love, but today I am talking about repentance, and the dominant emotion of repentance is sorrow over sin.

Sin is the problem and Christ is the solution. Christ came to deal with sin and guilt. If you don’t have any sense of sin or guilt, then Christ is not for you. Christ said in our gospel lesson for today: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” People who thought they were fine just the way they were – that they were right in their thinking and alright with God – (the biblical word for that I righteous) people who considered themselves righteous criticized Jesus for talking about sin and hanging out with sinners. Jesus said he did not come to earth for the righteous. He came for those who knew sin and he came to call sinners to repentance. This leads me to the next aspect of repentance.  

3. The third aspect of repentance is volitional. It is moral. It has to do with our behavior. One of the Hebrew words for repentance means to turn or to turn around. Like so many words it is a picture word. It pictures a person walking down a path and stopping, changing his mind (rethinking) and deciding to turn around and head in a different direction. The idea is that we have been walking apart from God, walking away from God. At some point we realize this fact and know we need to turn our lives around before it is too late. It is time to turn around and head home.

Jesus parable of the Prodigal Son contains a lot of these different aspects of repentance. The wayward son leaves home and travels to a far country where he loses everything, his whole inheritance. He falls into poverty and deep depression, as I read the story. He is down in the dumps in every way we can imagine. Then the story says that he “came to himself.” He rethinks. He sees his situation in a new light. He is standing there slopping hogs in a distant land, when all of a sudden he wakes up. He thinks to himself, ‘What am I doing here?” I need to go home. He repents. He thinks about what he has done to himself and to his Father. He rehearses in his mind the words he is going to say to his Father. He says, “I have sinned against heaven and against you and am no longer worthy to be called your Son.” I detect here real godly sorrow. So he turns around and goes back the way he came until he arrives at his Father’s house.

The apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians in his second letter: “8 For even if I made you sorry with my letter, I do not regret it; though I did regret it. For I perceive that the same epistle made you sorry, though only for a while. 9 Now I rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow led to repentance. For you were made sorry in a godly manner, that you might suffer loss from us in nothing. 10 For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation….”

There is nothing wrong with feeling bad when it is godly sorrow. We live in a society where people think feeling sorrow is pathological and needs to be treated with medication. Sometimes it does need medication when it is clinical depression. But sometimes it is right to feel bad. We ought to feel bad when we have done wrong. That emotion means God is excavating our soul, digging down to the core of our being, and getting rid of the garbage in our lives. Sometimes you have to go to the dump. What if we never went to the dump? Our homes or barns or sheds (or wherever you keep your trash) would get pretty smelly and unhealthy real quick. The same with our lives. They can get pretty smelly with the stench of sin. Confession and repentance is the moral equivalence of taking out the trash and going to the dump. Forgiveness is being cleansed in the living water of God.

When we do something wrong we can handle it different ways. We can deny it to ourselves and others, and live in a self-esteem fantasy world of denial. Or we can admit we messed up and say we are sorry – to God and to whomever else we sinned against. It is a wonderful to be able to say we are sorry, to admit that we were wrong. It is freeing. I love the feeling of it; it is liberating. Our sorrow over sin turns to joy very quickly when we admit to ourselves, to others, and to God that we are wrong. The burden of living a lie is lifted. Why can’t we admit this more? Why do we always feel like we have to justify ourselves and defend our behaviors? This society would be a lot better off if people could admit their sin and not cover it up or deny it.

 

4. The fourth dimension of repentance is spiritual. The Greek word for repentance is metanoia. It means literally “after the mind” or “beyond the mind.” Just like the word metaphysics means beyond the physical world, so does metanoia means “beyond the mind.” Beyond the mind is the spiritual. Human beings are made up of the intellectual, emotional and the volitional – mind, heart and will. That is the biblical understanding of the self. Then there is something beyond the self – beyond the mind and body. That is the spirit. That is the essence of who we are. That is the core of our being.

Repentance catapults us beyond ourselves, beyond our minds and hearts, into the very heart of God. Repentance might feel bad, but it is good. It is our salvation. Life is difficult. Life hurts. It hurts physically. It hurts emotionally. It hurts in relationships. Most of us see this pain as a problem most of the time. People look for a way out of the suffering. So we take pills, or drink alcohol, or we lose ourselves in our work, or in sports, or in activities, or in relationships. We lose ourselves so we don’t have to think about it or rethink our lives. But what if the suffering of life is not a problem? What if this is part of the plan of God? What if the purpose of hard times in our lives is to push us beyond our normal way of thinking into the very presence of God. To see who we really are when we are not self-absorbed and preoccupied with ourselves.

Paul says to the Thessalonians, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Repentance takes us beyond the mind, beyond the psyche to the spirit. We see who we really are - created in the image of God, designed to reflect God back to himself and to others. When we repent, we move beyond mind to spirit, where there is found complete forgiveness and cleansing and liberation. This is the truth of who we are in Christ, and when we know the truth the truth shall set us free.

When we repent, we experience freedom from sin. Repentance is acknowledging sin to ourselves and God, But when we do this we are not left in our sin. We are freed from sin. This is experienced in the Spirit because Jesus Christ has taken care of sin through the Cross. The way to forgiveness, the way to eternal life has been opened up through the Cross, which is a powerful symbol of the death of the old self and resurrection to new life beyond self – life of the Spirit.

Think about this, and then think again. 

War & Peace

Habakkuk 1:1-11; Matthew 5:38-48

I watch the evening news every day. Actually I watch two evening new programs each evening. I am a glutton for punishment. I record two American networks or sometimes the BBC America news to give a little different perspective. I also read a daily newspaper. The war in Syria in an ongoing leading news story every day, especially now that the US has decided to get involved. One of the news programs recently mentioned that 93,000 people have been killed in the Syrian War so far. It is tragic. War is one of the great tragedies of human history. The numbers of people who have died in war in recorded history are so high we do not even know how to count them. When I researched the figures for this sermon the estimates for WW II were between 40-72 million. WWI estimates were between 15 and 75 million, depending on whether you include the influenza epidemic that followed it. The Russian Revolution killed between 5-9 million. Those are just the twentieth century wars! There were the wars like Mongul conquests of the 13^th and 14^th centuries that killed 30-70 million. The list goes on and on; we can really depress ourselves in the process You get the point. War is bad.

War is not the only opportunity we find to kill each other. There is murder and violence. There are the senseless crimes of young men going into schools and cinemas and shooting them up, or go to the Boston Marathon and blow up innocent spectators. People are rightly concerned about the culture of violence in America when it comes to gun deaths. We had our 14 year old nephew visiting with us for a weekend a few weeks ago. He spends a lot of time playing hand held video games where in the game he kills people with automatic weapons. It makes you wonder what such games are doing to a generation of kids. Of all the sermon suggestions that I received, more people asked me to preach on the topics of war and violence than any other. It is not an easy subject to preach about, but I will honor your requests today.

War. The world is filled with it and always has been. The Bible is filled with war. The history of Israel in the OT is a story of war, just like our American history is. I have no shortage of scripture texts to use to hang this sermon on. Even God is described as both a God of Peace and a Man of War. The song that Moses sang after Pharaoh’s chariots and soldiers are drowned in the sea is this:

“I will sing to the Lord,

For He has triumphed gloriously!

The horse and its rider

He has thrown into the sea!

² The Lord is my strength and song,

And He has become my salvation;

He is my God, and I will praise Him;

My father’s God, and I will exalt Him.

³ The Lord is a man of war;

The Lord is His name.”

And yet we also find in the OT wonderful visions of peace. From the Book of Isaiah:

“Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

To the house of the God of Jacob;

He will teach us His ways,

And we shall walk in His paths.”

For out of Zion shall go forth the law,

And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

⁴ He shall judge between the nations,

And rebuke many people;

They shall beat their swords into plowshares,

And their spears into pruning hooks;

Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

Neither shall they learn war anymore.”

In the NT we have repeated references to the Lord as a God of Peace, and Jesus’ lofty instruction on the Sermon on the Mount to love your enemy, turn the other cheek, and resist not evil. Today I am going to look at the topic of war under two categories.

I. First is the Cause of War. To put it simply the cause of war is human beings. Animals skirmish over territory, food and mates, but only humans wage war on a vast scale. If we are looking for the cause of war, we need look no further than our own hearts. A couple of weeks ago I quoted the apostle James on this subject, “Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war.” Peterson’s translation “The Message makes it even clearer: “Where do you think all these appalling wars and quarrels come from? Do you think they just happen? Think again. They come about because you want your own way, and fight for it deep inside yourselves.”

How did this violence get into the human heart? You could argue from an anthropological or psychological point of view that it is human nature. That we are a violent species. We can’t help it; it is in our genes. When we look in the Bible we find murder and violence very early. Adam and Eve didn’t kill each other, but their sons did. In Genesis there were only four people in Eden and one of them killed another. Cain killed Abel. When he is banished from Eden for his crime, he is scared that he will be killed by others. He replied to God’s sentence of banishment: “I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, and it will happen that anyone who finds me will kill me.” Violence appears to be part of human nature.

Christians explain this theologically in terms of original sin. The doctrine of original sin says that humans are by nature sinners. There are those who will argue that people are naturally good and they only become corrupted by human society. But anyone who has raised kids knows that is not true.  I know that is not true just by watching our grandkids. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr famously said, “The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.” We are natural born sinners. And war is proof of this. The Great War, World War I was optimistically called “the war to end all wars.” But it actually only ushered in a century of war.

We are the problem. Christian theologians look to the idea of the Fall to explain this tendency to sin. We are studying the Book of Genesis on Wednesdays. In Chapter 1 everything is made good, and Chapter 2 starts out with Adam and Eve in the paradise of Eden. Then it says that a choice was made by man and woman that brought moral evil into the world and very quickly brought violence into the human family. And it has been happening ever since. The Christian doctrine of the fall not only teaches us that sin and violence are inevitable. It also teaches us that we are accountable. We can’t just blame it on our DNA or our upbringing.

If it is in our nature, then war and violence are inevitable. I am not being pessimistic; I am being realistic. I have this on good authority. Jesus said that there would be wars and rumors of war until the end of the age. When you read the scriptures there is no sense that war can be ended by the goodwill of good people. Jesus was a good person, and he was murdered by the government. Even people of nonviolence like Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi were murdered by violent people. Practitioners of nonviolence can do great good – and I will talk more about that in a little while – but we should be under no illusion that it is possible to end war, or legislate away violence in society, or form a perfect treaty to end all international conflict. The Treaty of Versailles (Ver – sigh) that ended the war to end all wars only planted the seeds for the next war. I am not against treaties or gun control, but we are deceiving ourselves if we think it is going to stop violence. We will just find another way to kill each other.

In fact I would go so far as to say that government is part of the problem as much as it is the solution. Historically governments fight wars. We are actually in an age of terrorism when nongovernment rebel forces also wages wars, but even they fight governments. We have seen that governments – including our own - are not honest when it come to the reasons for fighting wars. War can be about noble causes like freedom and human rights, but it is just as often about greed and power. As the saying goes, the first casualty of war is truth. Why have we fought all the wars we have fought as a nation? Maybe you believe everything the government says about our reasons, but I don’t.

2. So what do we do as Christians when faced with a violent human nature and a world of war and violence? What is the proper Christian response? What do the Scriptures instruct us in this matter? There are a number of possible Christian responses to war and violence.

One is to fight evil with force when necessary. I am not a pacifist. I believe that sometimes war is the only solution left to people of good faith. But I realize that even to make that statement is problematic. Who is to decide when war is necessary? How do we know which side is right and which side is wrong? Every government paints itself as being on the side of good and God. How do we know what is propaganda and what is true? Listen to the statements that President Assad of Syria makes. You would think he was on the side of the angels, when it appears to us that he is a dictator killing his own people with chemical weapons. The people whom we call terrorists see themselves as righteous warriors fighting on the side of Allah against the great Satan, the United States, whom they understand to be waging a crusade against Islam and Muslims. We see them as an evil distortion of religion, killing innocents with a misguided understanding of God’s will.

Given the human capacity for self-deception, how do we know what side is right? But having said that, we cannot throw up our hands in despair and refuse to take sides. I do believe that there is good and evil in the world. When it comes to war there is often one side that is more on the side of right than the other. Neither side has completely clean hands in war. War brings out the worst in some people, just as it brings out the best in terms of self-sacrifice and heroism in others. There is never a war without war crimes. Innocents are always injured and killed. But still it is often necessary to fight.

There is a long history in Christianity of taking this position. It has been codified in what has been called the Just War theory, which puts forth the principles under which war is justifiable. Last month on the news I watched an excerpt from a speech that President Obama gave at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., on May 23, 2013. In it he invoked the Just War theory to explain his stance on the use of drones in assassinations, even against American citizens fighting with Al Qaida. He is in a long line of American presidents and lawmakers who have historically justified war based on Christian principles and the Bible.

The truth is that Bible is filled with war, often waged with the blessing of God. The Book of Joshua describes the campaigns against the Canaanites and other peoples of the land of Canaan sanctioned by God. We can dismiss OT wars out of hand as examples of a primitive tribal god of violence, or we can see it as something more. The whole history of Israel involves war, and God is not always in Israel’s side. We not only have Israel fighting its foes, we have Hebrews fighting Hebrews – the northern Kingdom of Israel fighting the Southern Kingdom of Judah. We also have God guiding foreign nations like Babylon to fight against Israel and even destroying Jerusalem and the temple. So God is not just a tribal deity in the OT. 

Furthermore a lot of people try to divide the OT from the NT, saying that OT portrays a God of war and the NT God is a God of peace. It sounds good, until you actually read the Bible. In the NT we have Jesus’ prophecies of the forthcoming destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans seen as God’s will. You will not find any bloodier book in the Bible than the Book of Revelation. I am talking the Battle of Armageddon, which is the fight of the forces of good against the forces of evil. The God of the Bible – OT and NT - is clearly involved in war. Therefore it is a biblical to be a Christian and a warrior. We find Jesus interacting with Roman soldiers in the gospels and Roman soldiers converting to Christianity in the book of Acts and nowhere does Jesus ask them to change their occupation nor does it say they resigned their commissions. There is a long tradition of Christian soldiers. There was an attempt in the 1980s to remove the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" from the United Methodist Hymnal and the Episcopal Hymnal. Outrage among church people caused both hymnal committees to back down. However, the hymn was omitted from the 1990 hymnal of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). I believe that it is a noble calling to be a soldier as well as a Christian, and that is why I am so supportive of those who serve in the military.

But having said that, I believe there is another calling just as noble. That is the calling of the peacemaker. I honor and respect those who have taken the road of nonviolence, those who see that history teaches that war only sows the seeds of future war in a never-ending cycle. That an eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind, as Mahatma Gandhi says. This is the road of Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist preacher. This is the road less traveled. It is the way of Jesus Christ. Jesus was a pacifist. Only on one occasion did Jesus instruct his disciples to buy swords, and that was prior to his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. But when Peter used the sword to defend Jesus from capture, Christ ordered him to put it away, saying, “Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” Then he proceeded to heal the injury of the man who had been wounded by Peter. In our gospel lesson Jesus famously said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.” And he also “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven…. Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

Some hear this call of perfect nonviolence, and they follow it. They have made the world are more peaceful and less violent place. I agree with the words of Jesus, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” These peacemakers may be our best hope for a more peaceful earth. But ultimately I believe that Jesus is also right when he says there will always be wars and rumors of war. The only end to war will be when Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, establishes his Peaceable Kingdom predicted by the prophets upon this earth. That is our hope. Let’s try not to kill ourselves completely off before that happens.

The hope for peace on earth is Jesus Christ. If the cause of war is the human heart than the solution to war is the transformation of the human heart. That happens only when Christ reigns in our hearts now just as he will reign someday on earth in the future. So I have three Christian responses to war and violence. One is to fight on the side of right, and do our best to discern the right. The second is to wage the spiritual warfare of nonviolence, knowing that the real fight is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual forces of evil. The third is to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ which by the grace of God through faith in the Savior transforms the human heart, leading it from violence to peace, curing our warring madness from the inside out. The work of Christ in our hearts and in the world is the only hope of peace.