Bob Kaylor

Preaching Without a Net (Sort Of)

This week's sermon isn't appearing in the blog in text form because I've been trying a new experiment lately with my preaching. Instead of always banging out a full manuscript and elocuting from the pulpit, I've instead been using images and notes on Keynote and wandering around the front of the congregation. Feedback is that people love the change and I'll keep after it. It's kind of fun "working without a net" in the presentation sense, but I still need to prepare as much as ever (probably more).

To catch this week's sermon, I invite you to listen to the audio on our website or by subscribing to the podcast on iTunes. Search "Bob Kaylor's Sermon Podcast" in iTunes and subscribe!

The Dance of Worship--1 Chronicles 15:25-29

If the stories in 1 Chronicles look at little familiar it’s because they are. Chronicles was designed as a kind of supplement to the books of 1 and 2 Kings, chronicling the history of Israel all the way from Adam to the Persian King Cyrus the Great. Though the Chronicler uses 1 and 2 Kings as his source material, he omits some details—like the whole story of the northern kingdom of Israel. He’s focused on Judah and the line of David, so as we read through this we’ll be going over some of the same territory we’ve covered before. But, the good news is that it lets us come back to some themes we’ve passed by quickly on our rapid march through the Bible.

One of those themes has to do with worship. As we’ve been reading through the Scriptures one of the things you notice quickly is that there is a lot of worship going on—people bringing their praise and offerings to God by building altars, writing Psalms, taking sacrifices to the Tabernacle or Temple. But one of the things we often miss, however, is the fact that the forms of worship that we encounter in the Bible are rarely passive. People aren’t just sitting in pews, soaking in information. When they worship, it’s a full body experience.

Today’s text takes us back to the story of David and his bringing of the Ark of the Covenant to the new capital of Jerusalem. This is a big deal, because the Ark represented the very presence of God with the nation of Israel, God’s chosen people. The Ark, you may recall, was such an icon that it was even revered by Israel’s enemies. I love, for example, the story in 1 Samuel about the Philistines who captured the Ark but suddenly they were inflicted with a plague—tumors caused by the fleas of rats. This is very Indiana Jonesy, really! The Philistines realize that the Ark is causing them all kinds of problems, so they put it on an unmanned ox cart and ship it back to Israel along with an offering of golden tumors and rats (wonder what those looked like?). The point is, though, that when God is present, stuff happens!

David encounters the reality and power of God’s presence the first time he tries to bring the Ark to Jerusalem. To speed things up he, too, puts the Ark on a cart, but God’s commandment had always been that the Ark needed to be carried by priests using poles, not a cart. So, when the cart hit a bump and began to topple over, a man named Uzzah ran up to steady the Ark. But when he touched it, bam, he dropped dead! 1 Chronicles 13:9-14 describes the scene and the fact that David was angry when this happened. But the point of the text is pretty clear—when it comes to holy things, God-ordained things, there’s no messing around. Worshipping God is serious business.

But it’s not boring business, at least biblically speaking. When David tried a second attempt to bring the Ark to Jerusalem, he adopted a much different approach. Rather than expediency, David carefully made preparations, lining up the musicians and priests and procedures to do it right. And while the Ark was being brought into the city, the Bible tells us that David didn’t walk solemnly beside the Ark, hoping that it wouldn’t tip over. Instead, he danced…in fact, it says he danced by “leaping.” 2 Samuel is even more graphic: David “danced before the Lord with all his might” (6:14).

Here is David, the King of Israel, dancing. Could this been a very early edition of “Dancing with the Stars?”

Interesting, isn’t it, that one of the most popular shows on TV these days is “Dancing with the Stars”—so popular that it has spawned imitators like “So You Think You Can Dance.” Dance studios have reported a huge upswing in people taking dancing lessons as a result. More and more movies feature dancing that would make Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers look positively motionless by comparison. We’ve got a culture that’s dancing with all their might everywhere.

Everywhere, that is, except in the church—where, we might argue, dancing itself originated!

Sure, some churches have tried something called “liturgical dance,” but that’s usually done by people who have been trained to dance and love it. They do it while everyone else watches. But, for the most part, worship in your average American church is a pretty passive affair—set up more like a lecture hall than a dance floor. And in some church traditions, dancing is considered to be the equivalent of cavorting with the devil. Dancing and church are just two things that don’t really seem to go together.

And for many of us, that’s fine. Jennifer will tell you that I’ve always been afraid to dance—probably too many gigs playing drums and watching people do it badly. At the high school dance I was usually sitting in the bleachers. I get out on the dance floor and feel very self-conscious so I do the only thing I know how to do…air guitar.

Yeah, most church people would rather not have anything to do with dancing…or any kind of demonstrative behavior. When someone raises hands in a worship service, for example, it really freaks out your average Methodist. That’s something those Pentecostals do. Dancing? Out of the question.

But I’ve had a conviction in the last few years that when it comes to worship, we get it all wrong precisely because we are self-conscious. Worship is always God-conscious. Like the call to worship this morning expresses, “It’s not about us.” It’s always about God. And if we’re truly worshipping, then we get out of the way and let our feelings and emotions and thoughts run to God and not to the worship leader, or the choir or the band and we don’t care whether someone else is watching.

Notice the contrast in this text. David dances while his wife, Michal, stands up in the tower of the palace and watches and is disgusted. She looks at David as an embarrassment because he is acting un-kingly by dancing. She’s the equivalent of a wallflower or, well, maybe more like a weed—always the one to choke out the fun. I’ve known a lot of Michals in the church—those who say the music is too loud or too classical or the preacher’s haircut is too short or too long.
But David doesn’t give in to her indignity. In the version of this story in 2 Samuel 6, Michal confronts David with sarcasm and disgust: “How wonderfully the king has distinguished himself today—exposing himself to the eyes of the servants’ maids like some burlesque street dancer!”  To which David replies: In God’s presence I’ll dance all I want! He chose me over your father and the rest of our family and made me prince over God’s people, over Israel. Oh yes, I’ll dance to God’s glory —more recklessly even than this. And as far as I’m concerned … I’ll gladly look like a fool … but among these maids you’re so worried about, I’ll be honored no end” (2 Samuel 6:20-22, The Message).

David is blessed by God. Michal is not. See, for David, it was all about giving joy and worship and praise to God. For Michal, it was all about reputation and appearances. True worship is never concerned about appearances or applause—only about giving ourselves and our absolute best to God.

Now, some of you are sitting there nervous right now because the pastor is going off the deep end. Pretty soon, you’re thinking, the pews will be gone and there will be a disco ball hanging in the middle of the sanctuary and he’ll be air-guitaring every Sunday.

Well, not exactly…but you never know.

Point is that if we show up here to worship God, and if God were to really show up in this place in a big way, we don’t know what will happen…but it’s bound to be something overwhelming joyful and good.

I love Annie Dillard’s quote about worship: “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies hats and straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offence, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” (Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 40)

When we come to worship, are we “sensible of conditions?” Are we ready to encounter the living God and have God transform us—the waking God drawing us to a place from where we can never return?

Worship is a huge thing, but it is also a dangerous and risky thing. It is a serious thing, but it is also a hugely fun and exciting thing when we do it right. It’s also a thing we don’t just do with our minds—like David, it calls for our whole body to be involved. Maybe it’s dancing, maybe it’s raising our hands in prayer (actually that was the way it was originally done, not hands folded and heads bowed). Maybe it’s singing, maybe it’s even air-guitaring…just a little bit. But when it’s God that we worship, we need not fear embarrassment, only the embrace of God’s blessing when we worship with all our might.

The point here is not what we do in worship. We may or may not raise our hands or break into a dance number, but the point is that whatever we do in worship we are to do enthusiastically with our focus on God.

Interesting word, “enthusiasm.” It comes from the Greek phrase “en theos”—“In God.” We we come to worship, we come to be “in God.” My prayer for Park City Community Church is that we’ll be the kind of worshipping community that’s a little less predictable, a little more joyful, a little less reserved and a lot more excited about giving God our worship.

It is here in worship that God meets us. It is here that God asks you and me, “Shall we dance?”

Why Nations Fall: 2 Kings 17:5-20

Note: Special thanks goes to Dan Carlin and his excellent "Hardcore History" podcast for the inspiration for the opening of this message. Check out the podcast on iTunes or at dancarlin.com.

2 Kings 17:5-20

At the end of the movie Planet of the Apes (the original with Charlton Heston), Heston’s character and his female companion are riding a horse down a beach—ostensibly toward freedom, when they come across something sticking up out of the sand. The closer they get, the more Heston begins to realize that it’s a familiar icon—The Statue of Liberty. He had thought he was on a different planet, but now he realizes that he’s on earth, but thousands of years in the future. And his country, and all its symbols, are forgotten—dispatched to the realm of archaeology.

Hard to imagine that ever happening, isn’t it? It’s virtually impossible for Americans to think that symbols like the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument or Mount Rushmore or the White House would ever be forgotten or lost, only to show up thousands of years later in an archaeological dig, with future people trying to figure out what it all meant.

But here’s the thing: people of every civilization in the history of the world have thought that their way of life, their symbols, their icons could not possibly ever be forgotten or ruined. And yet, history teaches us that every civilization, every dynasty, every empire eventually winds up as an archaeological curiosity sticking up out of the sand. Travel in the sites of the old world and you see it over and over again—the ruins of Egypt, Greece, Rome: great civilizations, great empires, but now just broken columns and crumbling architecture.

The stories we read in 1 and 2 Kings in the Bible are illustrative of this principle. There’s a lot of detail here about the different kings and wars of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah—Kingdoms that, no doubt, the rulers and people thought would last forever. But these texts tell us that within the course of a few hundred years these kingdoms would be at best reduced and, at worst, wiped out. But, then again, so would the kingdoms and empires of their conquerors.

This period in biblical history corresponds to the rise and fall of two great empires in the ancient world: The Assyrians and the Babylonians. The Babylonians you’ve probably heard of, but the Assyrians are less well-known for reasons I’ll get to in a minute.

The Assyrians were a factor on the world stage for some 1700 years and, in many ways,  were the Nazis of the ancient world. They conquered most of the Ancient Near East including the northern Kingdom of Israel, and they did so with a cruelty that would seem to be unmatched in history. Listen to how one Assyrian king named Ashurnasirpal describes his treatment of a defeated people:

“I flayed all the chief men who had revolted, and I covered the pillar with their skins; some I walled up within the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes, and others I bound to the stakes round the pillar. . . . Many captives . . . I burned with fire; and many I took living. From some I cut off their hands and fingers and from others I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers; of many I put out their eyes. I made one pillar of the living, another of heads, and I bound many heads to posts around the city. Their young men and maidens I burned in the fire; the city I destroyed, I devastated.”

These are the kinds of writings you find in Assyrian ruins—no literature, no philosophy, just endless boasting of military conquest. This was the original terrorist state and they ruled for almost two millennia.

But then, suddenly, they disappeared. Having stretched their empire too thin, the Assyrians were vulnerable to attack. The neighboring Babylonians and Medes, who had been subject to this Assyrian cruelty, took the opportunity to finally revolt and laid siege to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh and, in fairly short order, destroyed it completely. The Assyrians had left nothing behind, no influence on culture, no legacy of art. A world power was so devastated that just two hundred years after the fall of the city, the Greek historian Xenophon visited the site and encountered the ruins of the enormous fortifications of Nineveh and none of the locals could tell him who these fortifications belonged to. It was the equivalent of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand—the Assyrians were simply gone, wiped out. And no one cried. The prophet Nahum would write, “Nineveh is in ruins. Who will mourn for her? Where can I find anyone to comfort you?” (Nahum 3:7).

The answer, of course, is no one—the Assyrian empire, the most powerful empire of its time, fell.

The Babylonians were the next power to rise, but their time in the driver’s seat of the ancient world was relatively brief—less than a hundred years—but long enough to conquer the southern Kingdom of Judah and take away many of its citizens into exile and slavery. But the Babylonians themselves would soon be conquered by the Persians, who were then conquered by the Greeks under Alexander the Great, whose empire eventually became the outline for the Roman empire.

You get the picture. These empires come and go, and the Bible portrays this continuous shift of power as a kind of human folly. Yes, God uses other nations to judge Israel and Judah, but then these nations are in turn judged themselves and taken over by others.

What’s it all mean? Well, I think one of the main points of these texts is to teach us that our reliance on our own national power and longevity is grossly misplaced. Reliance on Kings, military power, nationhood, boundaries, monuments, conquests, and the like ultimately leads to forgotten monuments sticking up out of the sand. Nations and empires fall and the Bible wants to teach us that our loyalties, hopes, dreams, and aspirations need to be given to a higher purpose.

Historically speaking, empires fall for a number of reasons. Edward Gibbons, who wrote the seminal work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century, said that there were eight different reasons for the fall of that empire and, by association, the fall of any empire. You see those reasons listed here:  a decline in morals and values, poor public health, political corruption, unemployment, inflation, urban decay, inferior technology and military spending. Look at any empire that’s fallen in history and you can trace it to a combination of these causes. I don’t know about you, but when I look at this list and look at my newspaper, I see it happening to us already! Cullen Murphy’s recent book Are We Rome? is an interesting study on how our own country is ticking off everything on Gibbons’ list.

But while these may be socio-economic reasons why nations and empires fall and wind up on the scrap heap of history, the Bible offers another reason that would seem to trump all the others. Look again at the text we read early from 2 Kings 17. The writer lays out the real reason for the decline and fall of Israel and Judah: “All this took place because the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God...They worshipped other gods and followed the practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before them...They followed worthless idols and themselves became worthless.”

See, for God the problem of nations and empires isn’t that they’re not managing themselves well, it’s that they don’t realize that they are subject to a greater authority. When people begin to worship their symbols, their prosperity, their military power, their economy, and their pride, they make those things into gods that, ultimately, will lead people collectively and individually to ruin. 

God, however, calls people of all nations and races to a higher way of thinking—an allegiance to a greater Kingdom and a most powerful ruler. Fidelity and faithfulness to God is the key to eternal longevity. It’s fine to be a citizen of a country like ours, but God calls us first to be citizens of his Kingdom—a Kingdom that encompasses the whole world for all time.

Jesus would talk about this often in the New Testament. In fact, most of his teaching will be about the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God (also known as the Kingdom of Heaven) isn’t about a place faraway in the clouds, but is focused on a present and future reality on earth—that God is King now and his reign will be made manifest in the future. What the Israelites consistently forgot, and what we forget, is that we have all been called to be citizens of God’s Kingdom and subjects of God’s reign and rule first and foremost because, after all, only God’s Kingdom is eternal.

Paul wrote to the Philippians that “our citizenship is in heaven.” Now, some clarification about that (and here’s where context helps). In the first century AD, Philippi was a Roman colony—a place populated by Roman colonists. They were citizens of Rome, but no one was expecting to eventually go back to Rome to live. In the same way, Paul says, we have our citizenship in heaven, which is a way of saying that our allegiance and loyalty is given to God, but we live in on earth and in earthly kingdoms. We are not to expect that someday we’ll go “back” to heaven, but rather that we are to populate and colonize earth with the life of God. I’ve said it many times, but it bears repeating: the point of the Bible and Christian faith is not about getting people into heaven, but about getting the life of heaven into people so that they can live the life of God’s Kingdom on earth.

That life has certain markers and characteristics.
•    Faith and allegiance to God as creator, redeemer, and sustainer of humanity and all of Creation
•    Moral, ethical, and spiritual practice (i.e. Mosaic Law, Sermon on the Mount)
•    Transcends boundaries of nationality and race
•    Emphasis on community of all nations “under God”
•    Living in the present with an eye toward the future
Life lived in God’s Kingdom has an eternal dimension. Regardless of whether our countries and kingdoms come and go, when we put our faith and allegiance in God we begin to see our lives as having a larger purpose that reaches beyond borders—a purpose that can never be buried in the sand. We are participating in God’s mission of redeeming the whole world.

A few years back I was standing at the door after church like I normally do, and a woman cornered after a worship service. She was deeply offended by the absence of the American flag in the front of our sanctuary and missed the “Christian” flag, too (An aside: Who came up with that flag, by the way? Was there a first-century Betsy Ross somewhere in Asia Minor? But I digress.) The woman began the conversation with a finger pointed at my chest saying, “My son is a Marine, and you should be honoring this country by having the flag up in the front.”

Well, I’m a veteran, too (Army), and I certainly understand her passion. I have saluted the flag, displayed it in my own home, worn it on my sleeve, proudly served my country and, while I was fortunate to never have experienced the horror of live combat during my 10 years in the infantry, I knew I could have been called on at any time to sacrifice my own life for what that flag represents, as many have done and continue to do. The Stars and Stripes have been a significant symbol in my own life.

But there are places where that symbol is less important than others. I may sound heretical to some of you, but I’ve come to believe that one of those places is in the church.

The U.S. Flag Code, Title 36, Chapter 10, Section 175.k states, “When displayed from a staff in a church or public auditorium, the flag of the United States of America should hold the position of superior prominence, in advance of the audience, and in the position of honor at the clergyman’s or speaker’s right as he faces the audience ....” When I exegete that passage of the code, it seems to me to be saying that in a public meeting place, the flag should have the greatest position of honor to the right of the speaker. And, in most cases, that’s exactly where it should be as the prominent symbol.

The way our church is set up, however, there is another symbol of “superior prominence” immediately to the right of the pulpit that is hard to miss and seems to cry out for the place of honor. It’s the cross, of course — the center of focus for just about every worship space in all of Christendom.

While the flag reminds us of the sacrifice of men and women who gave their lives in defense of the United States of America and its freedoms, the cross reminds us of a Savior who gave his life for the whole world. It reminds us, too, that if we are truly following Christ, then our primary allegiance must be to his Lordship, no matter where we live. Patriotism has its place, but it is always less prominent than the place of discipleship. When we come into a place of worship, we’re called to recognize that we are citizens of the kingdom of God, first and foremost, and Americans second.

So I gently reminded the proud Marine mom that morning that I celebrate her son’s service and respect the flag so much that I didn’t want to violate the Flag Code (or at least my interpretation of it). In this place, I said, we always pledge allegiance to a greater symbol first. In here, it’s always “Dependence Day” because when we worship, we recognize our full dependence on God to save us. That’s why the cross is our symbol of superior prominence.

Someday, all of our monuments and achievements will be fodder for future archaeologists. What will last? Only that which we do for God.

So, which Kingdom do you want to serve?

Elijah: Trial by Fire

We’ve come a long way in our study over the last two weeks so I want to update you on where we are historically. Last week we were going to be talking about Solomon, that is, until the advent of the “aporkalypse”—had to do a sermon on that. We’ll talk more about Solomon when we get into the wisdom literature in few weeks.

What’s important for us to note for our purposes today, though, is that after Solomon’s death the nation of Israel that was ruled by David and Solomon becomes rent in two by civil strife. Solomon was a heavy-handed ruler who exacted a high price in taxation and labor from the people in order to maintain his opulent lifestyle. After his death, his son Rehoboam increased the oppression of the people and the then northern tribes revolted under the leadership of Jeroboam (Jeroboam had formerly been one of Solomon’s trusted overseers). Jeroboam sets up his own centers of worship in the north, thus cutting off connection with all of Judah and, in a very real sense, setting the table for the destruction that was to come.

But for now, realize that you have two kingdoms. The Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. The rest of the books of Kings and Chronicles tell the parallel stories of these Kingdoms, their rulers and the prophets who challenged those rulers. You might want to use this chart to keep them straight.

The succession of rulers in the north became increasingly idolatrous and evil, according to the biblical narrative. In response to that apostasy, we begin to see God raise up prophets from among the people—prophets who were to be God’s mouthpiece and speak God’s truth to these wicked kings and warn them of God’s impending judgment.

That brings us to the story in I Kings 18. Now let me set this up for you …Elijah was called to be a prophet in about the ninth century BC during the reigns of Kings Ahab and Ahaziah. Elijah seems to come from nowhere in particular, coming out of the desert as many other prophets will do.

Now King Ahab was exceptionally powerful for a king. If you go to the city of Megiddo, for example, you’ll see the remains of the stables for his horses, a symbol of military might. But Ahab had a glaring weakness – he had married a foreign woman from Tyre, a pagan named “Jezebel”. Jezebel brought with her the worship of the Baal fertility god and, once again, Israel found herself on the outs with God. Jezebel was, well, a “Jezebel” – controlling the king and the kingdom with her fury. She even launches a campaign to kill all the Israelite prophets of God while Ahab simply yes, “OK, dear.”

Elijah shows up to call the king and queen to account. He is a nomadic prophet, dressed in leather, a wild-haired kind of guy. He proclaims a drought over the land as a sign of God’s judgment. Ahab decides to go after him, and when he meets Elijah he calls him the “troubler of Israel.” Here again we see a prophet being a burr in the saddle of the status quo, challenging the prevailing culture.

But rather than simply gripe at Ahab, Elijah proposes a contest – a winner take all kind of event, a superbowl of prophets that will settle once and for all who would really be the god of Israel – the wooden deity Baal, or the God who had brought the ancestors of these same Israelites out of slavery in Egypt.

Elijah tells Ahab to gather all the people of Israel at Mt. Carmel and there they’ll have a contest – the 450 prophets of Baal (and 400 prophets of Asherah, Baal’s female deity consort) vs. Elijah the prophet of God. When the people gather (tickets must have been hard to get), Elijah says to the people, “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.” No more fence-sitting. Choose.

But the people said nothing in response, their silence indicating their indecision

Now Elijah sets the rules. Each side will build a stone altar to their god and sacrifice a bull on that altar. They’ll cut the bull up in pieces and lay the wood to burn it. But here’s the kicker: the fire for the altar will have to come from a divine source.  Look at verse 24 where Elijah says to the prophets of Baal, “Then you call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the LORD. The god who answers by fire—he is God.” Whichever altar gets fired up first is the winner.

 The ultimate fire-building contest.

An interesting geographical note here: Mt. Carmel lay between Israel and Phoenicia, the lands of the gods in question. The Phoenicians believed that the god Baal actually dwelt on Mt. Carmel, thus Elijah had already given the prophets of Baal a homefield advantage. Not only that, Elijah lets them go first.

The 850 prophets build their altar to Baal and begin their ritual fire dance. From morning to noon, with whooping and hollering, prayers and dancing, the 850 prophets milled around their altar. But no fire came, no answer from the mighty Baal.

About noon Elijah, who I picture as kind of standing off to the side by himself, arms folded, has a bit of a smile creep across his face and he starts to talk some trash to his opponents. Verse 27: At noon Elijah began to taunt them. “Shout louder!” he said. “Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.” (translation note: the Hebrew word translated as “busy” can also be translated as “going to the bathroom”. In other words, Elijah suggests that Baal just might be in his “throne room”, if you know what I mean).

The prophets of Baal just get louder and begin to cut themselves, which was part of their ritual. But still, nothing happens. I like the way it’s put in verse 28: There was no response, no one answered, no one paid attention.

Evening comes and now it’s Elijah’s turn. Elijah builds the altar of the Lord with 12 stones, representing the 12 tribes of Israel. And puts out the wood and bull, but then he does something unusual. He digs a trench around the altar and then instructs the people to fill four large jugs of water and pour it over the wood, the sacrifice, the whole thing. Then he has them do it again. And again. Three times So much water is poured over the altar that the trench around it is full to the brim, the wood thoroughly soaked.

Then Elijah, standing alone, prays – not with loud shouts or dancing, but a simple prayer: “O LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. 37 Answer me, O LORD, answer me, so these people will know that you, O LORD, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”

And this time…the  real God shows up.

Fire comes down from heaven – whether it’s lightning or whatever – and the fire consumes the wood, the bull, the stones, the surrounding soil and even all the water in the trench….a serious fire! An impressive display.

It’s fire that puts the people on their knees. Impressed by the display they shout, “The Lord, he is God! The Lord, he is God!” Elijah orders them to hunt down the prophets of Baal and then turn their allegiance to God.

It’s an amazing victory. Elijah, as God’s prophet, has stood alone in the face of overwhelming opposition and was successful with God’s help. If this were a fairy tale, everything would be turned right and the people would live happily ever after.

But here’s where the lesson comes in for me for this section of the Bible By now you have come to realize that most biblical stories have no “happily ever after.” Humans continue to be broken and weak. Even the prophets are no exception.

That brings us to chapter 19, which we read earlier. Word reaches Jezebel, the evil queen, that Elijah has killed off her prophets and she is angry. She sends word to Elijah that she will use all her powers to hunt him down and kill him.

Now Elijah has just demonstrated the power of God, has defeated the prophets of Baal, has shown amazing pluck and determination. He is at his zenith as a prophet of God. But when this pagan queen threatens him, what does he do? He becomes afraid and he runs away into the desert from whence he came. He sits under the shade of a broom tree and, according to 1 Kings 19:4, prays for death. Listen to his prayer: “I have had enough, Lord. Take my life. I am no better than my ancestors.”

You’d think that he’d be pumped up by the powerful fireworks display on Mount Carmel, but instead he is exhausted and defeated. As Anna Carter Florence puts it: “Maybe he’s was just having ‘one of those days.’ You wake up, you eat breakfast, you slaughter 450 prophets of Baal, y’know. Well it’s hard work to be the only one left. It is no fun.”

Ever felt like you’re the only one left? Does working only 9 to 5 sound like a dream? Too much chauffer duty for soccer practices and piano recitals and youth group events? Serving on too many committees and sitting in on too many meetings? To-Do lists longer than the days to accomplish them? Screaming kids leaving you with a tired soul?

Or maybe the isolation is ever more painful — maybe you’re dealing with a painful loss of a family member or friend recently. Some may be feeling the emptiness of lonely singleness. I know some deal with feelings of depression and despondency. Sometimes, like Elijah, there are those even wondering if not living is better than living like this.

But notice in this story that God doesn’t choose to meet Elijah in the midst of success. Sure, God sends the fire to impress the people, but for Elijah God waits. See, God chooses to meet Elijah not in his success but instead in the midst of all of this life chaos — in his fatigue, in his busyness, in his stress, in his depression, in his questioning, in his self-doubt. An angel comes to strenghthen him by giving him food and water—call it comfort food. But the real comfort for Elijah will come in a different form.

The first thing you notice here in this story is that God meets Elijah’s needs through his presence within these circumstances, not the removal of the circumstances.

Through his angel bearing food and rest, God brings his presence to Elijah’s physical needs. Through his own words, God brings his presence to Elijah’s spiritual needs. It is the presence of God which is what Elijah most needs.

I know that I have had times in my life when I have felt like running away. Indeed, times when I’ve done it. I figured that if I could change my circumstances, everything would be better. If I could only run away from that bad job or that difficult person, then I’d be OK.

But I have found that it never works that way. We might be able to change our scenery, but if our problem is a spiritual one then running won’t change our outlook.

What we need is a change of heart—the kind of change that we receive only when we experience the presence of God.

Elijah goes and hides in a cave. God comes to him and says, “What are you doing here?” Why are you hiding? What are you running from? Don’t you know that I am with you now and have been with you all the time?

Elijah’s response is that of a burned out prophet—“Don’t you know that I’ve been working for you? I’ve been zealous for you, but these people haven’t been. They’ve rejected you and rejected me. And now I’m the only one left.”

I’ve had this same conversation with God on more than one occasion. Maybe you have, too. It’s a kind of pious pity party, when you get right down to it.

But there in that cave God decides to show Elijah that he isn’t alone. God “passes by” in a loud display of wind, earthquake and fire—but note the text: “God was not in earthquake, or in the wind, or in the fire.” Where was God? Verse 12: “in a gentle whisper.”

Man, how we want God to come in earthquake, wind and fire to show us his power and shake, destroy and burn up the circumstances that frighten us. But God doesn’t do that. God doesn’t always rescue us with a display of raw supernatural power. But God does come—in a whisper.

To hear that whisper, though, we have to be listening. When we’re under the crushing burden of burnout and despair, we have to get alone, quiet our hearts, shut up all that self-talk that breeds fear and simply listen to God. Would your life be quiet enough — free enough of noise and distraction — that you might hear God’s whisper and know his voice there? What keeps you from hearing from God?

If we look at the rest of this passage we can see that meeting God changed Elijah. It rested and refreshed him. It reset his attitude and lifted his depression. It prepared him for life once he went down the mountain again. It restored his sense of God’s purpose in his life. His solitude filled him up with God so that he was spiritually and emotionally healthy enough to be around people again.

And read the beginning of verse 15: “Go, return on your way …” That is spiritual direction. As part of comforting Elijah and meeting his needs, he sends him right back to the place that either caused or was the location of his difficulties. Instead of running away, God encourages Elijah to face the very things that are challenging him. And he does…not because circumstances have changed, but because Elijah has—having encountered God in the midst of silence.

God doesn’t always remove the hard circumstances of our lives or allow us to run away from all that challenges us. In this case, God joins Elijah in the midst of difficulty. He gives him purpose within it.

We live in uncertain and fearful times. Like Elijah, we can look around us and think that we’re the only ones left, that everything and everyone seems to be against us. But it is in that place that God wants to meet us, to strengthen us, to comfort us, to get us to go back and face our difficulties with a renewed sense that God is with us.

The Year of the Pig - A Sermon on the Aporkalypse

As many of you know, a lot of Park City has been shut down over the presence of the H1N1 Swine Flu virus in our town...well, if one case so far counts as a "presence." At the Health Department's recommendation, we're not holding any "large group gatherings," which includes Sunday worship. But I wrote a sermon anyway and it's below. You can also catch the podcast on our website.

The Year of the Pig
Mark 5:1-20

There have been a bunch of national magazines arriving at newsstands in the last several months that have featured a picture of a smashed piggy bank on the cover. In each case the pulverized piggy was grinning, but the stories about the economy that were grimly told inside the magazines were nothing to smile about. These days when that little piggy that is our bank account goes to market and sees the 401k disappearing, it cries “Wee, wee, wee!” all the way home--which is probably in foreclosure. When we start having to dig through the pig for loose change, we’re getting down to a crisis of pig sty proportions.

Lots of folks blame Wall Street hogging up bad debt or CEOs who’ve pigged out on big money while their companies went bankrupt. The government’s trying a bailout, but everyone’s concerned about too many pork barrel projects getting thrown in the to mix.

And now, this very week, we encounter another porcine problem. The Swine Flu, or the H1N1 as it’s more properly called, is threatening to reach pandemic proportions. Schools are closing, travel advisories being issued, and folks are wearing surgical masks and buying their weight in hand sanitizer. With some confirmed deaths in Mexico and health officials brooding over a potentially historic health crisis, anxiety is running high. But the question that many are asking is, “Is it really that scary, or is this all hype? Is it a true health emergency or simply a pandemic of paranoia?”

At this juncture we still don’t know for sure. But it’s pretty obvious that we’ve all been hit hard by some seriously bad news in quick succession over the last several months. The year 2009 has already left many people wallowing in fear, doubt, and despair. The Chinese may call this the year of the ox, but you could definitely make the case that this is really the year of the pig.

When the Scriptures refer to pigs it’s usually in a negative context. The Israelites were forbidden to eat these “unclean” animals (Leviticus 11:7; Deuteronomy 14:8). While it’s common to see this as an ancient sanitary precaution, it more likely had something to do with the fact that other ancient pagan peoples saw swine as being sacred. In 167 B.C., for example, the Seleucid ruler Antiochus deeply offended the sensibilities of the people of occupied Jerusalem by polluting the Temple with an offering of a pig to the Greek god Zeus. This was the “abomination that makes desolate” referred to in Daniel 11:13. There wasn’t much that was more repugnant than a pig in ancient Israel.

Paganism was one disease the people in first century Israel didn’t want to catch. As we are seeing in our study through the Old Testament, the pagan practices of Israel’s Canaanite neighbors brought on a debilitating illness of sin and death. Worshipping idols, syncretizing their belief in God with belief in other gods, would ultimately result in the devastating pandemic of exile at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians. The very existence of their nation had been held in the balance.
So, by the time of the first century, the ancestors of those Jews who had been taken into exile were, by and large, very sensitive about anything pagan or porcine. Keeping pigs was not something your upstanding Israelite would do.

Which brings us to this story in Mark, also told in Matthew. Jesus has gone to the other side of the Sea of Galilee to the region of the Garasenes. Scholars don’t know exactly where that was, but the implication of the text is that it was territory that your average Jew would avoid like the plague. For one thing, there were tombs everywhere, it seemed, and being around the dead was also a ritual no-no.

That brings up a point about the idea of uncleanness. The ancient Israelites believed it to be, in some sense, “contagious.” If you touch an unclean thing, that makes you unclean and then if someone touches you, they’re unclean, etc. We’ve been hitting the hand sanitizer hard these last few days, but in first century Israel the whole thing was about getting yourself cleansed ritually in a mikvah in order to preserve your purity. Bottom line is that if you didn’t want to get the virus of uncleanness, you just didn’t go where those people were. Call it the original “social distancing” strategy.

But notice that Jesus goes there anyway. A wild man comes running out of the tombs—a man so crazy and his actions so bizarre that, as Matthew’s Gospel tells us, nobody could pass that way. The man’s seeming insanity increased his strength to the point that no one could contain him. He was demon-possessed, isolated, and outcast.

It’s interesting to note what has happened during this most recent panic. I read an article on CNN’s web site this week about how the flu has brought out some of the latent racism of our culture as Mexicans and people of Hispanic descent are, in some places, being considered pariahs because the flu supposedly began south of the border. Countries are shutting off travel and commerce with Mexico, which threatens to further topple its already fragile economy.

What we don’t understand, we fear and what we fear, we tend to hate. The implications of that fear are all over this story. The Jews feared the pagan Romans who had conquered their land. The religious people feared the unclean Gentile people because they didn’t act properly and their disease of religious idolatry could be contagious. Everyone feared the man running wildly and dangerously through the tombs.

Everyone, that is, except Jesus. Read the Gospels enough and its pretty evident that there’s really nothing that scares Jesus. Now, you could argue that’s because he’s the Son of God and all, but I think there’s a different reason he’s not afraid. See, Jesus isn’t afraid because he’s got a larger vision for the world beyond himself.

Look at the previous context at the end of Mark 4. That’s the story of Jesus and the disciples crossing the Galilean lake in a boat that is nearly swamped by one of the storms that is common to that region. The disciples, even though they are experienced fishermen, are in an absolute panic. Now, surely, they had weathered other storms but in their groupthink they allow the terror to overtake them. So they wake up Jesus. “Don’t you care if we drown?” they ask.

But Jesus rebukes the wind—“Quiet! Be still!” The wind dies down. You’d expect that from someone who was the Creator God come in the flesh. All of creation is at his command. But Jesus doesn’t look impressed with himself here. Instead, he rebukes his disciples. “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

See, for Jesus the answer to fear isn’t all about knowing what to do, though that’s important. The disciples knew how to fish, how to pilot a boat in a storm. We know how to quell the spread of disease—washing our hands, covering our mouths when we cough or sneeze—we’ve been taught that since we were little. Yet even with all that knowledge, we still can become frozen with fear. The answer to fear is faith—faith in God, faith in the power of God to make us whole, faith that God is at work in the world, faith of the kind that sees God’s hand at work even in the midst of difficult times. In the midst of a viral storm, Jesus seems to be saying to us, “Quiet! Be still!” No need to panic when God is in your boat.

So when Jesus is confronted with this maniac demoniac, he doesn’t cower in fear. He moves right toward the problem. In this case it’s the violence of evil at work in this man. The term “Legion” that the demon gives its collective self is instructive here. After all, Legion was the name of the basic Roman fighting unit. There are those pagans again. This man is possessed by great powers, evil powers, powers that want to remain in the country and wreak havoc on the populace.

But the powers can’t stand up to Jesus—that much is clear. They beg Jesus for a new home—a home where they belong—with the pigs. The legion of demons enters a herd of swine nearby and causes them to throw themselves into the sea, which in biblical terms always seems to represent chaos and disorder. In effect Jesus takes all the fear, all the suspicion, and all the terror and puts it where it belongs—back into the realm of chaos.

Remember how the biblical narrative starts in Genesis? There is a formless void of watery chaos, but then God separates the sea from the land. God brings order out of chaos. And he does so with a word. With a word, Jesus brings order out of chaos and a man’s life is restored.

Even the pig herders got this. They ran back to town and told the story. The people came and saw the former maniac now clothed and in his right mind. But notice their response—they were afraid! And they begged Jesus to leave their region!

Fear is what keeps us wallowing with the pigs. Fear is what keeps us from seeing the truth. Fear is what drives us deeper and deeper into chaos.

And Jesus asks, “Why are you so afraid?”

This pandemic won’t be the last. The economy will rebound but will go through another down cycle at some point. We can watch the news and be gripped by fear for our lives and our livelihoods, or we can live as Jesus people—people who see these situations and other people as opportunities to serve and bring a message of hope.

Jesus told the man to go home and “tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how he has had mercy on you.” Jesus took his problem and gave it back to the pigs. Maybe that’s where our anxiety needs to go, too.

It’s important that we pray for those affected by the Swine Flu, but it’s important that we be praying for and in ministry with people who are sick every day, people who are crippled by fear, those who have been immersed in the chaos of life outside of a relationship with Christ. We can’t just make that a concern when there’s a crisis!

It’s perfectly OK to take precautions. That’s what we’re doing with church this Sunday. I think Jesus would concur with that. But we musn’t be willing to give into fear, now or at any time. As it says in 1 John 4:18, “Perfect love casts out fear.”

In the Year of the Pig, we need more than ever to turn our focus toward the Lamb of God—the one who takes away the sins of the world. The one whose perfect love can cast out all fear.

Finishing Well: A Sermon on 2 Samuel 11

When I was back at Asbury a few weeks ago I went out for a run one afternoon and somehow wound up in the town cemetery. I’ve always had an interest in cemeteries, which I guess comes from being a historian. When Jennifer and I were dating, whenever we’d pass a cemetery in Western PA I wanted to stop and look for Civil War or Revolutionary War veterans. Somehow, she married me anyway.

I slowed down there in the cemetery when I came across the grave stone for one of my beloved professors who had taught my pastoral care classes back in the early 90s. It was from this professor, whose name was David, that I got my foundational education in pastoral ministry—how to work with people in crisis, how to help couples move toward healing in their relationships. I recorded every lecture and still have all the tapes. He had been a missionary to India, was the author of many books, was highly respected in the United Methodist denomination. Every class was a form of healing for all of us there. Jennifer and I also went on a Marriage Encounter weekend that was led by this professor and his wife. It was extremely helpful to us and to many of the other student couples that were there. David was one of my biggest influences during those seminary years.

A couple of years ago, however, it came to light that while he was teaching us about the sanctity of marriage and how to work with people dealing with the brokenness of extramarital affairs, he himself had been harboring a secret—that he had had an affair with a member of his congregation over the course of many years just before he became a professor at the seminary. When the story broke, David, now in his early 80s, had to confess that it was true. It was a devastating admission. He died a year or so later.

Seeing his grave that afternoon really got me thinking about all of that, the disappointment, the shock, but also about something else we had been talking about in one of my doctoral classes. The question we were wrestling with was this—how does a person “finish well?” Over and over again we hear stories about people whose public life was one of success, admiration, and a golden reputation…only to learn later that, in private, their lives were broken. Often, that brokenness finds its way outward in a risky or sinful behavior that, when discovered and brought to light, can destroy not only that person’s reputation but shake the faith of those who put their trust in him or her. We’ve seen plenty of high profile cases like this: think of Ted Haggard, the megachurch minister, who was caught doing the very thing he was preaching against; or John Edwards, the presidential candidate, who wrecked his career by having an affair with another women while his wife was dealing with cancer.

We may look on and be appalled, maybe even wag our fingers or get angry, but the truth is that all of us, and I do mean all of us, are susceptible to this kind of life-shattering behavior. I heard a quote this week that I thought was very powerful: Character is what you are. Reputation is what others think you are. When one’s character and reputation aren’t compatible, it will eventually lead to disaster.

The story of the biblical David represents this truth for us in a very powerful and convicting way. If you are reading along with us through the Bible you covered a lot of his story over the past couple of weeks and time doesn’t permit me to retell it all (there’s a whole sermon series there in itself). Yet, even if you aren’t too familiar with the whole story, you know at least part of it. You know how David, as a young shepherd boy, slays the Philistine giant Goliath with just a sling and a stone. David is anointed king in place of Saul, who we profiled last Sunday. Saul is fiercely jealous of David and wants him dead, so David flees into the wilderness and puts together his own band of warriors. But instead of exacting revenge on Saul, David bides his time and continues to serve God by cunningly manipulating and raiding the enemies of Israel. Even when David has an opportunity to kill Saul and end his exile, David refuses to do so. He is fully committed to serving God and, as a result, achieves great success. When Saul dies on the battlefield, David is formally made king and leads Israel into a period of great prosperity and peace. He is offered a covenant by God, that God will build his “house,” his lineage, and establish it forever. The writer of 1 Samuel characterizes David as “a man after God’s own heart.” Biblically speaking, it’s hard to imagine a finer thing to say about someone.

But success is a dangerous thing. Success can breed a sense of invulnerability and a desire to keep up appearances at all costs. When you’re at the top of the heap, you can’t show any weakness, any struggles. And so you begin to compromise your character and, perhaps even more dangerously, you begin to see others as less important than yourself. Worse, you begin to see them as less than people.

I read a great book this week that’s been on my shelf for awhile. Someone left it in my mailbox a couple of years ago, anonymously, but as I was looking over my library for help with this week’s text I came across it again. It’s a book entitled, Leadership and Self-Deception and, when I started looking it over, it hooked me so much that I read it in an afternoon.

The basic premise is this: that all of us have a problem and that problem is that we each have a tendency to believe that other peoples’ needs and desires are not as important as our own. The book calls that state of thinking “self deception” or, more graphically, being “in the box.” When we’re “in the box” we are focused on self and others are seen as problems or as objects to be manipulated for our own purposes. From our boxes, we find it easy to blame others or we begin to believe that we deserve certain things that others just aren’t giving us.

How do we get in the box? Well, it happens when we choose not to do the things we know we should do. Here’s a simple example: I come home from work and notice that the dishwasher is full and ready to be emptied. Now I’m confronted with a choice: I can simply empty the dishwasher, which is what I know deep down I can do and should do. Or, I can choose to leave it full. Now, why would I do that? Well, maybe it’s because I did it last time. Or maybe it’s because my spouse was home all day and “should have” done it. After all, what else did she have to do? Or that my kids are too lazy and maybe they should do it. Suddenly, I’m no longer thinking of the other people in my house as people with their own plans and agendas, their own busy lives. I’ve suddenly made it all about me. I’ve put myself firmly in the box. And when I’m in the box, my biggest problem is that I don’t realize that I’m the problem. I blame others, but I’m really betraying myself. And the worst part of it all? I chose to be in that box without even realizing it.

See, when I’m in the box I can wind up inflating others’ faults, inflating my own virtue, and inflating the value of the things that justify my self-betrayal. In other words, I’ll make a bigger deal out of my “busyness” or the need to teach the others a lesson. Lastly, I’ll blame them for the whole situation in the first place. Now, that seems like a lot of work…probably more than emptying the dishwasher, eh?

Now, I read this book at the same time I was preparing this week’s sermon and two things occurred to me. One, whoever gave me this book did so for a reason and now I get it! As a leader, I’ve sometimes had a tendency to put myself in the box—to think of the church more as an organization than a collection of people with their own hopes and dreams and feelings and their own boxes. As a leader, I’m prone to wanting to take credit for all the success but blame the failure on others. It’s a classic pitfall of leadership. So, to whoever gave me this book I want to say a big thanks! Message received!

But the second thing I learned is that the real secret to finishing well has a lot to do with staying out of the box. My theory is this: the more one is concerned about one’s reputation over and above one’s character, the deeper they go into the box and the more likely they are to fail.

Look at what happens to David in 2 Samuel. He is the King. He has all the success in the world. But look closely at the first verse of chapter 11: “In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king’s men and the whole Israelite army…But David remained in Jerusalem.” Here is David, whom God had made successful and who was always out in front with his troops, leading them by example, now making a different choice. He knows that’s where he’s supposed to be, but he chooses to stay back. Why should he go out and risk his neck? It’s somebody else’s turn. I do and do for these people and now it’s time for a break.

So there he is, lounging on his couch, strolling around the roof when from his high perch he sees a beautiful woman bathing on her own roof. Here again is another choice. David knows this woman is off limits to him, but he’s in the box. So, he thinks to himself, “Wait a minute…I’m the king. I can have whatever I want! I deserve it, nobody else knows the strain I’m under. My other wives give me grief all the time, blah, blah, blah. In the box, David sees only himself. Bathsheba, the woman on the roof, is simply an object to him that he wants for his own self-gratification. He knows she can’t refuse him, he’s in a position of power over her, so he sends for her and he has a sexual affair with her.

But then she’s pregnant. He’s in his box and that’s a threat to his reputation, so he starts manipulating people like pawns. He tries to get her husband, Uriah, a loyal soldier, to come home from battle and sleep with her so that everyone will think the baby is his. But Uriah isn’t in the box. Look at his response in v. 11: “The ark and Israel and Judah are staying in tents, and my master Joab and my lord’s men are camped in the open fields. How could I go to my house to eat and drink and lie with my wife? As surely as you live, I will not do such a thing!”

Notice the contrast. Uriah’s only concern is his fellow soldiers still in the field. Unlike David, he chose to do what was right, what a good soldier would do. David tries a second time to get him to go in to his wife by getting him drunk, but even then Uriah is loyal.

So, David, now needing to scramble for a cover-up, decides to have Uriah killed. To demonstrate the extent to which David was deep in the box, look at verse 14-15. David orders the army commander to put Uriah in the front of the fiercest fighting so that he’ll be killed, but get this—he has Uriah be the one to deliver the order!

Things were spiraling out of control. Uriah is killed. David gets Bathsheba for himself as a kind of trophy. And he stays in the box. When the prophet Nathan confronts him by telling him a story about a rich man who steals a poor man’s beloved sheep for himself, David is enraged. He says to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!” He still doesn’t realize that he is the problem! That is, until Nathan utters those convicting words:

“You are the man!”

How many leaders, how many pastors, how many husbands or wives, how many people have gone up like a rocket in success, but have come crashing down like a stick because they became so deep in their boxes that they never realized that they were the problem?

As I stood at look at the grave of the David I had respected so much I couldn’t help but feel a shudder of fear. What would it be like to have worked so hard, to do so much good, to be loved and respected so much, only to be remembered by many, in the end, as a failure? If it could happen to this David, if it could happen to the David who slew Goliath and was a man after God’s own heart, then surely it could happen to me. Or to anyone.

The results of such a fall are long-reaching. For the David of the Bible, the consequences were grim. The child born of his affair died. His other offspring, sons of different mothers, are rivals of each other and one, Amnon, rapes his half sister and then is himself murdered by her brother in retaliation. Eventually, his own son will try to overthrow his Kingdom in a coup. His son Solomon will build God’s Temple in Jerusalem, but will suffer the same temptations as his father and die under a cloud. Solomon’s sons will spark a civil war that rent Israel in two. All because he chose to do the wrong thing.

There are two lessons I draw from these stories. One has to do with finishing well. How do we do that? How do we avoid the pitfalls of success and the blindness of being in our own boxes?

Well, to begin with, I think it has a lot to do with changing our foundational assumptions about the world. We can’t get out of the box unless we first realize that we’re in it! We need a healthy sense of self-evaluation, to recognize when we’re treating others as less than ourselves, to recognize when we have the opportunity to do the right things. Scripture helps us do that by giving us these stories to ponder over and over. A trusted accountability partner can help with that, too. A wise mentor of mine once said that a key to being a person of integrity is having someone in your life who’s not afraid to tell you when you’re full of it—someone with whom you can be brutally honest about your hopes, your fears, your temptations, your frustrations…someone who will help you realize when you’re in the box! The old adage goes, “It’s lonely at the top,” but it’s that loneliness and isolation that so many successful people experience because they set themselves apart that causes them to go deeper into the box.

The other piece, though, is all about practice. Can you recognize the little places in your life where you’re in the box? When you start thinking that guy who cut you off on the highway is an idiot, or when you start seeing your kids as nuisances when you’ve got important things to do or your conversations with your spouse are only about coordinating schedules or arguments about who’s supposed to take out the trash…that’s when you need to stop and realize that you’re getting in the box. If you can start recognizing that in the little decisions you make every day, then it should be easier to catch yourself when those major temptations come along. Treating others as being as important and valuable as yourself is the best ticket out of the box!

But here’s the other lesson. When we do fail, and even if that failure is a big one. We don’t have to see all hope as being lost. Both Davids I’m talking about today repented of their sin, they took responsibility for their actions and accepted the consequences. God forgave them both. Our relationship with God is never irreparable.

I feel sad for both Davids, but I’m also reminded through them of the grace of God. While we can’t avoid the consequences of our sin, we can be assured that God loves us no matter what and that God wants to restore us to spiritual health and wholeness through his saving love. God’s forgiveness helps us to get out of our boxes and to see others as ourselves—as sinners in need of grace.

So, how about you? Are you in a box this morning? Are you keeping a secret that has the potential to wreck your reputation? Have you been treating others as pawns in the game of your life? If so, it’s time to break out. Confession helps us do that—it helps us to name our pain and our failure and when we name it we have power over it or, better, God’s saving power can overcome it. Who do you need to talk to about your box?

And if you’re feeling like none of this applies to you, well, then you especially need to hear it! Remember, the box is most destructive to us when we don’t realize that we’re in it in the first place.

I want us to share in a prayer this morning…actually, a prayer that the biblical David wrote after his sin. As we pray it, may it become your prayer. It’s an out of the box prayer, one that we all need.

The Criteria for a King - 1 Samuel 8:1-22

We have taken a little detour from our journey through the Bible over the last couple of weeks as we celebrated Easter Sunday. Actually, it’s not so much a detour as a way of peeking toward the end of the book and seeing all the action leading up to the climactic moment through the lens of the cross and resurrection. Easter is where the whole Bible is leading us toward, so keeping that in mind periodically is a good thing.

I know that many of you have been reading along through this series so far (we’re in week 15), but some have told me that you’ve gotten behind. Others have joined us somewhere along the way and may want to jump in and start reading along with us. Wherever you find yourself in reading through the Bible I want to encourage you to pick up with us here as we move into one of the more interesting and important parts of Scripture—the story of the monarchy. It is the typology of kingship in these historical books of the Old Testament that pave the way for us to understand the kind of King that Jesus becomes in the New Testament. The books of 1 and 2 Samuel are a treasure trove of stories about the kind of leader God desires for God’s people and yield a lot of lessons for those of us who are leaders in our homes, our workplaces, and our community.

But before we dive in there I want to take a few minutes to review where we’ve been. When I was at Asbury a couple of weeks ago I picked up a book by Dr. Sandy Richter, who teaches Old Testament at the seminary, entitled The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament. If you’re looking for a book that puts the Old Testament into an easily manageable framework, this is it. There are some great charts in the book, one of which is a timeline of the Old Testament (I emailed her and she gladly shared an electronic copy with me). On this chart you can see where we’ve been.

One of the ways in which Dr. Richter frames the Old Testament is through the understanding of covenant—a general law or organizing principle that holds all the stories together. The Old Testament or Old Covenant is thus organized around five central figures, four of whom we have already met. Those five are Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and, as we’ll see over the next several weeks, David. The whole theology of the Hebrew Bible is found in God’s interaction with these important figures.

In this chart, which is also provided by Dr. Richter, we see how the covenant has come forward thus far—the original covenant with all of humanity, represented by Adam, was broken by humanity, who chose to reject God’s protection and provision as the more powerful and benevolent partner in the relationship. The result was a break in the relationship between God and humanity, a relationship broken by sin. God decides to begin all over again with one man, Noah, who survives the purging flood with God’s help. God promises to be faithful to humanity, even though God knows that the ways of humanity are rebellious and sinful. With Abraham, God thus begins a covenant designed to repair the divine-human relationship. It is through his family that the world would come to know God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of the whole world. From that one family, a nation is born called Israel. God makes a covenant with this nation, much like larger empires made treaties with their client states in the ancient Near East. God promises them protection, provision and purpose if they will stay faithful. If they do not, there will be consequences, which come in the form of invasion and dominance by foreign pagan nations. The covenant God makes at Mount Sinai with Moses is a binding contract. Richter writes that the reason Moses gets two tablets from God is not that there are 5 commandments on each…rather, the two tablets each contain the whole covenant but there were two copies: one for Israel and one for God. They were to carry the tablets with them in the Ark of the Covenant, which was the representative of God’s presence with them. Both God and Israel could thus continually review the covenant.

We’ve seen already, though, that Israel has a hard time keeping their end of the covenant. They invade Canaan and establish themselves there, but they are still under the constant threat of foreign domination. The Book of Judges reveals a constant cycle of apostasy. The Israelites fall away from God and pursue relationships with other pagan gods in the form of idols. They are threatened with destruction by a pagan power. God raises up a leader from among the people, empowers that leader and fights for him or her and the nation. Israel is saved, the people vow allegiance to God. But then the leader dies and the people go back to flirting with other gods and betraying the covenant.

The conflict here is really about who is in control. God is the one who has kept Israel intact, preserved the nation, protected it in the desert and in Canaan. God has even fought for Israel, as we have seen. And yet, Israel constantly continues to look at its pagan neighbors and want to be like them, worshipping gods of convenience and sexuality. The Israelites didn’t fully abandon worship of Yahweh, their one God, but simply added on to that worship a deeper affection for the Canaanite gods, particularly Baal and Asherah. Baal was the storm god and Asherah his female consort. The Canaanites believed that rain, so vital to that drought-prone area, was the result of a sexual union between Baal and Asherah, so the rituals of Baal worship were sexual in nature and, thus, very attractive to the Israelites as well. As one commentator I read this week put it: “[The Israelites] had one God for crises and another for everyday life.” They ran back to Yahweh when they were in trouble, but otherwise they were preoccupied with the sexual delights of Baal worship.

This was, of course, unacceptable to Yahweh. The division of loyalty was destructive and threatened to derail Israel’s mission as the chosen people. The constant call of God/Yahweh was to choose. Choose God and see your mission and purpose in life fulfilled or choose the false god Baal and face the consequences of life apart from God.

That choice would also be couched in political terms. Who was going to lead Israel? Would it be God, the one who had preserved them all along, or would the people continue to reject God and pick their own kind of leader? That’s the crisis we encounter at the beginning of 1 Samuel.

The end of the Book of Judges is very clear about the problem in Israel. “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit” (Judges 21:25). I like how Dr. Richter describes the situation: “Rather than allowing the covenant to set the parameters of their behavior, these people (who claimed to belong to the covenant) were creating their own morality. And their self-centered lifestyles (influenced by the ideals of their culture) were resulting in a ‘people of God’ who looked and acted just like…the Canaanites…Interestingly, from the perspective of the Israelites, the problem was foreign oppression. They thought that what they needed was a better army. What they did not see was that the role of foreign oppression in their covenant was disciplinary—its purpose was to bring Israel back into right relationship with Yahweh. Hence, the solution to the problem was not a more effective military; it was adherence to the covenant.”

So, as the writer of 1 Samuel tells us, the Israelite solution was to get a king. Notice their request of the prophet Samuel, the last of the judges: “Appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have” (1 Samuel 8:5).

Now, it wasn’t as though having a king was a bad thing altogether. Even God had anticipated the need for leadership in Israel all the way back in Deuteronomy. Look at Deuteronomy 17:14-20. God anticipates that Israel will have a king someday, but that the king should meet specific criteria: 1) He should be someone chosen specifically by God, 2) he should be a native Israelite, 3) he must not spend his ambition acquiring horses (military power through chariotry), or wives (which were taken to form international alliances) or money (which corrupts) and 4) that he should “write for himself a copy of this law on a scroll” and read it every day of his life” (v. 18-19). The King, in other words, must be fully submissive to God in his leadership of the people and not rely on his own wealth, power, or military prowess to overshadow his relationship with God.

But when we come to 1 Samuel, we see how God’s idea of kingship has been distorted. The people want a king who is very much like the kings of the Canaanites. Notice what they ask for in 8:19-20: “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”

Problem was that up until this point, God was the one who had ruled Israel and fought its battles, often miraculously intervening to preserve the nation in the face of impossible odds. The people’s typology of kingship was not God’s, but reflected their own fascination with the Canaanite religion and practice. They wanted a king who would solve their problem with foreign oppression, but hadn’t God told them all along that the problem with foreign oppression wasn’t a military problem but a problem of their covenant unfaithfulness? A king would no better solve that problem than the Judges had before him as long as the people continued to live outside the covenant.

So God saw their desire for a king to be what it was and told the prophet Samuel, “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly what the king who will reign over them will do” (8:7-9).

Samuel explains to the people who a king in the Canaanite mold will draft their sons for battle and their daughters for forced labor, how the king will exact heavy taxes from them and take some of the best of their produce. But the people are persistent and impatient. And so God says to Samuel, “Listen to them and give them a king” (v. 21).

I’ve said it many times, but often God’s best way of disciplining his people is to give them exactly what they want. Be careful what you ask for.

So the Israelites get a king—one who fit their profile exactly. We see a description of Saul in 1 Samuel 9:1-2: “Now there was a son of Benjamin whose name was Kish…He had a son whose name was Saul, a choice and handsome man, there was not a more handsome person than he among the sons of Israel; from his shoulders up he was taller than any of the people.”

Saul is the matinee idol, the dashing king, the military hero type. So God instructs Samuel to anoint him with oil, the traditional sign of kingship. Interestingly the Hebrew verb for anoint is masah, the origin of the word “Messiah.” The people thus get their king.

Saul takes over as leader of a tribal confederacy that occupies the central hill country of Canaan. The flatter and more fertile land on the coast is still occupied by the Canaanites, but from their hillside stronghold the Israelites gradually begin to expand their control.

That is, until they run into a buzzsaw. See, here on the coast are a race of people known as the Philistines, who were immigrant sea-faring people of Greek origin who had fled the collapse of the Mycenean civilization in Greece that happened around the same time. The Philistines were heavily armed and skilled as warriors, thus now you have two peoples fighting for their lives pushing toward one another in the confines of a small strip of land.

Saul doesn’t fare well against the Philistines, which is a very bad sign. We also see that Saul himself is not following the prescription of kingship laid out in Deuteronomy. Two incidences show his failure. In chapter 13, Saul is about to engage in battle with the Philistines but needs the prophet Samuel to offer the proper sacrifice to God in order for the Israelites to have any hope of success. Samuel is delayed and Saul becomes impatient and performs the sacrifice himself, usurping God’s command and procedure.

Then, in chapter 15, Saul engages in battle with the Amalekites, another Canaanite people, and fails to carry out God’s instructions, keeping all the spoils of war (namely sheep and cattle) for himself instead of dedicating them to God by slaughtering them. In one of the most interesting exchanges in the Bible, Saul sees the prophet Samuel approaching after the battle and says to him, “See, I have carried out the Lord’s instructions.” But, Samuel said, “What then is this bleating of sheep in my ears? What is this lowing of cattle that I hear?”

Saul’s confession reveals the major problem with his leadership. Look at verse 24—“I have sinned. I violated the Lord’s command and your instructions. I was afraid of the people and so I gave in to them.” And later, Saul keeps begging but with a self-serving tone. “I have sinned,” he says in verse 30, “But please honor me before the elders of my people and before Israel…” Saul reveals that his career and his success is ultimately more important to him than God’s Kingdom.

Saul’s reign would end in disaster. Instead of triumphant victories, Saul will ultimately die on the battlefield, falling on his own sword. The Philistines would take his body and hang it from the walls of Beth Shan as a sign of their own victory and, once again, Israel’s failure. Before that, though, God would reveal a new kind of king—one after his own heart. David would replace Saul as king even before Saul was dead. We’ll begin our look at the David story next week.

There are a couple of important lessons for us to draw from these chapters. One has to do with our own faithfulness to God. Are we looking exclusively to God in our life of faith, or do we, like the Israelites, syncretize our belief in God with the values of the surrounding culture? Other pretender gods and goddesses are paraded in front of us every day on our TV and computer screens, which sit like altars in our homes and offices. They lure us with the promise of sexual gratification, with the promise of wealth and the promise of pleasure. We believe in God, we may even go to church, but the pull of these other gods is strong. They deliver an instant high, whereas Yahweh is in our lives for the long haul.

When we choose God, when we choose to follow him and give our obedience to him, even when it isn’t culturally popular, we see purpose, preservation, and provision for our lives. That’s no promise that life will be easy. In fact, it’s clearly harder to serve God. But the outcome is favorable for the long term—a life that means something. If we choose the gods of the culture, however, we begin down a road toward destruction. The breakdown of community and family are the inevitable result of a failure to follow God and look to our own self-gratification instead. The story of Israel is a cautionary tale for all time. Who are you going to serve? You can’t serve both God and the gods of this world.

Secondly, we learn a lot here about godly leadership. If we’ve been chosen by God to lead, be it in our families or our businesses or our community, then we must continually guard our hearts and minds against the temptation to be the kind of leader that can be used by others or use others for their own purposes. It’s important that we not use leadership to build our own kingdoms, but rather to see everything we do as being subject to the vision of the Kingdom of God. How do we do that? Remember the prescription God gives back there in Deuteronomy—to read the Scriptures every day and follow it carefully, not to consider yourself better than anyone else, but stay on a faithful track with the vision of God’s Kingdom ever before you. That’s God’s secret to effective leadership!

I want to encourage you to read through these texts with an eye toward your own life situation. Where are you compromising your faith in God by chasing after the lure of other gods? Are you constantly checking your faithfulness and obedience by spending time daily in God’s Word, in prayer and in reflection?

Faithfulness to God doesn’t just happen. It takes work and diligence. The Israelites were looking for someone to bail them out, even though God had been doing that all along. May we put our full trust in God and find our way to life!

A Sermon for Easter 2009--Dead Man Down Under (Luke 24:1-12, 36b-49)

For Michael O’Neill of Middlesbrough, England, death was just a vacation.

See, on June 2 of last year, Michael decided to take a last-minute trip to Australia to visit a friend and made his plans without telling anyone. His neighbors, who had seen neither hide nor hair of him for days, grew worried and called the police, who broke down the door of his flat only to find that he had disappeared, leaving behind no evidence of what had happened to him.

Honest mistake, right? But it gets weirder. A few weeks later, a death notice appeared in the local paper for a Michael O’Neill, another resident of Middlesbrough, who was about the same age as the intrepid traveler and who had brothers named Kevin and Terry. In a bizarre coincidence, the vacationing Michael’s brothers are also named Kevin and Terry.

Friends and neighbors of the very-much- alive O’Neill figured that their worst fears had been realized. That is, until one of them received a postcard from him, confirming that, while he was indeed Down Under, it wasn’t in the way they had thought. Michael arrived home on August 11 to find his front door smashed in, police watching the flat, and his neighbors, once again seeing him on the street, believing in ghosts.

“Everywhere I am going, people I know are grabbing hold of my hand, saying, I thought you were dead!’” O’Neill told The Daily Telegraph. “They can’t believe it’s me and I’m still alive. I’m a nervous wreck because everywhere I go people keep grabbing me!”

Reminds me of the old movie, “Death Takes a Holiday.” Or of that story that’s been floating around the internet for a while about a couple from Minneapolis who decided to go to Florida to thaw out during an icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Due to their hectic schedules, the husband left Minnesota and flew to Florida on Thursday; his wife was to fly down the following day.

The husband checked into the hotel and sat down at the computer in his room to send his wife an e-mail. However, he accidentally left out one letter in her e-mail address, and without realizing his error, sent the e-mail to the wrong address.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston, a widow had just returned home from her husband’s funeral. He was a minister who had passed away following a heart attack. The widow decided to check her e-mail, expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the first message, she screamed and fainted.

The widow’s son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and saw the computer screen, which read:

To: My Loving Wife

Subject: I’ve Arrived

Date: October 16, 2007

I know you are surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now and you are allowed to send e-mails to your loved ones. I’ve just arrived and have been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then! Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was.

P.S. It sure is hot down here!

It’s not hard to imagine the shock of seeing someone who’s “dead” returning from Down Under! Jesus himself experienced a similar reception when he, too, returned from the down under of the grave — except that his friends and neighbors had seen him die and it was no vacation.

The events of that Friday left Jesus’ disciples, his closest friends and his casual acquaintances no doubt shocked at the brutal, painful and shameful way that Jesus had died on a Roman cross. The only saving grace of the whole experience was that at least his body was allowed to be laid in a tomb by his friends instead of left hanging for days to rot in public humiliation, as was standard Roman practice.

But it wasn’t as if Jesus hadn’t told them where he was going. Unlike Michael O’Neill, Jesus was very clear with his friends that he would be taking a trip down the road toward the cross and the grave. In fact, Jesus had given them his fateful itinerary three times but “they understood nothing about all these things; in fact, what he said was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said” (Luke 18:34).

They were surprised, then, to find the tomb door open, the flat stone of his resting place empty and no indication of Jesus’ whereabouts on Sunday morning. Matthew even says that the Roman cops had been watching the place but to no avail (Matthew 27:62-66). Instead of being missing and presumed dead, Jesus was dead and presumed missing. No one needed an obituary to determine which Jesus bar Joseph of Nazareth had died, only where his body had been taken.

It was the angelic messengers who provided a postcard description of his whereabouts. Reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated, they said. “He is not here, but has risen,” they said, and then reminded the women again of his travel plans (Luke 24:1-12). Two disciples traveling on the road to Emmaus got the same reminder, only to find that it is the risen Jesus himself who was delivering it (Luke 24:13-26).

Now gathered together in Jerusalem, with the anxiety, grief and wonder of the last three days on their minds, all the disciples and friends of Jesus tried to sort out the evidence. But then, suddenly, there he was among them saying, “Peace be with you” (Luke 24:36). Like the perplexed and astounded neighbors in Middlesbrough, the disciples thought they were seeing a “ghost” (v. 37). Death is a trip from which no one is supposed to return, so it’s little wonder that the disciples were “frightened” and that even “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering” (vv. 39, 41). Yet, unlike Michael, Jesus had no problem with people grabbing on to him to see if he’s real. “Touch me and see,” he says to his incredulous friends, “for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (v. 39). Luke makes it clear that this was no projection of imagination or collective fantasy. The risen Jesus was touchable and even hungry, asking his friends for a little fish on the barby (vv. 41-43).

These physical details about Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances are offered by Luke as a form of proof, cataloging and foreshadowing the essential thrust of the message about him that his disciples would carry into the world. It’s instructive for us to remember that the “good news” the disciples preached was not bound up in the teachings of Jesus as much as it was focused on the pivotal events of his death and resurrection. The risen Jesus, wiping the crumbs of fish off the table, reminded them that it was not a philosophy they were dealing with, but a real and resurrected person in whose name “repentance and forgiveness” would be proclaimed “to all nations beginning from Jerusalem” (v. 47).

Later, in the book of Acts, Luke tells us that the disciples did not go around the Roman world setting up Jesus memorial societies or simply repeating his parables.

Instead, they insisted that Jesus was alive, that his death and resurrection had ushered in the new age when God would set a fallen world to rights, and that they had been witnesses to the fact.

They also understood that, after his ascension, they were to continue to embody his scarred hands and feet, feeding a world hungry for the hope of salvation, wholeness and promise of new life made possible by his sacrificial death and bodily resurrection. They hadn’t seen a ghost or a resuscitated corpse (two of the most accepted ideas of life after death at the time). They had witnessed something utterly new, surprising and overwhelmingly joyful. No matter how bizarre their story seemed to be and no matter how much the prevailing powers tried to crush their movement, they continued to be “witnesses” to the reality of resurrection. We must not lose the connection here that the root of the Greek word for “witness” is the same as the root for “martyr” (v. 48).

There in Jerusalem, sometime on that amazing Sunday, Jesus mapped out for his disciples just how the journey had been leading God’s people to this precise point in history. He led them on a biblical travelogue through the liberating stories of the exodus, on to the warnings and exhortations of the prophets, and through the pain and hope of the psalms to his own journey to the cross (v. 46). His death had been an essential part of the journey and was now to be seen as a holiday instead of a day of mourning. Jesus had journeyed downward from heavenly exaltation into humanity, had taken the trip to the depths of pain and death, and had returned in amazing triumph. Because of him, death is no longer our final destination.

Jesus was the original dead man Down Under, but the passage of time since that Sunday can distance us from the feeling of surprise. Easter comes every year, but it usually finds Christ’s followers arguing and debating theological points and social issues among themselves while the rest of the world yawns in indifference. Perhaps that’s because we’ve forgotten the sheer, audacious surprise of the resurrection. We can become so enamored with our lives, our structures, our positions, and even the day to day work of our churches that we neglect the incredible claims of the gospel. We act as though Jesus has gone on some kind of long vacation, and while we do things in his name, we don’t usually expect anything to change as a result.

Coming back to these familiar texts reminds us, though, that the risen Christ is among us in the Spirit and will return to us and with us in his resurrection body to finish the work he began. In 1 John 3, one of this week’s other texts, the writer offers a word of encouragement and motivation for those for whom the resurrection is a distant memory or a theological conundrum. “Beloved,” he writes, “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he [Jesus] is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have their hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3).

The friends of Jesus came “looking for the living among the dead” that Easter Sunday. The promise of resurrection means that we’re always looking for the dead to come to the land of the living!

The point of the resurrection is not simply that Jesus went to heaven when he died and, someday, we can too. No, it’s really about the fact that God is going to renew this creation and make it “good” again, as it was in the beginning. God is not seeking to suck us up in the heavenly Hoover into the great beyond someday, but rather to bring new life to a world deadened by sin and brokenness. Jesus’ resurrection was the first sign that God’s Kingdom, God’s reign, God’s ultimate plan for the renewal of creation was becoming a reality—a reality that we pray for everytime we say the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done…where?...on earth as it is in heaven!”

Jesus rose from the dead to demonstrate to us what is possible for this world. Death will not have the last word in our world. God will raise us all to new life—not just spiritually, but physically and wonderfully—a renewed people in a renewed creation.

In the meantime, we are to be living and working with that resurrection renewal in mind. This world matters to God—that’s one of the key meanings of resurrection—and if it matters to God, it should matter to us. Caring for the physical and material needs of others is a major theme of Jesus’ preaching. Being stewards of the earth and its resources was the first command to Adam and Eve in Genesis. Resurrection tells us that we are not a people whose religion is simply about qualifying for a ticket to heaven somewhere far away. It tells us instead that we are part of a movement that the Bible has been talking about all along and that finds its climax in Jesus—a movement that is all about making God’s creation “good” again. As Leonard Sweet puts it, “Our job is to make earth look so much like the Kingdom of God that when it comes it won’t be such a culture shock!

Jesus returned from Down Under, shocking the world. We are called to join him in a journey toward a new world full of God’s renewing grace—to shock the world with a message of renewal and hope in the face of death and destruction!

I hope you won’t leave here this morning thinking it’s just another Easter. This is the most important news the world has ever known. May you seek the living Christ—the one who returned from Down Under to bring us new life!

(Note: This sermon is adapted from one I wrote for the March/April 2009 issue of Homiletics.)

The Mess in the Message

Many of you have been asking about our trip through the Lands of the Bible a couple of weeks ago. It was a great trip filled with breathtaking and important sights (See photo album on the left for pics).

This is the second group I’ve taken to the Holy Land and I hope there will be many more because I really believe that there is great value in walking the land where Jesus and Paul and the other people we read about in Scripture lived and worked. To borrow a phrase I once heard, the Holy Land is a “fifth gospel”—a three dimensional reminder that these stories we’re reading are set in real places and within the stream of human history. We’re not talking fables here, nor are we speculating about some faraway fantasy land. When you put your feet on that ground, you’re walking with a new sense of understanding of God and God’s people.

Last week we talked about some of the stories of violence in the Old Testament and when we read those texts from the detached distance of history we can become very critical. How could this be? Surely, God could not be involved in this. We want a kinder, gentler vision of God. We’d rather that God give us a systematic theology than these stories of blood and guts.

But when you walk the ground, be it in Egypt, Jerusalem, or anyplace else in the world for that matter, you remember that human history is pretty messy. Cities and civilizations come and go, but the evidence of human achievement and folly are always left behind. As we walked through the ruins of several millennia of history during our trip, the one thing that kept coming back to me was a very real sense that if God was going to truly be involved with the mess of humanity, then God was going to have to get messy himself.

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the Bible is as full of violence, love, lust, failure, betrayal, hope, and heartache as the rest of human history. Again, we’re not talking about a fantasy world here—we’re talking about reality.

As singer Rich Mullins once put it, "The Bible is not a book for the faint of heart. It is a book full of all the greed and glory and violence and tenderness and sex and betrayal that befits mankind. It is not the collection of pretty little anecdotes mouthed by pious little church mice. It does not so much nibble at our shoe as it cuts to the heart and splits the marrow from bone to bone. It does not give us answers fitted to our smaller minded questions but truth that goes beyond what we even know to ask."

When you stand in the shadow of the Pyramids in Egypt, you are reminded of the cruelty of slavery and the ego of dictatorial kings. When you ride through the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel you are reminded of the thousands of people slain there over the course of centuries in hundreds of battles—battles whose names are even lost to history. When you travel anywhere in the Mediterranean you see the remains of the Roman Empire—it’s glory and might now reduced to broken columns and piles of rubble. Human history is full of mess.

But one of the things the Bible also tells us is that this God is one who’s willing to get messy and not just in a figurative, theological sense. If you’ve been reading along with us this week, you’ve been getting into the Book of Judges, which is another series of stories about the messiness of Israel’s history. They are constantly going through the cycle of being faithful for a time, then falling away from God, getting in trouble, threatened by a foreign power, then being rescued by God through the actions of a tribal leader. Even God’s people, who have witnessed God’s miraculous provision for them over and over, have a hard time being consistent and ordering their life of faith. They are tempted, conflicted, violent, fearful, frustrated and, sometimes, faithful. We learn that God works with them through it all, but we also get a sense that God is frustrated, too. God will have to take extraordinary steps to reach these people.

On this Palm Sunday, we have the opportunity to peek ahead a little bit in the story and get a glimpse of how God will ultimately deal with all this human mess. Theologically speaking, it’s about “incarnation”: God coming in person.

Phillip Yancey, in his book The Jesus I Never Knew, describes the incarnation beautifully:

“I learned about incarnation when I kept a salt-water aquarium. Management of a marine aquarium, I discovered, is no easy task. I had to run a portable chemical laboratory to monitor the nitrate levels and the ammonia content. I pumped in vitamins and antibiotics and sulfa drugs and enough enzymes to make a rock grow. I filtered the water through glass fibers and charcoal, and exposed it to ultraviolet light. You would think, in view of all the energy expended on their behalf, that my fish would at least be grateful. Not so. Every time my shadow loomed above the tank they dove for cover into the nearest shell. They showed me one “emotion” only: fear. Although I opened the lid and dropped in food on a regular schedule, three times a day, they responded to each visit as a sure sign of my designs to torture them. I could not convince them of my true concern.

To my fish I was deity. I was too large for them, my actions too incomprehensible. My acts of mercy they saw as cruelty; my attempts at healing they viewed as destruction. To change their perceptions, I began to see, would require a form of incarnation. I would have to become a fish and “speak” to them in a language they could understand.

A human being becoming a fish is nothing compared to God becoming a baby. And yet according to the Gospels that is what happened at Bethlehem. The God who created matter took shape within it, as an artist might become a spot on a painting or a playwright a character within his own play. God wrote a story, only using real characters, on the pages of real history. The Word became flesh.”

The Jesus who rides into Jerusalem is a conquering hero of another sort—a conquerer who comes not to kill, but to die. God’s Word becomes flesh in all the messiness of humanity.

On our trip went to Bethlehem and saw where it all began—where God came into the world as a helpless child, born in a cave in a small, unimportant village—a messy place.

We went to Galilee and saw where he spent most of his life as the Word become flesh, walking the shores of the lake, teaching people, laughing with friends, crying over the loss of loved ones, eating and drinking with neighbors, seeing the brutality of life under Roman rule…he experienced it all right there.

Then we went to Jerusalem…to the Mount of Olives where on that Palm Sunday long ago he looked over the city in all its grandeur—the sight of the Temple filling the foreground. We followed his ride down the Palm Sunday road, past the massive graveyard that was there even in the first century, down the steep traverse through the olive groves of Gethsemane and then up to the gates of the city. On the way down we passed the church of Dominus Flevit which is shaped like a tear drop. Here we remember that Jesus wept over Jerusalem, knowing that the messiness of human conflict and God’s judgment would come to a head in the destruction of the city by the Romans in 70AD.

We followed his steps into the city to the walls of the Temple itself and were reminded of the mess caused by the thousands of animal sacrifices brought by pilgrims day and night—the smell of blood and roasting flesh that permeating the whole city. We recall that Jesus turned over the tables of the money changers as an acted parable of judgment on the Temple. Jesus knew the mess that was coming and tried to warn them to flee the destruction.

But then, most powerfully, we walked down the streets of old Jerusalem along the route called the Via Dolorossa, where Jesus, the Word become Flesh, received the most horrible violence that humanity could conceive. Beaten within an inch of death by Roman scourges, forced to carry a heavy wooden cross, stumbling through the narrow corridors, Jesus and his mocking entourage came to that place outside the city walls where the Romans routinely executed the lowest of the lowest kind of criminals—nailing them to a cross, naked and low to the ground, letting the victims hang there until they suffocated and then leaving the bodies there to rot or be picked apart by dogs and other wild animals. The cross was a sign of Roman domination—the ultimate symbol of violence. It is here that God hangs—not as the God who fights, but the one who suffers.

It’s that picture that sticks with us 2000 years later and the picture that provides us with the flipside of those Old Testament images. The God who suffers. The God who is the victim of violence. The God who metes out his ultimate judgment on humanity not by smiting us all, but by hanging helpless on a cross—taking all that judgment on himself. It’s hard to imagine a messier, bloodier, more painful way to do it than this. But there God is…for us.

We learn from the Old Testament that God is a righteous judge who cannot tolerate sin and rebellion, but that’s only half the story. The New Testament teaches us that the righteous judge then turns around and takes the punishment of judgment on himself on behalf of all humanity. The judgment of God is ultimately borne by God himself. The violence and evil and mess of history are played out on a cross. And that cross proves to us, once and for all, how much God loves his creation…how much he loves us in spite of our sin.

I don’t know about you, but I never cease to be amazed at this story. It’s scandalous and confusing, and wonderful and life-changing all at the same time. It’s a story that couldn’t be confined to the pages of a book or to the realm of legend. It’s a story that has to be told over and over again.

It’s this story that came through the rest of the ancient world on its way to us. We followed Paul’s route through much of the Roman world—through the cities of Asia Minor—Antioch, Tarsus, Perga, Ephesus—cities of power and prestige, but places where the message of a God who suffers on behalf of humanity began to take hold in small communities of believers. We went to Athens, where Paul preached to the philosophers on Mars Hill, proclaiming to them this story of a God that was very much unlike the cruel and manipulative gods of their pantheon—gods whose statues and temples were everywhere in the city. This “unknown God” was the one true God—and we know this, said Paul, because he came and showed us in person.

The ancient world was a messy place—but no more messy than our own. But we are learning about a God who is not afraid to get involved in that mess…involved enough to die for us.

That’s the lens through which we look at the stories of the Bible and the lens through which we are called to see our own stories. We cannot know God only through the pages of a book…we must know him in person.

See, all our study of the Scriptures is designed not just so that you can know the Bible better. My prayer is that you’ll come to know the God within…a God who is righteous and benevolent, but a God who is also fiercely concerned about his people…a God who judges the world, but also a God who will take that judgment upon himself…a God who is mighty and powerful, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent…but a God who is also a helpless baby, a humble teacher, and a broken victim of human violence—a God who will get involved in the mess of humanity…a God who can deal with the mess in your life, too.

That’s the kind of picture we need to see. That’s a God we can believe in!

The Battle Belongs to the Lord--Dealing with the Violence in the Old Testament (Part I)

If you’ve been reading along with us in this year-long sermon series that will take us through the whole Bible, you undoubtedly have started to formulate a list of questions—some of them big questions. And chances are that your questions are some of the same ones that have puzzled scholars, faithful folks, and biblical critics for generations. As a pastor, I often get those questions and, quite frankly, have often asked them myself.

And perhaps at this point in our reading there is one question that stands out above some of the others—one that I’ve been asked more frequently in recent weeks. It’s a question that has to do with all the violence in the Old Testament. More specifically, the question has to do with God’s involvement in that violence. How can God be a God of love, as we have been taught, and yet participate in such bloody affairs, even ordering the deaths of whole cities as we read here in this week’s texts. As one person said to me recently, “When I read these passages, I’m not sure that I still want to be a Christian.”

We read a passage like Deuteronomy 20:16-18 and we wince when God says to the Israelites that when they enter the land of Canaan and attack its cities they should “not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them…otherwise they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods…” In these post-9/11 years we here in that command the kind of stuff that jihadist radicals would like to hear. We are reminded of ways in which holy war has been waged by people of all faiths—from today’s Islamic terrorists to the Christian Crusaders of the Middle Ages to the Jewish zealots of the first century—and we cringe. We wonder if atheists like Richard Dawkins aren’t right when they say things like religion is the cause of most of the world’s violence (though, historically, most of the wars of the 20th century were started by secular regimes, but that’s another lecture).

We may wonder those things, but we come to church anyway and we continue to read and use these stories. What’s been interesting to me over the course of my life in the church is that we’ve often simply glossed over these texts or politely ignored the violence. When I was a kid, we would read about the Battle of Jericho and see it played out on the flannel graph and the whole point of the story was that the children of Israel were victorious (we’ve even had our Sunday School kids march around the church when studying this story). No one said much about the apparent slaughter of Jericho’s inhabitants, including women and children. We were encouraged to be strong and courageous like Joshua, but the older I’ve gotten the more I begin to look at these stories from a different perspective. How do we reconcile these accounts with an understanding of a good God?

I think we need to address that question before we go much further, because as we’ll see the rest of the Old Testament is full of war and violence—sometimes perpetrated by Israel as God’s chosen people and, perhaps even more often, that violence is meted out upon Israel herself as a form of God’s judgment. But nowhere are the accounts more in-your-face than they are here in the late part of Deuteronomy and in the Book of Joshua. If we’re really going to read the Bible as a whole, we can’t simply skip over these passages or wave them away as “something we’ll never understand.” Truth be told, I wish these passages weren’t in here, but there they are. We may not ever fully grasp what God had in mind here, but I do believe that we can begin to see how these texts fit into the larger context of Scripture and inform us more deeply about the nature and character of God.

So, what I want to do today is to begin framing some of the ways these passages have been traditionally understood and then offer some critique of those understandings. In doing so, my goal is two-fold: 1) to examine some of the usual arguments about this section of Scripture and, 2) to demonstrate to you a way of doing what scholars call “biblical criticism”—critical and contextual examination of the Bible as a document with literary, historical, and theological dimensions. Then, next Sunday, Palm Sunday, I will move to the next phase and put these texts within the context of the story of Jesus, the climactic story of the whole Bible. I really believe that the only way we can truly understand what’s going on here in the Old Testament is to look at it through the lens of Christ. This week may sound a little more like a lecture than a sermon, but I think it will help lay some important groundwork for your continuing study of the Bible. You won’t want to miss next week, then, to see how it all comes together (actually, I can’t wait to see how it comes together myself!).

I want to begin today by outlining three possible approaches to the bloody accounts of the conquest of Canaan—common arguments that are often used to try and reconcile these accounts and, in some way, preserve God’s reputation as the kinder and gentler deity we’ve all come to know and love.

The first argument is perhaps the most common one and it has to do with the relationship between the Old and New Testaments and their portrayals of God. That argument goes something like this: The Old Testament is full of violence and God comes across as an angry, cantankerous, judgmental God who deals in fire and brimstone more than in love and grace. By contrast, the New Testament is full of peace and love. God himself is love. There is no judgment, only grace. Therefore, we should only take the Old Testament and its violence and judgment with a huge grain of salt, if we take it at all, and focus only on the New Testament concepts of God’s forgiveness and love.

Look at the texts preached in most Christian churches on a given Sunday and chances are they’ll overwhelmingly come from the New Testament. We don’t want the angry God, so we’ll just leave the Old Testament behind because, well, it’s old! These stories, then, are an Old Testament problem that the New Testament somehow puts right. As Christopher Wright says, “Perhaps we might think that God had to do some of that Old Testament stuff at the time, but Jesus has shown that God really prefers to do things differently now. So we allow the New Testament simply to cancel out the Old Testament and consign its most unpleasant parts to the dustbin of history (and theology).”

But there are three reasons why this argument won’t stand up to a full reading of Scripture:

1) The Old Testament has as much to say about the love and grace of God as the New. Remember our trek through Exodus and the number of times that God relents and forgives his people. Most famously we read these words in Exodus 34:6-7 –

"The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation."

Moses shows that the weight of God’s character is toward compassion, grace, and love—he is “slow to anger,” and wrath is not God’s first choice.

The Psalmists also pick up this theme of Gods grace. Look at Psalm 103:8-11:
8 The LORD is compassionate and gracious,
       slow to anger, abounding in love.

 9 He will not always accuse,
       nor will he harbor his anger forever;

 10 he does not treat us as our sins deserve
       or repay us according to our iniquities.

 11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
       so great is his love for those who fear him;

Time and again, the writers of the Old Testament express the compassion of God as the foundational aspect of God’s character over and against the manipulative wrath and violence of the pagans and their gods. Remember that from the beginning, God created humans for relationship, not wrath. We need to balance our understanding of the Old Testament with this image of God.

2) By contrast, the New Testament isn’t all about puppies and rainbows and the soft and mushy love of God. The New Testament has much to say about the anger and judgment of God. Jesus talked often about the destruction that was coming upon Jerusalem as a form of God’s judgment for their failure to turn from their nationalistic and self-interested ways. He also talked about Gehenna as a metaphor for hell—Gehenna being the garbage dump outside Jerusalem that smoldered and smoked all the time (it’s now a park). For Jesus, judgment was the other side of grace and his preaching was a constant call for people to repent or turn to God in anticipation of the coming judgment.

Outside the Gospels, God’s judgment remained a constant theme. Read Paul’s letter to the Romans, for example, or the letters of James and Peter (not to mention Revelation). The writer of Hebrews would compare the judgment of God to those prescribed in the Old Testament Law and say, shockingly, that they would be much worse!

“If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," and again, "The Lord will judge his people." It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

3) The New Testament uses examples of Old Testament judgments as a warning. Jesus used the example of the flood (Matthew 24:36-41), and Sodom and Gomorrah (Matthew 10:15, 11:23-24), while Paul used the plagues as a warning from history (1 Corinthians 10:6-10)

Thus we see that the New Testament doesn’t simply portray God as a jolly Santa, but as a God who balances grace and judgment as two sides of the same coin. In fact, the specter of judgment seems to be much worse in the New Testament. In the Old Testament, the judgments were in the form of physical death or exile…in the New, eternal punishment is involved. We may not like that, but there it is!

That brings us to our second argument about the conquest of Canaan and that has to do with the Israelites themselves. This argument says that it was the Israelites, and not God, who acted to destroy their enemies in total. Somehow, this argument goes, they simply misinterpreted God’s commands and went on a bloodthirsty killing spree. Blame them for what happened, not God.

Well, that sounds great, but the rest of Scripture doesn’t support that view. In the rest of the Bible, the conquest of Canaan is always viewed as something that accomplished God’s will as the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham of land and descendants (Genesis 15:18-21). The prophets would view the conquest as a positive thing, a great act of God in Israel’s history and a reminder of God’s provision for the nation (Amos 2:9). Even in the New Testament, the conquest is viewed as an act of God’s sovereignty. In the Book of Acts, the martyr Stephen points to the conquest as the means by which Israel “took the land from the nations God drove out before them” (Acts 7:45) and Paul would preach that God “overthrew seven nations in Canaan, giving their land to his people as their inheritance.”

Clearly, the rest of the biblical writers saw the actions of the Israelites in the conquest of Canaan as being directed by God as an act of God’s sovereign judgment on pagan nations, whose wickedness had reached epic proportions, and as a means of making a home for God’s chosen people through whom the whole world would come to know God. They didn’t wave away these texts, nor did they try to explain them in a way that makes them more palatable. That makes it very difficult for us to do so as well.

There’s a third argument that has emerged in recent years, however, that many have gravitated toward and it has to do with the literary setting of the Bible. With increasing frequency, many scholars have come to view the texts of Deuteronomy and Joshua in particular as being written during a much later period in Israel’s history than the time of the events themselves—perhaps even as late as the period of the exile in the 6th century BC, some 600 years or more after these events purportedly took place.

Deuteronomy, for example, seems reference events in the exile, when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586BC and carried off the people as slaves. The commands of God to destroy their pagan enemies, then, are projections back on their history—a way of saying, “Had we done this, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” Joshua, on the other hand, may have been written during the reign of one of the ancestor’s of King David, Josiah, who may have been trying to legitimize his claim for reconquering the land after foreign invasion. At any rate, the argument goes, these accounts of the conquest reflect a later projection of writers trying to craft a foundational narrative for their claim on the land.

Some of the historical and archaeological evidence seems to support this argument, at least to a degree. The archaeological record of the Israelites prior to the time of David is sketchy at best. Excavations at cities like Jericho reveal layers of destruction, but the dating doesn’t seem to line up with the Israelite conquest. Even the Bible itself shows that the total destruction of cities and peoples outlined in Joshua didn’t really happen that way. By the Book of Judges, which we’ll get to next, we’ll see that some of these same Canaanite peoples are still alive and well and wicked as ever. Total war, with the leveling of cities and the slaughter of whole populations, was a fact of life in the ancient Near East, but there’s scant evidence that the Israelites were the perpetrators of so much of it.

Not only that, we’ve already seen the biblical writers were fond of hyperbole and exaggeration. We’ve already seen this in some of the numbers and lifespans in the Old Testament. When they say, for example, that “all” the people of a particular city were killed, it’s not designed as a factual statement, but a statement that there was great destruction as is common to war. There may have been battles and skirmishes, in other words, but they were likely more like localized not of the scale that the biblical writers report from the perspective of several centuries later.

There’s a wide appeal for this argument because, in some sense, it does let God off the hook. If these stories are merely later projections, we can breathe easily and know that while God is still sovereign, he’s not a bloodthirsty killer. Problem solved, right?

Well, not exactly. We still have to reckon with the Bible’s clear, unwavering, and consistent view that God is a righteous judge, who judges not only the pagan nations for their rebellious wickedness and idolatry, but Israel herself. Unlike the modern jihadist or the medieval crusader, the Israelites themselves were never to wage a kind of holy war in God’s name, believing that they would be victorious because they were more righteous. Even Deuteronomy warns them of thinking that way:

After the LORD your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself, "The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness." No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you. 5 It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the LORD your God will  Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 6 Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the LORD your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.

God would later use pagan empires like the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Romans as instruments of judgment on Israel. Violence is part of the whole biblical narrative because it is part of the human narrative.

And perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us. God is holy, humanity is fallen and sinful. Warfare and destruction are the byproducts of human sinfulness, but rather than destroy us all God chooses to operate within the confines of fallen humanity in order to still achieve his ultimate purpose for creation. As N.T. Wright puts it, “Somehow, in a way we are inclined to find offensive, God has to get his boots muddy and, it seems, to get his hands bloody, to put the world back to rights.”

We cannot escape these stories of violence because they are, in a very real sense, the story of humanity and if God is going to work with us then God will somehow need to be involved in the midst of it in ways we cannot understand. I think it’s ok that we’re offended or at least troubled by these stories in the Book of Joshua. I think it proves that we’re humans, made in the image of God. In some sense, I think God himself would have found the whole business offensive, too, however it played out in reality. As God himself said through the prophet Ezekiel, “As surely as I live, declares the sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live” (Ezekiel 33:11)

Wickedness gets played out in our world in a myriad of ways. Perhaps we’d be even more offended if we believed that God ultimately did nothing about it. We’re uncomfortable with a God who judges, yet without judgment we ultimately have no grace and without grace we have no hope. At the same time, we see that God’s first movement in Scripture is rarely judgment—always patience and hoping for repentance. Remember Abraham pleading with God over Sodom and Gomorrah and God relenting from destroying the complaining Israelites in the desert. No, the Scripture seems to indicate that God wants to hold back judgment as long as possible, and that God grieves over the fallenness of humanity.

With God, we grieve that falleness. With God, we grieve over violence, in our own communities, in our nation, and in places like Darfur, Rwanda, and other places where the destruction of whole people groups still is part of human evil. Humanity is in pain because of sin, and somehow in ways we cannot fully fathom God enters into that pain both to judge and to heal.

It’s so easy for us to get hung up on these stories as barriers to faith, but we have to remember that they are only part of the story. Remember, we’re still in Act 3. In Act 4 we will meet God’s ultimate answer to the sinfulness of humanity. We will meet Jesus. But we will not escape stories of violence and judgment in Act 4, either. They will be there in spades and will even be more graphic and bloody and horrible than anything the book of Joshua can give us. God will once again get his boots muddy and his hands bloody in order to set the world to rights.

But in Act 4, the target of violence will not be a nation, be it Israel or another. No, the victim of violence will be God himself in the person of Jesus Christ. And in that violence, God himself will take on the judgment due to the whole world.

That’s part 2 and we’ll talk about that next week as we meet Jesus on the way to Jerusalem.

Sources:

Wright, Christopher. The God I Don't Understand:Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith. Zondervan, 2009.

Wright, N.T. Evil and the Justice of God. IVP Press, 2008.