Apocalypse Right Now

Probably more lies are told about Revelation than about any other book of the Bible. That’s too bad, because Revelation has an important message for us that should not be obscured by lies.

Most of the lies come from what is called Dispensationalist theology. This is also known as “Left Behind” theology because of the series of best-selling books it inspired.

Dispensationalist theology was created virtually out of the whole cloth in 1830 by a wacko Brit named John Nelson Darby. Since then it has managed to infect many believers around the world, but especially in the United States, where it took root like a poisonous weed alongside other similarly wacko fundamentalist fantasies.

The chief Dispensationalist lie is that Revelation is about predicting the future. It is not. Revelation is a book of prophecy, but – as I’ve said many times before – prophecy is not about predicting the future. Prophecy is telling the truth about the present. Prophets aren’t harassed and killed because of what they say about some far-off neverland. Prophets are harassed and killed because of what they say about the present.

The title of the book actually tells all. Revelation is an English rendering of the Greek word apocalypsis, meaning unveiling. Revelation reveals or unveils or unmasks the truth about what’s going on in our world.

Think of that scene in the movie “The Wizard of Oz” where Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal the funny little man controlling all the scary pyrotechnics. That’s what Revelation does. It lifts the veil, it parts the curtain, it shines a spotlight on the truth about human life and how God is acting to save us.

Revelation is not primarily about the future. It is mostly about the present. That’s why misunderstanding it is so critical. Revelation is not about what’s going to happen a long time from now. It’s about what’s already happening right now.

Since the powers that be don’t want you to know what’s happening right now, they want you to think Revelation is about some other time – any other time – so you won’t know the truth about what’s happening today.

It follows, then, that Revelation is not about the so-called “end times.” It’s certainly not about the “end of the world.” That’s a phrase that you shouldn’t find in your Bible, by the way, though you will find it in mistranslations of Matthew 13:49.

So kindly forget all that “end times” garbage, plus all the nonsense you’ve heard about “the Rapture” and the Anti-Christ and the millennium all the other stale dispensationalist fantasies.

Also forget about reading Revelation literally. John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, tells us in the very first sentence that he’s going to be speaking in symbols. Oddly enough, only the King James manages to translate this correctly. John says that God “signified” the message to him. That is, God used “signs” or “symbols” to convey the message.

If that’s not clear enough, John warns us more than 50 times that what he is describing is “like” something. It’s not really this, he’s saying, but it’s like this. So if you take his description literally, you miss the point. Most interpreters of Revelation have missed the point, especially for the last 200 years.

I can hear some of you wondering, “Revelation was written 2,000 years ago. How can it be about the present?” That’s because Revelation is about the way things are, the way things have always been and the way things are going to be – not world without end but until Christ comes in final victory to clean up this mess.

Despite our advances in technology, nothing has significantly changed in the last 2,000 years. What was then also is now and will be. As time goes by, only the names, clothing fads and hairstyles change.

If you read Revelation literally, you will misunderstand it terribly. If you read it as a parable, as a symbolic revelation of how human systems oppress people and how God acts to save us from oppression by human empire, then you will gain much from it.

Revelation is full of bizarre and often violent imagery. It contains visions of seven-headed monsters and the gory deaths of millions of people. Should we take these images literally? No. Are these images real? Oh yes.

One example. You’ve all heard of the Four Horses, or Four Horesemen, of the Apocalypse. These are four horses and riders that appear early in the story as seven seals are broken to reveal the message on a mysterious scroll.

Some people imagine that these horses will appear in the future, and when we see them, we’ll know that the end is near. But there’s something so very familiar about these horses. They’re not future at all. They have galloped throughout history, and they gallop today as well.

First comes a white horse ridden by a conqueror. He rides out to conquer and destroy. Next comes a bright red horse, representing the blood spilled by the conqueror. Next comes a black horse. Its rider measures the hunger and want that always follow war. Finally comes a horse that’s pale green, the color of death, the inevitable result of warfare and oppression by human empires.

There is nothing specifically future about these horses and their riders. We know them all too well. The horses may tell about the future, but they also tell about the past and the present as well. From beginning to end, that’s what Revelation does. It tells about our past and our present and points to a glorious future when God literally brings heaven down to Earth. It also points to disasters that may occur if we continue to ignore God’s command to act as caretakers of the earth.

With that in mind, let’s look at Revelation 8:6-13. This passage describes the first four of seven trumpet blasts made by angels who serve at the throne of God. The text is from the Common English Bible.

Then the seven angels who held the seven trumpets got ready to blow them.

The first angel blew his trumpet, and hail and fire mixed with blood appeared, and was thrown down to the earth. A third of the earth was burned up. A third of the trees were burned up. All the green grass was burned up.

Then the second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain burning with fire was thrown down into the sea. A third of the sea became blood, a third of the creatures living in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.

Then the third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star, burning like a torch, fell from heaven. It fell on a third of the rivers and springs of water.

The star’s name is Wormwood, and a third of the waters became wormwood, and many people died from the water, because it became so bitter.

Then the fourth angel blew his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, and a third of the moon, and a third of the stars so that a third of them became dark. The day lost a third of its light, and the night lost a third of its light too.

Then I looked and I heard an eagle flying high overhead. It said with a loud voice, “Horror, horror, oh! The horror for those who live on earth because of the blasts of the remaining trumpets that the three angels are about to blow!”

Note first that it is never said that God orders these awful events. The trumpets simply announce them. Also note that you cannot take any of this literally. For example, if a star actually fell to earth, more than one-third of the rivers would be affected. All of Earth would be obliterated.

But what if you took this passage seriously rather than literally? What if you tried to discern what Revelation might be saying if you examined its images as symbols of reality, pictures of things that are “like this” but not this exactly, images that point to the truth about current events?

Wouldn’t you, in fact, come up with a picture of what is happening on Earth today?

Wouldn’t you find that the awful images of Revelation accurately describe what’s happening today because of centuries of human destruction of our environment?

Wouldn’t you find that the awful images of Revelation accurately describe what’s happening today because of global climate change triggered by centuries of human destruction of our environment?

Consider the evidence, which corroborates what scientists have been warning us about for more than 50 years.

Exceptional volcanic eruptions on the island of St. Vincent, in Hawaii and elsewhere.

Uncontrollable forest fires in the American West, in Africa and Australia and Indonesia and Siberia.

Drought, massive crop failures and famine all around the world.

Widespread, sometimes unprecedented, flooding, and increased numbers of dangerous hurricanes. Last year’s ocean storm season was the most active on record.

Marine life dying because of pollution and changes in water temperature; not just coral reefs and whales and dolphins but also mammals such as sea otters and polar bears.

Glaciers worldwide melting and the level of the seas slowly rising, eroding shorelines, destroying beaches, soon threatening cities as well.

Poisoned public water supplies such as in Flint, Michigan.

The Western Monarch butterfly, which used to be such a joy to see returning every year, now nearing extinction.

Winter snowstorms that catch public utilities unprepared, causing power outages, rolling blackouts, and untold amounts of misery

And it goes on. All of nature is out of whack because of human sin. Time after time, the call echoes throughout Revelation: Repent! Change your ways! Time after time, the call is ignored. We continue to treat God’s beloved creation shabbily.

Do you know what leads people to repentance? Two things, according to Revelation. First is the perseverance of the saints. Don’t give up hope, Revelation says repeatedly. Don’t be bewitched by the lies of a twisted culture whose continued existence depends on you believing its lies.

Revelation describes this twisted culture as empire – specifically, in the first century, the Roman Empire. It calls this culture Babylon, and it says, “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins and do not share in her plagues” (Revelation 18.4).

Babylon is any human regime that does not honor God and God’s purposes for creation. Babylon is every human regime, to one degree or another, because all humans and all human institutions are tainted by sin and all human governments allow or promote the rape of the earth for momentary profit.

So the first thing that leads the world to repentance is Christian perseverance, Christians awakening to the truth about Babylon and staying free from it as much as possible. The second thing is Christian witness to the truth.

Ultimately, Revelation seems to be saying, Christian witness is the only thing that convinces non-believers to turn from their destructive ways and follow the ways of the Lord. No amount of plagues and other disasters will do it. Only clear Christian witness will convince non-believers of the truth about life and the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

So there you have it. If anyone asks you what the book of Revelation is all about, tell them to forget all the end-times lies they’ve heard concerning monsters and the slaughter of infidels. Tell them that Revelation reveals the shining truth about the love of God and the need for believers to stay faithful to God’s commands and witness to their faith.

Revelation is about the victory of God over the forces of evil – a victory that is being won not in some weird fantasy world in the future but today in our everyday lives, if we are faithful and witness to the truth.

Amen.

This message was delivered June 6, 2021, at Edgerton United Methodist Church in Edgerton, Kansas.

God is not Mad at You

Trinity Sunday always follows Pentecost because the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost complicates our thinking about God. We think we know God the Father, and Jesus shows us who the Son is, but the Holy Spirit remains a mystery to many of us.

Sometimes on Trinity Sunday, we pastors complicate things even more by trying to explain the Trinity the way we might explain how an internal combustion engine works. All we do is confuse the daylights out of people, not to mention ourselves.

As I wind down my time with you as pastor, I am very conscious of having only a few weeks left and so many things I want to share with you. So today I’m going to offer you three messages in one. And it’s no mere coincidence that these three mini-messages happen to concern Father, Son and Holy Spirit – in that order.

Part one: God is not mad at you.

Not the Father, not the Son, and not the Holy Spirit, but especially not the Father, whom many of us have been taught to fear. Many of us have grown up hearing the mixed message of fundamentalist-evangelical pop religion. You know it well. God loves you very much and has a wonderful plan for your life, but if you don’t shape up, God is going to send you directly to hell, where you will roast in agony for all eternity.

As often as we hear the part about God loving us, it’s the second part that worms its way deep into our heads and influences everything we do. Truth is, most of us, most of the time, are pretty sure that God is mad at us and that God is just looking for an excuse to clobber us. It’s an awful feeling, isn’t it, feeling that God is out to get you?

Against this anti-gospel I wish to declare the real gospel. Our English word “gospel,” you know, comes from the Anglo-Saxon “godspell,” meaning “good story” or “good news.” Some Christians have managed to turn it into very bad news.

Here is the good news. God is not mad at you. God may often be disappointed in you because of the way you treat yourself and others, but God is not angry with you.

Consider this statement that runs through the Old Testament like a refrain: “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Psalm 103:8).

What the Bible sometimes refers to as God’s anger is better described as God’s disappointment over what our sin is doing to us. It’s similar to what any parent feels when a beloved child screws up bigtime. Our sin hurts God in ways that we cannot fathom, but I think what may hurt God the most is the toll that sin takes in our lives and in the lives of those we mistreat. What really hurts God is our inability to be happy in God because we are so mired in sin.

“God is love,” according to 1 John 4:8. And God never stops loving us, ever, because loving is basic to God’s nature. It is never said that God’s anger lasts forever, but it is frequently said that God’s steadfast love lasts forever. The Hebrew word we frequently translate as “steadfast love” is hesed. It occurs several hundred times in the Old Testament. That is impressive testimony to its importance.

It is frequently said that there is nothing you can do to make God love you more and nothing you can do to make God love you less. You can try to impress God all you like with more good works or more prayer or more Bible study, but there is nothing you can do to make God love you any more than God loves you already. Similarly, you can do the most awful things imaginable, and there is nothing you can do to make God love you any less than God loves you already.

God loves you exactly the way you are. There is always vast room for improvement, and God will always push you toward that, until you become the person God created you to be. But, to mangle a hymn lyric, God loves you just as you are.

God loves you, period. That’s the mantra of Rudy Rasmus, who pastors a huge United Methodist church in Houston. Rudy is famous for saying: “God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

For your mental and spiritual health, I urge you to ignore all the voices from pop religion that tell you that God is mad at you. That’s a lie. God loves you. God will never stop loving you. And there is nothing you can do about it!

Part two: Jesus shows what God is like.

This ought to be one of those “duh!” revelations, but so many people just don’t get it.

Let’s glance at the testimony of the New Testament, starting with the words of Jesus himself. John 10:30: “The Father and I are one.” John 14:9: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” John 14:11: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”

Hebrews 1:3: “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being…” Colossians 1:15: “He is the image of the invisible God…” Colossians 2:9: “All the fullness of deity lives in Christ’s body.”

Get the point? If you want to know what God is like, just look at Jesus. Why is it necessary to say this? Because a lot of people when they think of God think not of Jesus but of the angry God image that have based on some memory they have from the Old Testament.

They think of God smiting all those who worship the golden calf. They think of God ordering the slaughter of every man, woman and child in the cities that the Israelites conquer in Canaan. They think of these atrocities and more, and they say: “God is really not very loving. In fact, God is a monster.”

But we do not believe that every word of the Bible is the final word. We believe in progressive revelation. That means that God reveals more and more of God’s self as the story the Bible tells progresses through the Bible. So the incomplete picture of God that we get in parts of the Old Testament may be very different from the more complete picture of God that we get from the New Testament.

Jesus himself talks about this. At one point on the night he is arrested, Jesus tells his disciples: “I have much more to say to you, but you can’t handle it now.” And he adds, “When the Spirit of truth comes, the Spirit will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:12-13).

Before we turn to the work of the Spirit, though, let’s finish this thought. God is just like Jesus. If you can’t imagine Jesus doing something, then you shouldn’t imagine God doing it. If you don’t believe that Jesus would order the slaughter of innocents, don’t believe that God would order it. Because God the Father cannot do what Jesus would not do, just as Jesus cannot do what God the Father would not do.

Let’s follow that thought a little further. Since human beings are made in the image of God, and Jesus is the perfect image of God, we also can say that Jesus is what a genuine human being looks like.

So if you want to know what God is like, just look at Jesus. And if you want to know what a genuine human being looks like, just look at Jesus. Keep your eyes on Jesus, and you’ll be OK.

Now part three: The Holy Spirit is alive in you, remaking you in the image of Jesus.

The point of salvation is restoring us to the image of God in which we were created. Since this is the image of Jesus, when we are restored to the image of God, we will look just like Jesus.

1 Corinthians 15:49 contrasts our present state with our future state, saying. “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.” That is, just as we have borne the image of sinful Adam, we will bear the image of the new Adam, Jesus Christ.

In Colossians 3:9-10, the Apostle Paul says we are stripping off our old self and clothing ourselves with the new self, “which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.”

2 Corinthians 3:18: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”

Earlier I mentioned the term “progressive revelation.” It sounds scary to some people. Does that mean it’s not in the Bible? Well, guess what? A good 80% what you’re routinely told by pop religion isn’t in the Bible at all. It’s just pop culture propped up with some random Bible verses that don’t say what you’re led to believe they say.

Progressive revelation? The Bible hints that slavery is evil but never comes out and says that. Today, the Holy Spirit testifies to our spirits that slavery is evil. A few verses in the Bible say that women should not be pastors, but far more others testify that from the very start women have always been pastors. And that is the clear testimony of the Holy Spirit today, though some churches have closed their ears and minds to such testimony. These churches worship patriarchy and imagine that it is God.

God is not mad at you. God also is not a sexist jerk.

I could go on. The Holy Spirit is not done talking to us. The Spirit did not die at the end of the apostolic age. Nor did the Spirit die when writings of the New Testament were completed. God is not dead. The Son is risen, and the Holy Spirit is very much alive and active today, and we ought to be actively listening to the stirrings of the Spirit in everything we do.

Thanks to the testimony of the Spirit, we are able today to see more clearly than ever before what God is saying to us about how to live in peace with our neighbors. There are still things that, as Jesus says, we are not able to handle yet. This side of Resurrection life, we will always see, as Paul describes it, “but a poor reflection as in a mirror” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

But that reflection keeps getting clearer, and it’s not because we keep getting a whole lot smarter. It’s because the Holy Spirit keeps speaking to us, as Jesus said, to guide us in all truth to all truth.

Friends, God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it. If you wonder what God is like, just look at Jesus. And if you wonder what your long-term future will be, just look at Jesus, because the Holy Spirit is working in you to make you just like him.

Amen.

This message was delivered May 30, 2021, at Edgerton United Methodist Church in Edgerton, Kansas.

Everything is Spiritual

Our scripture reading tells the story of the coming of the Holy Spirit. It occurs on the first day of the Jewish festival of Shavuot. It’s a harvest festival that also celebrates the giving of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, the basic teaching of Judaism.

Shavuot is also known as Pentecost because it comes on the 50th day after the first day of Passover. Christians celebrate Pentecost 50 days after Easter. So, for Jews this year, Pentecost was May 16. For Christians, it’s today.

I’m not going to elaborate on it much more than that this morning. Instead, over today and next Sunday, I want to explore some dimensions of what it means for us to even talk about the Holy Spirit’s presence with us and within us.

I want to begin this morning with a simple exercise. I would like you to do whatever you need to do to concentrate. You may close your eyes, look down at your hands, look up at the ceiling, do whatever you need to do to clear your mind for some heavy duty thinking. Now I want you to think a purely spiritual thought.

By purely spiritual, I mean that it has no physical or material connection. This thought may not refer to any person, place or thing, past, present or future. It must be purely spiritual. Understand? I will give you 30 seconds. In that time, think one purely spiritual thought. Begin now.

Time is up, thank you. Now I have a question, though I ask you not to answer it verbally or with a gesture. Were you able to think a purely spiritual thought? If you think you did, I want to suggest that either your thought was not purely spiritual but actually included some material aspect, or you are perhaps the first person ever to have had such a thought. So if you think you did, you’d better write it down now before you forget it and it’s lost to history.

Fact is, you cannot think a purely spiritual thought. It is not possible for embodied creatures such as ourselves to think such a thought.

Not that we don’t try. We commonly make this crazy distinction between what is physical and what is spiritual. My point is that there is no difference. Everything is spiritual. Nothing is purely material, without a spiritual component. Nothing is purely spiritual, without a physical component. Everything is spiritual.

Rob Bell has an hourlong presentation by that title. It’s very different from what you are about to hear. I did not steal the title from him, and I doubt that he stole it from me, though I’ve talked about it occasionally for more than 20 years.

Various dictionaries define it various ways, but in general they all describe “spiritual” as something that is incorporeal – that is, it has no corpus, no body, no physical existence. By its very definition, the spiritual is not the physical.

This strict duality divides not only the spiritual and the physical but other realms as well. It begins as spirit versus matter. It becomes sacred versus secular. Then it’s religion versus science. And so it goes. When you split things apart this way, putting the spiritual in one box and the physical in another, bad things inevitably happen.

Pioneering psychotherapist Carl Jung once said that most psychoses he saw were spiritually based. Some people today sneer when they hear stories of Jesus casting out demons from people. They say: “We know better today. It’s all psychology.” No, it’s not. Mind and spirit and body are linked in ways that we are only beginning to understand.

A few years ago, Gus Speth, a Yale University forestry expert, said: “I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

Global warming isn’t just a physical problem. It’s also a spiritual problem. The two realms interact because, in fact, they are a single realm. Because everything is spiritual. All our problems today – social and political and cultural and environmental and economic – at base, they’re all spiritual problems.

We want to separate the realms because we want to keep God out of certain areas. We want to keep questions of right and wrong out of certain areas. We want to do things our own way, God be damned.

Let’s take a closer look at the sacred versus secular divide. The idea is that some things are spiritual and sacred. These things belong to God. Everything else is physical and secular. God doesn’t care much for them. Didn’t Jesus say, “Give to God what belongs to God and to Caesar what belongs to Caesar”?

So if God gets the spiritual part and Caesar gets the material part, how does that work out? What’s included in the spiritual? Praying, going to church, reading your Bible, maybe working at the Food Pantry and in other ministries. What percentage of your time is that? Five percent, maybe 10 percent tops?

That means Caesar’s got all the rest. Working, sleeping, eating – all that stuff you do every day just to get by – that’s all material, isn’t it? That’s all physical. That’s all secular. You don’t need God for that, do you? And God can just keep God’s nose out of those things.

See what we’ve done? We have effectively removed God from the world. We have evicted God from our daily lives. And we wonder why the world is so screwed up.

People who work in the church – pastors and priests and nuns and the like – they all have spiritual vocations. They work for God, as it were. Everybody else works in the secular world. They work for Caesar. They work by different rules. They can cheat and get away with it because God’s not looking, right?

But what if you’re an accountant or a truck driver or a farmer or whatever, and you want to follow Christ in your everyday life? Forget about it. Your everyday life is secular. You’d better leave God out of it, or you might lose your job.

Need I tell you that all of this nonsense is unbiblical and unchristian?

It is true that God and the world are separate. We do not believe in pantheism, the notion that God and the world are somehow one. But we do believe that God cares very much for what happens in the world and God is active in working for God’s will in the world. When we pray, we bridge the spiritual and the physical. We ask God not only for spiritual blessings but for physical blessings as well – health, well-being, a new car, winning the lottery.

Do you have a concordance at home? A concordance is a book or a computer program that that allows you to search for how words are used in the Bible. If you have a concordance, look up the word “spiritual” in the Old Testament. You should not find a single use of the word because Hebrew lacks a word for spiritual. Hebrew has no word for spiritual because the way the ancient Hebrews saw things, everything is spiritual.

Turn to the New Testament, and you’ll find many uses of the word spiritual in the writings of Saint Paul. That’s because for Paul just about everything is spiritual. When Paul uses the word, he means “animated by God’s Spirit” or “inspired by God’s Spirit.”

A moment ago I said you “should not find” a single use of the word “spiritual” in the Old Testament. But in a couple of translations, you will find the word used, improperly, to translate a word that would be better translated as “animated” or “inspired.”

What does the word “inspire” mean? It means to take in, or breathe in, and be animated by the Spirit. In fact, all human and animal life is animated by the breath of God. Everything that breathes is inspired by God.

Fundamentalists often defend their erroneous doctrine of verbal inspiration by citing 2 Timothy 3:16. It says, “All scripture is inspired,” or “All scripture is God-breathed.” Big deal. According to scripture, all living creatures are inspired; all living creatures are God-breathed. In this regard (and probably only in this regard), scripture enjoys no distinction from a cat or a dog. God moves and breathes in all living creatures.

Genesis 2:7 says that when God breathed life into the first human, he became a living being, or a living soul. We often misunderstand the word “soul.” It is not an incorporeal thing to be distinguished from our material bodies. It’s not something that is eternal that escapes and lives on when your body dies. In biblical usage, your soul is the whole you, body and spirit, material and spiritual.

The idea that spirit and body can be distinguished and separated comes from the Greek philosopher Plato. The idea is not biblical. Your soul is you – all of you, body, mind and spirit. When we Christians speak of resurrection, we mean that you will be raised in a new form of soul. In 1 Corinthians chapter 15, Paul calls this “a spiritual body.” Try imagining that, if you can. Whatever it is, in some ways it must be similar to the body Jesus has after his Resurrection.

It all comes back to and is tied up with not only the Resurrection of Jesus but the very incarnation of Jesus. God becomes incarnated in Jesus. That is, God takes on a body in Jesus. That may be the ultimate proof that everything is spiritual. In Jesus, human and divine are bridged. In some way we cannot understand, human and divine become one.

In the garden before he is arrested, Jesus prays that his followers may become one just as he and his Father are one, “I in them and you in me” so that the world will know that Jesus is of God and we are of Jesus (John 17: 22-23).

In short, we are to become the new incarnation of Jesus. Here’s how Teresa of Avila put it 400 years ago.

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

We cannot see the way Christ sees or touch the way Christ touches unless Christ lives in us. And how does Christ live in us? Through the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, our Advocate, our Comforter, our Counselor, our Helper.

Some believers insist on seeing certain physical manifestations of the Spirit: speaking in tongues or speaking in other languages, as the apostles did on that first Pentecost. Others think of the nine gifts of the Spirit, or Fruit of the Spirit, as described in Galatians chapter 5. The change in us and the effect on us don’t have to be showy. They does have to be powerful and real.

A spiritual life is a life lived in Christ. It’s a life inspired by the Spirit, animated by the Spirit, made alive by the Spirit. A spiritual life is one in which the realms of spiritual and physical are not separated but are lived as one, as we are one with Christ and one with our Heavenly Father. No aspect of our lives is excluded. Everything is spiritual, and as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:32, everything is for God’s glory. I think that is a perfectly marvelous idea! That’s why everything is spiritual. Because everything is from and for God’s glory!

Amen.

This message was delivered May 23, 2021 at Egerton United Methodist Church in Edgerton, Kansas.

Friends in Christ

On Ascension Sunday, we celebrate Christ’s transition from earth to heaven. It’s an event that’s hard to imagine and maybe even harder to describe or illustrate.

Shown here is the earliest pictorial representation of it that we know about. It comes from the Rabbula Gospels, an illuminated version of the gospels created in Syria in the year 586.

It shows Jesus ascending to heaven, surrounded by angels who sing his praises and offer him crowns of glory. As he ascends, Jesus raises a hand in blessing. It almost looks as if he’s saying goodbye. In fact, he’s saying hello in a new way.

Every time I think of this story, I think of the Paul McCartney song recorded by the Beatles in 1967, “You say goodbye but I say hello.” The disciples think they are saying goodbye to Jesus. It is true that they are seeing the last of him in the bodily form that they have grown to love and revere. But he won’t be gone long.

“I will not leave you orphaned,” he has told them. “I am coming to you” (John 14:18). We’ll hear more about that next week, when we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

Today, on this last Sunday of the Easter season, I want to wrap up this worship series that I’ve called “Living the Resurrection.” It’s about learning to live in light of the Resurrection. We’ve hardly looked at everything we could learn, but this sets us off in the right direction.

We began with the story of Thomas. He is famous for initially doubting that Jesus was raised from the dead. But when he saw the risen Jesus face to face, he exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!”

It is no sin to doubt. Doubt is the door to faith. If you can’t doubt something, you don’t need faith to believe it. If you’re not skeptical, then you live in a fantasy world called certainty. As Paul the apostle says in 2 Corinthians 5:7, “We live by faith, not by sight” (NIV). We live by faith, not by certainty. If you live by certainty, you live in an alternate universe that isn’t real. Certainty is the real enemy of faith.

That’s partly because even sight does not necessarily lead to faith. Sometimes we see and will still do not believe. Sometimes – maybe most of the time – we have to believe something before we are capable of seeing it. We have to trust something or someone as real before we can even recognize their existence.

To see the truth of the Resurrection and learn to live in light of it, we have to make the Resurrection of Jesus the lens through which we see the world. We need to put on Easter lenses and see with Easter vision. Our vision has to be transformed by our own personal experience of the risen Christ.

Our transformation also means learning to listen and to respond to his voice. Listening is more than hearing. Hearing is about perceiving a noise. Listening means paying attention to what a particular noise is trying to tell you.

Like sheep who are lost without their shepherd, we respond to the voice of the Good Shepherd. We learn to recognize that voice through training and experience. The more we mature as Christ followers, the more God’s voice outside us becomes our own inner voice, so that eventually the shepherd leads us from within rather than from without.

All along the way, we have to abide in Christ, to stay connected with him the way a branch is connected to the grapevine. Christ is the True Vine and we are the branches. We get all our nourishment from the vine. Separated from the vine, we can produce nothing. Separated from the vine, we wither and die.

But connected to the vine, we not only flourish personally but more importantly we bear fruit. We share our faith with others, in tangible as well as intangible ways, and in both ways helping to create other disciples.

We do it all in imitation of Christ’s love for us and for his heavenly Father. “I’ve loved you the way my Father has loved me,” he tells us. So now he commands: “Love one another the way I loved you” (15:9, 12).

The love Jesus is talking about is a sacrificial love. It means dying to self, setting aside for the sake of another your own priorities, your own comfort, your own safety. There is no greater love than to give your life for your friends, Jesus says (John 15:13).

Referring to himself, he meant that literally. Referring to us, most likely he means what I call “everyday heroism” – those smaller day-to-day sacrifices of self that each of us can make that add up to a life of selflessness and service in the name of Jesus.

Some of us seem to be better at it than others. Some actually seem to come by it almost naturally. Maybe they were raised that way, and it stuck. Others of us have to fight our own self-centered inclinations every step of the way, and again and again we are surprised by how good it feels when we put others before ourselves.

In an era corrupted by Trumpism, some people seem to think that “Looking out for Number One” is the national motto. Others want to keep Jesus first. They follow that JOY motto: “Jesus, others and you.” That’s where real joy resides, putting Jesus first, others second and yourself third. I’ve always preferred to personalize it as “Jesus, others and me,” but JOM is a lousy acronym. JOY works much better.

When he spoke of his greater love, Jesus told his disciples that he no longer considered them disciples; now he considered them friends. I think that is just about the highest compliment he could ever pay them. Who wouldn’t want to be friends with Jesus?

I have mixed feelings about that hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I love the title, but I think the music is sappy and the lyrics are anemic; they just don’t go far enough. “Got a problem?” the song says. “Take it to the Lord in prayer.” I certainly have no problem with making our requests known to God. I do it all the time, as your pastor and as an individual.

But 166 years ago, when the lyrics were written, I wonder how many people understood prayer as conversation with a friend. Truly, I wonder how many people today understand prayer as conversation with a friend.

But that’s what it is. Or at least that’s what it should be. It is, first of all, a conversation: it works two ways. Sometimes you talk and sometimes you listen. Talking is easier than listening, of course. Secondly, prayer is conversation with a friend. That means you don’t have to get all puffed up with self-importance and use big words and fancy phrases. It does mean that you speak honestly and plainly. It also means that you listen carefully for what your friend has to say in response, even if that response is not what you want to hear.

Quakers call one another “friends” and form a Society of Friends. Originally, and for most Quakers still today, that means “friends in Christ.” Christian friendship has a special bond. We are friends not only in the human sense but friends also in a heavenly sense. We are friends “in Christ.” We are friends bound together by the love of Christ for us and for the world.

“In Christ,” we are able to pray to Abba, our Father in heaven, the way Jesus prayed to his Father in heaven. We have received a spirit of adoption as God’s children, Paul says. As adopted sons and daughters of God, we have received Christ’s own Spirit in our hearts, crying, “Abba, Father!” (Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:6).

Swiss theologian Karl Barth says that Jesus is the self-giving of God, and that Jesus in turn gives his life back to God. Jesus asks us to give ourselves back to God through our self-giving love for others. Just as he died for us, he asks us to die to self in the giving away of self.

We give more of ourselves as we are more closely conformed to the image of Christ – as we more fully “put on Christ,” as Paul says in Romans 13:14. As I outlined two weeks ago, it’s a slow process of lengthening in some areas, learning to extend ourselves, as it were; and pruning in other areas, cutting back our tendencies to serve self first and others later, if at all.

The end product, which we won’t likely see in our earthly lifetime but hope to see eventually, is no longer just me, but Christ who lives in me. As Paul says in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And the life that I now live in my body, I live by faith, indeed, by the faithfulness of God’s Son, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

We’re not just nice people, as some outsiders may think. We’re friends of Christ who are being remade in Christ’s image and someday will look just like him – certainly not in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense that encompasses all that we are, both physical and spiritual.

“We love because God first loved us,” 1 John 4:19 says (CEB). John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, comments: “This is the sum of all religion, the genuine model of Christianity.”

God loved us first by creating us, by giving us this wonderful world so full of delights. God continued to love us by becoming one with us in Jesus, living for us and dying for us, being raised to new life for us and ascending to the heavenly throne of grace for us.

God continues to love us by residing within us by the Holy Spirit, working to change us from a pale human glory to a robust divine glory, leading us to live the right way, leading us to love the way Jesus loves, the way God loves, the way we first were loved and are being trained to love in return.

There is more to living in the light of the Resurrection than what we have said in the last six weeks, but we have learned a few things.

We have learned to seek the depth of true faith that resides just beyond our doubt. We have learned to see the world through the lens of Christ our Savior. We have learned to listen for the distinctive voice of our Good Shepherd. We have learned to stay connected with the True Vine. And we have learned that these things are all part of what it means to be friends with Christ and to be friends in Christ.

Friends, this is a new day. The Resurrection of Christ makes all things possible for those who trust in him. May we joyfully explore the possibilities in days to come.

Amen!

This message was delivered May 16, 2021, at Edgerton United Methodist Church.

No Greater Love

One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic is a wider definition of heroism. I don’t spend more than a few minutes a week on Facebook anymore, but I used to waste a lot of time paging through it, and I was alarmed by a trend that I saw.

It seemed like every ninth or tenth post was a photo of a man in military garb carrying a semi-automatic rifle and a caption that said, “This is what a real American hero looks like.”

Occasionally the soldier would be replaced by a police officer, always male, his sidearm prominently displayed. Rarely a firefighter would show up, but firefighters don’t carry guns, so they apparently ranked low in the Facebook hero department.

I always wondered, “What about other first responders? What about medics and corpsmen and chaplains, who also serve on the front lines, and doctors and nurses, who are just off the front lines? What about military families who wait at home for word of their loved ones? Isn’t their service heroic?

“What about the single mom who works three low-paying jobs to keep her family fed and clothed? What about the teachers who buy their own school supplies because schools can’t afford to provide them? What about old folks who struggle to live their last days in dignity, abandoned by family and friends in dingy nursing homes? Aren’t these people heroes, too?”

Then came the pandemic, and with it came stories of doctors and nurses working under impossible conditions to treat covid patients while risking exposure themselves. Suddenly, they, too, were recognized as heroes. They were giving themselves for others, sometimes giving all of themselves. People began to line up outside hospitals to cheer them and send them care packages and other signs of regard.

Even today there’s a nursing facility near me that has a sign out front that says, “Heroes work here.” And they do. Heroes also toil, largely unrecognized, in nearby homes and apartments. Once a year, on Mother’s Day, we pause to recognize some of them.

Today is the day we celebrate our moms and the love we’ve enjoyed receiving from them and from other special women in our lives – grandmas, aunts, next-door neighbors.

Sometimes we make the mistake of saying that God’s love for us is like Mom’s love for us. But the opposite is what’s true. At its best, Mom’s love for us is like God’s love for us. “We love because God first loved us,” 1 John 4:19 says (CEB). God’s love always comes first. But someone had to convey that love to us. Someone had to teach us how to love, by showing us how to love. For many of us, maybe most of us, that was Mom.

Not every Mother’s Day card is adorned with flowers and frills, but we tend to over-sentimentalize our love for Mom. Often what we love most about her has little to do with sentimentality. We love her not just because she smelled nice and we enjoyed her warm and soft hugs.

We love her also because she was the one who pried us out of bed every morning, force-fed us breakfast and shoved us out the door in time for school. She was there when we skinned our knees, and when we fell down in other ways, too.

Her fury was a frightful thing, but we knew it was kindled only because we had failed so totally to be the best we could be. And we had no louder cheerleader than her when we jumped back into the fray. Whether we won or lost, she would do whatever she needed to do to turn our defeats into victories and our victories into moments we would always remember.

Yes, what Moms do, or what other special women in our lives do, is mirror for us the love of God.

Friends, this is another in our series of messages about Living the Resurrection. It’s the second to last, to be exact. We pick up today where we left off last Sunday, as Jesus is speaking to his disciples right after the Last Supper.

“I’ve loved you the way my Father has loved me,” he tells them (John 15:9). So now he gives this command: “Love one another the way I loved you” (15:12).

See how that works? The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves us and tells us to love one another the same way.

The disciples can’t know yet how much he loves them, though they soon will learn. “This is the very best way to love,” he continues. “Put your life on the line for your friends.” (15:13)

That’s how the Message version words it. We may be more accustomed to hearing something like this: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (NIV).

It’s his friends he is speaking to now, not those who follow him as his disciples. Their relationship has changed. He says: “You are my friends when you do the things I command you. I’m no longer calling you servants because servants don’t understand what their master is thinking and planning. No, I’ve named you friends because I’ve let you in on everything I’ve heard from the Father” (15:14-15).

The best way to love, Jesus tells us, is to love sacrificially. That means putting your life on the line for your friends – or in more traditional terms, laying down your life for your friends.

It may come to that, literally, and you may be recognized as a hero because of it. A friend of mine has a son who was a corpsman, a medic, in the Marines before he went to college. My friend says he was never prouder of his son than the day there was a live shooter on campus and while everyone else was running away from the sound of gunfire, his son ran toward it, the way he was trained to do, and he ministered to the wounded as well as he could, putting himself in harm’s way while doing so.

That’s the greater love Jesus is talking about. It’s sacrificial love, dying to self, setting aside for the sake of another your priorities or your comfort or your safety. Yes, that is the best way to love and to live.

Most of the time for most of us, it won’t be on a field of carnage, and it won’t be an act that is often recognized as heroic. No, it will be in quiet and familiar places, in the normal moments of our daily lives. It will be something we may have done a thousand times already but by doing it one more time, for someone else, when we don’t have to, in a way that inconveniences us – by acting in this way, we make this act heroic.

What makes it heroic is not the pain or inconvenience it causes us but rather the good that passes to someone else because we are willing to suffer the pain and inconvenience. That’s how the greater love of Jesus changes the world.

We are willing to go one step more, one step beyond the expected, one step beyond what we think we are capable of making – and that step has a cascade effect. It snowballs, as it were. It keeps having a greater effect than any one step can normally be expected to have.

One step changes the world because it changes another person. If that person takes a similar step, soon hundreds, even thousands, of others are affected. All because one person decided to make a phone call, just to say hello to a friend. Or send a card. Or drop by with a plate of brownies. Just one little step.

We all know, though, just how hard it can be to take that little step. Maybe I’ll sleep five minutes more before waking the kids. Maybe, instead of making that phone call tonight, I’ll just watch a little more TV. Maybe … maybe … maybe. Understand, I’m not berating you. I’m talking about me. If there were a procrastinator’s club, I might run for president, if I had the energy, which I don’t. Surely someone else will do it.

Jesus calls us friends. Do you understand what a big deal that is? Some years ago, one of my daughters was going through confirmation at the church we were part of then. For Confirmation Sunday, the confirmands were asked to write a statement about what they had learned, about what Jesus meant to them.

Several of them wrote long paragraphs full of the kind of theological profundity only 12-year-olds and doctoral candidates are capable of. By contrast, my daughter’s statement was short and simple. She wrote: “I learned that Jesus is my friend.”

I was momentarily shocked. That’s all? Jesus is your friend? That’s all you learned? Sometime later, Jesus got me alone for a moment, and he said, “Look, dummy, she got it right. I’m your friend, too, when you let me be.”

Jesus says we are his friends when we do what he commands us to do. And what does he say about that? He says: “This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you” (15:12).

We do our darnedest to complicate that. We want to make it undoable so we can throw up our hands in mock despair and say, “I knew it would be too hard.”

It is hard. But it is not undoable. God loved us first by creating us, by giving us this wonderful world so full of delights. God continued to love us by becoming one with us in Jesus, living for us and dying for us and being raised to new life for us. God continues to love us by residing in us by the Holy Spirit, leading us to live the right way, leading us to love.

“Love one another the way I loved you,” Jesus says. Sort of the way Mom did, or maybe still does. It’s the best way to love. It’s the best way to live.

If you can, give your Mom a big hug today. If you can’t, give somebody a hug for her. You’ll both be better for it.

Amen.

This message was delivered May 9, 2021, at Edgerton United Methodist Church, from John 15:9-15.