The Breaking Dawn

As I (along with everyone else) prepare for Christmas, and the services that come with it at church, I thought I'd post this brief sermon from Christmas Eve 2008:


The Breaking Dawn

Christmas Eve, 2008

Our daughter Emily wakes up early each day, and I have the morning shift with her. She wakes up sometime just before six most days – this time of the year, for all practical purposes, the middle of the night. And the darkness in the morning can be oppressive, can hang like a curtain over us. But for the past ten days or so, when she and I get downstairs to the living room, the first thing I do is walk over to the corner and plug in the tree. Suddenly the room sparkles, Emily’s face lights up, her eyes brighten and her mouth widens into a smile. It’s Christmastime.

This is the time of year when we celebrate the coming in a manger of the one called in Scripture the Light of the World. But this is the time of year when it’s darkest. The winter solstice was just a few days ago, the shortest day of the year. These winter months take their toll on many people. We find the darkness suffocating and lonely, empty and tiring. Seasonal depression plagues many people.

We anticipate the first fall of snow, dream of a white Christmas, enjoy the opportunity to go skating or spend a week at a ski lodge, or just tear around the woods on a snowmobile. But by January and February most of us are ready for the darkness to lift, for the light to break a little earlier and last a little longer. You get tired of driving to work in the morning before the sun rises and coming home for supper when it’s already dark.

In many ways the world is a dark place. There is suffering, there is pain. There is inexplicable evil. We can’t avoid sickness, can’t dodge death. We are unable to ensure that our lives are going to turn out the way we’d like, with fulfilling jobs, loving marriages, healthy children, strong communities. People are often deliberately unkind to one another. Sometimes, maybe even worse, people are simply callous and uncaring toward their neighbours. Then there are the extreme situations: natural disasters and life-changing tragedies, wars and outbreaks of unexpected violence. In more places than we can imagine there are people willing to give up their own lives in order to take the lives of others. Meanwhile Scripture shows us one who gave up his life in order to save others – the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.

It’s his birth that we celebrate this evening. We recall that dark night in the middle eastern country of Israel and in the midst of that dark night a star shining, guiding wise men from the east to the little boy and his family. We commemorate the one who himself said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” Along with those wise men, we worship the one of whom it is said in the gospel of John, “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Those of you who spend time at camps in the summer or any who have ever slept outdoors know that when summer sunshine breaks in the morning it pretty much starts your day for you. With the sun in your eyes it’s hard to pretend it’s still time to sleep. A few years ago I stopped and stayed in a friend’s house while on a road trip. The room I was given was comfortable and made up nicely for me, but it had no curtains and was on the east side of the house. It was early June. By 4:30 the sun was shining brightly and straight into my window. I couldn’t sleep anymore – the dawn had arrived and I couldn’t convince myself it was night no matter what my watch told me.

Now some people are able to turn over, to ignore the light and fall back to sleep even though everything is illuminated. Others sleep with blindfolds to keep away this troublesome light breaking in on the darkness. And if we have darkening curtains we won’t see the light until someone opens them upon us. There are many ways to miss the light but still the darkness can’t win a battle with the light. As a friend of mine mentioned once, you can’t flash darkness into a room and have the light disappear, but as soon as you shine a flashlight in a room darkness loses its power.

The world we live in, the one we all experience, from our daily aches and pains to our marriage difficulties, from disputes with family members to tragic loss, is a world in need of the light. We see glimpses of light all around us, moments when kindness and sacrificial love show themselves, when people seem to have a great capacity to care for one another. But still the darkness nags at us – motives are questionable, true feelings are often hidden. We live undercover, holding ourselves back from others. We are afraid to open ourselves up to others, for fear of how we may be treated. We have trouble trusting. Darkness appears to be more powerful than light.

But the light is there. The light has broken in on this world of darkness and has changed our outlook on the landscape around us. Like the sun coming into that east window at an hour that seemed like the middle of the night, Jesus’ birth, and his life, death and resurrection that followed it, is the decisive light breaking into our world. We may not always be able to see it clearly, we may be able to go on our way in spite of it, we may be able to deliberately ignore it, but things are not the same now that he has come.

In his life he showed the power of God over sickness and sin as he healed and forgave people. As he stilled the waters on the sea, he showed that, one day, creation itself, with its wildness and storminess, would be tamed, giving way to calm. In his death he showed his willingness to share our plight, to give himself up freely for those who did not know him or love him. In his resurrection he showed that, one day, death itself, the penalty for sin – the price our sin and evil earns for itself – would be overcome. Through his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus has opened the way for us to enter the light and freedom of God’s new world. All we need to do is follow him who is the light, trusting that in him we are enabled to live in the light.

Those lights on our Christmas trees began as symbols of Jesus as the light of the world, and the evergreen tree was a picture of the eternal life that is found in Jesus. And that is the challenge of Christmas – once the light has come, things are changed in a real and lasting way. Unlike our days, which begin with a sunrise and end with the sun going down again and giving way to darkness, the Bible speaks of the eternal city of God as having no need of the sun or moon because it is lit by God’s glory and by Jesus himself. Many people live their lives apart from God, and then at Christmas time come for a few minutes to recognize that he is the one we celebrate at this festive time. The year is clouded in darkness, with a little light at the holiday season. But if Jesus is the light of the world we’ll want to walk in that light every day, not just at Christmas time, so that we can live for that day when the light is all that we can see, when God makes everything new in eternity. This Christmas let us celebrate the light together, and in gratitude take up the challenge to live in the light all year round.

Advent Sermons

Again I find that I'm not very good at blogging consistently. So I thought I would post my sermons each week for those who are interested. Here is the sermon from Nov. 28, the first Sunday of Advent. It fell on the 85th anniversary weekend of our church, for which we had a pretty big celebration, so that plays into the message as well.

Living in the Future

Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14

Date: November 28, 2010

I’ve called today’s sermon “Living in the Future.” Coming as it does on the anniversary weekend of the church, it might seem like a hopelessly inappropriate title. Today, as much as ever, after poring over pictures and memories of times long past and people who are no longer among us, we might seem prone to criticism as people who are in fact living in the past.

But Christians are never permitted to live in the past. We get criticized on occasion for being behind the times or being old-fashioned, since we spend so much time with such an old book, and we live with an awareness of a great heritage that has been passed down through the church’s history. But in spite of all that we are not people who consider it a good thing to live in the past.

If we ignore the past we are fools, and we’re bound to make the same mistakes that have been made over and over through history. And if we ignore the past we’re also arrogant, if we think we are the only ones who ever had a thought worth thinking or that our time is the wisest time that has ever been. But we cannot ever live in the past, even as we learn from it and incorporate it into our life by hearing stories and singing songs from long, long ago. We do not live in the past. We as Christians believe that in a certain way what we are called to do is to live into the future.

We believe that in Jesus Christ, God has come into this world and has changed things. The way of the past is death and corruption. The way of the world around us is very much a way of death and corruption. But we believe that Jesus died and rose again. The life of God, eternal life, incorruptible life, has come to take up residence on this earth. And God has made us who believe in him through Jesus Christ alive together with Jesus by his Holy Spirit. One day he will give us the fulfilment of our hopes, but even now we live our lives in expectation, living into that future that always motivates us and strengthens us. We believe that one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father, and we live now with him as our Lord. We live now serving him, obeying him, understanding that he is in control and that our trust in him is not misplaced.

We live into the future, but we keep on looking at the past. Last night, we looked at a chunk of our recent local past. But week after week we look even farther into the past, reading ancient words that we believe give us life, and reveal God to us.

But the more we look at these ancient words, the more we see we keep getting urged to look toward the future.

Think of our passage in Isaiah 2. Think about Isaiah the prophet for a minute. Isaiah was a spokesperson for God who lived in Jerusalem nearly three thousand years ago. And he lived in that city in a time that didn’t make him think very positive thoughts about his city. He looked around himself and knew that this city, the so-called “city of God,” the place where God had said, “I want my temple to be there,” – Isaiah knew that this city had gone to pieces. People who claimed to be in with God were in fact living double lives. “When you spread out your hands for prayer,” Isaiah said, “Your hands are full of blood.” Whether he was speaking literally or metaphorically, the point is clear: Jerusalem, the city of God, was a mess.

And yet he looked at the city and prophesied of a coming day that looked very different: He foresaw a day when the swords of war would be traded in for plowshares, when the spears of war would be turned into pruning hooks. He looked at this city of murder and saw the day of peace coming.

When most of us are in the middle of anything bad, we have a hard time seeing anything else. It’s hard to see that there will ever be a day when it won’t be this way. Someone gets mad at us and it seems like the whole world is against us. A deadline is closing in and it seems like the project will never be completed. We get sick and we wonder if we’ll ever know what it is to be healthy again. And on and on.

But Isaiah looked at the city of Jerusalem, so far away from what she once was, and saw that there was a new day coming in the future. What does it take to be able to envision peace in a time of war?

Isaiah the prophet looked at his hometown of Jerusalem and saw that it had gone astray. Not only was it full of violence, but it had failed to be faithful to the Lord. “See how the faithful city has become a harlot! She once was full of justice, righteousness used to dwell in her – but now murderers!”

When Isaiah saw Jerusalem he saw the faithful past, the glory days when God was truly worshiped there, and he knew that it had dissolved into unfaithfulness and lack of interest in really following God.

And yet he looked at the city and prophesied of a coming day that looked very different: “In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple” – that was what they called Jerusalem – “will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. Many peoples will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.”

Isaiah, this man who lived so long ago, lived with a disastrous present all around him. But he kept his eyes on the future that God had shown him, a future where disorder would become beautiful again, where war would turn to peace, and where faithlessness would give way to the glorious witness of obeying and trusting God.

How hard is it for us to imagine living with that kind of vision?

The world keeps on telling us that we should live in the present – be realistic. If you live in the past you’re old-fashioned. If you live in the future, you’re a dreamer. But if you live in the present you’re a realist.

But what if Isaiah had been a realist? What if Isaiah couldn’t see these things God had shown him? What would have happened then? He wouldn’t have had any hope and he wouldn’t have envisioned any peace. He would have abandoned the people of God as a faithless bunch of rebels.

I wonder for a minute what would have happened if the people who started our church had simply been “realists.” What went through their minds during those months when they started to think about having a Baptist church here? What went through the minds of the Wallaces, the people the Home Mission Board sent out to see if they might start a United Baptist Church here? In the words of our own history books, they were “a group of unorganized Christians, mostly Baptist,” who got together that day in November of 1925. Unorganized. They didn’t really have a plan, didn’t really know what to do. But they had an idea. They had a vision. They believed that God was calling them to do this. The Wallaces believed they saw something here that could be something.

And in those early months, before this church building was here, as they looked at their financial situation, as people brought in their two dollars and three dollars a week for offering, what did it take to envision having a building here that would become a home for their worship and fellowship together?

And forty years later, when the Sunday School was overcrowded, when those curtains downstairs just weren’t doing it for keeping the noise down, when the class in the choir loft had to try to be quiet enough for the classes in that corner (point) and in that corner (point) to hear, when all that was going on what did it take to see the wisdom in buying the house next door and using it for Sunday School classes and church meetings? That’s pretty creative thinking. That’s not being hampered by the circumstances of the present. That’s not hanging on to the past. That’s looking to the future.

And what about ten years ago, when again the church had to look at its facilities? What about then, when the decision to tear down the church house had to be made? Were we then living in the past? Were we then as a church hamstrung by the present? Or were we oriented to the future? Were we looking to what might be rather than what was, because we believed that God still had work for us to do?

Christians are always looking in hope toward the future, because we believe God is there, ahead of us, beckoning us to follow. And thankfully, this little church fellowship has proven that over and over through the years. We’ve learned that lesson again through looking back at the church’s history this weekend.

And when we look deep into our past, even before Jesus came, we see that that is what Isaiah was like. Even though he was surrounded by violence and faithlessness, God had shown him a glorious future when peace would come, and when it come in the house of Israel itself.

The peace that Isaiah envisioned, the hope that Isaiah was filled with, came to life in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s Messiah, the representative of all God’s people.

When Jesus was born, peace entered into this world. In fact, the one that Isaiah referred to as the “Prince of Peace” we understand to be Jesus Christ, the one who restores the relationship between God and his fallen creatures, human beings.

Think of the years, the decades, even centuries of expectation between Isaiah’s time and the time when the Son of God came to earth. Think of the expectation, the desperation, the hope, the longing for God to step in and rescue his fallen people and the fallen human race. The words of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” refer to “the hopes and fears of all the years.” And those hopes and fears “are met in thee tonight.”

At the season of Advent we look back to the expectation and the longing that yearned for the coming of salvation, the coming of true peace. And we recognize that the one we wait for is Jesus, the Prince of Peace.

Each Sunday of Advent we highlight the expectation of God’s salvation coming into the world in Jesus. We look forward for the peace that God brings in Jesus with an attitude of hope, and we recognize the joy that comes to us in Jesus and in his peace, and we remember the great love that brought Jesus to us, and indeed brought Jesus to the cross. So we light a candle for each of these aspects of God’s salvation, today for peace, next week for hope, the week after for joy, and then the Sunday before Christmas for love. And at Christmas Eve we light the centre candle, the Christ candle, to celebrate that in him all of our longing is fulfilled.

But as we do this during these four weeks before Christmas, we aren’t just playing make believe. We aren’t putting ourselves back into a fantasy land of the past and pretending that we are waiting for Jesus. We celebrate Advent not just to remember Jesus coming into the world, but also to acknowledge that we are still expecting Jesus to come again. The peace, the hope, the joy, and the love that came into the world when Jesus came will still find a greater fulfilment. One day, Jesus will come again and bring our hopes to life. He will “restore all things” to the way God intends them to be. He will bring peace not just in our hearts but in our world, when heaven and earth are renewed, when sin and pain and death are defeated, when God is victorious and all things are made new.

During Advent, then, we find ourselves as people who remember the past. We are people who remember that God came into this world in history, in the chaos and mess of the Roman Empire in the first century, when kings were ruling in violence and oppression, and when God’s people longed for his rescue. We remember the past, because Jesus came in the past.

But during advent we are oriented to the future, knowing that what was begun in Jesus’ first coming will be fulfilled in his second coming.

What that means for us now is that in the present we live with one eye on the past, never forgetting that the foundation of our life is in the past, in a specific place, in Jesus’ coming, his life, his death and his resurrection. But we also live with our shoulders turned toward the future, knowing that because Jesus who died is risen life has come. Death has had its day, and will finally be defeated. Sin has ruled us long enough and will finally be put away for good. Pain has plagued us plenty and will finally be done with.

The world tells us to “live for the moment,” to discover “the power of now,” as one popular spiritual teacher puts it. But we say, “No.” We say, “Remember the past, because that is where Jesus has acted, and look to the future because that is where Jesus is, ready to one day bring it to us in one final victorious event.” And that changes the way we look at everything in the present.

So we find the apostle Paul saying in Romans 13:11-14, “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us live honourably as in the day.”

I used to listen to a lot of rap music when I was in high school, as my parents would attest for you. And it used to be a common thing to hear rappers shout out the words “What’s the time?” And there was one rapper who used to go around with a giant clock face hanging around his neck on a chain, I guess to remind people that it was time for change or time for a party or whatever the case may be.

Well here, the apostle Paul has got a big clock hanging around his neck and he’s saying, “Christians – you know what time it is. You live between the most important event that has ever happened and the most important future event that ever will happen, the first and second comings of Jesus.” You have been given in Jesus, in the past, a taste of the future, and your life ought right now to have the character of the future.

Your morality, your attitude, your relationships with others: all are to be as if that future is present now. Night is gone, because in Jesus the light has come. Those who have not met Jesus or accepted him may be able to go on living in the night, but we who have seen him have no reason to live in the night. Daylight has come. Live in the light.

For those here who have not accepted the light that God has brought into this world in Jesus and in no other: now is the day for you to leave the night behind and live in the day. Leave aside the old way of living according to the present, the old way of living as a hard-boiled realist: this Advent season we recognize that we can be reconciled to God and live as people of hope.

This weekend we’re remembering the past of our church. As we do so we need to remember that the God who worked then is the God who is working among us now. The God who made those “unorganized Christians” into the family that we call our family is the God who still cares for us and walks with us and leads us into the future he still has for us.

We face live in different circumstances and in many ways live in a different community than those early Baptists in McAdam 85 years ago. We face different challenges than they did. But we serve the same God, and we live with the same hope in Jesus that they did. We have been given the same gift of salvation, the same commission to be a light in this community that they were given. Our ministry will likely look different, but it ought to have the same character of peace, hope, joy, and love in Jesus Christ that has sustained us through the years. The same Holy Spirit brings life to us that brought life to them.

We remember the past because God worked there. But we look to the future because God is there now, and he calls us to follow.

Today's sermon: Glorious Food

A few weeks ago I attended the Hayward Lectures at Acadia Divinity College, where Edith Humphrey was this year's speaker. She is a New Testament professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Her series was called "What the Bible Really Says About Tradition." She is a recent convert to the Eastern Orthodox church, so her insights on tradition were new to many of us. It was also a good chance to learn more about the eastern church, so remote from most of our experience of Christianity.

In the talkback session, she recommended a book called For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann, as a good basic book from the orthodox perspective. Strictly speaking, it's a book on the sacraments and on liturgy, two things that Baptists and evangelicals in general don't have much to do with. But the book turns out to be a wonderful perspective on the Christian life as a whole, and shows how the sacraments are exactly appropriate to a Christian view of life in the world.

This morning's sermon (really an extended meditation before communion) was pretty heavily influenced by the wonderful insights I've gained from Schmemann's book, which I finished this weekend. Here's the text, pretty much exactly as I preached it, which accounts for some of the style of the writing. I'm very thankful that Dr Humphrey called this book to my attention.

Meditation - Nov. 7, 2010

When Paul wrote to the Corinthian church about their celebration of the Lord’s supper, he reminded them that “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

Usually when we celebrate communion we focus on what it reminds us of – the death of Jesus. But what about the other part of our celebration? What about the fact that every time we eat and drink this bread and cup together we look forward to the coming again of our Lord?

The book of Revelation refers to “the marriage supper of the Lamb,” and when Jesus shared his last supper on earth he told the disciples he would not eat it again until he shared it with them in the kingdom. But we were told to do this in remembrance of him. We were told to keep on eating together. In the early church we are told that “day by day…they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts.” The trouble Paul confronted in Corinth was that something had gone wrong with their suppertime together. He was concerned that when Christians eat, they have to do it right.

We might wonder, “What’s the deal with all the food?” Why did the Lord give us the command to worship and remember him by eating a meal together?

We need food to live. We can go a certain amount of time without it, but we know that our bodies were made to run on the fuel of food and drink. By a wonderful process that God has designed, we eat food and our bodies know what to do with it. They take it in, digest it, and convert it into the energy that powers our bodies. I’m one of those people who usually has to eat a little bit every couple of hours, and when I’ve gone a little longer than usual I can feel it. I start to get a little faint and I might get a headache. My body doesn’t run at full strength without food. Food gives us the energy that allows us to live.

For that reason farmers used to be at the centre of our social structure. We depended on them for our food, so we depended on them for our life. Farmers have lost some of the respect they used to have because we’ve figured out other ways to get our food, but the basic idea is still there: without our groceries we’d all be in trouble fast.

As we read the Bible we discover that that’s how it has been right from the beginning. The first man, Adam, was a gardener, given charge over God’s garden of Eden. In Genesis chapter 2 the first words God speaks to Adam are a gift of food.

It says that “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’”

Being human and eating food are bound up together completely. But as we just heard, food is not just our life. It is also our death.

God made humans, put them in a world of beauty, and gave them food to sustain them, to give them the life that they would fulfil by knowing and loving God. But there was another food, on another tree, that would bring them death and cut them off from the blessings they had known of life with God.

Some writers have seen food as a kind of representative of all the things in the world that God has given to us. This world was made for our good; it's the place where we live and thrive as we know and love God.

But that tree of the knowledge of good and evil was something else. The fruit of that tree was food that you eat not for the sake of living your life in God’s presence, but for the purpose of becoming your own God, knowing the things God only knows, and running your own life apart from God.

What Adam and Eve did with that tree of the knowledge of good and evil is what we all do with everything in this world before we come to Christ. We care about the things that will give us something, the things that will bring us profit, the things that will give us an edge, an advantage, a leg-up. We pour ourselves into the things that give us pleasures, and the things that give us escape.

So we devote ourselves to our work, or we convince ourselves that happiness will be found in fleeting relationships without commitment, or we drink too much or become addicted to drugs, or we make friends only with people who will help us get ahead.

There are clichés everywhere about this: It’s a dog-eat-dog world. “You’ve got to get ahead in the rat race.” “Climb the corporate ladder.” “Look out for number one.”

All of this is what happened when Adam and Eve ate the food that brought them death.

God had offered them joy and peace if they had remained in the garden, tilling it and keeping it, eating the fruit of all the other trees, and enjoying their unbroken fellowship with the Lord.

This was life: a life of work, a life of food, a life whose purpose was perfect communion and friendship with God.

But they threw it away because they wanted instead the food that give them something, the food that would cut them loose from God, and make them wise enough to be king and queen of their own lives.

Food was meant to sustain our life. But instead food was the thing that brought us death.

But when the Son of God came to earth, when he took on flesh “for us and for our salvation” he spent his time eating and celebrating with people, living life as if it were one great party of celebration, one joyful time of feasting. When Jesus was on his way to the cross, on his way to his death for our sins, on his way to take upon himself all the weight of what Adam and Eve had first done in the garden, he spent his last evening sharing a meal with his friends.

He told us to keep on sharing the meal together.

And that’s what we did. The early church met daily, we read, breaking bread together, and “ate their food with glad and generous hearts.” He told us to share the meal together. And we’ve been doing it ever since, not just in the communion meal but in twenty centuries of pot luck suppers and sunrise breakfasts and after-church coffee hours.

The ancient church thought anything worth remembering in the life God had given us was worth remembering with a feast. Jesus came and he ate with us, and when he left he told us to keep on eating this remembrance of him until he comes. Are you starting to see why?

Our relationship with food went wrong in the garden of Eden. God gave us food to sustain our life so that we could love and know him. But food brought us death when we used it to gain our independence from God. What we did with food is like what we did with the world itself, the world that God had made for us to live in for his glory. We took it and made it a place for us, and not for God’s glory. As a result our experience in the world is death.

But in Jesus’ life and death and resurrection, the mess that humankind has made of God’s world is undone. Everything we did to turn the world into death – because we wanted to make it a place for us and not for our life with God – is overcome in the incarnation and the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is called the last Adam by the apostle Paul. The first Adam had the world and lost it through disobedience and the abandonment of his God. The second Adam – Jesus – came into the lost world, and gave it life through obedience and faithfulness to God. Jesus has redeemed the lost world, bought it back with the precious blood that we remember at the table this morning.

Jesus has reclaimed us for God, and reclaimed the world for God and for us as the ones who were made to live in the world. We were made to be the rulers of God’s creation, rightly caring for it under the authority of our God and for his glory. What Jesus has accomplished for us is our restoration to the place of honour God gave to us. We were given so much in the beginning by God, but it wasn’t enough – we wanted to be gods – so we lost it all. But now Jesus has come to give us the life God has always wanted us to have, a life of both dignity and obedience, a life of both true humanity and true worship of God.

Jesus has redeemed us and he has redeemed his world. We live with the promise that one day we will live in the glorious new creation where Jesus’ redemption will be fulfilled. But even now we live as the people who have been redeemed, who have been renewed, who now reflect God’s work in Christ to the world of death all around us.

We are the sign of life. We are the sign of hope.

We live in the same world, but we live according to a different arrangement. We enjoy the world and life, but in a different way than those who do not know Christ. In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul says, “all things are yours, whether…the world or life or death or the present or the future – all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.”

When Jesus came and sat us down at the table and offered us food again, he gave us life again. No longer is the world death to us. No longer do we live as the people who eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because we want to run the world, because we want to be gods.

No, we now live as the people who receive God’s gifts – of food, of life, of the world itself – as gifts from him, as tokens of his love for us. Now we don’t run away. We don’t want to get out from under his authority. We know he loves us. He has blessed us with life, and with food to sustain us to give him glory, with people to meet so that we might learn about his grace and creativity and love, with ground to walk on and birds to hear, to point us to the glory of the one who made us all.

When we become Christians we die to our old life, and are raised to walk in “newness of life,” according to Romans 6. The writer Alexander Schmemann, thinking of the white garments traditionally put on those who are baptized, says, “The meaning of this ‘newness of life’ is manifested when the newly baptized person is clothed, immediately after baptism, in a white garment. It is the garment of a king. Man is again king of creation. The world is again his life, and not his death, for he knows what to do with it. He is restored to the joy and power of true human nature.”

Jesus did a tremendous thing when he gave us a meal by which to worship and remember him. So much of our story, the long and tragic story of humanity’s fall into sin, and our redemption through the life and death of the one who was not only true God but also true man – so much of our story is found at this table.

It is a meal in which we celebrate our freedom even as we remember our slavery.

It is a meal in which we remember the love of our Lord who gave himself – his very real body and blood – for our salvation.

It is a meal in which we are constantly reminded of our mission in the world – to live as God’s new humanity, and as a witness to the rest of the world, dying in sin, that in Jesus Christ is found forgiveness, is found life.

As we share this meal together, this bread and this cup, let us receive it with thanksgiving, recognizing that everything that is worth having comes from the hand of our God.

As we share this meal together, this bread and this cup, let us pray that we will be ever aware of the life we’ve been given and that we will conduct ourselves in such a way that the world sees in us the life from God, the life of the kingdom, the life of joy: the life of the promised new creation. Amen.

A Grand Vision

It sometimes seems like my vision of what Christianity and Christian life are all about doesn’t exactly square with what many people (both critical outsiders and those within evangelical circles) suppose it to be. As I have read over the years, through seminary and into the pastorate, I have become more and more excited about the sheer scope of God’s work for his world in Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection.

For many people Christianity is narrowed down to the point of being something akin to “my own personal self-help” – good for me, but no better than exercise might be for another person or a successful career for someone else. For this reason, it’s often a very private thing, “my relationship with God” and “something that is my business and no one else’s.”

Certainly a personal relationship with God is an important thing to cultivate, a great gift providing great peace for which we should be full of gratitude. But God does not exist for my purposes; I exist for his purposes. Theologians emphasize the unnecessary nature of creation, the grace of it: God didn’t need to make the world in order to fill a certain emptiness within him; in other words, he didn’t make the planet and people because he was lonely. He made us for his glory, and invited us in to share his life and reflect his glory to the whole creation. Our lives are gifts given for the ultimate praise of God. For this reason (among others) we should care a little less about what God can do for us and a little more about what we were made to be for God.

Does this mean Christianity doesn’t offer benefits to those who come to faith in Jesus? As the apostle Paul might say, “By no means!” When we come to understand our proper place and start to realize just what we were made for, we will find a kind of fulfilment and satisfaction and peace that nothing else can offer. Our friend and teacher Jonathan Wilson always talked in his classes about becoming “truly human” and about God’s interest in “human flourishing.” But in a world where money and power and sex have such huge sway over our thinking and our ambitions, we need a new definition of what being human is all about. Psalm 8, with its resonances with the truly human life of Jesus, has been one of my great guides in relearning the nature of humanity as God planned it:

O LORD, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory

above the heavens.

From the lips of children and infants

you have ordained praise

because of your enemies,

to silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens,

the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars,

which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,

the son of man that you care for him?

You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings

and crowned him with glory and honor.

You made him ruler over the works of your hands;

you put everything under his feet:

all flocks and herds,

and the beasts of the field,

the birds of the air,

and the fish of the sea,

all that swim the paths of the seas.

O LORD, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

It’s a grand vision of God, beginning and ending with the majesty of the LORD, but within which humans have a very special place, below the heavenly beings but responsible for all the rest of creation. We haven’t kept our place very well, to be sure, but in Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, we see the fulfilment of this psalm, with the truly human one standing over creation, multiplying loaves to feed the crowd, calming the wind and seas, bringing healing and wholeness to a broken world. He is now exalted to the right hand of God, a human being ruling over this world, inviting us to participate in his life by his death and resurrection, through which he not only offered forgiveness of sins, but also overcame the power of sin that has enslaved us all our lives and made us fear death and struggle to live with this world’s brokenness.

When I think of this psalm and of the mission of Jesus, “the second Adam,” the one who through his faithful obedience to God reversed the problems that came from the disobedience of the first Adam in the beginning, I find that what Christianity and the Bible story as a whole offers is a beautifully vital vision of existence in this world: we are called to be those who have been brought “from death to life”, with hope in God’s final victory when he will set all things right.

In my upcoming blog posts I am planning to share some thoughts on the writings that have meant the most to me in shaping my Christian thinking over the past several years. I hope they can be helpful to anyone who might read them, but also anticipate that it will be a helpful exercise for me, to try to set down how I have come to look at Scripture and Christian life.

"Christian" Music

It's been over a month since I posted on the blog. We were on vacation in Nova Scotia for the last three weeks of August, and although I had lots of time to sit and visit with friends and read and even play the guitar, I didn't take any time to blog. Now it's been so long and so many ideas have been swirling around in my head that I thought I'd just post whatever came to mind.

We discovered a new (to us) group a couple weeks ago, called the Welcome Wagon. The group is a pastor (Vito Aiuto) and his wife (Monique) from a church in Brooklyn, NY, and their music is a nice combination of traditional sounding gospel songs and indie pop a la Sufjan Stevens (a friend of theirs - I presume that the "Vito" of Stevens' "Vito's Ordination Song" is this Vito). The album is called Welcome to the Welcome Wagon, and contains a couple of originals and a bunch of covers from everything from 60s rockers The Velvet Underground (their probably-tongue-in-cheek song "Jesus" becomes a beautiful sincere prayer here) to old spirituals ("He Never Said a Mumblin' Word," about Jesus' silence in the face of his trial and death on the cross) to hymn texts reset to fingerpicked acoustic guitars.

Best of all the covers, though, is probably the bizarre "Sold! to the Nice Rich Man", which imagines Jesus coming from heaven to earth to the cross as a rich man entering a town and messing with everything as he buys their wonderful world by "paying the price" in full. Greatest line about the ultimate and costly claim Jesus makes on our lives and our world's violent reaction to it:

"A rich man came to our town and changed our minds, took our things, took our knives...tonight we fight!"

The song was written by Daniel Smith of Danielson (another new artist for us, and another friend of Sufjan Stevens, and himself the son of Leonard Smith, Jr., the writer of the worship song "Our God Reigns"), whose music I've just started listening to in the past few days.

The song that has meant the most to us so far, though, is an original by Aiuto called "Up on a Mountain." The song is simple and relatively spare, and is all about the trip "all the way down" Jesus made for us, that results in our assurance that we are "not alone." After talking about Jesus' loneliness in Gethsemane and his fear on the cross (at least I think it's about the cross in the second verse) comes this final verse:

Up in the heavens our Lord prays for you
He sent his Spirit to carry us through
So it's true that you're not alone
Do you know he came all the way down?

With The Welcome Wagon and Danielson (more later on them!) and Sufjan Stevens (though his songs are less explicitly Christian on the whole) I feel like I've been introduced to a wholly different kind of "Christian music", not nearly as predictable and much more alive than most of the Christian music I have heard in the past. It has always seemed a shame to me that Christian music should seem to lack the creativity you find in the more interesting artists working today. I guess I can't say that anymore.

Patience - a hymn text based on Romans 8

(can be sung to the same tune (Beecher) as Love Divine All Loves Excelling)

Breathless for her Lord's redemption,
All creation sings God's praise
While he patiently composes
Her long history's final page.
In her suffering she possesses
Love's reminder, hope unseen:
Liberation unto glory
When she reads the final scene.

Humble bearer of our weakness,
Jesus Christ, the crucified,
Shared with us our sore condition
Now his life to open wide!
Heirs of faithlessness and sorrow,
By our sadness always led,
Now in him have found God's victory:
Resurrection from the dead!

Facing conflict, strife, and trial,
Now we seek to find their place,
Reaching outward, loving, longing,
Looking for the Father's grace.
Through the Spirit, we are promised,
All our groaning shall be heard,
Crying, "Abba, come restore us
At your strong, triumphant word..."

Tongue Taming in James and the Church

“A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine. Above all, mind what you say. ‘Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire’ – that’s the truth.”

- Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

On my desk at the church is a book loaned to me by one of the folks from my Bible study as we read through the Letter of James this spring. The book is called “30 Days to Taming Your Tongue.” As we approached chapter 3, it struck me as odder and odder that I had heard this type of thing many times before – “How to Tame the Tongue,” etc. – despite the fact that we are given a pretty dire message about the tongue in James: “No one can tame it.” There is no suggestion that anything we do to take control of our own tongues as they set themselves loose on our friends and family will ever work. We are told the opposite. You can’t win this one; the tongue is too wild.

But the grim position we’re in is not a hopeless one. James’ letter is throughout concerned with the problems of good and bad speech being mixed in Christian life. He certainly gets a good handle on the situation we’re in, but by the end he also mercifully gives us hope. There is a type of speech that is right, and God has introduced us to it.

The last section of chapter 5 outlines a new set of activities in which we can engage our tongues that God will use to overcome the dangerous, destructive speech that we are all too familiar with.

These new speech activities? “Pray…sing songs of praise (v. 13)…call the elders to pray (v. 14)…confess your sins to each other and pray for each other (v. 16).”

The destructive speech of chapter 2 (gossip, lying, cursing, and so on) comes from people who put their own way above those in need (1:26-27) and the rest of the community (4:1-3), people who ignore “the law that gives freedom” (“Love your neighbour” in 2:8, with love of God implied in 2:5-7). At its heart it is the sin of an individual, acting as an individual.

Proper speech, as seen in chapter 5, is done by and in community. The community of God in Jesus Christ, the community that doesn’t show favouritism to any (2:1-4), is the community that will sing praises to God, confess sins to one another, and pray to God for the rest of the community. The contrast is striking between these two types of speech and the setting in which each is found.

Living in a small community the last several years, with the inevitable gossip that grows in that terrain, I have increasingly believed that the solution to gossip is not more privacy but conversation. If we share our burdens and listen to others share theirs, we'll be much less excited about telling stories about those we don't know, and much more likely to take the concerns we have heard to God in prayer.

None of us can ever tame our tongues, but God in Christ has placed each of us within the church, the community where a new type of speech, the language of praise to God and open-heartedness toward one another, takes root and grows.