Sermons

Come, Lord Jesus!

Posted on May 29, 2022 by refresh -

The Seventh Sunday of Easter

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21

The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

This is the last sermon in a series called “Good News for Hard Times.” I’ve been wondering how to end it and I think the author of Revelation may have had the same problem. Because he could have ended it in chapter 18, with the spectacular collapse of Babylon, which represents not only the city of Rome but also the Roman Empire—the Government—that was making life so difficult for the Christians of that time. “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great,” says an angel, at the beginning of Chapter 18. “Rejoice over her, O heaven, you saints and apostles and prophets! For God has condemned her condemnation of you” (vs. 20). That would have been a good ending, but John writes on.

He might have ended it in Chapter 19, when the Beast is captured and thrown into the Lake of Fire. That’s the one who represents Caesar Domitian, the one who was directly responsible for persecuting the Christians of John’s time. Once he was out of the way their problems would be over, right? They could rejoice. But, as in our own time, John seems to understand that evil is not the product of any one person. You don’t bring evil to an end by doing away with Caesar Domitian or Adolf Hitler or Vladimir Putin. So John writes on.

In chapter 20 he shares his vision of the great dragon who represents Satan being bound with a heavy chain and thrown into a bottomless pit for a thousand years. That’s the real enemy, right? That’s the one who’s behind everything. You could end the book right there but for some reason John says he will only be locked up for a thousand years, and then he “must be let out for a little while.” Really? Nonetheless, John assures his readers that when the time comes Satan will be finally and utterly defeated. Like the Beast before him, he will be thrown into the Lake of Fire where he will be tormented day and night forever. Bad news for Satan, but good news for us. And yet, that’s not the end.

In chapter 21 John writes about a new heaven and a new earth and the New Jerusalem coming down “like a bride adorned for her husband.” God himself will be with his people, and he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more. Not only that, but there is room in this city for everyone, and there is no darkness there—God himself is her light. The river of life flows from his throne, and on both sides of that river there are trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. That’s good news too, right? And yet it still isn’t the end.

That doesn’t come until Chapter 22, where John ends his story in the same way he started it: with a vision of Jesus. Have you noticed how many times Jesus shows up in this book, and in how many different ways? There he is in the beginning, looking like the Son of Man from the seventh chapter of Daniel: his hair white as wool; his eyes like flames of fire; his feet like burnished bronze. But just a few chapters later he shows up again, this time as the Lamb that was slaughtered and yet stands. All the host of heaven sings, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.” And then, near the end of the book, he shows up again, this time as the Word of God, riding a white horse and wearing crowns on his head. From his mouth comes a sharp sword and on his robe is written, “King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”

None of these is the way we usually picture Jesus. We see him as he is in that famous Sunday school painting, looking up toward heaven with his blue eyes and long, beautiful hair. Or we picture him in that stained glass window, standing at the door and knocking. Or we picture him as the Good Shepherd, smiling down at the wayward lamb in his arms. Or we picture him in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying on the night he was betrayed. John’s images of Jesus, on the other hand, are almost disturbing. You have to be able to read the symbols, and understand that he is talking about Jesus’ strength, his righteousness, his purity, his wisdom, his sacrifice, his sovereignty, his glory, his justice. For John, Jesus is everything, and he tries to show it in every way, because in his world Jesus has competition, and the competition is Caesar.

Can you imagine anyone in our time demanding our absolute loyalty, our ultimate allegiance? Can you imagine any human being requiring us to bow down to him and call him Lord? I don’t think we always appreciate the meaning of that word. A lord is “someone or something having power, authority, or influence; a master or ruler.” But if you only have one lord, then that one has all power, all authority; that one is your sole master and ruler. That’s why you have to be careful about who you give that title to.

Caesar Domitian wanted every citizen of the Roman Empire to call him Lord, and he used his power, his authority, to intimidate them. If they didn’t call him Lord they could be imprisoned, tortured, or even put to death. If they didn’t take his mark upon them they would not be able to buy or sell. And yet the Christians living in that era knew there could be only one Lord, and that was Jesus. The Book of Revelation was written to assure those Christians that in the end—if they didn’t give up, if they didn’t lose faith, if they didn’t bow down to Caesar—then their love and loyalty would be rewarded. Jesus would be crowned King of Kings and Lord of Lords and they would become the blessed citizens of his glorious kingdom forever and ever and ever.

On Thursday of last week I read the entire Book of Revelation in one sitting, just to get a feel for the drama of it. But I hadn’t gotten very far into it when I read these words, from Jesus’ message to the church at Ephesus. He said, “I know your works, your toil and patient endurance. I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers; you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them to be false. I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.” And that reminded me of the first sermon I preached at my last church, just a few weeks after moving to Washington, DC, from Wingate, North Carolina. I climbed the stairs to the pulpit on a warm, summer Sunday, looked out over the congregation, and said:

“It isn’t often that you get a visit from a prophet, but three months ago I did.

“He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and stood about six-feet-two, weighed about 225 pounds. He was the husband of the daughter of a member of my church, someone I had met only a few times before at family gatherings. He and his wife went to a big, Pentecostal church in the city and I couldn’t imagine why he had come to see me, a Baptist preacher, but I invited him to come in anyway.

“He said, ‘Jim, I have something I need to say to you, and I think it’s a word from the Lord,’ and then he swallowed hard and looked away, struggling under the burden of his message. ‘Go ahead,’ I said, bracing myself. Say it.’

“He said, ‘Don’t lose your first love,’ and I recognized it right away as a quote from Revelation, where the Lord says to the angel of the church in Ephesus, ‘I have this against you, that you have abandoned your first love.’ The words stung as he said them, because I knew what he meant. Even in the ministry it is possible to become too professional, too polished, too slick. You step into the pulpit for the first time with your heart pounding and your soul on fire, but after ten or twelve years you find yourself thinking about ‘appropriate eye contact’ and ‘deliberate pauses.’ You preside over the Lord’s Supper for the first time, with your hands trembling as you bless and break the bread, but after the hundredth time you catch yourself wondering where to go for lunch after church. You sit beside a hospital bed for the first time, praying for a sick parishioner and rejoicing in the knowledge that you are helping, but after a thousand such visits you sneak a peek at your watch and wonder if you can beat the rush hour traffic home.

“It is possible for all the strange newness of ministry to become old and familiar. And it isn’t only ministry! It is possible for all the strange newness of Christianity to become old and familiar, for the holy to become common through regular use, for the warm fires of first love to grow cold. The prophet who came to see me knew that and warned me not to let it happen as if he knew, even before word got out about my move to Washington, how tempting it would be in a place like this one to sacrifice love for success. In the days that followed his visit I spent a good bit of time thinking about what he had said, and remembering my ‘first love.’”^[i]

In the rest of that sermon I talked about falling in love with Jesus when I was thirteen years old, about being baptized in the muddy waters of the Big Coal River, about reading my Bible in those days as if every word had been written just for me. But that kind of love can grow cold, can’t it? Other things, and other people, can become more important. There was a time in high school when I might have given up my faith in Jesus if I could get that one girl that I liked so much to notice me. And these days it seems there are Christians who are willing to give up their faith in Jesus for a particular political candidate, or the concept of a Christian nation, or the right to bear arms. Maybe that’s why we need the Book of Revelation, and maybe that’s why we need it now: because it forces each one of us to ask who or what is most important to us; who or what is our first love; who or what is Lord?

If I asked you right now you would probably say Jesus, but that’s not the way it usually happens. I think about the man who cheats on his wife. He didn’t set out to do it, didn’t intend to betray his first love. It started with a friendly conversation while he was waiting his turn at the color copier. The next time it was playful flirtation. The next time it wasn’t playful at all. And then the line between what was appropriate and what was inappropriate became blurred. And one night, after an office Christmas party, he staggered drunkenly over that line. Once he had crossed it he realized he couldn’t go back, he could only go forward, which he did again and again and again, until he came to the day where he found himself thinking about giving up his wife of 27 years for a middle-aged woman in the accounting department.

How did it happen? Not all at once. If someone had asked him on that first day if he would leave his wife for that woman he would have said no. But it’s like the proverbial frog in the kettle. Drop a frog into a pan of hot water and it will jump out, but if you put it into a pan of cool water and gradually turn up the heat it will sit right where it is. What about us? If I asked you this morning if you love Jesus more than you love Caesar I’m almost certain you would say yes. We’re in church after all. But if I asked you tomorrow morning, on Memorial Day, whether you love the Kingdom of God more than you love the United States of America you might have to think about it. And if I called you on a Tuesday night, and asked you if you would rather listen to the Word of the Lord or your favorite news channel you might choose the news.

It doesn’t happen all at once, it happens a little at a time. You begin to give your absolute loyally, your ultimate allegiance, to something or someone other than Jesus. So, let me ask you: was there ever a time when he was all you could think about? Maybe on that day you walked down a church aisle on wobbly knees, or the day you came up out of the waters of baptism, gasping for breath? Was there ever a time when you stood in a church pew singing, “Jesus is all the world to me,” with tears running down your cheeks? How did it get like this, where he is almost an afterthought? Where, if you didn’t make yourself come to church you might not come at all?

The writer of the Book of Revelation knows that he is writing to people whose ultimate loyalties are being tested. They are being asked to say, “Caesar is Lord,” and they are searching for the courage to refuse, to say instead, “No, Jesus is Lord. He is all the world to me. And even if I have to die for him I will do it!” That’s the one who says he is coming soon, and those are the people who say, “Yes, come, Lord Jesus!” And then he repeats his promise, “Surely, I am coming soon!” And they say, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” This is the way people who love each other talk. They can’t wait to be together. They want it to happen now.

If I were John I might have ended my book in a different place, with something a little more dramatic, a little more climactic. But maybe his hope is this: that every person who reads his book will come to the end, close it, put it down, and say along with his original readers:

“Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”

[i] Jim Somerville, “First Love,” a sermon preached at the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C., on July 9, 2000.

Wait for the Ending

Posted on May 15, 2022 by refresh -

The Fifth Sunday of Easter

Revelation 21:1-6

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

A few years ago Christy and I went downtown to see the Lion King at the Altria Theatre. It was part of that series where they load an entire Broadway show onto a few big trucks in New York City and then bring it to Richmond so that we don’t have to get on Interstate 95. And they bring the whole show! When Christy and I got settled into our seats we could see that the Altria Theatre had been transformed. I can’t imagine how long it took to rebuild that Broadway set on our Richmond stage, but when the lights came up and the cast began to sing the opening number the magic of musical theatre materialized before our very eyes. We weren’t in Richmond anymore: we were somewhere on the Serengeti Plain. And in that scene where the life-size giraffe slowly stilt-walks onto the stage I could hear the entire audience gasp.

It was magic, I tell you: magic!

But what we were seeing was a live-action version of a children’s cartoon about a lion cub who grows up to be king, and that’s how it is with Broadway musicals: they can be about anything. There’s one about the Wicked Witch of the West. There’s one about a Fiddler on the Roof. I think there’s even one about Cats. So, as I said to someone recently, “What if it were your job to write a Broadway musical about the end of Cancer?” What would the music sound like? What would the costumes look like? What would the characters say? That question, all by itself, can get the imagination going, and in a way, that’s what the Book of Revelation is like: it’s like a Broadway musical about the end of Evil.

Funny I should bring that up, because in his best-known book my old seminary professor, Jim Blevins, compares Revelation to drama, in fact he talks about it as drama. He writes about the theatre in Ephesus, the largest theatre in the ancient world, with a seating capacity of 25,000 people. I’ve actually been to Ephesus. I have seen that theatre. And, as Dr. Blevins would say, it is “impressive!”

It was built on the slopes of a mountain in the Third Century, BC, at the intersection of the city’s two principal streets, and by the time Revelation was written Greek tragedies and comedies had been acted out on its stage for more than 300 years. Like every other theatre of the time it had an orchestra, and then above and behind the orchestra a stage, and then above and behind the stage a skene—a “scene building”—kind of like a long shed with openings called thuromata where stage hands could place painted panels depicting scenes too difficult to perform on stage.^[i] For example, if a scene took place in winter, a stage hand might place a painted panel in one of the openings showing snow falling while an actor walked across the stage wrapped in furs and shivering.

The interesting thing about the theatre in Ephesus, and what caught Dr. Blevins’ eye, is the fact that while all the other theatres in the ancient world had 3-5 scene windows, the theatre in Ephesus had seven. It was the only one of its kind. Blevins began to think about how the number seven features so prominently in the Book of Revelation, and how the entire book could be easily divided into seven acts of seven scenes each. He began to speculate that this was no coincidence: that John, the author of Revelation, who had lived in Ephesus for many years and almost certainly attended plays, may have cast his visions in dramatic form, as if they were going to be staged in that theatre.

Now, before you begin to think that John made the whole thing up, or that the entire Book of Revelation is simply a Broadway musical about the end of Evil, listen to what Dr. Blevins said in one of his famous dramatic monologues, dressed as John of Patmos. He said, “Finally, I would like to say to you modern readers that I saw these things: these are visionary experiences. I heard the beautiful music found in my book. I could not express what I had experienced in prose. Instead I chose this dramatic medium to express that which I had beheld. You cannot come to Revelation and just read it on the printed page. You must use all of your senses; you must see it, hear it, read it, open yourselves up to its great majesty.”^[ii] And then he talks about the theatre in Ephesus and explains that, “In it were performed the great Greek tragic dramas. Tragic drama was always religious drama; a throne to God was always on the main stage; a chorus of 12 or 24 stood around the throne and sang the music of the drama; the actors were called priests.” And then listen to this detail, which may inform today’s reading from Revelation 21: Blevins writes, “At the end of the drama, God was always brought down from the upper level of the stage to solve the dilemmas posed in the drama.”^[iii]

Did you hear that? God was always brought down from somewhere up above to sort things out and solve the remaining problems. Can you imagine those ancient Greeks acting out a tragedy on the stage and making such a mess of things that it looked like the end of King Lear, with dead bodies lying all over the stage? But then, in that moment when you think all hope is gone, when it looks as if Evil has won the day, here comes God.

So, think back to what you actually know about the Book of Revelation, and think about it not as a hodgepodge of bizarre animals, images, colors, and secret codes, but as a Broadway musical, or maybe an ancient Greek tragedy, where it isn’t over until God steps down from heaven to sort things out. Dr. Blevins imagines it like this: The first eight verses of the book are an introduction in which, John, the narrator, introduces himself and the scope of the play. And then we have:

Act I: the Seven Gold Lampstands, where Jesus—looking like a “Son of Man,” with hair as white as wool, and eyes like flames of fire, and feet like burnished bronze—dictates letters to the churches of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. How many churches? Seven. And how many scene windows? Seven. And in each one an image of a seven-branched candlestick with a different candle lit. These letters to the churches take up most of the first three chapters and then we have:

Act II: the Seven Seals, where John is caught up to heaven and sees the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders around the throne. He also sees the Lamb who was slaughtered but now lives, the only one worthy to open the seals on the scroll that is handed to him. When he does, we see frightening images of the end that is about to come upon the earth (and maybe you can imagine those stage hands scurrying around inside the scene building to make sure they have the right painted panel in the window). And then, near the beginning of chapter 8, we have:

Act III: the Seven Trumpets, with plagues of hail, fire, blood, and locusts that sound like something straight out of the Book of Exodus. But remember that in Exodus God was trying to get Pharaoh to let his people go. Maybe that’s what he’s doing here: trying to get Caesar to leave his people alone! In Revelation 11:15 the choir gets excited and begins to sing, “Hallelujah! The kingdom of the world has become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever!” Which brings us to:

Act IV: the Seven Tableaux, where it becomes apparent that the choir has gotten a little ahead of itself. The kingdom of the world has not yet become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. The first tableau is of a dragon representing Satan. The second tableau is the Beast from the Sea, the one who represents Caesar Domitian. The third tableau is the Beast from the Land, Caesar’s prophet, who speaks for him. But the fourth tableau is the Lamb with the 144,000, who represent the entire people of God. And then we see the Son of Man on a cloud, the harvest of the grapes of wrath, and the great hymn of the Lamb (and this might be a good time to remind you that throughout this drama there is music. Beautiful music! Songs, and hymns, and choruses you can almost hear as you are reading). In chapter 15 we get to:

Act V: the Seven Bowls of Wrath, where the angels of God pour out curses on the earth, the sea, and the sky, and everything else, until there isn’t anything that hasn’t been cursed. But remember? The kingdom of this world is giving way to the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. Which brings us to chapter 17 and:

Act VI: the Seven Judgments, in which Rome is portrayed as a prostitute, drunk with the blood of the martyrs, and identified as Babylon: a previous empire that had also persecuted God’s people. But then the heavenly chorus begins to sing, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great!” And you can imagine how excited the Christians in the audience would be as the chorus sings one funeral dirge after another about Babylon. Jesus, now riding a white horse and identified as the Word of God, comes to make war on the wickedness of the world, to fight the final Battle of Armageddon, and throw Satan into a bottomless pit. All of this would be good news for hard times. But in Revelation 20 we come to:

Act VII: the Seven Great Promises, where the Beast who represents Caesar Domitian is thrown into a lake of fire forever (don’t you just love it when the bad guy gets it in the end?). Evil is judged, the wickedness of the world is destroyed, and John sees a new heaven and a new earth, and then he sees the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband.

I have to tell you, this is one of my favorite images in all the Bible, and just think how it would appeal to Christians who were living in the Roman Empire in a time of persecution. This is like the god who comes down at the end of a Greek drama to solve all the remaining problems, right? Except this is God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and also, apparently, the maker of the new heaven and the new earth.

A loud voice from the throne cries,

See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them
and be their God;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain
will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.

I will have more to say about the New Jerusalem in the next couple of weeks, but for now imagine those poor Christians of John’s time, some of whom had lost loved ones in the persecution of Caesar Domitian, being reassured that when this drama finally comes to an end, when God steps down from his throne to make all things right, then he will be with them and be their God, and they will be his people. “He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

That’s good news for hard times.

Some of you may remember an Easter sermon I preached a few years ago where I quoted a song by David Wilcox called “Show the Way,” which he once introduced by saying, “It’s a song to help us live in a world like this one.” He said that more than a decade ago, when the world was going through hard times, but he might have said it yesterday, when a white supremacist with an assault rifle shot 13 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, 11 of whom were Black. Listen to the lyrics.

You say you see no hope
You say you see no reason we should dream
That the world would ever change
You’re saying love is foolish to believe

‘Cause there’ll always be some crazy
With an army or a knife
To wake you from your day dream
Put the fear back in your life.

And then Wilcox eases into the next verse:

Look, if someone wrote a play just to glorify
What’s stronger than hate
Would they not arrange the stage
To look as if the hero came too late?

And I want to pause there for a moment, because you could think of the Book of Revelation like that, like a play somebody wrote to glorify what’s stronger than hate, but you might also think of it as a play in which the hero comes too late. Because haven’t we lived through enough hard times? If Revelation really was written 2,000 years ago haven’t there been hundreds of good opportunities for the hero to show up? What about when those early Christians were suffering persecution? What about when the Jews were going through the Holocaust? What about the people of Ukraine, fighting for their lives even now? And what about those poor people in Buffalo?

But the song goes on. Wilcox says:

If someone wrote a play just to glorify
What’s stronger than hate
Would they not arrange the stage
To look as if the hero came too late?

He’s almost in defeat
It’s looking like the evil side will win

So on the edge of every seat
From the moment that the whole thing begins,

It is Love who mixed the mortar
And it’s Love who stacked these stones
And it’s Love who made the stage here
Though it looks like we’re alone

In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us

But it’s Love that wrote the play

For in this darkness Love can show the way.

I preached that sermon on Easter Sunday, 2016, when we were celebrating Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, the surprise ending of a tragic drama. Here on the Fifth Sunday of Easter, 2022, we are still celebrating the Resurrection, and still proclaiming the good news that even in the hardest times, and perhaps when you least expect it, love can roll away the stone,

And show the way.

[i] James L. Blevins, Revelation as Drama (Nashville: Broadman, 1984), p. 17.

[ii] Ibid., p. 15.

[iii] Ibid.

The Blood of the Lamb

Posted on May 8, 2022 by refresh -

The Fourth Sunday of Easter

Revelation 7:9-17

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

Today we continue an Easter Season sermon series called “Good News for Hard Times,” based on the lectionary readings from the Book of Revelation. And although I am familiar with some of the more popular interpretations of that book (like The Late Great Planet Earth, by Hal Lindsay, or the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins) I probably need to tell you that everything I know about Revelation I learned from an actual New Testament scholar named James L. Blevins, who loved this book and devoted his life to it. Dr. Blevins was one of my professors at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I took New Testament Survey, Part II, with him, and also a graduate-level seminar on Revelation where we translated the entire book from Greek into English. He wasn’t the most exciting teacher I ever had, but he did what he could.

In that New Testament survey course he once walked into class wearing a long, striped robe with a sash tied around his waist and the worst fake beard you have ever seen. It looked as if he had glued cotton balls onto his face with rubber cement. But when the room got quiet he said, “I am the Apostle Paul.” And then he told us his story. I had a hard time accepting him as Paul, in the beginning. He didn’t look like Paul. He didn’t sound like Paul. But as he told his story I was drawn in, especially when he told us about his dramatic conversion experience on the road to Damascus. After that I learned that Dr. Blevins often performed dramatic monologues. It was one of the ways he tried to keep his students interested. Yes, the costumes looked like something from the youth Christmas pageant but I may have learned more from those monologues than from anything else Dr. Blevins tried to teach us.

Near the end of that New Testament survey course he came into the classroom dressed as John, the author of Revelation (I mean, that’s what he told us; you couldn’t tell from the costumes; they all looked exactly the same). But when he began to tell his story I leaned in close, because most of what I knew about the Book of Revelation at that time I had learned from those popular interpretations like The Late Great Planet Earth. But Dr. Blevins told a different story. He didn’t talk about the coming persecution of Christians; he talked about the persecution of Christians near the end of the First Century, AD, under the Roman Emperor, Domitian, who thought of himself as divine and forced his citizens to say “Caesar is Lord!” But, as Dr. Blevins emphasized, no real Christian would ever do that. When they were baptized they would say, “Jesus is Lord!” They would do it as an act of defiance, to show Caesar who was boss. But they suffered for their convictions. They were put in jail, they were put to death, they were boiled in oil. John himself was exiled to the island of Patmos where he was forced to quarry rock in the hot sunshine.

Still in costume Dr. Blevins said, “In the cool of the evening we prisoners would be led up the hillside and locked in a cave. Many evenings I stood at the entrance to the cave, looking out at the blue Aegean Sea, as still as a sea of glass. One evening as I stood looking out of the mouth of the cave, I heard a voice behind me saying, ‘John, John, write down the things that I will reveal to you.’ Over a period of nine months I received these revelations and wrote them in a scroll to be sent to the persecuted Christians in Asia Minor.

“Because I was in a Roman prison I could not openly speak of Christ, so the Spirit led me to write the revelation of Jesus Christ in the apocalyptic codes of the Jewish people, developed centuries earlier [and used in other secret writings, like the Book of Daniel]. The first word in my book is the word apokalypsis, which means ‘to uncover’ or ‘reveal.’ It was a clue to my readers that this book was going to be written in secret code.”^[i]

So, what is the secret code of the Book of Revelation? Wouldn’t you like to know? Well, Dr. Blevins shared it with us. He typed it up and handed it out in class. I’m going to attach it to the manuscript of this sermon and in a day or so you should be able to find it on our website by clicking the button that says “Church Anytime.” No extra charge for that. But for today’s purposes it might be enough to say that it is an elaborate code involving numbers, colors, and animals.

5-8-22 Secret Codes of Revelation

Let me give you a few examples:

In the first chapter of Revelation John has a vision of “one like the Son of Man.” Christians would have heard that title before in the Book of Daniel, where it says, “I saw one like a Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven,” but in their own time they would have recognized it immediately as a reference to Jesus. Still, this Jesus was not like any you have ever seen on the wall of a Sunday school classroom. His hair was as white as wool, his eyes were like flames of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze. It can be rather disturbing unless you know the code.

Dr. Blevins explained it like this: “In chapter 1 of my book I describe the Son of Man in color codes. I was in prison for preaching Christ, I could not openly speak about him, so I set forth a living sermon in colors. The Son of Man is described with bronze feet, depicting strength, white robes of conquering, white hair of purity, a gold band around his chest, representing his worth or value, a sharp, two-edged sword coming from his mouth, representing truth. All the Christians hearing this passage read aloud would have known immediately the one of whom I was speaking.”^[ii]

But Christians would have also known who John was speaking about when he talked about “The Beast.” In the Book of Daniel four great beasts rise up out of the sea, each one representing a different historical empire.^[iii] In the Book of Revelation a beast rises up out of the sea representing the Roman Empire, and particularly Caesar Domitian. Dr. Blevins, speaking as John, explained it like this. “[In apocalyptic literature], monster beasts represent monstrous persons or forces. They are constructed from bits and parts of wild animals to represent extremely evil persons. The Beast from the Sea in my book is a symbol for Caesar Domitian or political power. It is comprised of the three symbols of the major world powers in my day: bear’s feet for Medea, leopard’s spots for Persia, and a lion’s head for Rome. There was no animal mean enough to represent Caesar, who had put so many Christians to death.”^[iv]

You may have also heard about “the mark of the Beast,” and his number, 666. Again Dr. Blevins explained that “Seven is the divine number. In many apocalyptic works the code number for God is 777. Many Jews added up the number of their name according to the Hebrew alphabet and this would be their code number in days of persecution. The number six stands for imperfection or extreme evil. In Revelation, 666 is the code number for Caesar Domitian, who was persecuting Christians and putting them to death.”^[v] Those citizens of his empire who would not pledge their allegiance to Caesar, that is, those who would not take “the mark of the Beast,” were in danger of losing not only their livelihood but also their lives.

And, finally, Jesus himself is pictured as an animal: a lamb with seven horns (representing divine power) and seven eyes (representing divine seeing). That may seem disturbing to you, even more disturbing than the image of Jesus as the Son of Man with eyes like flames of fire and feet like burnished bronze. But speaking as John Dr. Blevins explained: “Because I was in prison I could not openly speak of Christ, so I used this coded animal to symbolize my Lord.”^[vi] This lamb that had been slaughtered, and yet somehow still stood before the throne of God, receiving all the accolades of heaven. Again, any Christian in the Empire would have known exactly who John was talking about.

There is more to say about these codes and the way John used them to communicate with Christians going through hard times, but for now that may be enough, and I want to stop with the symbol of the lamb for a reason. This is not only Mother’s Day, it is also Good Shepherd Sunday, and we were called to worship with a recitation of the 23^rd Psalm, the one that begins, “the Lord is my shepherd.” As I said in the children’s sermon, David wrote that psalm about God, his shepherd, but in today’s Gospel lesson from John 10 Jesus talks about himself as the Good Shepherd. He says, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand” (I hope those of you who are going through hard times can hear and appreciate those words). In John 10 Jesus is presented as the Good Shepherd, but in much of the Book of Revelation he is presented as the Lamb that was slaughtered and yet stands. Do you remember from last week’s sermon how everyone in heaven bowed down and worshiped him, singing, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!”? It left me wondering, as I thought about this week’s sermon, “How does all this work? How does the Lord who is my shepherd, become Jesus, the Good Shepherd, and finally the Lamb who was slaughtered and yet stands?”

Well, let me explain it to you as I might explain it to a little child, and ask all you professional theologians out there to withhold your judgment, at least for a little while. Let’s begin by imagining that God, the one who is our shepherd, became an earthly shepherd in the person of Jesus. The author of John’s Gospel says as much. He says that the One who was with God and was God in the beginning became flesh and lived among us. Theologians would call that the Doctrine of the Incarnation but for today’s purposes we might simply say that the Divine Shepherd came down from heaven and became human in order to watch over his earthly flock; he became Jesus, the Good Shepherd. But then there’s this other idea: the idea of the Lamb that was slaughtered and yet stands. And you probably don’t even have to know the codes of the Book of Revelation to know that the author is talking about Jesus. But how did that happen? How did the Good Shepherd become the sacrificial lamb?

Some of you know that I have trouble with the concept of Substitutionary Atonement, the idea that God’s righteousness was so offended by our sinfulness that somebody had to pay, and the one who ended up paying for it was Jesus. What I have trouble with is the idea of God, at the full height of his divine wrath, shouting, “Somebody’s got to pay for this!” I don’t picture God that way. I picture God the way many of the biblical writers do, as being “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” I can’t imagine him saying, “Somebody’s got to pay for human sin!” and then pointing at Jesus. But I can imagine Jesus, the Good Shepherd, being willing to do whatever it took to protect and preserve his flock. And if someone came to him and said, “I need one of these sheep to offer as a sacrifice,” I can imagine him saying, “Wait just a minute,” and then—in the same way the Divine Shepherd became a human being—this Good Shepherd would become the sacrificial lamb, and offer himself willingly for the sake of his flock. I can imagine that. That seems so much like Jesus. And apparently the author of Revelation could imagine that, and helps us picture this Lamb who was slaughtered now standing on his feet again, raised from the dead by a God who is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” a God who honors his son’s willingness to lay down his life for the sake of his sheep.

And that’s us.

Friends I don’t know what kind of hard times you may be going through, but in today’s reading from Revelation there is a flock no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, an incredibly diverse multitude standing before the throne and before the lamb, robed in white, waving palm branches. They cry out with a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” One of the elders asks John, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” but John says he doesn’t know. So, the elder says, “These are they who have come out of the Great Ordeal.” And any Christian in the Empire would have known who John was talking about. He was talking about those brothers and sisters in Christ who had suffered at the hands of Caesar Domitian and died for their faith. “They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” the elder continues. And any Christian in the Empire would have known that whatever sins these martyrs carried with them had been forgiven, that they were now perfect and pure forever. “For this reason they are before the throne of God,” the Elder says, “and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”^[vii]

As I said, I don’t know what kind of hard times you may be going through, but here is an image to keep you going: the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, slaughtered by the evil forces of the Roman Empire but raised by a gracious and merciful God—this Lamb at the center of the throne will be your shepherd. He will guide you to the springs of the water of life. And God himself will wipe away every tear from your eyes.

[i] I didn’t actually record Dr. Blevins presentation to my New Testament class, but I do have a copy of his book, Revelation as Drama, which includes “John’s Testimony” as a first-person narrative. I’m quoting from that (Nashville: Broadman, 1984), pp. 11-12.

[ii] Blevins, Revelation as Drama, pp.13-14.

[iii] Daniel 7:3ff.

[iv] Blevins, Revelation as Drama, p. 14.

[v] Ibid., p. 13.

[vi] Ibid., pp.14-15.

[vii] Revelation 7:13-17, NRSV.

Hard Times in the Empire

Posted on May 1, 2022 by refresh -

The Third Sunday of Easter

Revelation 1:4-8

John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come…

Today we begin an Easter Season Sermon series called “Good News for Hard Times,” and we could use some of that, couldn’t we? Because these are hard times. For more than two years we have been suffering through a global pandemic. Many of our members have been sick; some of them have died. But just when we thought the worst of it was over we got the news that Russia had invaded Ukraine. We haven’t been directly involved in that war but many of us have been prayer warriors, asking God to help and heal the people of Ukraine. On this side of the world inflation has risen to levels we haven’t seen in forty years; the stock market has been on a roller coaster ride; and don’t get me started on the price of gas. I saw a meme recently where someone was wearing a face mask over his eyes. It said, “The CDC is now recommending the use of masks to prevent heart attacks at the gas pumps.” These may not be the hardest times we have ever lived through, but they are certainly hard. We could use some good news.

So, turn with me if you will to the Book of Revelation (laughter). What? You don’t believe Revelation is the obvious choice for people going through hard times? Let me assure you, this book that was written specifically for people who were going through hard times. Scholars believe it was written near the end of the First Century, AD, when Christians were suffering persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire. The Emperor, Domitian, wanted every citizen to say, “Caesar is Lord!” He thought he was divine. But the Christians of that time insisted on saying, “Jesus is Lord!” As a result Domitian had many of them locked up in prison, boiled in oil, or put to death by the sword. You think you’re going through hard times? These people were going through hard times! They needed a word of hope, and they got it from a man named John.

We don’t really know who he was. Many scholars refer to him simply as “John of Patmos,” because that’s where he was, on the rocky island of Patmos, about sixty miles off the coast of Asia Minor, exiled for his faith in Jesus Christ. Whoever he was, he cared for his fellow Christians suffering persecution. He wanted to send them a message of hope, but it wouldn’t be easy with the Roman government watching his every move, censoring his every word. He had to find some secret way to get his message across. And so, like every good pastor, he looked to the pages of scripture for inspiration and he found it in the Book of Daniel.

I don’t know how much you know about Daniel. It, too, was written for people living in hard times, specifically for the people of Israel living in the Second Century, BC. The king of Syria, a madman named Antiochus Epiphanes, had invaded Israel. He wanted to “Hellenize” the Jews, that is, force them to adopt Greek culture and customs, to give up the Hebrew language, the practice of circumcision, and the worship of God. Some of the Jews were giving in, and that’s when the author of Daniel, like every good pastor, turned to the Bible for inspiration. He found it in the story of the Jewish exiles who had been carried away into captivity in Babylon. He began to write the stories of a few Jewish heroes who held onto their faith even when a foreign king threatened them with death. You may remember from Sunday school the story of Daniel in the lion’s den, or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace.

The first half of the book is filled with those inspiring stories, but in the second half of the book the author begins to record a series of mysterious dreams and visions. Listen to this one: “I, Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. The first was like a lion and had eagles’ wings…”^[i] Sound familiar? Yes, it sounds exactly like the Book of Revelation! Or, rather, Revelation sounds exactly like it. But the author of Daniel may have gotten his inspiration from the prophet Ezekiel, who actually lived during the time of the Babylonian Exile, and who starts his book with a vision of a bright cloud and flashing fire and four living creatures who “sparkled like burnished bronze.”^[ii]

Whenever you find dreams and visions in the Bible, you find a kind of literature called apocalyptic, and it is written specifically for people who are going through hard times. You can find examples of it in other books—in Isaiah, Joel, Zechariah, and even in the Gospels—but the best examples are in the second half of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. It comes from the Greek word apokalypsis, which means “to reveal,” or, literally, “to remove the cover from.” I like to think of it like this: like coming home at the end of the day and smelling something good coming from the kitchen. You go back there and see a pot simmering on the back burner of the stove. You lift the lid of the pot—you apo kalypsis—and see what’s cooking for supper. It looks and smells delicious. But apocalyptic literature is different. When you lift the lid of that pot what you see and smell is anything but delicious. But in scripture, most of the time, the ones who have it coming are not God’s people but their enemies: the ones who are making things so hard for them.

Let me take you back to the Book of Daniel for a moment. The author writes about beasts coming up out of the sea, each one with a certain number of horns. What he’s writing about, actually, are the different empires that emerged in history and the kings who ruled over them. We know this because the visions in the Book of Daniel precisely parallel the history of the ancient world right up to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes. They describe the conquests of Alexander the Great and the four generals who succeeded him. They describe the power struggle on both sides of Israel, between the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria. They describe Antiochus Epiphanes as one who will “speak words against the Most High, and wear out the holy ones of the Most High, and attempt to change the sacred seasons and the law.” If you were reading this in the Second Century BC and thought it was written in the Sixth Century BC you would be amazed at the precise parallels between the visions of Daniel and what actually happened in history, right up until the Archangel Michael steps down from heaven and crushes Antiochus Epiphanes and all his forces. That part didn’t actually happen. But it allowed scholars to pinpoint the moment when history gave way to hope, and confirm the date of this book as somewhere right around 168 BC.

I remember learning this in seminary and being blown away by the idea that this biblical writer, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, was combining history and hope in a way that would strengthen and encourage the people of God. In that sense it was like preaching, but instead of filling his sermon with colorful illustrations, the author of Daniel had filled his sermon with dreams and visions. This is typical of apocalyptic literature. It says, “Things may be bad now. You may be wondering if they will ever get better. But I’m telling you they will. God is still on his throne, and God has not given up on his people. You just have to remain faithful.” Which isn’t easy in hard times, but it also isn’t impossible. Those people Ezekiel was writing to? They made it through the Exile. Those people the author of Daniel was writing to? They made it through the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes. And those people John was writing to, those who were suffering through the persecution of Caesar Domitian? Well, let’s take a closer look.

The passage that Allison read earlier, from Revelation 1, is actually last week’s reading, but it serves as a helpful introduction to this series. The author identifies himself only as John, but he addresses his apocalypse to “the seven churches that are in Asia,” and that is a brilliant strategy: before he gets into the visions that will comprise the major portion of this book he takes time to encourage each of the seven churches with words from Jesus himself. “Get ready,” he says. “Prepare yourselves for what is about to come upon the earth, because it is going to be like nothing you have ever seen.” Can you imagine how we might respond, if we got a letter from Jesus addressed to the church in Richmond, telling us to get ready? Don’t you think we would do it? “Look!” says John, “He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be.”^[iii] And so, we had better get ready.

But after John has shared the words of Jesus with each of the seven churches he writes, “After this I looked, and there in heaven a door stood open! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, ‘Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.’” John sees some strange things up there. Some people think he may have spent too much time breaking rocks in the hot Mediterranean sun. He sees a throne, and someone sitting on the throne who dazzles the eye like a jewel. Around the throne are 24 elders, twelve of them representing the tribes of Israel and the other twelve representing the disciples of Jesus. And he sees four living creatures standing around the throne, one like a lion, one like an ox, one like an eagle, and one like a man. All these creatures do, day and night, is say, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” as the 24 elders fall on their faces and cast their golden crowns before the one seated on the throne.

Today’s reading from Revelation 5 comes from that heavenly throne room, where John sees a lamb standing as if slaughtered, and this may explain why this particular passage was chosen for the Season of Easter, because slaughtered lambs don’t usually stand up again, crucified Messiahs don’t usually get up out of the grave, but here is this lamb standing there, and John says, “I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, singing with full voice, ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing! (when we all get to heaven, right? What a day of rejoicing that will be).^[iv] Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, ‘To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!’”

Take that, Caesar Domitian. You may be King of the World now, but one of these days you are going down, and the only one left standing will be the lamb who was slaughtered. You see? This is good news for hard times. It is a reminder to those Christians who were being persecuted that their suffering wouldn’t last forever. If they could just hold on a little longer, if they could just remain faithful, God would deliver them yet.

That’s apocalyptic literature, and it’s different from prophecy. I read an article last week that said, “Prophecy believes that this world is God’s world and that in this world His goodness and truth will yet be vindicated…. The apocalyptic writer despairs of the present and directs his hopes to the future, to a new world standing in essential opposition to the present.”^[v] When I read that I thought, “Well, I must be a prophet. Because I still believe in this world. I still believe that God’s kingdom can come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” You’ve heard me: I keep on telling you to look around for anything that doesn’t look like heaven, and then roll up your sleeves and get to work. I believe the KOH can actually come to RVA.^[vi] The apocalypticist is different. The apocalypticist doesn’t see any hope for the world as it is. He’s like that scientist who believes a gigantic asteroid is going to hit the earth and there is nothing we can do. Our only hope is that God will do something, that God will save us. Otherwise, we are doomed.

I am not an apocalypticist; I’m a prophet. I still believe in this world and in our ability to make a difference. But you may not be in the same place. You may not have that same kind of hope. Your world may be so broken that you don’t see any way of putting it back together again. If so, then the Book of Revelation may be good news for you. Because no matter how bad things look the writer of Revelation believes that one day God Almighty is going to get up off his throne, and when he does the earth beneath our feet is going to shake. And then God is going to roll up his sleeves, he’s going to reach up with both hands, he’s going to take hold of the wheel of human history and then begin to turn it ever so slowly in the right direction, until everyone who is on the top is on the bottom, and everyone who is on the bottom is on the top, and everything that has been broken is repaired, and everything that has been ruined is restored, and everything that has been lost is found. We can’t do that. Only God can do that. But in the pages of this beautiful and often neglected book the author insists that one day—one day!—God will do exactly that.

[i] Daniel 7:1-4, NRSV

[ii] Ezekiel 1:4-7

[iii] Revelation 1:7, NRSV

[iv] One of the anthems of the day was “When We All Get to Heaven”

[v] “Apocalyptic Literature,” Wikipedia

[vi] Our acronym for “Kingdom of Heaven to Richmond, Virginia”

A Creation That Groans

Posted on April 24, 2022 by refresh -

I think it is safe to assume that most of us are familiar with the account of creation found in Genesis 1. I mean, it has become so mainstream that even those that aren’t religious most likely have some idea of the story of God creating the animals alongside Adam and Even in the garden. I’m afraid it has become so familiar, in fact, that it has lost its charm, or beauty. We read it and don’t embrace all that is happening, or we simply hear it as a literal story and miss the beautiful imagery of creation coming into existence, of a God that works all things together for good. So help us with that, I want to read Genesis 1 right now, but read it from the message version, which as you may know is written to sound more like a story we’d read in English rather than a literal translation from the Hebrew. The message’s version of Genesis 1 is rather poetic, so I wonder if reading it now would help us really appreciate all that there is to this story. And let’s try a response together. After I read a section, and motion to you, respond together say, “God saw that it was good.”

1 ^1-2First this: God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.

^3-5God spoke: “Light!”
And light appeared.
God saw that light was good
and separated light from dark.
God named the light Day,
he named the dark Night.
It was evening, it was morning—
Day One.

^6-8God spoke: “Sky! In the middle of the waters;
separate water from water!”
God made sky.
He separated the water under sky
from the water above sky.
And there it was:
he named sky the Heavens;
It was evening, it was morning—
Day Two.

^9-10God spoke: “Separate!
Water-beneath-Heaven, gather into one place;
Land, appear!”
And there it was.
God named the land Earth.
He named the pooled water Ocean.
God saw that it was good.

^11-13God spoke: “Earth, green up! Grow all varieties
of seed-bearing plants,
Every sort of fruit-bearing tree.”
And there it was.
Earth produced green seed-bearing plants,
all varieties,
And fruit-bearing trees of all sorts.
God saw that it was good.
It was evening, it was morning—
Day Three.

^14-15God spoke: “Lights! Come out!
Shine in Heaven’s sky!
Separate Day from Night.
Mark seasons and days and years,
Lights in Heaven’s sky to give light to Earth.”
And there it was.

^16-19God made two big lights, the larger
to take charge of Day,
The smaller to be in charge of Night;
and he made the stars.
God placed them in the heavenly sky
to light up Earth
And oversee Day and Night,
to separate light and dark.
God saw that it was good.
It was evening, it was morning—
Day Four.

^20-23God spoke: “Swarm, Ocean, with fish and all sea life!
Birds, fly through the sky over Earth!”
God created the huge whales,
all the swarm of life in the waters,
And every kind and species of flying birds.
God saw that it was good.
God blessed them: “Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Ocean!
Birds, reproduce on Earth!”
It was evening, it was morning—
Day Five.

^24-25God spoke: “Earth, generate life! Every sort and kind:
cattle and reptiles and wild animals—all kinds.”
And there it was:
wild animals of every kind,
Cattle of all kinds, every sort of reptile and bug.
God saw that it was good.

^26-28God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image, make them
reflecting our nature
So they can be responsible for the fish in the sea,
the birds in the air, the cattle,
And, yes, Earth itself,
and every animal that moves on the face of Earth.”
God created human beings;
he created them godlike,
Reflecting God’s nature.
He created them male and female.
God blessed them:
“Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge!
Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air,
for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth.”

^29-30Then God said, “I’ve given you
every sort of seed-bearing plant on Earth
And every kind of fruit-bearing tree,
given them to you for food.
To all animals and all birds,
everything that moves and breathes,
I give whatever grows out of the ground for food.”
And there it was.

³¹God looked over everything he had made;
it was so good, so very good!
It was evening, it was morning—
Day Six

On this day of celebrating God’s creation, what a wonderful message to be reminded of. Yet, I often feel that such a message seems to be a thing of the past, as I more often than not think that creation is no longer good. I mean, if creation was so good then, why does God’s creation seem to be in chaos now? As far as the earth goes, we’ve got record breaking hurricanes occurring year after year, massive droughts in the west, huge famines in parts of Africa, glaciers melting at an alarming rate, the average temperature globally rising to dangerous levels, earth quakes, volcanoes, floods, yo name it, the world seems to be in chaos. And that’s just the natural world. As far as humans go, war has killed thousands in Ukraine, refugees leaving Afghanistan and many other countries throughout the middle east, civil unrest in Myanmar, Economic collapse and the destruction of health, education and other critical systems in Yemen, the list goes on. What has happened to God’s good creation?

I feel like Paul was feeling the same way when he wrote the passage from Romans that we read earlier. He said that whole creation groans, and labors with birth pangs together until now, and he goes on to say that “Not only that, but we also who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.”

Now, to honest to the context, Paul isn’t really speaking on issues of creation care, but rather the “not yet” that is God’s kingdom, and how it encompasses all of creation, but still, I think it is a message worth noting on this day of celebrating God’s creation. Because on days like today, I’m not sure what to feel, and maybe you’re there too. I am thankful for God’s creation, but I’m also ashamed at how we’ve treated it, and I’m a little uneasy about the direction we are going in terms of correcting. When I think about creation, maybe you’re like me, as I’m often led to one of two schools of thought.

On one side, you have the orthodox view of Christianity, that God is in control, so if God is in control, why should we care how we treat the Earth, I mean, God is in control, could we really do harm? The world is so big and we are so small. Could we really cause irreparable harm? And God gave us these resources. Shouldn’t we be able to use as much as we want, as fast as want, without any consequences?

I’m afraid many Christians feels this way, and I’m afraid this rhetoric is not only doing harm to our environment, but harm to our cause of Christ followers to share God’s love to others. I think this is a big concern for our young people as well and it’s why they often feel that their concerns aren’t shared by their older leaders. I mean, we wonder why young people today seem to be more cynical, and have higher levels of anxiety: it’s because they see their planet exhibiting symptoms of damage, and so often the adults in charge don’t seem to be doing anything.

And this can be where people end up on the other side of the spectrum. They’ve tried and tried to get others to feel the same way they do about the environment but it feels like there is no longer any point, so they stop caring, they stop working towards a cleaner and greener tomorrow, and they succumb to the ways of the world and only maintain hope that humans will eventually kill themselves off with their overconsumption to leave a prospering Earth for the plants and animals left behind.

But is there not another way, because both of these perspectives seem to be hopeless. How do we care for God’s creation that seems to be crumbling while still maintaining hope that what we are doing matters and that we can save our planet from the negative effects we’ve had on it for the past couple of centuries? It’s a challenge, but one that I think we need to wrestle with. I think it is a question that humans have been asking for quite some time, especially as we’ve realized our capabilities of doing harm to the world.

Did you ever see that movie, “The Day The Earth Stood Still? There was one that came out in 2008, but I’m talking about the one from 1951. Don’t get me wrong, the one from 2008 is good, but I don’t think it compares to the one from 1951. In fact, I think the difference in the two movies may highlight how we have come to view creation and the negative ways of thinking that have evolved since the original movie came out in 1951.

In both movies, an alien named Klaatu, who inhabits a body that looks human, and actually is human in the new one, comes to Earth, alongside a large robot named Gort. Gort in the original inhabits a large silver suit that looks robotic, with ridged arms and a robotic type walk characteristic of most sci-fi movies in the 50s. In the 2008 film, Gort gets an upgrade with CGI and is much, much larger.

In the 1951 version, Klaatu says that he comes with an important message that he needs to communicate to the various world leaders, but as you can imagine, this proves to be difficult. To awaken the Earth to the severity of Klaatu’s message, Gort causes all of the electricity to stop working for thirty minutes. Shots from London, Paris, New York, Moscow, are seen alongside images of factories at a standstill, a woman taking wet laundry out of her dryer, a worker trying to make a milkshake at a soda fountain lifting the cup onto a stationary mixer, even the poor dairy farmer can’t use the pumps to milk his cows. Hence, the title of the movie, the day the earth stood still.

After such a display of power, the military was set on capturing Klaatu at all costs, and they do catch him, and end up killing him in the process. But, his new friend Helen, who has become a vital character in the story, manages to get Gort, remember the big silver robot, to go retrieve Klaatu’s corpse. Those of you that have seen it, do you remember the line that Helen has to tell Gort? Klaatu barada nikto

Gort temporarily revives Klaatu so he can communicate his message, which he does, before the spaceship is seen departing Earth. His message was that humans must learn to live in peace or face certain annihilation. The movie ends there, leaving viewers to wonder: Do we have what it takes?

The 2008 version, unsurprisingly, is much different. In that version, Klaatu is here to check up on the Earth, and quickly decides that humans are too destructive to be allowed to continue ruining Earth, only one of a few planets in the cosmos capable of sustaining complex life he says. So, we then see futuristic arks harvesting animals in to them before Gort, who can now apparently turn himself into microscopic flying insects that eat everything in their path, begins wiping out the human race. As we see this occurring, Klaatu tells one of the main characters of the reasoning for such a cruel act: if the earth dies, you die. If you die, the earth lives.

But as the events unfold, Klaatu begins to have a change of heart. We see Klaatu speaking with another alien who has been living among humans for several decades. This alien decides to stay on Earth and die with the humans because he has come to love them. Even among our destructive tendencies, this alien considers himself lucky to have lived life among humans.

In another scene, Klaatu sees two characters at a tombstone, crying over the loss of a loved one, and this sight moves him enough to sacrifice his own life to stop the destruction of the world, and as the spaceship leaves, the earth is left standing still reflecting on the events that occurred and their meaning for the future.

Now I can already feel your judgement: oh Justin, stop being so critical. That message is still good. Humanity is flawed, but still worth saving. Can’t you see the value that Klaatu sees in humans.

And yes, sure. I think there’s a point to it, that even among the hardships of life, love is worth saving. But in comparison to the 1951 version, I feel that the 2008 dodges the underlining question of the original. The 2008 version implies that Klaatu was the one who needed to change. He was the one who needed to learn from humans, where the 1951 implies that humans are the ones in need a change of perspective.

Yes, the 1951 version of Klaatu, changes his mind too, but he does so with a warning: the choice is up to us. We can live peacefully together, or face our end, because as he states, “There must be security for all, or no one is secure.”

Do you see my critique now? The 1951 didn’t make excuses for humanity but gave us a warning, as the film ends without the viewer knowing if humans were capable of changing or not, yet the 2008 version just assumes we should be saved without the tension of questioning if humanity is capable of actually living in peace with the rest of creation.

As dark as it may seem, I prefer the warning, because I think it’s rooted in our calling to live in the struggle of life without succumbing to apathy.

Because I think there is a third perspective to creation that we can hold, besides the two I mentioned earlier that lead to apathy, and it’s one I think was what Paul was getting at in our gospel reading today. He said,

¹⁸For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. ¹⁹For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God.

Did you catch that? Creation itself is eagerly waiting for the sons of God, us, to be revealed. Just like us, Paul says that the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of ^[^f^]corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

I think this is what Jim was referencing last week when he spoke of the resurrection of the body at the end of time. Do you remember what he said? To God, there is no time, so this time of not yet and the time of redemption are both at hand. To God (slap) there is no time and both are at hand. But for us experiencing linear time, we are not at a place where we can fully know all there is to God’s kingdom, so we must die, and our bodies lay lifeless until God’s final redemption is made known. Until then, creation, and us, eagerly wait for God’s kingdom to be made known. So, we work to bring in God’s kingdom as we maneuver this life where it hasn’t yet fully materialized, maintaining hope that we are moving towards a time when all things will be made perfect.

But this time of waiting isn’t meant to be wasted. We are called to embrace the “not yet of this world” where, as Paul states in verses 26-27, we are to embody the tension of bringing the new creation into the old. Christians must be at the forefront of bringing in this new creation, for it is a foretaste of God’s eventual perfect kingdom of full healing and redemption. We can’t put off this work until some other time in the future. The time is now. God’s kingdom is at hand.

Yet, instead of bringing in new creation, we seem to want to hold onto the old. We want to make salvation merely about individual piety rather than bringing other people into God’s love. We decide that certain people can be included in God’s kingdom and others can’t. We think it’s okay to make jokes or look down upon about others that dress differently than us, live differently than us, love differently than us, and even worship differently than us. We prioritize the desires of the wealthy over the needs of the poor. We prioritize our own convenience over the needs of the world. We prioritize affordable goods at the expense of low-paid workers and environmental devastation. We shed blood to maintain power.
We have decided that not all of God’s creation is good, so we ignore call to address wider issues of corruption, injustice, oppression, division, and war, all things that prevent God’s creation from fully prospering into what it was originally intended. But do you remember our Genesis reading? God created humans in God’s image, and found them to be very good.

That’s the thing about creation care. It is just as much about how we treat our neighbors as it is about how we treat our environment, because everything is a part of God’s creation.

I think the 1951 Klaatu was an inspiration, not just for his message, but also because of his sacrifice, and I wonder if we too would be willing to give up our own biases and prejudices and desires, to truly embrace the new kingdom that is coming, would we too be willing to make the sacrifices to help make this world look more like heaven.

After Gort brough Klaatu back to life, Helen spoke with Klaatu. She said:

Helen: “I thought you were…”
Klaatu: “I was.”
Helen: “You mean he [Gort] has the power of life and death?”
Klaatu: “No. That power is reserved to the Almighty Spirit. This technique, in some cases, can restore life for a limited period.”
Helen: “But how long?”
Klaatu: “You mean how long will I live? That, no one can tell.”

Even with the uncertainty of life, do we have what it takes to truly see God’s creation as good, to repair it when it has been harmed, and to sacrifice in order to help others experience this good creation? It is difficult, but as Paul said, in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who^[^a^] have been called according to his purpose. Friends, we have our purpose. Let’s care for God’s good creation together.

Risen

Posted on April 15, 2022 by refresh -

Easter Sunday

Luke 24:1-12

The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.”

Dearly beloved: we are gathered here today to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ. The word in Greek is anastasis, which means, literally, “to stand up again.” It’s a reference to the fact that on Good Friday the enemies of Jesus knocked him down, they nailed him to the cross, they hung him up to die, they laid him in a tomb, but “early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark,” he stood up again. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the angels said to the women. “He is not here, but has risen.” That’s the word of the day. That’s what we’ve come to celebrate.

But that’s not all.

Today’s epistle reading is from 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s famous “resurrection chapter,” in which he argues that not only Jesus, but also all of us who belong to him, will be raised from the dead. He argues so passionately and so persuasively that the resurrection of the body, rather than the immortality of the soul, became the official doctrine of the early church. In the Fourth Century Christians began reciting the Nicene Creed, which says, “We look for the resurrection of the dead.” The Apostle’s Creed, written sometime later, makes it more personal. It says, “I believe…in the resurrection of the body.” Even now, the idea that our physical bodies will someday rise is the orthodox teaching of the church, but that doesn’t mean that everyone believes it.

The question of bodily resurrection came up after one of my sermons a few weeks ago, when I talked about the Hebrew word nephesh, the one that is most often translated as “soul.” Tim Mackie from the BibleProject.com says, “That’s unfortunate, because the English word soul comes with lots of baggage from ancient Greek philosophy. It’s the idea that the soul is a non-physical, immortal essence of a person that’s contained or trapped in their body to be released at death.” But that is not the biblical view. According to Mackie “The Hebrew word nephesh refers to the whole person. When the life-breath goes out of a person, the nephesh remains. It’s just called a dead nephesh, that is, a corpse. So in the Bible, people don’t have a nephesh; rather, they are a nephesh—a living, breathing, physical being.”[i]

One person came looking for me as soon as church was over, saying, “Wait a minute! I’ve always heard that when your body dies your soul goes to heaven, but you’re telling me something different.” I said, “I’m only telling you what the Bible says.” Someone else wrote to me later that week with the same kind of concern. When I said, again, that the immortality of the soul is not the biblical view he wrote back and said, “Well, it’s the one I feel most comfortable with, so I’m keeping it.” I didn’t say so, but I was thinking, “Are you going to believe things that aren’t biblical, just because they’re easier?” I wondered what was so hard about believing that when we die we are completely dead, and that when God is good and ready he will raise us up? And that’s when it hit me that the hard thing for this man, and maybe for most of us, is time.

Let me use a personal example. My father died a little more than seven years ago. My mother died a few years after that. The two of them are buried on my brother’s farm, on a beautiful hillside in West Virginia that faces the rising sun. Their tombstone says, “In sure and certain hope of the Resurrection, here lie the mortal remains of James and Mary Rice Whiting Somerville.” You could ask me, “Do you believe your parents are there, in those graves?” and I would say, “No! I believe they are with the Lord.” “But what about this tombstone, that makes it sound as if they are just lying there, waiting for the sun to come up on the Day of Resurrection?” Well, here’s what I believe, but try to stay with me, because it’s complicated:

I believe that the clock started ticking on the first day of creation, when God said, “Let there be light.” And I believe that someday the clock will stop ticking, and time will come to an end. If you stretch out the time line in space it might look like this [pulling hands apart as if pulling a string, to a distance of about two feet]. But God is bigger than time [drawing a large oval around the time line]. That’s how he could be with Moses on Mount Sinai and with Jesus on Mount Calvary at the same time. But we’re different. We are stuck on the timeline. We are slaves to the ticking clock. Slaves, that is, until we die, and when we do I believe we step off the timeline and into the presence of God (which may explain why Jesus could say to the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in Paradise”). One of my seminary professors put it like this: “The only thing that separates the day of your death from the day of your resurrection is time [holding a pencil between his palms], and when time drops out of the equation [dropping the pencil] the two come together, like this!” [clapping his hands]. He clapped his hands together so loudly some of us dropped our own pencils.

I know this is hard to grasp. None of us has ever lived outside of time. So, here’s another way to think about it. Imagine that all of us are on our way to the Promised Land, like those Hebrew children of long ago. We’re walking on a wide road that winds through the wilderness. We’re singing old hymns as we go. But then, every once in a while, someone falls to the ground and dies. It just happens. But when it does an ambulance comes, only it’s not blaring that awful siren, it’s playing, “When the Roll Is Called up Yonder.” The paramedics get out, load the body gently into the ambulance, and then drive off toward the Promised Land, ahead of us. When we finally get there, weary from our travels, there they are!—those saints who went before us—standing on the other side of the Jordan, alive and well, smiling and waving and welcoming us home.

That hymn, “When the Roll Is Called up Yonder,” was one of my mother’s favorites. Near the end of her life she suffered from dementia; she couldn’t remember much of anything. But one day I took her for a drive in the country and I started singing that hymn. She sang it right along with me. Do you remember the words?

When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound

And time shall be no more (!)

When the morning breaks, eternal,

Bright, and fair;

When the saved of earth shall gather

Over on the other shore,

And the roll is called up yonder,

I’ll be there.

My brothers and I sang that hymn at my mother’s funeral, wiping tears from our eyes while her simple pine casket rested under a cedar tree, but I think if she could have spoken she would have said, “Oh, children! I have been there and done that! I’ve got the T-shirt! Only it doesn’t say, ‘When the roll is called up yonder I’ll be there,” it says, ‘When the roll is called up yonder I’ll be here!”

My mother believed in the resurrection of the body, and so do I. But in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul anticipates our next question. He writes: “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’’ People have asked me that question. Especially when a loved one has been cremated people want to know how bodily resurrection works when there’s not much of the body left. I usually say, “I don’t know how it works, but I trust the God who made the first man out of a handful of dust to re-make your loved one out of a handful of ashes.” That’s what I say. But Paul (who must have skipped that class in seminary where you learn how to be gentle with people) says, “Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.”^[ii]

It’s an analogy, but a good one. I can still remember how disappointed I was, as a boy, to buy a packet of seeds at the hardware store with all those brightly colored flowers on the front and then open it up to find only those dry, brown, shriveled-up seeds. But my mother helped me plant them and water them, and in a few weeks’ time there were flowers in my back yard more beautiful than those on the seed packet. It really is a miracle, isn’t it? Paul simply claims that what happens to the bodies we bury in the ground (or reduce to a pile of ashes) is no more, but certainly no less, miraculous than that.

It’s an analogy: a way of comparing something we don’t understand with something we do understand in an effort to make sense of it. Jesus did it all the time. The author of John’s Gospel tells us that, “In the beginning was the Word (meaning Jesus). The Word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made.” But then the Word became flesh and almost immediately the Word had a problem: how do you explain the wonders of heaven in the words of mere humans? It’s hard. You have to use similes, analogies, metaphors, and parables. That’s what Jesus did. He told his hearers that the Kingdom of Heaven was like a mustard seed, for example, or like finding treasure in a field. “He did not tell them anything without using a parable,” Matthew says.^[iii]

He didn’t have a choice.

Maybe Paul didn’t either. In 2 Corinthians 12 he says he knew a man who was taken up to “the third heaven,” which seems to be a modest way of talking about one of his own spiritual experiences. What did he see while he was up there? We don’t really know, and when Paul tries to talk about those things he, too, has a hard time putting them into words. He opens his mouth in a parable.^[iv] He says that our resurrection bodies will be like the beautiful flowers that grow from a handful of dry, brown, shriveled-up seeds. In that same chapter he says, “Lo, I tell you a mystery! We shall not all sleep (that is, die), but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound of the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and [those of us who are still alive] will be changed!”^[v]

Do you know what he’s talking about? I don’t. And anyone who tells you they know what happens to you after you die, or what kind of resurrection body you will have, or when all of this is going to happen, is probably someone you should avoid. It’s a mystery. But recently I had an experience that seems like a good analogy, one the Apostle Paul may have used if the Apostle Paul had used a smartphone. Because here’s what happened:

My phone was dying. I’d had it for five or six years and the battery just wouldn’t hold a charge anymore. I’d charge it up overnight, take it with me to work, and by noon the battery would be down to ten percent. Plus the memory was nearly full, which is another way of saying that, like me, my phone was having trouble remembering things. I put it off for as long as possible but on my birthday I ordered a new phone from Amazon. Well, not a new one (and this is what makes this such a good analogy). I ordered a renewed smartphone: one where they had taken an old phone and brought it back to life again, with a new body, and a new battery, and an upgraded operating system.

It was delivered that same day, and when I took it out of the package it was charged and ready to go. The instructions said that if I wanted to transfer the data from my old phone to the new one, all I had to do was put the two side by side and let modern technology work its magic, so I did, and about an hour later my new phone was ready to go. And here’s the amazing thing: when I picked it up and turned it on there was my grandson’s face looking back at me. How did it know? How did this phone, that had been renewed in some distant factory, and delivered from some random warehouse, know that was my grandson? And how did it know me? Because when I started looking through the apps there were all my photographs, all my contact information, even my daily Bible reading plan was up to date.

It seemed like a miracle.

But what a good analogy of the resurrection body! Because my new phone has a battery that lasts practically forever, and my new phone has more memory than I will ever need, and my new phone can do things my old phone could never do. I want a resurrection body like that. I want a resurrection body that will download all the information from my old body, but make it new. And if Paul could talk to me now I think he would say, “It’s coming. It’s at the factory now. It will be in the warehouse soon. But when the time comes, it will be waiting.”

Frederick Buechner says, “The thing that God in spite of everything prizes enough to bring back to life is not just some disembodied echo of a human being but a new and revised version of all the things which made him the particular human being he was and which he needs something like a body to express: his personality, the way he looked, the sound of his voice, his peculiar capacity for creating and loving, in some sense his face.”^[vi] And more than his face, I suspect: his arms. Her arms. Arms that can hug you and hold you and welcome you home. Why would you settle for a disembodied soul when you could have all that?

[i] Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, “Soul,” BibleProject.com (https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/nephesh-soul/)

[ii] 1 Cor. 15:36-38

[iii] Matt. 13:34

[iv] Psalm 78:2

[v] 1 Cor. 15:51-52

[vi] Frederick Buechner, “Immortality,” Wishful Thinking (https://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2017/9/2/immortality).

Enter

Posted on April 10, 2022 by refresh -

Palm Sunday

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29

Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the LORD. This is the gate of the LORD; the righteous shall enter through it.

When my family and I lived in Washington, DC, we would often drive to worship on Sunday morning by going from our home in Chevy Chase, through Rock Creek Park, and down 16^th Street, which some people called, “The Avenue of Churches.” On that four-mile trip we would pass 32 houses of worship. I know because my children used to count them, and sometimes ask why we couldn’t visit one of those other, closer, houses, like the Buddhist Temple with all its colorful flags. Ignoring their requests, I once sent out a lighthearted invitation to our sister churches along 16^th Street that read like this:

Dear Sisters (and brothers, too, I suppose. We try to be inclusive):

I would like to invite you to join the willing and able members of First Baptist Church for a Palm Sunday Procession from Meridian Hill Park to our respective churches on Sunday, March 20, 2005. We’ve done this alone for the last couple of years, but think it would be much more fun (and meaningful, and ecumenical) if you would join us.

We gather at the park at 9:45 and begin processing downhill at precisely 10:00 a.m. We carry palm branches and wave them as we sing, “All Glory, Laud, and Honor” (song sheets provided). We also visit with each other, enjoy the beauty of the day, and the interested stares of people passing by. Clergy are invited to wear robes and stoles (purple for the season) and whatever other impressive vestments they rarely get to show off in public.

Our custom is to arrive at the door of our church a little before the 11:00 worship service, bang on the door loudly, and shout (in unison) the following line from Psalm 118: “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord!” We then process into the church, up the side stairs, along the balcony aisle, down the back stairs, and into the church again, accompanied by organ, brass, and timpani, and waving palm branches like mad the whole time. It’s fun, but feel free to do it your way when you get to your church. I hope you will join us.

Faithfully,

Jim Somerville, Pastor

That year I went to church early, parked my car, put on my robe and stole, picked up a huge sheaf of palm branches, and started walking up the street to Meridian Hill Park, a distance of just under a mile. Somewhere along the way a taxi pulled up beside me, stopped, and the driver jumped out and said, “Excuse me, Father. May I have a palm branch? I pulled one out of the sheaf, gave it to him, and said, “Bless you my child.” And then I went on up the hill.

No one from any of the other churches joined us that day. I had sent the invitation too late; they all had other plans. But still, it was a fun Palm Sunday tradition, and when I came to Richmond I tried to start it here. On Palm Sunday, 2009, some of the fun-loving members of First Baptist Church joined me as we walked from the Robinson Street parking lot to the front of the church and up the steps. We waited until the prelude was over, until it was time for the opening hymn, and then I banged on the door with my fist and we all shouted together, “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through then and give thanks to the Lord!” And then I stepped back so that Wally Hudgins, our head usher, could open the door. Only he didn’t do it.

The door didn’t open.

We stood there in silence for a few seconds and then I stepped up and banged on the door again, and we shouted louder, “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord!” And then I stepped back, and again, nothing happened. I turned to the crowd and said, “Maybe we’re not being loud enough. Let’s try it one more time!” And then I banged on the door till my hand hurt while we all shouted together, “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord!” And this time the doors swung open, and we were all able to enter in. Turns out Wally Hudgins, our head usher, just loves a little drama.

But can I tell you how it felt to be outside those big, heavy doors on the front of our church, banging my fist against them, begging to be let inside to worship the Lord, and being denied entry? It didn’t feel good. It made me think about all those other people around the world and through the centuries who have stood on the wrong side of a closed door, begging for entry. In today’s reading from Luke 19, Jesus is presented as one of those people. It doesn’t seem that way at first. He comes up the long and winding road from Jericho with a great crowd of followers. He sends his disciples to fetch a donkey from a nearby village. They bring it back, throw their cloaks on it, set Jesus on it, and then Luke writes:

As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”

But then listen to this: Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” And there it is: resistance. Everything is moving forward, the crowd is ushering Jesus, the obvious Messiah, into the capital city, but then, suddenly, “Order your disciples to stop.” It’s a reminder that behind every gate there is a gate-keeper: someone who decides whether you should come in or stay out. The followers of Jesus want him to come into the city and claim his rightful inheritance; the Pharisees want him to stay out.

And they aren’t the only ones.

It’s not only the religious authorities, but also the political authorities who want to stop Jesus. Because it was the Festival of the Passover, the annual celebration of Israel’s deliverance from slavery, and in that sense it was a kind of Independence Day—a Jewish Fourth of July—complete with the first-century equivalent of fireworks, and parades, and backyard barbecues. It was a big, noisy, exuberant celebration of freedom except that these people weren’t exactly free. Israel had been ruled by Rome for some seventy years. Roman soldiers occupied the city of Jerusalem and patrolled its streets. The Roman flag flew over the capitol. Nevertheless, tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of faithful Jews would stream into Jerusalem for this annual celebration, packed inside its city walls “like gunpowder in a Fourth of July firecracker. All they needed was someone to light the fuse.”^[i]

That’s why Pontius Pilate always came up for the festival from his headquarters on the Mediterranean coast, and that’s why he always came up with a full battalion of soldiers: he wanted to intimidate the people through a show of military strength. He wanted them to see that he meant business. Here’s the way Nancy Rockwell describes it: “Awesome stallions. Clanging hooves against the paving stones. Gleaming metal lances. Swords, dirks, helmets. Polished leather armor, saddles, boots. Drums. Pilate was marching his men because the Jewish Feast Days were beginning, and that stirred a restlessness in the people. He was sending a message: any trouble would be crushed. The Pax Romana, Caesar’s peace, would be enforced.”^[ii]

Behind every gate there is a gatekeeper, and in the City of Jerusalem, in the time of Jesus, it wasn’t only the religious authorities, it was also the political authorities. You can bet your last denarius that the Roman guards were watching this Palm Sunday procession coming down the Mount of Olives and across the Kidron Valley, listening to the crowd shouting, “Hosanna to the King!” as they tightened their grips on their spears and thought to themselves, “What is this? We already have a king. His name is Caesar. And this is beginning to look like an insurrection.”

Maybe that’s why the Pharisees told Jesus to order his disciples to stop. They weren’t always his enemies, you know, not in this Gospel. In Luke 13 it is “some Pharisees” who come to Jesus and say to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you!” And here in Luke 19 they might be saying, “If your disciples keep it up, with all this talk about you being a king, it’s not only Herod who will want to kill you, but Caesar, too!” Jesus knows that. He has known it since the last time the Pharisees tried to warn him. “It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem,” he told them. And then he raised his voice and cried out, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’” (Luke 13:34-35). Well, now that time has come, and when the Pharisees tell Jesus to make his disciples stop he says, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

There is a certain inevitability to what is happening and Jesus knows it. He hasn’t come to Jerusalem to sit on the throne of his ancestor David; he has come to Jerusalem to die. The city that should have welcomed him as their king will ultimately despise him, reject him, and lead him out to the place of his execution. The gates will be shut behind him forever. But it didn’t have to be that way then, and it doesn’t have to be that way now.

Back during the worst part of Covid, when we weren’t able to gather in this building for worship, I once found myself standing outside after dark, looking up at that stained glass window that is lit up from behind. It’s an illustration of Revelation 3:20, where Jesus says, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” So, there was Jesus, knocking on an unopened door, just as I had on that Palm Sunday back in 2009. I thought, “Look at that: not even Jesus can get inside the church.”

I was joking, but like a lot of jokes there was some truth to it. If you look closely at that window you will see that the door Jesus is knocking on doesn’t have a knob on the outside. He has to wait for someone to open the door from the inside. And here’s the truth: we are—each of us—the gatekeeper of our own heart. Jesus can stand out there and knock forever, but until we open the door from the inside, he can’t come in. Words matter, and the one word you could utter today that would make all the difference is the word enter. “Enter, Jesus. Come inside. I am ready at last to welcome you.”

Now imagine that the roles were reversed, that you were the one knocking, hoping that Jesus would let you in. He would, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t the friend of sinners and tax collectors drag you into the entry hall and hug you around the neck? Is there anyone he would leave standing on the doorstep? Probably not, and yet the same is not always true of his church.

When I was living in North Carolina I used to visit a Catholic monastery every once in a while for a 24-hour retreat. The first time I went the guest master showed me to my monk’s “cell” and I was relieved to find a comfortable bed, a sturdy desk, and a big chair in the corner with a good reading light. I was picturing something a little more austere. He invited me to eat with the monks in the refectory, which I did, and where I found that the women who cooked for them seem to think of it as a divine calling—the food was delicious! I envied the monks for their comfortable robes, cinched up with a rope belt that could be easily loosened after a big meal. I was also invited to sit with the brothers in the chancel for the many worship services they observed throughout the day but the evening service was special. That’s when the doors of the church were opened to the public and communion was served.

The guest master invited me to attend that service as well but made a point of showing me the statement taped to one corner of my desk. I can’t remember every word, but I do remember that it said the participation of non-Catholic Christians in Holy Communion would suggest a unity which, “sadly, does not exist.” In other words, as a Baptist, I could come to the service, but I could not take communion. And as a guest in someone else’s tradition I was fine with that until the service itself, when I was sitting in that beautiful sanctuary watching people get out of their pews and go forward to receive the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I sat there, thinking, “What? Did Jesus not die for me?! Would Jesus turn me away from his table?” I was getting angrier and angrier when suddenly I realized what was happening: I was learning what it felt like to be excluded. It dawned on me that this was what so many of the world’s citizens must experience every day—people who are denied opportunities because of their color, their gender, their ethnicity, their orientation, their annual income, or their level of education. As a straight, white American male who was reasonably affluent and fairly well educated I had hardly ever experienced that feeling. The world’s buffet table was open to me, but that night, in that candlelit Catholic church, the communion table was closed.

Rather than pretending to be Catholic, or demanding my right to be served, I decided to bottle up my rage and preserve it so that, for the rest of my life, I could remember what it felt like to be excluded, and feel compassion for those people who—through the centuries—have been told that they have no place at the Lord’s table, or even in his church. I’m sure Jesus himself feels that compassion—he who couldn’t even get into his own church during the worst part of Covid, and who on that Palm Sunday years ago stood outside the gates of Jerusalem with a crowd of his followers shouting, “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord!”

[i] Jim Somerville, “Behold Your King,” a sermon preached at Richmond’s First Baptist Church on April 1, 2012.

[ii] Nancy Rockwell, A Bite in the Apple, April 5, 2014.

Restored

Posted on April 3, 2022 by refresh -

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Psalm 126

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, “The LORD has done great things for them.”

There’s a verse from the Book of Revelation that I think of from time to time. It’s Revelation 21:5, where the One who is seated on the throne says, “Behold, I make all things new.”

I thought of it just last week.

I have a friend named Bob who invited me to go sailing with him during the height of the pandemic. We drove over to the Northern Neck on a fall day, and even though it wasn’t the season for it Bob put the top down on his convertible so we wouldn’t breathe each other’s air. His boat was an old Bristol that a friend of his had bought thirty years ago in hopes of sailing around the world. But then his friend had a stroke, and Bob ended up taking care of him, and when he died he left the boat to Bob. It was a generous gift, but also a big responsibility. What do you do with a thirty-one-foot sailboat, in the Northern Neck, an hour-and-a-half away from your home in Richmond? Well, you pay a certain amount to keep it at the marina, and then you pay some more when they take it out of the water for the winter, and then you pay some more when they put it back in again, and every once in a while you invite a friend to go sailing, and it feels good just to get the boat out on the water, and put up the sails, and feel it moving beneath you once again.

Bob confessed to me on the way home that he doesn’t use the boat nearly as much as he would like. He feels that he isn’t honoring his friend’s gift. I said, “I could help with that. I love to sail. I’m not very good at it, but if you need a friend to go sailing with you I could be that friend.” It was a bold offer, but Bob took me up on it right away, and since then we’ve been sailing several times, far more than he would have otherwise. On one of those trips I made another bold offer: I said, “What if you and I struck up a kind of partnership on this boat, the kind where you pay the bills but I help you use it? You could teach me to sail, maybe even let me take it out myself someday. In exchange I could put in some ‘sweat equity.’ I could polish the teak and buff the gelcoat and get the sink in the galley working again.”

Believe it or not, Bob thought that was a great idea, and for the past few weeks, on my day off, I’ve been driving to the Northern Neck to work on that boat. I thought fixing the sink was going to be the easy part, but when I opened up that cabinet door and took a good look underneath I found parts of that boat that hadn’t been touched in thirty years. It looked as if the rubber drain hose had come loose from the drain, but when I tried to re-attach it I found that it had dry-rotted; it came apart in my hands. That was the moment when I thought of that verse from the Book of Revelation, when I was watching the dust from that broken, rotten, rubber hose float through the beam of my flashlight. “What if I had that power?” I thought. “What if I could say, ‘Behold, I make all things new!” and this hose would be new again? Even better, what if I could say it and this whole boat would be new again?”

Today we continue this sermon series called “Words Matter,” and making things new is almost literally the definition of this week’s word—restored. When something has been restored it has been brought back to its original condition, it has been repaired or renovated. It’s what my friend Mike does with old cars: he finds one sitting in somebody’s grandmother’s garage and then lovingly restores it until it looks like it just rolled off the assembly line. I’m not sure I have the patience for that. I want to wave the magic wand, I want to say the magic words. I want to touch that old sailboat and whisper, “Behold, I make all things new,” and find the price tag hanging from the tiller. But I do not have that power, and I know it.

And I’m not the only one.

Psalm 126 was written by people who were holding a rotten rubber hose, figuratively speaking. They had returned from their long exile in Babylon. They were standing in the ruins of Jerusalem, looking back on its former glory and wondering if it could ever be restored. And then they remembered that moment when they had been set free from their captivity in Babylon. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream,” they said. “Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.” You almost have to hear the story again to appreciate it.

Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC; its leading citizens were carried away into exile. Psalm 137 says, “By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs and our tormentors for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ But how could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” I’ve imagined them looking toward Jerusalem every evening, watching the sun set over their former home, 500 miles away, and swearing: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.”

For nearly fifty years they swore that oath, but one day they heard the sound of the Persian army marching toward Babylon, and when they looked up they saw a multitude of soldiers advancing: their shields and helmets gleaming in the afternoon sun; their swords flashing like lightning; their chariots rolling like thunder. They smashed through the defenses of the city as if they were made of paper. The Book of Daniel claims that Babylon fell in a single night and when the sun came up the next morning Cyrus, King of Persia, was in charge. And with one royal edict he set God’s people free and allowed them to return to Jerusalem.

Imagine being dragged from your home when you were still a child, leaving your fingernail marks on the threshold. Imagine living out most of your life in exile in a foreign land, being held captive by the Babylonians. Imagine looking out through the bars of your prison cell as the sun went down each night, longing for your heart’s true home. And then imagine that in a single day all of that changed, and the new king was telling you you could go home. Have you ever had one of those moments when you thought, “I must be dreaming,” when what you were seeing or hearing seemed too good to be true? That’s how it was for these people. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream,” they said. “Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy. Then they said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them!’ The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.”

Imagine their excitement as they gathered up their few belongings and headed out through the broken-down gate of the city. Imagine the songs they would sing on the way home, and the stories they would tell about Jerusalem, their happy home. Imagine how they would camp by the side of the road at night, barely able to sleep, so eager to get going again and finally to get where they were going. But when they did they found Jerusalem a heap of rubble, the walls broken down and weeds growing up through the burned and blackened stones that were all that remained of the temple. It was a hard homecoming. All that laughter that had filled their mouths? Gone. All those shouts of joy that had been on their tongues? Silenced. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,” they said, “we rejoiced,” but if you hadn’t noticed it before, that word is in the past tense.

I’m thinking of how it would feel for some of those refugees from Ukraine who have crossed the border into Poland. Suppose they got word that the Russian army was retreating from Kyiv, focusing its attacks now on the Eastern part of Ukraine. Suppose that some of those refugees rejoiced in that news, and got up the nerve to return home. But suppose that when they did they found their houses and apartment buildings in ruins, destroyed by Russian missiles. How would they feel as they dug through the rubble, as they discovered a daughter’s teddy bear, for example, soaked with water and covered with mud? It would have been so exciting to hear they could go home again, but this? This wouldn’t have been home at all. This would have been the ruins of home—almost worse than if they had stayed in Poland.

“When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream,” the Jewish exiles said. “Then our mouth was filled with laughter, then our tongue with shouts of joy, then it was said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’” But now? Now we stand here looking on this pile of rubble and thinking about how much work is ahead of us. Now we wonder if the walls of this city will ever stand again or if we will ever worship in the temple. Now we realize that getting here was only half the battle, and that making it home—feeling at home—will be the real challenge.

We may not have the strength.

And this is the moment in the psalm where the word changes from restored—past tense—to restore—future tense. In the same way the exiles couldn’t do anything to free themselves from their Babylonian captivity they really can’t do much, or at least, don’t feel that they can do much, to turn this burned and blackened, weed-infested heap of rubble into home again. And so they pray: “Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negev” (and in case you’re not familiar with that analogy the Negev is a desert. Deserts don’t get much water and when they do, they can’t hold it. The rain comes down hard and fast and flows into watercourses that are bone dry most of the time, but during a heavy rain they run like raging rivers). “Restore our fortunes like that,” the people pray. “Overflow the banks. May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.” And then, because it’s happened before, because the Lord actually did set them free from their exile in Babylon, the people begin to dream of future restoration as if it were a certainty. “Those who go out weeping,” they say, “bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.”

Psalm 126 is a Psalm of Ascent. It’s one of fifteen in the Book of Psalms (120-134) that the people would sing when they were making their way up to Jerusalem for the annual festivals. Just imagine how the mood changed for them over the years as they continued to sing that song. Imagine how in those first few years after their return from exile they could hardly go up to Jerusalem without weeping. When they looked on the devastation of what had been their home all they could do was cry. But as the years went by, and with the Lord’s help, the walls of the city were gradually rebuilt, the ruined temple was eventually restored. And as the people made their way to Jerusalem in those latter days their weeping was turned to laughter, and their laughter to shouts of joy.

It happens like that, doesn’t it? It takes time, and it takes God’s help, but it happens. I have a feeling that if we could look at what will happen in Ukraine over the next few years we would see ruined homes repaired and restored, office buildings and apartment buildings rising from the ashes, flowers blooming in window boxes once again and children laughing in the streets. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream.

Think about what’s happened in your own lifetime, those of you who have lived long enough. Did anybody here live through the Great Depression? Do you remember what it was like when the economy finally recovered and you were able to sing “Happy Days Are Here Again” and mean it? When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream.

Can anybody here remember the end of World War II? The Allied victory in Europe on May 8, 1945, and in Japan a few months later? Do you remember the ticker-tape parades in New York City and sailors kissing girls on the streets? When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion we were like those who dream.

I’ve tried to think of more recent examples—the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, for some of you Carolina’s victory over Duke in last night’s basketball game, and for all of us this time that is beginning to feel like the end of a global pandemic. When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

We can’t do it by ourselves. Honestly, I don’t think I can fix a broken hose on a boat by myself. But listen to the rhythm of this psalm and remember: “the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion.” Who did it? The Lord. He is the One who makes all things new. Looking back at what he has done in the past gives us confidence that he will do it again in the future, so that we can pray, along with the psalmist:

May those who sow in tears

Reap with shouts of joy.

And those who go out weeping,

Bearing the seeds for sowing,

Come home with shouts of joy,

Carrying their sheaves.

Amen.

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Psalm 126

There’s a verse from the Book of Revelation that I think of from time to time. It’s Revelation 21:5, where the One who is seated on the throne says, “Behold, I make all things new.”

I thought of it just last week.

And I’m not the only one.

We may not have the strength.

May those who sow in tears

Reap with shouts of joy.

And those who go out weeping,

Bearing the seeds for sowing,

Come home with shouts of joy,

Carrying their sheaves.

Amen.

Forgiven

Posted on March 27, 2022 by refresh -

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

Psalm 32

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

Today we continue a sermon series called “Words Matter” by looking at Psalm 32 and the word forgiven. Notice that it’s not the word forgive, which could lead to a lot of finger shaking and a stern lecture about how we need to forgive others, but the word forgiven, which is about how good it feels to come clean, to confess our sins, and receive God’s pardon. Two times in the opening verses David uses the word happy, as if the person whose sins are forgiven is doubly blessed.

It’s no accident that Psalm 32 is paired with the story of the Prodigal Son in today’s lectionary readings, because in that story the son comes to his senses, goes home to his father and confesses his sin, and as a result receives the kind of forgiveness no one could have anticipated. The father throws a party, celebrating his son’s return. Where there might have been weeping and gnashing of teeth there is instead music and laughter. “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,” writes David. “Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity.” So, what about you? Do you want to be happy?

You might need to confess your sins.

I visited my older brother Scott last week and as we were talking I asked him if he had ever had any experience with unconfessed sin. Immediately he began to tell a story about something I had completely forgotten. He said, “When you were six or seven years old you had this little plastic soldier with a parachute, and you would wind that parachute around the soldier and throw it into the air, or drop it out of an upstairs window, and it would float gently to the ground. You loved that little soldier and you loved his little parachute. But we were living in a house that had an office in it, and in that office there was a fancy ‘stapler’ that joined paper by crimping the sheets together. For some reason I tried to crimp the strings of that parachute, but I ended up cutting them, and you were devastated. When you found your little soldier, and saw that the strings of his parachute had been cut, you began to cry, and Dad came to see what all the commotion was about and when he asked me if I knew anything about it I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘No.’”

I said, “Scott, I remember that little soldier and that little parachute, but I don’t remember the rest of that story. I mean, if you need my forgiveness you’ve got it.” But he said, “No, you weren’t the problem. I confessed my sin to you. The problem was Dad. I had lied to his face and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about it. In fact, I didn’t tell him about it until I was eighteen or nineteen years old.” Can you imagine? This boy who must have been seven or eight years old when he accidentally cut the strings on that parachute, lying about it to our father and then carrying the guilt of that lie around for ten years? And can we pause long enough to appreciate the fact that a little boy was plagued with guilt because he had told a lie? You don’t hear much of that these days. And I don’t know what Dad said to him when he finally came clean. I forgot to ask. But I’m guessing that Dad forgave him, and when he did Scott felt that rush of relief David talks about in this psalm.

David writes: “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,’ and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” I don’t know what David had done, but it must have been something big, because in those few short verses he uses all three Hebrew words for sin.^[i]

The first one is Chata’, which means something like “failing,” or “missing the mark.” It’s when you pull back the bowstring, aim for the target, but the arrow flies wide. As I say to people sometimes, “Hey, at least you were trying to hit the target. It’s not like you were aiming in the wrong direction.” So, as sin goes, it’s not only the most common, but also the least offensive. My brother Scott, for example: he wasn’t trying to cut the strings on that parachute, it just happened (although I’m still not sure why he thought they needed to be crimped).^[ii]

The next word for sin is Pesha, which is often translated “transgression.” It’s when you break trust with someone, or break a covenant. It’s a word that is frequently used in the Old Testament, because God’s people were always breaking their covenant with him. It’s probably the word that best describes Scott’s sin against my dad. Dad trusted him to tell the truth, but in this case he didn’t. Dad didn’t even know it, but Scott did. It took him years to get up the courage to tell Dad the truth and try to mend that broken trust. And can I just tell you this? It is hard to mend broken trust. I have my own stories to tell about that.^[iii]

The third Hebrew word for sin is Avon, and it is often translated “iniquity.” It’s related to the verb Avah, which means “to be bent,” or “crooked.” Someone’s back can be bent, a road can be twisty. Avon is when you take something good and twist it into some perverted shape, and in the Bible (and in everyday life) that sort of thing happens all the time. When Dad asked Scott if he knew anything about my parachute he was hoping for a straight answer, but he didn’t get one.^[iv]

Now, as I said earlier, whatever David was feeling guilty about must have been something big, because he uses all three of the Hebrew words for sin. The traditional understanding is that he was feeling guilty about his adultery with Bathsheba, and that’s probably a good guess. When it comes to that first word, Khata’, David certainly “missed the mark” of being a good king, didn’t he? Good kings don’t sleep with the wives of their best soldiers while those soldiers are off fighting their wars, but that’s what David did. And when it comes to that second word, Pesha, David broke his covenant with both God and neighbor. First he coveted his neighbor’s wife and then he committed adultery—two of the Ten Commandments. And when it comes to that third word, Avon, David twisted the ideal of marital love into an ugly perversion. There wasn’t anything loving about what he did. He was simply using his power to take what he wanted. When it was over he sent Bathsheba home.

He thought he had gotten away with it until she sent word that she was pregnant. And then he tried to cover his sin by bringing Uriah home from the war, by sending him down to his house to spend the night with his wife, so that when the baby was born everyone would assume it was Uriah’s. But that didn’t work either. So he ended up having Uriah killed—another of the Ten Commandments—and after a brief period of mourning he took Bathsheba as his own wife so that when the child was born everyone would assume it was his.

And maybe some people did assume that, but not Nathan, the prophet. He’s the one who came to David and confronted him with his sin. He told him a story about a rich man who had very many flocks and herds, and a poor man who had only one little ewe lamb that he loved like a daughter. When the rich man had an overnight guest he didn’t take a lamb from his own flock. He took the poor man’s lamb, slaughtered it, and served it to his guest. When David heard that story he said, “The man who has done this thing deserves to die,” and Nathan said, “You are the man!”

As soon as David heard it he knew that his secret was out. He said, “I have sinned against the Lord.” But thank God the secret was out! Because any of you who have tried to hide your sin know how difficult it is and how damaging. David says, “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.”

In biblical times there was an understanding that sickness and sin were related: that if you were sick, it was because you had sinned. The best illustration of this is the Book of Job, where Job loses everything in a single day and later ends up sitting on a heap of ashes, covered with sores, and scraping his skin with a broken piece of pottery. His friends come to see him, and for a full seven days they simply sit with him and say nothing. But eventually they begin to ask him what he has done to deserve this kind of punishment. He insists on his innocence, and if you’ve read the book you know: he is innocent. But they can’t get past the idea that he must have sinned and they keep asking him to spill it. “Tell us what you did,” they say. “You’ll feel better!” In Psalm 32 David does feel better. Nathan confronted him with the truth, and David confessed his sin, and God forgave his guilt. At the end of it all he was able to say, “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity!”

As I said, it’s a good guess that the guilt David was feeling in Psalm 32 was his guilt about his adultery with Bathsheba and his subsequent murder of her husband. But there is one part of that theory that just doesn’t add up, and it’s this: in Psalm 32 David appears to make up his own mind about confessing his sin. After all that talk about his body wasting away through his groaning all day long and his strength being dried up as by the heat of summer he says, “Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD.’” It doesn’t say that he was confronted by the prophet Nathan. It doesn’t say that he was forced to acknowledge his sin. It sounds as if he took the initiative and said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” Which means he could be talking about some other sin, and not only his most notorious one.

And I think that’s helpful. Because if you’re like me, you haven’t sinned only once. And if David was anything like me, he didn’t sin only once. Psalm 32 then becomes a kind of prescription for dealing with sin of any kind and not only the kind that makes the front page of the newspaper. So, what do you do with sin?

First of all, you become aware of it, and in the example we’ve been talking about it was Nathan who helped David see that what he had done was sinful. David may have already known that, but if he did he was keeping it to himself.
Secondly, you acknowledge your sin. Once David had been confronted he was able to own up to his complicity. After Nathan told him everything he had done David acknowledged, “I have sinned against the Lord.”
Thirdly, you confess your sin. Our Catholic brothers and sisters practice this more regularly than we do. They go into the confession booth and say, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” We Baptists probably don’t do it as often, but when we do we go straight to the source. We say, “Forgive me Heavenly Father, for I have sinned.”
In Psalm 32 that’s enough: David says to the Lord, “I acknowledged my sin to you and I did not hide my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”
What happens after that is the joy that pervades this entire psalm. God forgives David’s sin and he can hardly believe it. It’s a taste of that amazing grace we sometimes sing about. It’s the experience of the Prodigal Son. David says, “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered! Happy are those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity!”

This might be a good place to point out that just as there are three Hebrew words for sin, God has three ways of forgiving sin. In a commentary written specifically for preachers Old Testament scholar Stan Mast points out that the Hebrew word translated “forgiveness” in verse 1 has to do with “the lifting of a burden.” [When you preach this passage], he suggests, “work with the idea of struggling through life under the heavy load of sin and guilt. The next word is ‘covered,’ which suggests that God can’t even see the ugly blemish of our sin anymore. The end result, says verse 2, is that the Lord ‘does not count our sin against us.’ That’s an accounting term; think of God cancelling debt or, as Romans 4 puts it more positively, giving us the credit of Christ’s righteousness. The lifting of a burden, the covering of an ugly stain, and the cancelling of a debt are all images that will resonate with even the most biblically illiterate seeker. No wonder God’s forgiveness brings happiness unmatched in human experience!”^[v]

That Prodigal Son, for example. When he made up his mind to go back home I don’t think he was expecting what he got. He wasn’t expecting forgiveness; he was expecting to be treated as one of his father’s hired hands. But then he did what David recommends in Psalm 32. He became aware of his sin, he acknowledged it, and then he went home and confessed it. He said, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired hands.” But the Father didn’t do that; he treated him as his son. Because the thing that had stood between them was no longer between them. The sin had been confessed and forgiven. And when that happens,

The party can begin.

[i] This next section is informed by Tim Mackie and Jon Collins of the BibleProject.com and their three videos on “Bad Words of the Bible” (see below).

[ii] https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/khata-sin/

[iii] https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/pesha-transgression/

[iv] https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/avon-iniquity/

[v] Stan Mast, “Psalm 32:1-7 Commentary,” The Center for Excellence in Preaching (https://cepreaching.org/commentary/2016-10-24/psalm-321-7/).

Satisfied

Posted on March 20, 2022 by refresh -

The Third Sunday in Lent

Psalm 63

O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

Today is the Third Sunday in Lent, but this is actually the fourth sermon in a Lenten series called “Words Matter,” because I started on Ash Wednesday, remember? And I told you that in this season I would be preaching from the Psalms, and listening for the one word that jumped out at me from each one. I started with Psalm 51, and the word wash. And then it was Psalm 91, and the word shelter. Last Sunday it was Psalm 27, and the word light. Today it is Psalm 63, and the word satisfied. It’s right there in verse 5. David writes: “My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips.” The image that came to mind immediately as I read that verse was one of my son-in-law, Nick, eating a full rack of ribs from Buz and Ned’s Barbecue, smacking his lips and making other happy sounds. Because he loves Buz and Ned’s, and he loves barbecued ribs, and when those two things come together it is a rich feast: an experience of complete satisfaction. But what the psalmist is saying is that his soul has been satisfied like Nick’s taste buds and stomach are satisfied, and I want to know more about that. What is the soul? Where do you find it? And how do you feed it?

Some of you have been reading through the Bible with me this year and watching the videos from the BibleProject.com that explain each book of the Bible and go into greater depth on certain words and themes. You may have seen the video on the word soul, which is only one part of a six-part series on the Shema, that famous passage from Deuteronomy that begins, “Hear, O Israel,” or in Hebrew, Shema Israel (I wish I could just step out of the way and show you the video, because it’s really well done, but I will put a link in the sermon manuscript so that when you look it up on the church website in a day or so, you can watch it).^[i] The narration is by Tim Mackie, who has a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies. He seems well qualified to tell us everything we ever wanted to know about the Hebrew word for soul, and this is what he says:

“For thousands of years, every morning and evening, Jewish people have prayed these well-known words as a way of expressing their devotion to God: ‘Hear O Israel, the LORD is our God the LORD is one, and as for you, you shall love the LORD your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your strength. We’re going to look at the word soul. The Hebrew word is nephesh. It occurs over 700 times in the Old Testament. The common English translation of this word is soul, and that’s kind of unfortunate. Here’s why.

“The English word soul comes with lots of baggage from ancient Greek philosophy. It’s the idea that the soul is a non-physical, immortal essence of a person that’s contained or trapped in their body to be released at death” (and this is where I wish you could see the video because it shows some kind of vapor going into a Grecian urn with the figure of a warrior on it, and then the urn is turned around, and you see the warrior has turned into a skeleton as the vapor rises out of the jar toward heaven). Tim Mackie says, “This notion is totally foreign to the Bible. It’s not at all what nephesh means in biblical Hebrew.”

So, what does it mean, Tim?

He says, “The most basic meaning of nephesh is throat. Like when the Israelites are wandering in the wilderness, they’re hungry and thirsty, and they say to God, ‘We miss the cucumbers and melons we had in Egypt, and now our nephesh has dried up!’ Or when Joseph was hauled off into slavery in Egypt, his nephesh was put into iron shackles. But nephesh doesn’t only mean throat. Since your whole life and body depend on what comes in and out of your throat, nephesh could also be used to refer to the whole person.

“Like in Genesis, there were thirty-three nephesh in Jacob’s family, that is, thirty-three people. In the Torah, a murderer is called a nephesh slayer, and a kidnapper is called a nephesh thief. On the first pages of the Bible, both humans and animals are called a living nephesh. And if the life-breath has left a human or animal, the nephesh remains. It’s just called a dead nephesh, that is, a corpse. So in the Bible, people don’t have a nephesh; rather, they are a nephesh—a living, breathing, physical being.”

And then he says, “Now that might surprise you, because most people assume the Bible says the soul is what survives apart from the body after death. And while the biblical authors do have a concept of people existing after death waiting for their resurrection, they rarely talk about it. And when they do, they don’t use the word nephesh. So even though nephesh is often translated as soul, the Hebrew word really refers to the whole human as a living, physical organism. In fact, this is why biblical people can often use this word to refer to themselves. And it gets translated ‘me’ or ‘I.’ Like in Psalm 119, most translations read, ‘Let me live, that I may praise you.’ In Hebrew, the poet literally says, ‘Let my nephesh live, that it may praise you.’ By using nephesh, the poet emphasizes that their entire being, their life and their body, offer thanks to God. In the Song of Songs, the young woman constantly refers to her lover as ‘the one my nephesh loves.’ And of course, love isn’t just an intellectual experience. It’s an emotion that activates your whole body, your entire nephesh.

“This helps us understand the brilliance of other biblical poets who could combine multiple meanings of nephesh in one place. Like in Psalm 42, we read, ‘As the deer pants for the water, so my nephesh pants after you, my nephesh thirsts for the living God.’ So on a physical level, your throat can be thirsty like a deer’s, but then that physical thirst can become a metaphor for how your whole physical being longs to know and be known by your creator.

“Which brings us all the way back to the Shema. To love God with all your nephesh means to devote your whole physical existence to your Creator, the one who granted us these amazing bodies in the first place. It’s about offering your entire being with all of its capabilities and limitations in the effort to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. And that’s the Hebrew word for soul.”^[ii]

Now, call me crazy, but I think that kind of word study makes a huge difference in how we understand the Bible, and even how we understand ourselves. It helps to know that the soul is not an internal organ, like the stomach or the pancreas, and it helps to know that the soul is not an immortal entity, that somehow survives death. No, the soul is us; it’s you and me and everything in us; it’s who we are, not something we have. And that makes a difference in how we read Psalm 63, because then we begin to see the beauty of poetic imagery, and the power of metaphorical speech.

The Psalm begins: “O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you (that is, “my nephesh,” and maybe here it should be translated as throat, as in, “My throat thirsts for you”); my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” I don’t know if you have ever been truly thirsty, but here the psalmist is saying that he is thirsty for God like someone who is wandering in a waterless desert. It reminds me of a story I heard my brother-in-law Chuck tell, about a time when he and his friend Lyndon were hiking in Big Bend National Park in Texas. Big Bend is a desert, and if you’re going to hike there you have to carry all your water. The recommended amount is one gallon per person per day. But a gallon of water weighs eight pounds, and if you are going out on a five-day hike you could, theoretically, add 40 pounds to your pack. Chuck and Lyndon decided to drive to the midpoint of their hike, hide a five-gallon container of water, and then drive back to the beginning. And so they started off carrying five gallons between them, about twenty pounds apiece, knowing there was water waiting for them. It should have lasted them two-and-a-half days, but it was hotter than they thought it was going to be and they were more out of shape than they wanted to admit. By the end of the second day they were almost out of water, with five miles to hike before they got to their stash.

They had just enough water to cook supper with a few sips left over to get them through the night. But they were thirsty, and by midnight they had emptied their water bottles. And then they began to imagine the worst: what if they couldn’t find that five-gallon container of water they had hidden? Or what if someone else had found it and taken it, or what if it had sprung a leak? What if they ended up in the middle of the desert with no water at all? Can you imagine how those kinds of thoughts would keep you awake at night, and can you understand why they broke camp at three o’clock in the morning and hiked the next five miles in the moonlight? But here’s the good news: they found their water right where they had left it, and they each drank until they couldn’t hold another drop.

That’s what it’s like when you find God, the psalmist says: it’s like quenching your thirst in the middle of a hot and dusty desert; it’s like drinking until you can’t drink anymore and then pouring a full bucket of water over your head. But the psalmist hasn’t gone to the desert for that experience; he’s gone to the temple. Because he knows that his soul is not an internal organ, nor is it an immortal entity: he takes his whole self to the sanctuary in the same way that many of us have today. Because his nephesh is thirsty, his entire being is parched, and where else would he go? “So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,” he says to God, “beholding your power and glory. And here’s the important thing: it’s not water he’s looking for, it is the steadfast love of the Lord, or in Hebrew, the hesed. That’s what quenches his thirst. He says, “Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you (like someone who has just drunk his fill in the wilderness). So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name.”

And then there’s that next verse: “My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips,” as if the psalmist had finally eaten after going days without food. And that made me wonder if any of us even know what hunger is anymore. Here in the land of plenty can you remember a time when you were truly hungry? Allison Collier has been trying to help us appreciate the spiritual discipline of fasting, but I noticed that not everyone was flocking to her Wednesday night class. The very idea of going without food, even for spiritual reasons, seems almost un-American. And yet it is an ancient practice, and it teaches eternal truth. One of the things it teaches is how to hunger and thirst for God.

I’ve told you about my own experience with fasting. The first time I did it wasn’t for spiritual reasons. It was because some group at my boarding school was trying to raise awareness about world hunger. But I decided to try it—to go 24 hours without eating anything. I was sixteen years’ old, and at the very height of my metabolic powers. I could turn a double cheeseburger into pure energy in about thirty seconds. Food was fuel for me, and I burned a lot of it in those days. So, to go without it, even for a few hours, was difficult. To go without it for 24 hours seemed like the ultimate challenge.

It was.

I won’t go into how miserable I was during that one endless day, or how many times my thoughts turned toward food. I will only tell you that the next morning, when I went down to the dining hall for breakfast, I loaded my tray with every good thing I could find, and then I wolfed down the bacon, the scrambled eggs, the waffles, the orange juice, the fruit cup, the muffin, the tall glass of milk, the second helpings of everything until I was stuffed. I finished my breakfast with one last piece of bacon and then pushed back from the table and praised the Lord with greasy lips.

That’s what it’s like for the psalmist as he feeds on God. He says his soul is satisfied as with a rich feast. He has come into God’s sanctuary to eat and drink until he can hold no more. But not only the sanctuary! Some of you know those places that “feed your soul,” but all of us know those moments when our soul has need, maybe in the middle of the night, when we cannot sleep. In those times the psalmist turns his thoughts to God. He says, “My mouth praises you with joyful lips when I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the watches of the night; for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.”

The final words in today’s passage are these: “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” Maybe it’s only because I’m a grandpa, but when I read those words I picture my daughter Ellie taking my sleeping grandson, Leo, out of his car seat. Even in that unconscious state he will sometimes put his arms around her neck and rest his head on her shoulder, and she will hold him there with her strong right arm, as she reaches for her purse, his diaper bag, that other thing she needed to take inside…. But if I put a frame around that moment when she is holding him it reminds me of another of David’s psalms, the one that says, “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child on its mother’s breast; like a weaned child, my soul—my nephesh—is satisfied” (Ps. 131:2).

[i] https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/nephesh-soul/

[ii] Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, “Soul,” BibleProject.com (https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/nephesh-soul/)