My Psalm 35

Oh Defender

Say to my soul,

“I Am your salvation.”

Oh King of Justice

May my whole being exclaim

“There is none like Jehovah.”

Oh Vindicator

heal my forlorn soul; ease my mourning.

Arise to defend the innocent; do justice to my gloating accusers…

that I may give thanks in the great assembly--

that I may praise you among the throng.

Oh Defender

amidst all my battles

Say to my soul,

“I Am your salvation.”

Coping with Regrets

       All of us live with some regrets, so as I began researching an upcoming sermon, I scanned the internet for what secular bloggers typically offer people struggling with regret.   

     Some of the advice out there is generally sound, although it sometimes suffers from a tendency to minimize the severity of our most troubling regrets.  “You are only human.  You are entitled to mistakes.  Don’t be so hard on yourself,” bloggers say.   Yet, I doubt the man who has ruined his marriage and hurt his children really believes that his problem is that he’s judging himself too severely.

      There’s also advice out there which seems a bit preachy to me.  There is the blithely simple: “Learn from your mistakes.  Don’t do it again.”  There is the sometimes plausible, “Be thankful you can rectify your mistakes.” Then there is the ever standard, “Learn to forgive yourself, and move on.”

     What all of this self-help fails to grapple with is that our failures, misjudgments and ethical lapses all bring about a very real cost.  Four years ago my wife and I discovered Ross Department stores on the East coast while on vacation, and I told her I wanted to invest over $1,000 in them.  Yet, I simply failed to act.  Ross has since rose 60 points on the NASDAQ. I don’t think I could quit kicking myself for not investing if I didn’t know I have far greater riches still available, riches that are forever insured.

      I also regret coaching my children the way my Dad coached me.  The problem with that, of course, is that I’m not my Dad and my kids are not me.  The kids bear in their souls the cost of that mistake.  I’ve told them I’m sorry. I strive to do better.  But they still bear that cost.  Such costs remain even when we want to forgive ourselves.  Regrets will likely maintain a compulsive hold on us unless we accept that there is one who alone can bear such cost, who forgives us and offers healing and recompense to those we’ve hurt both now and forevermore.      

   

Sacred Space in Exile 1 Peter 2:1-10

      By this time it should be obvious that I read  1 Peter as a sustained reflection on the consequences of the new birth for people who feel like cultural exiles in the world.  This particular reflection calls on the church to remember its baptism as if they were all new Christians, and this section may have originally been an address specifically to new Christians, which was later folded into Peter’s wider masterpiece.    It addresses us as if we have arisen from the baptistery: As new born babes… (2:2)   As you come to him, the living Stone… (2:4) The new birth is like entering a temple—Americans might sense some remote hint of the feeling of awe inspired by the approach and entrance into special revered space if they have walked up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 

     Critical to my “approach” to these verses is the notion that the new birth brings about an approach or a coming into an experience of the sacred that is likened to the approach of faithful Israel to a sacred stone which marked entrance into the sacred precincts of the temple.  Jesus is a living Stone.  That is to say he is functioning like a sacred stone was critical to Temple entry.      

     This draws heavily on the early church’s understanding of Jesus as the renewed Temple of God.  To be joined with Christ in baptism is to be ushered into this experience of the sacred space.  Of course God in Christ is a living temple—a living Body.  The glory of God resides not in dead stones but in the incarnate body of Jesus who comprises the Temple as Living Stone.  And the very approach into Christ, the living Stone, is one where believers are made into interconnecting stones—we are made into a spiritual house—a spiritual temple—we become living sacred space.  Yes, we are a house in the sense of a household of priests (2:9), but also a holy temple—thus, “living stones,” who collectively house the glory of God’s Spirit.  This dual meaning of house makes the image sometimes hard to follow, but I think we know a collective bunch of people are a ‘household of faith’ and that household always occupies some space.  Thus, where the Body of Christ is we also have a temple—a mysterious space in which the holy may be encountered.  

       All three of the Stone passages Peter cites in these verses are about the approach into sacred space.     

       Isaiah 8:14  is a text where God is himself becomes the appropriate sanctuary for both North Israel and South Judah—he is the one temple presence that the faithful of both divided kingdoms may enter.  He, is the place of refuge.  God is the sanctuary area where there is safety.  Yet, for those who are disobedient attempting to enter into this sacred space is dangerous.  For those, God is not a sacred garden of safety walling out danger—he is rather a discarded stone at the edge of the compound which trips up those defiant and unholy souls who wish to presume on the benefits of the holy.  To the faithless the holiness o God is a fearful and dangerous stumbling stone.

        Isaiah 28:16 looks forward to the re-establishment of the Temple compound which will wipe away evil.  There is a Stone which is the foundation of the Temple’s activity.  The Temple will bring the living water of righteousness to Israel and the nations.  That is good news for those who love righteousness.  Yet, for those who have a covenant with death, the waters of the temple will come as a deluge which washes them away.  

     In Psalm 118:22 we meet the metaphor that we often associate with Palm Sunday when Jesus entered into the temple courts the last week of his life.  There Jesus is being rejected as the entry into the Holy by the leaders of the Temple in his day.  This is similar to Israel’s ancient rejection of God in the quoted Psalm.  The builders of Israel had rejected a certain building stone—the way I might throw away some 2x4’s that I deem crooked.    But God, when he takes over the building project in making the Temple new, selects the very stone the builders rejected and makes it the integrating capstone that makes an entry into the compound possible.   Without the capstone—two sides of an arch would just crumble.  What was rejected is now celebrated as the very entry into the sacred space.  The instrument of entry into the holy, rejected by some—is the one who has ushered us into an experience of the holy. The Jesus the society around the Christians of Asia minor may reject Jesus, but for believers he is the holy threshold into holy space. 

     In all three passages we are reminded that holiness is necessary for entry into and the creation of sacred space.  So it is in light of these verses that I read the initial commands in the first verses of the chapter.  The initial command to take off, lay aside or discard a series of evils, I read as if it were a moral dress-code for priests of holy space.  The concept is a baptismal theme (Gal 3:27).  Malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy and slander all stem from insecurity and a competitive comparative righteousness which exists in the world of favoritism.  These things are discarded as inappropriate attire for people who have received an anointing as priests--who have been born and adopted by an impartial Father, sacrificial Son and imperishable Mystery.    All of these forms of poor dress-code make a community of people and unsafe and unholy place.  Yet, when priests take off unclean attire in holiness they make the temple a sacred place of refuge for all who enter.

     The second image of new birth, alongside a change of clothes, is that of tasting heavenly milk.  Such an image likely arises from places like Isaiah 55:1, 10 where Israel is encouraged to drink milk that costs nothing—by drinking in the word of God that is showered from heaven.  “Tasting” the goodness of the Lord occurs as this kind of positive metaphor only in two other locations in the New Testament.  Once in John 2 where the master of the wedding feast in Cana tastes wine of the Kingdom which Jesus makes from 30 gallon water tanks.  The other is Hebrews 6 where believers are similarly commanded to go beyond their baptism in which they are said to have, “ tasted of the heavenly gift, made partakers of the Holy Ghost,  tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come.”  Newly born priests are, thus, to take their gospel strait up.  Learning to crave undiluted gospel will enable them to grow up into the salvation which is already born in them in embryonic seed form.  Such ritual clothing and diet will produce a community where there is a sacred and safe space.

        This section reaches a crescendo in verse 9: So, we are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God that we may declare the praises of him who called us out of darkness into his wonderful light.  Thus, our new birth then has caused us to take off unholy clothes—to drink the heavenly milk of the Word, to exhibit the kind of character that makes our space safe for others—a place of refuge.  We minister to the world by mystically entering into the heavenly temple where God creates light out of darkness.  Once we were barred from entry into such holy space.  Once we, like early Christians in a pagan empire, lacked a common adoption or any sense of belonging or covenantal agreement, but then we received the mercy that involves us in the redemption of the world.  But now we are priests who maintain sacred space that declares the wonders of God’s underived and eternal life.  So in addition to a new set of clothes, a new nutritional source of holy food, a new approach into holy,  the new birth also ushers us into a new vocation—one of declaring praise and exhibiting the danger and the safety of Divine Presence in the world.

Here's the link to the full sermon

Reborn into Loving Non-Conformity

   Peter tells his churches, who feel like they are cultural exiles, there is a kind of feeling of belonging that is possible through loving non-conformity. Forming a community of deep belonging starts with thinking differently.    Peter says in 1 Peter 1:13 as people with tightened mental belts, disciplined, completely set your hope on the grace being carried to you through the revealing of Jesus Christ.    In the movie Sea Biscuit, the horse’s jockey, Red Pollard, gets uncontrollably angry when another rider cut him off.  The outrage made Pollard’s character so mad that he ignored their race plan and just focused on getting even with this other 40-1 long shot.  The result was that Sea Biscuit wore himself out sprinting after this other horse, and the field overtook him and trounced him.
      After the race, Sea Biscuit’s trainer and owner asked Pollard, what happened to the plan?  Pollard’s response was—“He cut me off, what was I supposed to do—let him get away with it?”
     “But we had a plan,” the trainer insisted.      Pollard again couldn’t focus on the issue.  He could only focus on—“he cut me off.”  And because of his inability to focus on anything but the injustice of being cut off, he lost the race.     In the race of life people are going to cut us off.  Forces that do not want people to come to faith and hope will be relentlessly active in trying to get you mentally distracted from what is the real issue of your spiritual growth.  Christian reflection is not free association, it disciplines the emotions so that you can keep the main thing the main thing.  The devil would like nothing more than to have you bouncing around from one injustice to perceived injustice after another.  But the injustices are not the issue.  The issue is that there is a reason you will let yourself be distracted by an infinite number of squirrel moments rather than focusing on the fact that Christ has ushered you into the grace of glory and that he will continue to do so until Christ’s final unveiling when the undying New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven from God.        The central theological assertion of 1 Peter 1:13-25 is that believers have been born of an imperishable seed. Verse 23 says, “For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.”   The whole of a plant and its destiny is contained within the germinating power of a seed.  Thus, all the future expressions of the undying kind of life are present within the reborn in seminal form. In a world of distractions we are to have the discipline of mind to stay focused on such a saving reality rather than to be conformed to the patterns of this world.  Holiness requires a kind of separation and distinction from the dying culture around the reborn.  What makes us truly alive comes from another dimension.       Americans are often shocked by what Peter thinks conformity looks like.  For Peter, worldly conformity involves being conformed to the preferential treatment we give to potential consumers and marketers of our idols.  By contrast, in coming up out of the baptistery we cry “Abba Father” and receive the Spirit’s testimony with our own spirit.    And so Peter insists in verse 17 that in the new birth we have all called on the same impartial father and are called to an impartial life—one that loves sacrificially rather than preferentially.      The concept of redemption is one where a slave is purchased out of slavery and generally adopted into a family.  In verse 18 we learn that freedom and belonging in the born-again sense is not gained by ordinary financial means but it is procured by Jesus blood, shed not preferentially for those who could do for him, but graciously for all.      In verse 22 we understand that those who have passed through the purification ritual --having obeyed the truth—have thus been ushered eis (into) a community of sincere brotherly affection.  Having called on an impartial father, having been redeemed through a transcendent grace offered graciously to all, having been joined into an adoptive family that is eternally alive—the reborn become focused on sacrificially and impartially loving others deeply.     In this lesson I explore the kind of belonging we feel as a result of the baptismal life which passes into us from eternity.  I contrast it with the temporary and dying forms of belonging often offered by the wider culture.  Here's the link to the whole sermon: Born into Loving Non-Cnformity

A New Birth into Joyous Suffering

     The theme of Christian rebirth or baptismal initiation into a life of discipleship is so sustained in 1 Peter that some scholars have proposed that it is a series of baptismal liturgies.  My own guess is that the letter reflects a tradition earlier and less formal than all that.  Yet, I acknowledge that the Apostle left us a series of discrete reflections about the new birth which all seamlessly teach about the consequence of baptismal experience. There is not a more theologically rich and sustained reflection about the meaning of the new birth anywhere.  Baptism reenacts the gospel and it thus acts as a hermeneutical key for understanding Christian life in an inhospitable culture where the church is seen as a continued Israel—chosen, diaspora exiles in a foreign culture. 

    The letter begins in 1 Peter 1:1-5:

To God's elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, 2 who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood: Grace and peace be yours in abundance.

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade — kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.

      Here the Apostle insists that the God whom we know in Jesus has always planned for us baptismal obedience. The washing of rebirth is then an act of faith in God’s initiative to be distinguished from any magical or self-righteous attempts to manipulate God or covenantally earn his favor. Christ’s offering in the heavenly temple sprinkles us with his cleansing power that we otherwise simply do not have.  Regeneration is then only possible by the gracious self-offering of God.  It connects us to the work of the Spirit who sets believers apart.  Only being ushered into a connection with the Spirit who pervades all life will give life to our spirits.

     This new-birth or rebirth is what Jesus spoke of in John 3 when he spoke of being born again or born from above.  In that context he spoke of the necessity of being born of the water and of the Spirit.  1 John 5:6 says that our relationship with Christ came by water and blood — Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. 7 For there are three that testify: 8 the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.  Thus, when we are baptized we are birthed into a mystical heavenly-temple reality.  This is not accomplished by water only as if ritual could ever manipulate God. It is rather the ordained ritual expression of faith we have in Christ’s blood to cleanse—and in the Spirit’s power to testify to our spirit that we are God’s children.  Faith in Christ’s blood, mystical encounter with Christ’s Spirit and the testimony of the church’s ritual washing all work together to assure a person that God has and always will rescue them from death and dying.   

      From Christ’s crucified side flowed the living water of the heavenly temple; from his pierced Temple flowed blood that renews covenant; his resurrected body breathed the Holy Spirit upon his followers.  Thus, Titus 3:6 says we participate in a washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, 6 whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ. 

     Most importantly for interpreting 1 Peter, 1 Peter 3:21 says this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also — not the removal of dirt from the body but the request for a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, 22 who has gone into heaven and is at God's right hand.  Again, the physical bath is important because in it we express and are saved "through [our] faith in the gracious power of God, who raised him from the dead."

      So in speaking of new birth made possible by the plan of the Father, the transforming work of the Spirit and the blood of Christ, Peter is not merely pointing to a religious initiation ceremony but to a mystical encounter which ushers in renewed spiritual realities from the eternal heavenly dimension. 

      In this lesson I explore how 1) the mystical rebirthing gives living hope in a world where hope routinely dies. 2) It bestows the kind of inheritance, assurance and significance that cannot spoil or fade because it is guarded and stored in the heavenly temple treasury.  3) This secures the believers eternal destiny in the face of deadly threats in that a believer has a place in herself that injustice and tragedy cannot touch—eternity has taken up residence and protects the entire soul.  4) These realities make it possible for there to be a hope and joy in the midst of many kinds of losses and dishonor.  It is then that Christian witness can no longer be passed off as a self-serving business. Such joy in suffering cannot help but arrest the world as somehow coming from another dimension.

Here is the link for the sermon: 

1 Peter 1:3-12 Birth into Joyous Suffering

Climate Change

    This article is not about climate change in the environment, though our long winter is just one more piece of evidence suggesting such change is upon us.  I don’t want to wade into the argument about whether humans are causing crazy weather.  The science is pretty clear: we humans are having some impact.  I wonder how much of the change might be attributed to other factors, but I’m a minister—not a scientist-- so I’m writing about changes in our social climate rather than our natural one.

       So I observe that behavior that shames and threatens is becoming more and more common the more secular we become.  This social climate change is destroying our collective capacity to adapt to any challenge.  Let me try to be delicate: as a preacher I think some of the well-meant concern for the environment comes off as a little too preachy. 

       Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve been interested in renewable energy my whole life. I want to see us plan communities where we are not so dependent on the automobile.  But I don’t want to hear that I’d better change my environmental footprint or be cast into a world-wide apocalyptic nightmare.   This may be true enough.  But this kind of fear isn’t the best motivator.  I can tell a person with COPD that he’s going to die if he doesn’t quit smoking to calm his nerves, but heaping death threats on him is not likely to calm him down.

        Some of this secular, “green” moralizing has all the subtlety of the road-side evangelism of my youth.  “Avoid hell.”  The signs said.  “Repent before it is too late.”  One time a youth pastor, a kind of self-appointed John the Baptist, started preaching to me and my 13 year old peers as if we were corrupt officials in Herod’s regime.  None of us were innocent, of course, but the dumb stuff we were doing was already caused by fear.   Heaping additional fears on us didn’t help.

      Only hope helps.  Paul tells us that virtues “rest on the hope of eternal life.”  People will naturally take care of what they think will always be theirs to enjoy.  Christians care for the world with the assurance that God will purge the world of all deathly elemental forces. (2 Peter 3:12) This hope is not extinguished by bad human behavior, for our hope is not rooted in science or human strategy, but in God.   It seems that once society is cut off from such joyous hope, we inevitably grow fond of pestering and fear-mongering.           

Mourning Chaos

      This week my town mourns a broken creation.  Our world is stalked by death.  Children shoot each other, bridges fall on people, and monstrous chaos incomprehensibly careens into some of our leading citizens' dreams. Easter means nothing unless we face this squarely. 

      Not long ago, a bereaved son, who had lost his mom to cancer, told me he did not want to hear anybody say, “God has a plan; God has a plan.” I don’t blame him.  If there is anything crueler than death, it’s telling the bereaved that God orchestrated their loved one’s murder in order to accomplish some inscrutable good.  That’s more insensitive than saying humans are nothing more than bio-chemicals; and, therefore, a mother’s death is nothing more than a change in chemical composition.  No, the grieving son’s instincts are right.  With the perfect mixture of rage and grief, he cried that his mother’s death “is just not fair.”   

      For many, unjust suffering seems to argue against faith in God.  One young man once pointed me to a video about some small creature who cruelly keeps its prey alive while it slowly sucks its life out.  “How,” this person asked, “could a loving God create a cruel world like that?”     

     “Because Jews and Christians believe that the process of creation is obstructed and unfinished,” I responded.

     He seemed unaware of this.  My questioner didn’t know that Christians believe alien forces of death have lodged themselves into an ongoing creative process and that it is a central tenet of Christian faith that God in Christ entered creation’s experience, suffering a most cruel and unfair death.  Nor had this man considered Jesus’ resurrection being a kind of renewed act of creation which shakes the unjust order to its foundation.  When God raised Jesus, this Jesus became the “first-fruits” of a “new creation” where Lion and lamb will one day lay down together.

     As the earth shook on Easter morning the angels announced the news to which church bells continue to give advanced notice: death and injustice will be damned.  While they are presently still with us, they will not have the last word.