Month: March 2024

The Empty Tomb and Charlton Heston

~ Vincent
“Are you a master builder or a master butcher?”

I love watching The Ten Commandments around this time of the year. You know, the one with Charleton Heston in it?  They had that movie on TV every year during Easter weekend when I was growing up, so we’d munch down on some jellybeans and enjoy.  Not all of it, of course.  That would have been absurd.  The movie is well over three hours long (not counting the commercials) and I was a kid.  If I was lucky, I managed to get as far as the Nile turning to blood before I got distracted by something else.  Mind you, there were a few marathons of endurance when I managed to make it through the entire thing (usually, by recording it and playing it back over the next few days), but usually I only got bits and pieces every year.  Needless to say, the Passover story just feels right for me to think about whenever Easter comes around.  Which is pretty weird since I’m not Jewish.

I’m not the first Christian to associate leaving Egypt with Easter.  Cyril of Jerusalem, a bishop in the 4th century, thought in those same terms.  I’ve been reading through some of his stuff lately because I’m leading a confirmation class, and Cyril’s catechetical lectures are some of the most famous confirmation materials in history.  In them, he covers the basics of Christianity for people who were hoping to be baptized, so there’s a lot about the Church, the sacraments, and why we need Jesus so much.  And in 4th century Jerusalem, you got baptized on Easter, so every class led up to that big day.  Afterwards, there were a few more bonus classes where Cyril taught the newly-baptized Christians from the mouth of the very tomb where Jesus was buried.  Can you imagine being present for that?  Even reading about it all these years later is exciting!

The first sermon that Cyril gave from the mouth of the tomb, was about… the exodus from Egypt!  Well, and baptism.  And Jesus.  All of that rolled into one.  Here it is in some of his words:

Let’s turn from the old to the new, from the figure to the reality.  There, we have Moses sent by God to Egypt; here, Christ was sent by his Father into the world.  There, Moses came to lead oppressed people out of Egypt; here, Jesus came to rescue people oppressed in the world by sin.  There, the blood of a lamb warded off the destroyer; here, the blood of the Lamb without blemish, Jesus Christ, wards off every demon.  There, a tyrant pursued the Isarelites all the way to the sea; here, the author of evil followed you even to the streams of salvation.  The tyrant of old was drowned in the sea, and the one today vanishes in the waters of salvation.

-Cyril of Jerusalem, First Lecture on the Mysteries (trans. Gifford 1894, paraphrased by me)

To Cyril, the Bible wasn’t this chaotic mess of stories all jumbling around.  Everything was deeply connected, and it was all intended to help us.  So when we read the Passover story, we should take note of details.  We should notice who the people are and what they’re up against.  We should notice where their salvation is from and how they are saved!  We should take note of every little detail.  Why?  Because it’s not just about a group of people thousands of years ago.  It’s about you and me, it’s about God, and it’s about how he saved us.  He acted in the past in certain ways to prepare us for what was coming in Jesus: the fullness of salvation for all people.

I have no idea what you’ve got in store this Easter season.  Whether you’re sitting through the full three hour and forty-five minute epic that is The Ten Commandments, or something way less exciting, just remember that it’s not a bad time of the year to think about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.  That story, with all of its drama and excitement, isn’t so far from our situation.  Just as the Israelites were saved by the blood of a lamb all those years ago, we are saved by the blood of the perfect lamb today.

Discipleship in a Postmodern World

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on December 4, 2022
Scriptures: John 18:28-40, 2 Timothy 4:1-8

Haven’t you heard of that madman who in the bright morning, lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly: “I’m looking for God!  I’m looking for God!”  Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused a great laughter.  “Has God been lost, then?”  Asked one.  “Did he lose his way like a child?”  asked another.  “Or is he hiding?’  “Is he afraid of us?”  “Has he gone to sea?”  “Emigrated?”  Thus they shouted and laughed, one interrupting the other.  The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.  “Where is God?”  he cried.  “I’ll tell you!  We have killed him- you and I!  We are his murderers.  But what does it mean?  … Is there still an up and a down?  Are we now straying through an infinite nothing? … God is dead.  God remains dead.  And we have killed him!… Do we not ourselves have to become God merely to appear worthy of it?”… Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners: they too were silent and looked at him disconcertedly.  Finally, he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and he left.  “I come too early,” he then said, “My time is not yet… This deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars and yet they have done it themselves!”  It is still remembered how on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and started singing a requiem.  Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied nothing but “What then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

That little parable was written by the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  I’m sure you’ve heard the quippiest line from it, “God is dead.”  It’s often used by amateurish atheists trying to argue that God isn’t real.  “God’s dead! Science has disproved him!”  Not true.  And not what Nietzsche was interested in saying.  Nietzsche isn’t trying to make some big clever atheist point.  No, in its original context, Nietzsche isn’t celebrating.  He’s lamenting.  God is conceptually dead to the world around him!  Nobody believes that he’s there.  Our way of thinking no longer includes that particular dogma.  We assume that God doesn’t act and probably isn’t capable of changing the world.  People act!  People change the world.   We vote and we invent and we work and we plan.  The idea that a God is genuinely represented in that process seems absurd to most!  If there is a God, he’s certainly not imagined to be the sort of God that can do things.  He exists in a little irrelevant box at best.  At worst, that box is his coffin.  As far as popular imagination goes, God is conceptually dead.  And what does that mean? 

If we don’t believe in God anymore, nothing can be the same as it was when we did.   Everything has to be different.  Is there still an up and a down?  Is there still a right and a wrong?  Can there be real meaning in the world?  Or are we all just floating in an infinite nothing, trying desperately to create meaning where there is none?  If God is dead, we are still here, we still crave some kind of point.  If God is dead, we need to become Gods to fill the void in the cosmos that we created.

In the end of his little parable, the madman (clearly a stand-in for Nietzsche) wanders away.  The crowd isn’t ready for him yet.  They want to pretend that everything is still the same.  That up is objectively up and down is objectively down.  That there’s an objective point and that things can politely go on as they have been.  But the madman knows better.  Nothing is objective anymore.  People just aren’t willing to admit it just yet.  And that’s a summation of Nietzsche’s philosophy.   Nietzsche’s whole idea was that if Westerners no longer believe in God, they need to start being honest with themselves.  There can be no appeals to absolutes.  There can be no pleasant, safe reliance on old social structures that were built with the assumption that a god existed and wanted certain things for us.  If we don’t believe in God, we need to tear down the old structure and build fresh.  Because the rules that we are playing by are absurd.

The future Nietzsche foretold is now.  The postmodern era is here.  There are no absolutes.  There is no objectivity…  no singular way of being.  We have each become as God, creating our own meaning, crafting our own laws, and living free from the commands of others.

And what has become of churches in this world?  If Nietzsche is to be believed, they’re tombs and sepulchers.  Evidence of something that’s gone.  Memorials for a lost era.  They exist so people can look backwards at what once was for those that wish to reminisce.

That’s not far off.

Eight weeks ago, we went through the statistics of not only United Methodist decline, but also Christian decline in the Western world.   I think they bear repeating.  In the early 1990s, around 90 percent of American adults identified as Christian.  In 2007, the number was down to 78% (a twelve percent loss).  In 2020, that number was 64% (a further 14 percent loss).  And that’s just the amount of people that are willing to tick the “Christian” box on a survey!  The number of devout Christians is much lower than that.

And there’s the fact that the average number of new United Methodists in the United States each year is about -200,000.  And there’s the fact that a person going into undergraduate studies as a confessing Christian only has between an 18 and a 30 percent chance of leaving that same campus as a confessing Christian.  Things are declining.  And on top of all of those sobering statistics, we saw the pandemic.  Some experts are saying that it sped things up by about ten years.  The decline that was happening slowly in our churches happened quickly.  Churches that looked like they were just one good pastor away from recovery can’t pretend anymore.  And the United States is one of the most religious countries in the Western world.  Don’t even start with Europe. 

If we’re going to be a church in the West, we have to acknowledge that we no longer live in a culture that creates Christians by default.  We live in a culture that is statistically proven to convert people away from Christianity.

Ever since I got here, you guys said you wanted to grow.  And that’s what every church says, right?  Well, most of ‘em anyway.  They say they want to grow.  If we want to share the Gospel with people around us, we can’t bury our heads in the sand as to these facts.  We’re past the time when most of the population is actively looking for a church to attend.  There are still cultural conservatives (people that look back and see something of value, even when others are moving away from it).  Which is brilliant!  That instinct will lead them to the most valuable truth there is.  But most people aren’t like that.  Most aren’t looking for churches, nor are they interested in what we’re doing.  Making disciples right now is the most difficult it’s been in over a thousand years.   Because for the very first time in Western History, we’re trying to share the Gospel with people who think they know it and think it doesn’t hold up.  They think that God is dead.

If you’re discouraged right now, don’t be.  Legitimately.  The downside of sermons like these is they sound so horrendously dire.  Gloom and doom and sadness all around.  There’s no point in that.  Here’s the good news:  God is real.  He doesn’t require our approval to exist.  He simply exists!  And he’s in control!  And we’re never alone or abandoned.  He has called us, you and me, to be missionaries to the Western world at the dawn of a new era.  We have been chosen by God for a remarkable task!  No need to feel upset.

We aren’t doing this to sit around and feel miserable.  We’re asking a question.  How?  How can we share the Gospel with a world that thinks God is dead.  How can we share the greatest news there ever was with a new generation?  

Evangelism today won’t look the same.  The status quo will not hold.  We can’t just wait for people to come to us and expect that with the right preacher at the helm, the right extra-fun event, and the right decor, people will come flocking.  They won’t.  A lot of them don’t even know we exist.  They’re not looking for events from us.  They’re not even thinking about us.  We have to go looking for them!  We’re missionaries in a new world, and we have to go to the people.  We have to know them.  To know what they love.  What they fear.  What they long for.  What concerns them.  We have to know the culture.  And once we do, that’s when we can start to meaningfully consider how we can share the Gospel.

So what did we learn over the past eight weeks?  What are the themes that emerged?  What do I hope we walked away with?

Well, I want to start with a Scripture.  If there’s one Scripture that reflects the post-modern person, I think it’s our first reading about Pontius Pilate, John 18:28-40.  Here is a man that is face to face with Jesus himself… and what does he say?  “What is truth?”  What is truth?  Pilate is a big, bad Roman governor.  He’s heard a thousand people tell him what’s “true.”  And he’s done bothering with all that.  There’s one truth: power.  The Roman Empire has sent him to govern this territory.  Fact.  The people of the territory are angry at Jesus for having the audacity to tell them that he’s God.  Fact.  They demand his execution.  Fact.   And now?  Now Pilate has to act.  Don’t bother talking to him about truth.

And here’s Jesus.  Weak.  Captured.  Assailed by enemies at every turn.  And he makes his claim once more.  “I’m God.”  And he does make that claim.  How else could you possibly read verse 36?  I have a kingdom but it’s not of this world.  Hmmm, so he is a king and has a kingdom, but it isn’t here.  I wonder where it is…  And yet he’s always clever enough to never quite say something that could get him killed.  Did I say I was a king?  I never used those words.  YOU used those words.  I was someone who was born to testify to the truth.  Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.

And then the words of Pilate.  “What is truth?”  Pilate is world-weary. To him, there is no truth in this world outside what we make of it.

That’s the postmodern world.  There is no truth in this world outside of what we make of it.

In our time on this theme, we’ve thought specifically about five big ideas that cause controversy.  Five doctrines that the post-modern world holds that our doctrines prevent us from agreeing with.

1. There is no objective truth.
2. The authentic self is inherently good. Society is inherently evil.
3. The only legitimate authority over a person is themselves.
4. The world is defined by power.
5. Happiness is the goal all living things should strive for.

First, we spoke about absolute truth.  Just like Pilate, we live in a world where people assume that talk about truth is ridiculous.  There is no objective truth.  We each have our own truth, our own separate way of being, our own assumptions, but our truth isn’t actually true for other people.  That would be absurd.  What is truth?  An unwillingness to consider truth as objective is a challenge to Christianity because Jesus never claimed to just be a subjective truth; a great option for those interested.  He claimed to be THE WAY.  The singular, objective truth in a world that is swimming with confusion.

Then we spoke about the second doctrine: authenticity.  Augustine and Jean Jacques Rousseau and their dueling stories of produce theft.  Why do people do bad things?  Is there something in us?  Or do the real factors lie outside of us?  The dominant philosophical forces tend to assume that wrong lies outside of ourselves.  That’s why it’s so easy to rail against society and so hard to talk about sins that we ourselves are actively fighting.  Another hurdle for people today.  Because believing in Christianity sounds like moving to a very positive way of thinking (I am inherently good) to a very negative way of thinking (I need help to be good).

Next, we talked about authority.  We looked at poetry and art and other mediums that reflect that great question: where does authority lie?  In an author?  In a work?  Or in an audience?  Postmodernism assumes there is no author that matters and the work is what you make of it!  The audience (us) holds all the real authority.  But it’s hard to live when you’re the one making up everything as you go along.  Because you know you made it up!  And there’s a suspicion that it was entirely arbitrary.  This is a sticking point where Christianity has some power over postmodernism.  Because we aren’t just making up meaning;  we’ve got it!

We spoke about power.  The world has become so cynical.  In our stories, we see self-interested characters doing whatever it takes to gain power.  And that’s what history has started to look like: just a bunch of jerks trying to get power over one another.  Our trust in any governing entity is just rock bottom, and not just because of particulars, but because it’s hard to believe that anyone is trying to lead for anything more than money.  Christianity presents, what I believe is a more compelling option.  The Bible says there’s more at work in the world than selfishness.  There’s hope, joy, and love.  Things aren’t as grim as they seem.  Things are more complicated than that.

Finally, we talked about suffering.  Since the post-modern world has no objective meaning, there’s no real reason to suffer.  You’re in charge of your own destiny, so aim to get as much pleasure as possible.  Seek pleasure.  Avoid pain.  Enjoy happiness.  Which makes all this suffering in the world hard to account for.  Because what does pain have to do with existing?  It’s just a meaningless frustration that humanity should have solved by now.  Christianity has always held that suffering is not all bad.  It’s not pleasant, but it’s not evil in and of itself.  Sometimes, we grow through difficult situations.  Because our lives aren’t just intended to make us happy.  They’re intended to make us holy.  And becoming holy can’t happen if everything is smooth.  We are challenged to smooth out those rough edges keeping us from listening to God.

That’s the past few months in a nutshell.  The world around us is different than us.  It has new assumptions that influence not only the way non-Christians look at us, but the way we look at ourselves.  If we’re going to be missionaries to the postmodern world, we have a lot to think about.

So what’s something to end on?  What’s a big takeaway that represents kind of an amalgamation of all we’ve learned?   I’ve been thinking about that all week.  I’ve been reading book after book of the Bible, looking for a Scripture that speaks to how we should hold ourselves.  And the more I looked, the more I was drawn to some of the last words of one of the greatest evangelists in all of history: the Apostle Paul.  And why?  Because here was a man that evangelized from some of the earliest days of the faith.  He traveled from town to town, trying to share the Gospel with people that weren’t actively looking for it just yet.  The passage we have today is from the last verse of the last letter he wrote.  Paul was in a prison cell in Rome awaiting his execution when he wrote this letter to the evangelist Timothy.  So these are his last words.  The last words from one masterful evangelist to another.  And here’s what Paul has to say in 2 Timothy 4:1-8:

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge:Preach the word; 

If you want to see people become Chrsitian, you have to tell people!  We don’t get to just politely show up on Sunday and then wonder, “Gee, why is it nobody is coming?  Is the sign not big enough?  I’ll go measure the sign.  Are we not having enough fun activities?  Let’s arrange for a few more of those.  Do we need some t-shirts with our logo that we can wear in public?  That’ll turn things around!

By no means are any of those bad things,right?  They’re good!  But in a world where people don’t think that God exists, nobody is going to start attending church because they saw a great sign, they attended a fun event, or saw us wearing a t-shirt with our logo on it.  Nope.  They know that churches exist!  There’s dozens of them littering the landscape.  They know we’re here.  They’re not gonna start believing in God because they saw a great sign.  They need someone to talk to them.  To actually explain to them why Christianity than they think it is.  Why it’s not just a relic of the past or a hand-me-down from a more primitive age; it’s the truth at the center of every life.

be prepared in season and out of season;

Have you ever had a moment where you thought to yourself, “Man, I could have witnessed back there, but I wasn’t sure that I could handle it.”  Sometimes that happens!  We’re talking to someone and it starts to get deep.  And we know that there’s room to start talking about Jesus.  But we’re scared.  What if we say it wrong?  What if they aren’t open to it?  What if they get mad at us?  What if we’re not good enough.

And you know, I’d like to say that in that moment, the Holy Spirit will take over and you’ll be shockingly eloquent and your speech will supernaturally start to be more than you were capable of on your own.  I’d like to say that… but I won’t.  Because even though miracles can happen, it’s best for that not to be plan A.  If we want to share our faith, we have to be prepared.  Be prepared to talk about it!  Be ready to answer questions.  Be ready to say why it makes a difference and answer questions that people have!  And you might think, “Oh, not me.  I’m not good at that sort of thing.”  That’s nonsense.  You are uniquely gifted with a perspective that no one else has.  You have relationships that no one else has.  You have a personality that no one else has.  You have a story that no one else has.  You are uniquely equipped to talk to people about Jesus in a way that no one else can.  So practice.  Talk about Jesus to other Christians.  Talk about Jesus to your family.  Talk about your faith so when the time comes to witness, you’ll be prepared regardless of whether it’s a moment you expected or a moment you didn’t expect.

correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.

Here, the Bible is showing us that this is about more than theory.  Nobody is asking you to talk at length about abstract philosophy.  There’s nothing wrong with philosophy when it’s addressing real needs that we have, but real life is not abstract.  It’s real.  It’s earthy.  It’s urgent.  When we share the Gospel with people, we need to do more than just tell people, “Well, you know, I think it’s quite viable that a God could exist.  Let me give you my list of proofs.”  That might be good, depending on the person, but it’s hard to work a theory that there might be a God into everyday conversation organically.

No, we share the truth of a God that we KNOW.  A God that we can talk to.  A God we have a relationship with.  A God that helps guide our lives towards what’s good for us and leads us away from those things that would harm us.  This isn’t about abstract theory.  This is about everyday living.  It’s about the choices that we make every second of every day to move towards truth or to move away from it.  To become the people that God is calling us to be, or to walk on paths that we’re not made to walk.  Paul mentions correcting, rebuking, encouraging, and patience because this is a lived faith, not a theory.

For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.

This is a theme that came up repeatedly that I didn’t expect: the fight between the hard work of believing God’s truth, and the comfortable work of accepting a convenient lie.  Repeatedly, the Bible has told us, “Watch out!  You’re gonna be tempted to make up easier stuff.  Don’t do it.  It’s not the way to go.”  Now Paul refers to a particular time in which sound doctrine will be unacceptable to people.  They don’t want anything to do with it.  They’d rather make up their own thing than believe what God says.

If you look through Chrsitian history, in every era people have wondered, is this that time that Paul was talking about?  Is THIS the era in which people will not put up with sound doctrine?  I’m not comfortable making that claim.  I mean, to even make it assumes that things in the West are what God is really focusing on and, as we’ve said before, Christianity is growing in Asia, South America, Africa, and other regions.  Just because some of us might feel like things are bad in our area doesn’t mean it’s not different in other places.  There are Chinese people on the other side of the world where church numbers are swelling thinking to themselves, “Finally, an era where people crave the truth!  Praise God!”  It’s always hard to know if this is THE TIME, given the limitations of our own perspective.

But it’s not new to assume that the time might be now.   I think that speaks to the reality that whether or not a specific, ultimate instance of that time has come, people naturally have a hard time accepting truth.  In our sin, it’s much easier to accept a pleasant lie rather than an uncomfortable truth.

People might not want to hear the tough truths that God is telling.  Sometimes WE don’t want to hear the hard truths that God is telling us.  Because truth is hard to swallow.  Life is hard enough.  Usually, we just want a pat on the back. But we were not born so that we could limp through life and get a pat on the back.  We were born for more than that.

So is this THE time that Paul was talking about?  Or is this just A time like any other?  I don’t know.  I only know that we can’t go around sharing God’s truth with people and expecting that they’re gonna be thrilled right off the bat!  We have to be gentle.  Patient.  Kind.  Understanding.  Because truth can be hard to hear.  It’s tempting to look for people who just tell us what we want to hear.  It’s hard to listen to the truth.  So we need to listen, even when it’s hard.  And we need to be kind and patient when we share with others.  Endure.  Do the work of an evangelist.

For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near.  I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.  Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.

Paul knows that his time is almost up.  He’s in prison.  He’s going to die.  Throughout his epistles, he compares the Christian life to running a race.  Here, he says that he has run the race.  The end is here for him.  And is he afraid?  Afraid that he didn’t do enough?  Afraid that all the churches he planted are gonna die now that he’s not there?  Afraid that he went too far in his preaching and should have chilled out a little so he could stick around?  No!  He didn’t do all of this evangelizing because he wanted to build a bigger church and get famous.  He did it because he loves God.  God commanded him to share and so he did!  There was no fear.  Because now, as things come to a close for him, there is only joy.  Joy for what lies ahead.  Joy for union with his creator.  Joy for himself and for all others that love Jesus.  The crown of righteousness lies ahead.   The life of an evangelist shouldn’t be defined by fear of how things are going to go or what others are going to say.  It’s defined by joy.  It’s defined by peace!  It’s defined by faith. 

As we come to the end of this series, here’s the post-pandemic truth: every church in America has to wake up to the fact that we have reached a fork in the road.  There are two paths ahead of us.  We have to pick one and move.  Because we can’t keep going like we were.  There’s no path at all in that direction.

The status quo isn’t a real option at this point.  Don’t get me wrong; we can keep the status quo as far as church goes.  We can change nothing.  We can even reset everything back to the way it was in the 90s, back when 90 percent of people were confessing Christians and things were easier.  We can do that.  We won’t make any new disciples, mind youm because we don’t live back then anymore.  We live now.  Looking backwards will feel good, but it will  be a huge waste of time.  Nostalgia is a heck of a drug.  It’ll make you feel better.  But it won’t change anything.

There’s two real options for those that want to build churches: The Path of Pilate.  And the Path of Paul.

The first option is the Pilate option.  We can recognize that we have enjoyed a certain level of power in Western society for thousands of years.  Our doctrines naturally made sense to people.  Our ways seemed intuitive.  Christianity was woven into the fabric of society, and that kept our churches full and the number of disciples high.  But Nietzsche is right.  We’re in a new world now, and our logic is no longer intuitive.  If we want to continue existing as a powerful, respectable, comfortable institution, we’ll need to make some trade offs.  We’ll need to adjust our doctrines to align with the world as it is today.  It’d align with the intellectual authorities of our age.  It’d be popular with the average person.  We can stop saying that Jesus is THE way and start saying he is A way.  We can stop saying that people are sinful and start saying that people need to be themselves.  We can trade out holiness for happiness.  And will we thrive?  Honestly?  Probably not.  But it’ll be comfortable, and a few people that are uncomfortable with the hard truth that other churches tell but that want the trappings of Christianity will walk through the doors hesitantly, and say to themselves, “Oh thank goodness, I found a reasonable church.  That’s great.”

Some of you may be thinking, geeze Vincent, tell me how you really feel.  The way you’ve presented it, that’s no option at all!  To the contrary, not only is the Pilate path an option, this would be a much easier option than all the alternatives.  None of us will have to work overtime.  None of us will have to have uncomfortable conversations.  Each of us will be free to relax.  Pilate lived a pretty good life, right?  He enjoyed a certain level of power in his heyday!  And we could too.  We could cling to our historic power and find ways to make it last.  What is truth, we’d ask.  And we’d eat and drink and be merry.

The second option is Paul’s option.  We can acknowledge that the world has changed its assumptions.  That they’re no longer eager to buy into what we’re saying.  A lot of what the average person assumes actually conflicts significantly with what God tells us.  And under these circumstances, we can say, “Welp, time to get out there and evangelize.”  And we’ll be weird in a lot of people’s eyes!  We’ll be those crazy outsiders that make wild claims that don’t make any sense.  But we’ll be those weirdos that chose Christ over Caesar.  The God of the next world over the God of this one.  It’ll be much harder.  But we stand to gain infinitely more.

We’re at the dawn of a new era, and a decision must be made.  I can’t answer this question for you.  Because this isn’t just a leadership decision or an institutional decision.  It’s not just the church that has to answer this.  It’s you.  Each and every one of you.

Pilate or Paul?
Power or Weakness?
Caesar or Christ?

Are you really willing to go all-in on this?  Because it’s not too late to cash out and enjoy the time we’ve got left.  It only costs your integrity.

Caesar or Christ?
Do you want to sell out?  Or are you going to go all in?

Shall We Suffer?

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 27, 2022
Scriptures: Genesis 32:22-32, 1 Thess. 5:12-24

Hedonism has a pretty bad reputation.  Just hearing the word brings certain debaucherous ideas to mind.  Hedonism is eating the most expensive, decadent chocolate cake you can find.  It’s wild partying with every illicit substance imaginable.  It’s unbridled sensuality.  Hedonism is wild living without any thought of future consequence.  And that’s more or less what the word actually means anymore.  Someone that calls you a hedonist isn’t trying to give you a compliment.  But what did it mean?  Because it used to mean something more.  It used to be a legitimate school of philosophy, and its teachings are more compelling than you’d probably think.

Let’s look at what may be the most famous hedonist philosopher: an ancient Greek man by the name of Epicurus.  Judging from our modern associations, you’d think Epicurus was some kind of wild party boy.  His life must have had a lot of sex, drugs, and the ancient equivalent of rock-and-roll.  Not so, actually.  Epicurus was a really decent guy.  His life wasn’t customized by wild excess.  It was simple.  He loved good friends, rural living, basic cooking, and that was about it.  He was a simple man with a simple philosophy: life is hard because we’re all too busy being afraid of losing what we have.  The solution?  Enjoy the little things.  Spend your time doing what actually matters and avoid wild excess, because if you get used to fancy things, you’ll spend your whole life being afraid that you’ll lose them.  Avoid the fear of loss, seek the simple pleasures, and you’ll be happy.

You’ll notice that there’s not a lot of room for God in that equation.  If simple pleasures are the route to happiness, who needs God?  To be fair to Epicurus, he actually does include God in his writings.  He doesn’t say a lot about him, but he includes him.  You can see right here in your bulletin a quote I pulled from Epicirus’s writings:

 “First believe that God is a living being immortal and happy, according to the notion of a god indicated by the common sense of humankind; and so of him anything that is at agrees not with about him whatever may uphold both his happiness and his immortality.”

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

What two words does he use to describe God?  Immortal and happy.  God is happy!  Don’t worry about him!  He’s up there, doing his thing.  At the end of the day, he’s a happy guy that wants you to be happy too.

Can you imagine if Epicirus was around today?  Think about a message like that: God wants YOU to be happy.  I think he’d sell quite a few books.  Maybe get an appearance on Oprah.  He’d be a big deal!  

But we have to ask ourselves, why didn’t his philosophy endure through the ages?  If the message resonates today, but most of us have never heard of this guy and his school of philosophy, what banished him to obscurity?  Well, Christianity.  Some of the people that denounced Epicirus’s teachings were Christian.  Augustine thrashed it in his writings.  Justin Martyr and Tatian did the same long before him.  Christians generally saw Epicureans as the worst available school of philosophy.  And why?

Because the happiness that Epicurus was selling wasn’t true happiness.

True happiness isn’t about managing to lower your expectations to the point that they’re no longer relevant.  It’s not about maximizing your pleasure.  It’s not about avoiding fear.  It’s not about the pursuit of dopamine.

Happiness, true happiness,the kind that lasts longer than an afternoon, isn’t about pleasure.  It’s about fulfillment.  Being what we’re supposed to be!  Doing what we’re supposed to do!  And that’s why life isn’t just one long pleasure trip.  There are other emotions besides pleasure-based happiness.  There’s sadness, fear, obsession and grief.  There’s panic, courage, annoyance and joy.  There are a million different emotions under the sun!  And all of them are on the table while we’re pursuing fulfillment.  And all of them are good.  All of them are important.  

Last week, we spoke of how our engagements with history have grown far too cynical.  The inclination to view the world through the lens of power has made the whole of history little more than wolves and sheep, tyrants and the oppressed.  That’s too shallow.  Christianity says that there’s more to the world around us than the selfish pursuit of power.  There’s love.  We Chirstians know that the world is driven by more than selfishness.  God himself is love, and he’s in this world at work.

If last week was about saying that the readings of the world around us have grown too shallow, this week is affirming that our readings of ourselves have suffered the same fate.  We have also become far too shallow in our own eyes.  Mind you, the readings of history focused on what was ugly, whereas the readings of our lives tend to focus on what’s good.  We focus on pleasure.  We’d like more money.  We’d like more stuff.  We’d like fewer jerks in the spaces around us and more friends.  When God gives us anything other than pleasure, it tends to be frustrating.  Why God?  What did I do to you?  We define success within our lives by the acquisition of pleasure.  We long for more dopamine.  Most of us have become functional hedonists.  But that does a great disservice to what life really is.  When we go through hard things, that’s when we tend to grow the most.  God isn’t trying to make us happy.  God is trying to make us holy.

Our first Scripture reading today, Genesis 32:22-32, is a famous one that points to this exactly: Jacob wrestling with God.  And what a weird story it is!  This is the Old Testament at its finest!  Let’s look at this a little:

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions.

First off, why is any of this happening?  Jacob is going to see his brother Essau.  When he was a kid, he stole Essau’s blessing and ran away.  All these years later, things aren’t going so well.  He has to go back to Esau for help, and he has no idea how Esau is going to respond.  Is he going to welcome him?  Begrudgingly allow him to stay?  Chase him off?  Kill him?  Here, he’s crossing a river.  This is the point of no return.  If Esau decides to attack Jacob and his people, they can’t just retreat if there’s a river at his back.  But God told Jacob to go to Esau.  So this is where he has to make that choice.  Does he really trust God?  This is the last stop.  There’s no turning back after the River Jabbok.  And he crosses it.

So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.

Notice that Jacob doesn’t start to wrestle with God.  He’s not out there picking a fight.  The Bible says that God picked a fight with Jacob.  What did God want from him?  Everything.  Jacob is a character that’s constantly scheming.  He’s manipulative.  He’s clever.  He usually plans on figuring things out for himself, rather than waiting around for God.  And how has that gone for him historically?  Not great.  He’s won a few, but he’s lost more.  This is a man that has to go back to the brother he cheated to beg for help, for crying out loud, he’s not in a good place.  His self-reliance has gotten him nowhere.  And now?  Now comes God.  And God wants the last shred of faithfulness that Jacob has been holding back on.

A really common reading of this passage is to say that this figure is a pre-incarnation of Jesus.  Some people say that anytime we see God in a human form, that’s Jesus.  I’m not a hundred percent on that one, but I think it’s really interesting at minimum.  How often have we wrestled with Jesus?  How often have we held out because we feel we can figure things out on our own?  Until Jesus hunts us down and wrestles that last bit of pride out of us.

When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 

Things look pretty evenly matched there for a while.  Both men are struggling.  Jacob is doing well.  The mystery man is doing well (remember, we don’t know it’s God just yet).  Nobody can quite get the edge over the other.  And then?  Out of nowhere, boom!  God touches Jacob’s hip and changes everything.  The fight isn’t as even as it looked.  God was always in control.  With one little touch, he could have won at any point.  A good reminder that no matter how things look, God is in control.  It might look like he’s evenly matched, but it’s all just a show.  God wins.  God always wins.

Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

At this point, it’s over.  Jacob can’t win with his wounded leg.  The man basically says, “Hey, move on.  It’s over.”  But Jacob doesn’t move on.  He may be defeated, but he’s not letting go.

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

The clever Jacob.  The man who always relied on his abilities.  His cleverness.  Has been humbled.  He’s held on for what?  God’s blessing.  He’s now someone that seeks only to be blessed by God.  This is a turning point for him.  He’s no longer good ‘ol crafty Jacob.  He’s someone new.

The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel,[a] because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”

But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.

Some people like to say this whole fight was metaphorical; just something representative of the inner drama that’s going on in Jacob’s mind during this challenging period.  I don’t think it is.  Because during the fight, God messes up Jacob’s leg.  And at the end of the fight, Jacob walks with a limp from then on.  It’s almost like a movie: there’s a really weird sequence where something absurd happens and after it ends, the main character looks back on it and thinks, “I must have been dreaming.  There’s no WAY that actually happened!”  But then they realize that they have a bruise or a scratch of something in their pocket from the time in question and they realize that maybe… maybe it wasn’t a dream.  Maybe something bizarre just happened.

Jacob wrestles God.  And he’s never the same after that.  Physically.  Mentally.  Spiritually.  It was a painful experience.  He bears the scars from that battle for the rest of his life.  But somehow, a Jacob that has experienced frustration, fear, desperation, and injury is better than the Jacob that we knew.  Through suffering, Jacob grows.  And hasn’t that happened to you?

Our second Scripture, 1 Thess. 5:12-24, is a little more direct.  Paul writes:

Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. 

Here, he’s talking about Church leadership.  Not just pastors, but others in your community that are leaders.  Leadership team members.  Choir directors.  Food pantry operators.  All kinds of leadership within the church.  And how does he describe them?  People that work hard.  People that care for others when times are hard.  People that scold others when the behavior within the community becomes inappropriate.  None of that is fun.  Who wants to work hard, deal with weird situations, and scold people that are out of line?  Nobody.  That’s the worst!  But Paul says, those people that are putting up with all that nonsense?  Give them extra respect.  They’re going through all that for you.  The true leader is a servant that suffers on the behalf of others.  THAT’S what makes them worthy of note.  Not because they have a fancy title or a nice degree or whatever other nonsense we come up with.

And now, Paul turns to everyone else and says:

And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else.

In other words, be like your leadership is supposed to be!  Work hard.  Don’t turn a blind eye when someone is being disruptive.  Take care of people that need help.  The work that leadership does isn’t just for leaders.  They may be the one that takes on a greater share institutionally, but that’s EVERYONE’S responsibility.  Everyone has a responsibility to do the tough stuff!  And he ends with the worst part: Don’t pay back evil for evil.  When someone does wrong, it’s natural to want to get them back.  It’s not just natural, it’s fair!  It’s reasonable!  But we’re not supposed to do that.  Be better than fair.  Be merciful.  Take the high road.

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

GIVE THANKS IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES.  It’s easy to give thanks on Thanksgiving.  Most of us have a nice meal in front of us.  A bunch of family around us.  Who couldn’t be thankful on a day like that?  But when our thanks is just driven by that, it’s just pleasure-based happiness.  It’s easy.  Anyone can get that.  It’s meaningless.  It’s here today and gone tomorrow.  We don’t just give thanks on turkey day.  We give thanks on EVERY day.  The good ones.  The bad ones.  The boring ones!  And we pray.  We pray continually in our hearts.  That’s a verse that’s so deep that I can’t even scratch the surface of it today, so I’ll just leave it at that and come back at some point in the future.  And we rejoice.  

It doesn’t say that you have to rejoice and give thanks for the bad things that happen.  That would be absurd, wouldn’t it?  “God, thank you for this broken leg.”  A broken leg is a bad thing.  We don’t have to thank God for the bad things.  But even in those moments defined by bad things, God is at work, making us better.  Making us shine brighter.  God’s will for us in Christ is to accept these moments, all the while praising God with joy and thanksgiving.  What a gift.  Now we move on to a passage with a theme very similar to last week:

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.

Again, not every religious idea is a good one.  Don’t hear something from your leadership and just assume it’s good because they’re good.  Don’t endure a tough situation and internalize some weird meaning because it feels like God wants that.  Just as with last week, we test the spirits.  We have to check to see that what we get actually lines up with what God has told us in Scripture.  Because we can develop wrong, even when we’re doing everything right.  We have to be discerning on this journey of growth.

May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

There’s our goal.  That’s true happiness right there.  Sanctification.  That’s God making us holy.  That’s fulfillment.  All of the pain we endure.  The hard work we get through  The insults we bear.  It’s God at work, sanctifying us.  God doesn’t want to make us happy.  He wants so much more than that.  He wants to make us holy.  That’s why any turn to epicureanism, popular though it may be, is ultimately a lost cause.  We’re more than dopamine centers.  We’re beings capable of a full range of emotions, even negative ones.  And enduring suffering isn’t pointless.  Epicurus was wrong.  The wholeness of our lives can’t be found in avoiding pain and collecting pleasures, because God has a way of helping us grow through suffering.  Who knew that a God who died on a cross might end up expecting his followers to suffer now and again?  So what will we do?  Will we rely on ourselves?  Will we back away from the Jabboks of our lives, avoiding any painful wrestling in the process?  Or will we cling and beg for a blessing?

The History of Power

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 20, 2022
Scriptures: 1 Samuel 26:1-12, 1 John 4

I want to read to you the dust jacket of a book I read long ago. The name of the book is King David: A Biography.  It’s written by Stephen McKenzey, a professor of Old Testament over at Rhodes College.

“Through a close and critical reading of biblical texts, ancient history, and recent archeological discoveries, Steven L. McKenzie concludes that David was indeed a real person. This David was not the humble shepherd who slew Goliath and became king, however, but was a usurper, adulterer, and murderer–a Middle Eastern despot of a familiar type. McKenzie shows that the story of humble beginnings is utterly misleading: “shepherd” is a metaphor for “king,” and David came from a wealthy, upper-class background. Similarly, McKenzie reveals how David’s ascent to power, traditionally attributed to popularity and divine blessing, in fact resulted from a campaign of terror and assassination. While instituting a full-blown Middle Eastern monarchy, David was an aggressive leader, a devious politician, and a ruthless war chief. Throughout his scandalous reign, important figures who stood in his way died at convenient times, under questionable circumstances. Even his own sons were not spared. David’s story, writes McKenzie, ‘reads like a modern soap opera, with plenty of sex, violence, and struggles for power.'”

That is a very different story than what is contained in Scripture!  In the Bible, we see King David as someone who is kind, gentle, and devout.  That doesn’t mean he always gets it right. There are some pretty bad stories in there about him too, but the overall vision of David is very different, especially in his ascent to power.  We see a young kind musician that is able to drive away the anger of someone as brutal as King Saul.  McKenzey imagines the opposite.  David is someone who is not at all kind.  He’s horrible!  He’s cruel, he’s vicious, he’s conniving.

How does McKenzey find a David that is the opposite of what the Bible says?  Well, a lot of this particular project comes from taking modern historical trends towards ancient documents and applying them to the Bible.  His first question: cui bono?  Who benefits from what happened in the story of David’s ascent to power?  Well, David did.  His second question: what biases might the author have?  The Biblical account was written by the royal scribes of Israel who worked for David.  The third question he asks is, “Where are they a little too insistent that something is true?”  Because if they had to keep telling people repeatedly that something was the case, maybe it wasn’t.  Maybe it was a lie, and they had to sell that lie with propaganda.  And that’s how McKenzey sees large portions of the Biblical narrative: royal propaganda to make the population think that David’s rise to power wasn’t as violent and brutal as it really was.

For example, in Samuel 24, King Saul is worried that David is more popular than he is and he could usurp the throne if he really wanted to, so Saul tries to kill him and David goes into hiding.  He’s hiding in a cave at one point, and Saul and his men are just outside, searching for him.  And the text says that Saul, “had to cover his feet,” which is a euphemism.  In our time, it might say something like, “Saul had to relieve himself.”  So Saul goes into the cave to relieve himself, and David is hiding right near him in this very vulnerable state, but David is not the kind of person that would murder the king that God put over Israel, so instead, he cuts off a piece of his robe.  When Saul gets back to his army, David comes out and shows him the fragment, essentially saying, “I could have killed you, but I didn’t.  I am not your enemy.”  So Saul gives up and goes home.  But then, Saul gets jealous again almost immediately.  He tries to kill David again, and again David has to go into hiding, and we end up with another story about how David could have killed Saul if he wanted to, but didn’t.  In Samuel 26, Saul and his men set up camp right by David’s new hiding spot.  So David sneaks into Saul’s camp in the dead of night, and, lo and behold, there’s Saul sleeping, his spear right next to his head.  One of David’s men whispers that David could kill him if he wanted to, but again, David is not that kind of man.  He will not kill God’s anointed.  So again, he doesn’t kill Saul.  Two instances where David has a very clear opportunity to take out his enemy; two times where he decided that he wouldn’t do that.  Mackenzie would look at that with suspicion.  Isn’t it convenient that David repeatedly had the opportunity to kill the man that he took the throne from but was just too good to do it?  Don’t trust the propaganda of Israel.  Look for the real story by sifting through their lies.

There’s nothing particularly unique about what McKenzie has done here, and I don’t say that to be dismissive.  By no means.  I only mean to suggest that this sort of reading technique is exceptionally common among modern historians.  It’s not surprising that he applied it to the Bible.  He wasn’t the first, and he won’t be the last.  It’s not any new methodology that makes me hesitate.  It’s the cynicism of that modern methodology.  How cynical is it to imagine that people are so incapable of good that the whole of a story is really just about power?  It’s not about God!  It’s not about being devout!  It’s not about being kind!  That is all nonsense.  No one is really like that.  No, people want to gain power.  That’s what David was really like.  

The last sentence on the dust jacket is particularly telling: “David’s story reads like a modern soap opera with plenty of sex violence and struggles for power.”  I just met with someone last week that was complaining about how hard it is to find a good show on tv today.  Every time a new show comes out, it’s darker and grittier than the last one.  More sex!  More violence!  The popular stories in our world, the stories that we see on tv and read in cheap paperback novels, are the ones we find to be the most comprehensible.  We can imagine people doing things to gain power, sex, and money.  Of course!  That’s what people do.  Stories about people doing things for God?  That’s a little hokey, don’t you think?  It’s unbelievable.  That cynicism bleeds into the stories from the past.  If stories aren’t about power, it’s because someone must have lied to cover up the real story.

This way of reading history isn’t uncommon. It’s not just for authors.  I’m sure you’ve run across it in random places.  I certainly have.  I remember being at a pub once with a friend of a friend.  He asked me if I was Christian.  I said yes.  He then asked whether or not I was Anglican.  I told him no.  He responded, “Good.  That one is so fake it’s ridiculous.  Everyone knows the Anglican Church was made when King Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Pope wouldn’t give it to him, so he created his own religion to make it ok and now millions of people today believe in it.  Why?  Because they don’t know history.  If they knew their history, they would know how fake all of it is.”  To give some credit to the gentleman, King Henry VIII was the one who started the Anglican church and his interest in getting a divorce was the deciding factor in many ways, but at the same time, the actual historical narrative is a little more complicated than that. When we reduce such a massive story to something so small, we miss a lot of it. 

It was common practice for the Pope to grant divorces to rulers who were looking for an heir and had a spouse that wasn’t able to provide one. Kings need an heir, and if they don’t have one, things get messy.  Mind you, the king was expected to ask the Pope with all due respect to show that he respected the faith and wasn’t being frivolous, but a divorce under those circumstances was considered a reasonable ask.  When King Henry VIII wanted a divorce, his wife was Catherine of Aragon.  She was older than him and had already shown that she had some significant issues when it came to bearing children, so the divorce didn’t seem all that wild… but the Pope said no.  A lot of the Pope’s good friends and supporters were her relatives.  If the divorce was approved, they would feel that she had been humiliated.  He would lose a lot of support.  Naturally, he chose to make sure that his allies were happy at the cost of Henry VIII and did not approve the divorce.  So  beyond lust, you already have some more motivations.  You have a king who wants to hand over his kingdom peacefully.  You have a church leader that needs to win points with powerful friends.  You have relatives protecting someone they love.  Now consider church tradition.  For all we know, the Pope really was sincere.  Maybe he was genuinely concerned about the institution of marriage and wasn’t willing to approve of sin just because the world found it convenient.  I mean, I can relate to that.  I’m not going to approve of any of your divorces, even if you do woo me a bit first!  So now we have tradition and faith added to the mix.  But beyond that, we have to remember that Protestants didn’t just pop into existence in England because the King was interested in talking to them.  They were already there!  They were already evangelizing!  It was hard to be a Protestant in England.  You risked martyrdom daily, but a lot of people risked a lot to tell the English that their church was leading them away from what God wanted and the Bible could steer them right again.  There were people who had lived and died hoping to see England embrace Protestantism like this.  When someone suggests that one man wanted a divorce so he made up a religion, it implies the whole thing was about lust and power, but really, it was about so much more.  There was fear of a succession war!  There were the obligations of leadership!  There was the love of family!  There was the weight of the Scriptures and hundreds of years of church tradition!  There was the rugged witness of the martyrs!  There was a lot that went into the creation of the Anglican Church.  It wasn’t  just a story about sex and power.

And we could get even closer to everyday life.  How many people say that churches are a scam?  I can remember a friend saying, “You know it’s a scam because they ask you for money every time you show up.  If it was really true, they wouldn’t want any money for it.”  Not an unpopular opinion, but a lazy one.  Most churches have pretty open finances.  If you want to learn more about them, you can ask and someone would be delighted to talk about where the money is spent, but that takes effort.  It’s much easier to just say it’s all about power and people are lying to get your money.

When people look at the world today, there’s this clear, repeated tendency to be cynical about motivations.  History looks like this long series of stories about people trying to get a leg up on one another.  This particular way of reading the world and its history really has its root at the beginning of the 19th century.  Last week, we talked a little about the shift from the pre-modern world to the modern.  How we went from seeing the author as the one with authority, to seeing the work as having its own authority, to seeing ourselves as the only authority.  That shift changed the way people told history, because there were no distinct inarguable causes that people needed to rally around sincerely.  There wasn’t even an objective framework to say what was good anymore.  If someone did something for love or beauty or God, that was just their opinion.  Their take.  Their way of obscuring their real motivation: they were promoting their personal thoughts and trying to twist the world to benefit themselves and those like them.

Things get a lot more cynical right around here.  There’s a quote from one of the most famous tellers of history in the modern era, Karl Marx, that comes to mind.  And if you’re wondering why your pastor is sneaking communism into the sermon this morning, stick with me.  Marx is such a good example of a cynical historian.  Right from the beginning of his most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, he attempts to explain the history of everything, and he starts like this:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In other words, he’s claiming to summarize every history book ever written right here.  There are people in power and they want to stay in power, and there are people who aren’t and they need help.  His big pitch is that we need to overthrow the people at the top so we can create a new society without these wealthy oppressors.  He may not have pulled off his utopia, but that big idea was very influential: history is about power.  There are wolves, and there are sheep.  There are oppressors, and there are oppressed. There are people who will hurt others to get what they want, and people who are too weak and disenfranchised to seek power.  It’s all very disenchanted; hopeless even.  

As we’ve been exploring the postmodern world, we’ve noted not only the challenges that we have in expressing Christianity to the world around us, but the advantages that we have.  Even if they don’t always understand us, we possess things that the world craves.  Last week, it was the simple fact that we know that there’s a point to all this.  There’s a real, actual point to life!  So many people in this world don’t know why they bother to wake up every morning.  They get up and ask, “What am I doing?”  They have to invent reasons to exist because they have no objective framework!  Nothing to wake up for!  We know that there’s a point.  There is something bigger than ourselves worth existing for: there’s God.  This week, it’s clear that we can offer a better reading of history.  The world is not just mired in selfishness and greed.  There’s more in this world than that.  People do things for so many reasons: hope, fear, courage, strength, weakness, and love.  There is so much more to the human heart and all of history than just a cynical drive to accumulate for ourselves.

This passage we’re looking at, 1 John 4, is one of the most famous passages of Scripture of all time.  It’s known for its beauty and quoted time and time again, but you’ll notice I grabbed a little more than normal.  People often start quoting from verse seven forward, when the language about love kicks in, but there’s an advantage to going back to the beginning of the chapter.  If you don’t have the context, it’s easy for a modern person to interpret this passage in a way that ironically doubles back on self-centeredness.  You’ll see what I mean.  Let’s begin at verse one.  

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.

That’s odd, right?  This is right before the “God is Love” bit that we all know and love!  You go up just a few lines and BOOM!  We’re talking about the Antichrist.  Nice, normal people may not talk about the Antichrist, but the Bible sure does, so we’ve got to look at it.  What is he really trying to get at here?  John is trying to address the fact that not all ideas religious ideas that people have are good ones.  Sometimes, people have bad ideas.  Sometimes, what people say is bogus.  Just because someone says, “Well I prayed and I really feel that God is saying XYZ,” does not mean that God has suddenly decided XYZ.   Sure, sometimes people get things from God, but sometimes people get them from other places, so John tells us to test the spirits.  See if this is legit before you buy in.

The test he proposes is asking people about Jesus.  People that are going to go off script and do something weird in their faith often have a warped understanding of Jesus.  They invent their own Jesus because the real one is too challenging for them to deal with.  To domesticate Jesus and his Gospel, they craft an idol in Jesus’s image.  You’ll see that he specifically warns about people in their region that are saying, “I believe Jesus is God, but I don’t believe he was really a man.”  Orthodox Christianity has always held that Jesus is fully God and fully man, but in the first three centuries, the “fully man” thing was really hard for people to accept.  Some people claimed that even though Jesus may have looked human, he must have really been a spirit.  If you touched him, your hand would have gone right through him.  Even his death on the cross was just an act!  He pretended to be crucified to teach us how to be a kind person, but he wasn’t actually crucified, because gods don’t become people and gods don’t die.  That school of thought was called docetism, and docetism was one of the first heresies.  

And what is a heresy?  Heresy comes from the Greek word haresis, which means to choose.  When the Church deemed something a heresy, they were saying that the people involved in those thoughts had not actually received the faith that was passed down by the apostles from Jesus himself.  Instead, they chose to pick out the bits that they liked and invent new ideas to cover up the things they didn’t like.  Heretics choose their faith, rather than inheriting it.  The docetists chose their own vision of Jesus, rather than accepting the real one.  That’s why John encourages us to test out ideas by asking people about Jesus.   If their vision of Jesus does not line up with what Scripture shows us, be wary.  Be very wary.

Today, I doubt we’d find many people that would claim that Jesus was pure spirit. That’s  just not a trendy idea anymore.  If anything, you’d be likely to find the opposite!  There are plenty of people that believe that Jesus was a good man, but not God.  Isn’t that interesting?  As much as things have changed, people still find it hard to believe that Jesus was fully God and fully man.  Here, John is warning us about people who have created an idol in the image of Jesus, but don’t have any interest in the real thing, and he says this only verses before his famous speech about love.  

He goes on:

You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.

Now, we start that classic build to the most famous line:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

The center of everything Is love.  Love is the beating heartbeat that keeps everything flowing. Love is what keeps everything from collapsing in on itself!  Love stands at the center of time.  It is the most dominant force.  Is there still selfishness and oppression?  Sure, but there’s a force better than that, bigger than that, and more powerful than that.  It’s not just this sort of background entity that has no real power.  It’s not just a matter of taste and aesthetics that justifies the people who are seeking to oppress.  No, it is a real, legitimate force at work in the world.

This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

People become truly capable of loving when they have a relationship with God.  That’s a bold claim, right?  We’ve all known Christians that sure don’t love very well, and we’ve all known non-Christians that seem to love a whole lot better.  How could he say something like that?  It seems absurd!  Where’s the logic to it?  He boils it down to three words:

God is love.

This is the section I warned is easy to misread.  It says, “God is love,” but it’s easy for people to reverse it in their head.  They think, “love is God.”  That would mean that whatever we think about God ought to be subjugated to our understanding of love, and we tend to think we have love figured out pretty well (at least, on a conceptual level).  We love watermelon!  We love our spouses!  We love running.  We love all sorts of things that make up our daily life.  If love is God, we don’t have to worry, because as long as we’re enjoying something, we’re being driven by love, and love is God, and we don’t have to change anything about our lives or anybody else’s.  But it doesn’t say love is God; it says God is love.  We should be subjugating our knowledge of love to what the Bible reveals about God.  What we know of love is so small so incomplete we’re just barely scratching the surface.   As we start to explore this thing called love, we become aware of a greater mystery; something that invites us forward beyond our shallow understanding and that is God. That is God.  

All of that can be a little confusing.  One theologian that said it very well is a man named Dionysius the Areopagite.  I can tell you guys want to say that one too!  That’s all right!  Try it with me: Dionysius the Areopagite!  Once more!  Dionysius the Areopagite!  There we go!  Don’t let anyone say we don’t have fun in church.  Dionysius the Areopagite was someone that wrote about this passage.  He taught that there are two ways to know God: we know God by what he is but also by what he is not.  There’s positive knowledge, and there’s negative knowledge.  Positive knowledge is used by comparing God to things that we know.  He uses this exact example!  God is love.  What does that mean?  This thing we know as love?  That is something like what God is.  But he also encourages us to be aware of the opposite which is equally true: God is not love.  By no means is he saying that Scripture is wrong.  He has tremendous respect for Scripture, but he says the point of making a statement like that is remembering that what we know as love is so rarely the fullness of what love really is.  Our love is often tainted by self-interest, lust, and ignorance.  It’s not really the kind of love that God has for us.  If we say, “God is love” and compare our paltry understanding of love to the fullness of the transcendent God, that’s not enough.  No, God is love, but that’s just the beginning.  God is also not the kind of love that we know because he is more than that.  The love that is God is infinitely more pure than we can imagine.  It is infinitely better.

John is writing in that same spirit.  He was saying that true love begins with God because nothing else is capable of bringing out pure love.  It’s not a matter of effort.  If you try your hardest, you might be able to capture something that is somewhat like love, but it won’t be pure love.  It’s also not a matter of knowledge.  Even someone who has studied the theory of love for years won’t be able to love perfectly.  Effort and knowledge might get you close sometimes, but it’s not either of them that truly allow us to love.  The fullness of love is something that can only be known through a relationship with God.  God is the only source of that pure, perfect love in creation, and it’s not effort or knowledge that can really bring us to that kind of love.  It’s faith in God.  Through faith, we can become instruments of the Holy Spirit, channeling that perfect love into this world. That’s what he’s saying.

He continues:

Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.  There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.  We love because he first loved us.  Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.  And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

Modern readings of history are stuck.  They are mired in cynicism.  Since we assume genuine goodness can only come from acting as our authentic self, it is so easy to read any attempt at communal action as a power-grab by the few to oppress the many.  King David becomes a tyrant.  Anglicanism looks like nothing more than an excuse for a divorce.  Churches start to be seen as schools for aspiring con artists.  If all action involving others is an exercise in oppression, the only thing we can hope for is an ideal future date where we can all be free from each other.

Christianity tells a different story.  It’s not about getting away from one another; it’s about coming closer together.  It’s not about subduing the world with our own affections; it’s about allowing our affections to be subdued by something far greater and purer than us.  It’s not about trying hard enough to love or learning something about love; it’s about living in God and allowing that love to show through.  The world is not mired in hopelessness.  There are more powerful things than self-interest afoot.  There is love.  God is love.  Amen.