What is the point of Pentecost? What is the use of this day we call the
birthday of the church? Are we
celebrating the coming of the Holy Spirit into our midst, the dawning of a new
age of humankind, or are we merely re-enacting a story, a play that is no
longer relevant, whose only characters have become long devoid of any meaning? Are the secularists right? Are we merely the perpetuators of myths,
peddlers of superstition and an age-old decrepit sort of order? Are we what they say we are? Are we the
pitiful inhibitors of progress they claim; con-artists so pathetic that we have
actually bought into our own con, sellers of the invisible to a people too
scared and too uneducated not to buy? Is
today a myth? Is the only difference
between Pentecost and Pandora, of the Holy Spirit and Heracles, that people
have evolved out of the one and not the other?
A tale of whispy fire and the miraculous speaking of other
languages, of blessings bestowed by breath, and Advocate that only exists for
those who believe he does? If someone
asks us as Christians, when we speak of Pentecost, which one do we speak of? Is it the one in John or is it the one in
Acts? Two separate accounts of the
coming of the Holy Spirit, two very different stories of the coming of the
third person of the Trinity, how can both be true? Who in their right mind
would ever believe such tales?
If we are honest we would admit these are all very good
questions, and as strange as it sounds I wish more Christians would ask
them. I won’t lie to you, ladies and gentlemen,
I have studied the history of the Church, and I see something of a disconnect
between the followers of Jesus now and the followers then. The followers then spoke boldly and with power. They spoke against the social injustices of
their time, sought reform, and went to their deaths gladly. They took babies off of garbage heaps and
found them homes, we trick scared mothers into fake Crisis Pregnancy Centers. They fought for the treatment of criminals,
removing cruel punishments; we take away their right to vote and have governors
go on record to say they do not mourn for a second that they have executed an
innocent man. They brought a message
into the wilderness of the world, taking a vibrant gospel to a people who did
not speak their tongue or even remotely knew their ways. We won’t even go across the street to get to
know our neighbors.
And so I looked at these things, I looked at the church then
and the church now and I asked myself, “What happened?” How did things get to be this way? What happened that turned a group of people so
empowered into a people so lifeless?
Ladies and gentlemen, most people forget I did not go to seminary first and then to law school. I was not some naïve schoolboy loyal to the
Christian story because my family would disdain me if I didn’t. I didn’t go to
seminary first and then law school, I went to seminary as a fully trained
attorney. I knew garbage when I heard
it, and if you think you’ve got it tough try being a theology professor under
cross-examination by one of your students.
Ladies and gentlemen, I know evidence, I know reason, I know how to
reconstruct an event that happened in the past, and I know how arguments are
made. These stories are NOT
garbage. They are NOT myth. Just because someone gives an account of the
fantastic does not mean it is fantasy.
I don’t say these things because I believe blindly in the
stories handed down to me, I was a questioning believer. I took nothing at face value. I read, I studied, I learned. When I read these pages I put them to the
fire because as a believer in God I knew that was what He wanted me to do. He wanted me to see if these words were true,
He wanted me to taste and see that He was good. He did that because He wanted me to have a
relationship with Him not a human religion.
I was not supposed to believe human institutions but doubt Him. So I tested the Scriptures, I attacked them
as vehemently as any lawyer would, because as a man of conscience THAT’S MY
JOB. I cannot take this message into the
world if in fact I am not convinced of its truth. I am not going to spread lies that get people
hurt, and I am not going to risk a single ounce of my time and resources over
something I am not 100% positive that it actually happened, and neither should you. And what was the end result of all that
testing, you may ask? Well, I’m here
aren’t I?
Ladies and gentlemen, our so-called scholars do a-lot to
detract against our Bible. They’ll go to
all sorts of lengths to say our Bible is not what it says it is. They say Moses did not write its first five
books, but they won’t tell you how many ancient Egyptian Words are in those Hebrew
books. They won’t tell you that the
author of those books not only clearly spoke Hebrew and Egyptian, was clearly
very literate, knew the landscape of ancient Egypt very well, so well in fact that
modern archeology has had to catch up to him, was extremely familiar with
Pharaoh’s court and was well versed in ancient military tactics. Clearly not the markings of a prince of
Egypt. What is more, they fail to answer
the question what would be the point of even writing such books. They say the Exodus is a myth, that the
Israelites were merely an uneducated band of loosely aligned raiders roaming
through Palestine. What they fail to
explain is why then these books even be written. If I came down to you today and said America
wasn’t actually a series of colonies that fought for its independence but that
we were all slaves of the Canadians thousands of years ago forced to build
their monuments but freed by a God you’d never heard of before, you might think
it was interesting but you wouldn’t believe it.
If you wouldn’t believe it, why would they? I’ve been around lawyers, my friends, and the
first rule is if you are going to lie you have to make it believable. What is the
point of telling your audience a story of how you were rescued from slavery miraculously
unless your audience already knew it was true?
Who else would ever receive such an idea?
And that’s just our Old Testament! Imagine what they do to the New? Jesus never existed and his divinity was
manufactured in the 4th century at the council of Nicaea. Well first of all, which is it? Conspirators generally don’t manufacture
divine status to people who never existed.
Second of all, these are all extremely interesting conclusions to make
of works that by all accounts were penned in the first century. Ladies and gentlemen, Nero caught Christians
and used them to light his palace grounds. After Nero comes Domitian. Since just taking us up and killing us
wouldn’t suffice anymore he denounces us as atheists and kills us then. After Domitian came Trajan, and despite all this
persecution in less than a century a governor in northern Turkey complains
about how these Christians are turning up everywhere: the city, the
countryside, everywhere. He captures our
women, tortures them, and discovers we don’t do anything terrible but that we
worship Jesus as Divine and the see the emperor as human. After Trajan came Marcus Aurelius, who after
learning that killing us outright wasn’t working decided to just torture us to
the point of death or imprison us and let us die of exposure. And they weren’t just attacking the laity
anymore, the targets became ever more nuanced.
They went after our bishops, our scholars, our learned men and
women. Their great minds like Celsus,
unable to argue effectively against Christianity, unable to denounce Jesus’
miracles as false, unable to decry the empty tomb, their greatest mind could
only say Jesus was a fatherless criminal who healed the sick, drove out
spirits, and raised people from the dead by witchcraft. I guess if you can’t win a debate through
argument, the only thing left is to kill the debaters. And so all this and worse continued until
Constantine and the Edict of Toleration occurred over half a century before any
Church Council. Ladies and gentlemen,
does this happen for people that don’t exist?
In a world where you literally had a different religion for every foot
of ground you could walk on, do you pick the one that gets you tortured and
killed if you weren’t radically convinced of its truth? It’s pointed out that people die for their
religion all the time, except no they don’t.
The terrorists that attacked the world trade center on 9/11 didn’t die
for Mohammed, I’d argue greatly they didn’t even know Mohammed. They didn’t die for their religion, they died
for their politics. They died to effect
political change, these Christians didn’t die for politics they endured
politics until it killed them.
Christianity is the only social movement in history that defeated a
superpower by losing. Do people do that
for a lie?
The fact is, the 9/11 terrorists didn’t know Mohammed, but
our gospel writers knew Jesus, and in the end they didn’t call him Prophet or
Rabbi, they called him God. And while
so-called scholars, what they really are media pundits with enough money to buy
their Doctorate, they dismiss the gospels out of hand and they do so too
readily. Each gospel is argument, a
challenge to the most basic precepts their audience has. Mark addresses persecuted Christians afraid
to talk about Jesus and he ends his gospel with a conundrum, with Jesus’ tomb
empty and women too afraid to speak about what they’ve seen. Matthew’s gospel is a message to fellow
Palestinian Jews about how Pagans acted more righteously than they, Luke’s
gospel is written literally to a hostile witness, he is writing his gospel and
acts so that Theophilus will believe what he has been told. Theophilus is not a believer yet, and the
fact is you don’t spend years upon years researching and writing books in the
ancient world to convince someone of an easily disprovable lie. And then there is John. John’s gospel is literally an insult to his
audience’s intelligence. It is back
handed slap that says that an itinerate uneducated homeless rabbi from
hillbilly Judea knows better than all of Greek education and philosophy
combined. It enrages, it taunts, no it
demands you investigate what they have to say and see for yourself whether or
not it’s true. Ladies and gentlemen, as
a man with his law degree you don’t make these plays unless you know you can
win. These arguments grab the audience
by the ear and MAKE them look at the Jesus story, they insist you do not take
them at face value and order you to spend every ounce of your energy trying to
refute them so that when you fail
you’ll finally get it. After every
argument is spent, after every dart you’ve thrown at them bounces off, only
then does doubt evaporate. Only then
does the fantastic reality of a God who loves you, who loves you enough to
become human and die for you, only then does it sink in that it’s real. All of it.
The problem with the Church today, my friends, is not that
our stories are false, the problem is we let people make us too afraid to
question whether they are false. We let
fear overcome us, fear of how people will treat us if we question, fear of what
the answers to those questions might be.
That fear crippled us, made us unwilling and unsure. It made us falter in our dedication to the
point where we had to be guilted into even doing a half measure. It made us think one hour a week was enough,
but that one hour a week for many turned into one every two, then one a month,
then just Christmas and Easter. We
traded a transformed people and a transformed worth for a few magic words and a
belief in fire insurance. As your pastor
I will remind you it doesn’t work that way.
The man who buried his talent in fact does not get rewarded for doing
so.
Ladies and gentlemen, last year I pointed out that you were
innocent. You remain so. After everything that happened, after
everything that this congregation went through it chose to remain faithful to
its character as it always has done, but a year ago I said Innocence would not
be enough. Our foe is too wily and too
cunning for innocence alone, and I challenged you to be wise as well as
innocent, and you have been. You’ve been
unorthodox, you’ve broken boundaries, taken calculated risks, and today we’ve
beaten the odds. We are still here are
we are more fruitful for Christ than we ever have been. This year, however, this Pentecost it is time
to be something more. You have been
innocent, you have been wise, but now I challenge you to be Empowered. Accept the Holy Spirit into your lives and
follow His direction. Strap on his sword
and put on the full armor of God. What
is Pentecost ladies and gentlemen?
Pentecost is God’s sucker punch.
After Yeshua’s victory in the resurrection the forces of evil, hate, and
human misery were left in disarray; too distracted, too dizzy, too focused on keeping
away from Christ in the boxing ring to notice that God gave us the gloves. The time to strike is now, the time bring comfort
for the grieving, relief to the wounded of body and spirit, the time call out
the unjust for all the hurt they cause IS NOW.
The Greedy, the power-mad, the hate-mongers, and the pilferers of human
suffering are out there and they have no idea the Holy Hell they’ve called down
on themselves. Let’s get out there and
do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment