The Last Barrier

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 4^th 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.   

     

Peace on Earth?

               Good Morning!  This year seems to have just whizzed by hasn’t it?  Indeed, every year I find the months seem to go a little quicker and the days fly by just a little faster.  And, in all honesty, though, ladies and gentlemen, for every year that goes by I wake up and find the world is just that much harsher, and the people in it just a little more cruel.  This year was certainly no exception, was it?  In 2015 so many names were brought to our attention, names like San Bernadino, Umpqua Community College, Planned Parenthood at Colorado Springs, and Charleston, North Carolina.  2015 also brought up other names, names like Islamic State and Boko Haram, the latter an African Extremist group who proudly proclaimed that they would marry nine-year olds, abducted some 270 school girls and forced them into marriages.  While we got those children back, our 6 month response time to that kidnapping was of little use to the young women who were victimized and the vast majority of whom are now pregnant.  And indeed, adding to this list that is already too long, we find also the names of Kim Davis, Missouri University, the Baltimore Riots, and finally Paris France.  It makes me just want to hide.  Yes, when confronted with the shear immensity of how violent and ugly our world is becoming it is easy to just want to lose myselves in the holidays, to envelope myselves in Christmas lights and tinsel, in presents, and carols – anything really.  Anything so I don’t have to admit to myself that this day there is not peace on earth and even on Christmas there is no goodwill toward men. 

                But in light of all the conflict and ugliness we have experienced this year, be they racial, religious, or otherwise, there is hope for all of this.  The good news is the world doesn’t have to be this way.  It doesn’t have to be angry, hurt, and confused and we do not have to respond to hate with hate, and in these regards I want to introduce you to someone.  He is not here right now, though I keep him with me.  You see, as I mulled over all that the world has been through this past year, my thoughts kept returning to my old mentor in seminary.  Now, as your pastor I want to affirm again that for us as Christians the answer is still Jesus, but I think there is a place for the people God puts in our path, and that our teachers and fellow humans often have important lessons to teach us about Him.  My mentor, as he referred to himself, was the right reverend Dr. Wilbur P. Stone.  He was a farmer, a businessman, a missionary, a pastor, and a professor.  He was a self proclaimed Congregationalist Baptist Pentacostal who also enjoyed the occasional Roman Catholic Mass. We didn’t agree on a lot theologically, but the loving heart of this man always struck me to the core.  As a Baptist minister he did not think a number of things were proper, homosexuality and homosexual relationships being one of them, but his response to his brother when he came out of the closet was just phenomenal.  When his younger brother told his family he was gay and in a gay relationship, much of his family left the dinner table never to speak to him again.  Wilbur just sat there, and in his fifties no less, as his brother turned to him through terrible tears. He asked Wilbur, “Aren’t you going to disown me too?  Aren’t you going to tell me what a sinful human being I am and tell me I’m going to burn in hell?” Wilbur turned to his brother and said, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, that is not for me to decide.  But I do know this, I am never going to abandon you, and wherever you are bound there will not be a day when you are not tripping over my love for you.”

                After my own study of the Scriptures and the history of the church, I disagreed with him that homosexuality was a sin.  Indeed, there is no evidence the church had much to say on the subject for its first 1100 years and had no problem producing wedding liturgy for same-sex couples.  But while we disagreed in theology we were in one hundred percent agreement over how that theology ought to be applied.  However, this is not the story I want to tell you about the man.  The story I am reminded of in these turbulent times is the story of Wilbur at one of his yearly Peace talks with Muslims in Eastern Africa.  While Israel and Palestine get most of the news coverage for peace talks in that part of the world, the fact is, as Wilbur and many others have found out, other places need them too.  And for many years Wilbur participated in these talks, addressing Muslim peoples pushed out of their homelands by their own Islamic brothers and pushed into tents where they had to rely on other peoples for food and water.  These talks of course had varying degrees of success but the time Wilbur remembered the most was one of the most recent. 

                These peace talks were always respectful, always non-violent, but this particular time a hard lined conservative Muslim imam found out about the talks and he butted his way in.  He was rude and he was quarrelsome.  He interrupted Wilbur’s points constantly, seemingly having a quote from the Qu’ran for everything Wilbur had to say.  At the end the imam got up and made a speech to Muslims in the crowd.  The word of God in the Qu’ran was clear, he said.  Wilbur and these Christians were infidels and even simply sitting here listening to them was nothing less than a show of disloyalty to Allah.  He called on the Muslim men listening to repent, to rise up and denounce these Christians as the faithless deceivers that they were.  Within moments some the Muslim men arose from within audience.  Steel in their backs and righteousness in their eyes, they stood up before Wilbur could even react.  Boldly they rose up and pointed their fingers at the Imam and said, “would you please just shut the hell up.”  They got up and told him that after being chased into the wilderness so many years ago by their own supposed Muslim brothers and sisters that they now knew why the Prophet himself sought refuge with the Christians when he was chased away by his own people.  Ugliness and hate in fact did NOT win that day, and years of hard work building peace amongst two very different peoples was not undone by one man’s self-righteous bigotry.  There was Peace on Earth in that little corner of the world and it was there because there was good will toward men.

                Our gospel lesson today is found in John, but today I want to talk about Luke’s gospel.  I want to talk about the Christmas story that tells of censuses and inns; of shepherds and angels.  I want to talk about that gospel, because in that gospel goodwill is absolutely the point.  When we hear Luke describe Caesar Augustus’ decree, we hear merely words of history, of a man just chronicling down facts as an accountant crunches numbers.  But what Luke’s gentile audience would know that perhaps we would miss is that the Jews revolted at every census.  Unwilling to be tracked by their government and unwilling to be recorded so they could be taxed, the Jews would be stirred up in Judea and would engage in violent riots.  As a Gentile Theophilus, a gentile friend of God, you would be constantly confronted with the often deadly actions of God’s people.  And while yes the Caesars and Rome were hardly above critique, that tax money supported the country in ways that people really benefited from.  It went to roads that kept trade healthy, it went to the courts so people could submit their pleas, and it kept the lands policed and crime down – in all except Judea.  That is why the story of Joseph and Mary obeying the census would be so shocking and yet so very vital.  Greek Historian Diodorus Siculus commented that the Jews considered all the world an enemy, but not these Jews.  These Jews did not revolt, they did not make war, they did not turn to violence.  For a Gentile believer in God this news was the world to you, for the long foretold and awaited Messiah did not come through the self-righteous and the war mongering, but through the peaceful and the obedient.  It came from Jews who obeyed the edict of their country, risking not only estrangement from their fellow kin, but risking their own lives and the life of their child in traveling the dangerous Judean countryside.  This was the Holy Family, the family that bore you as a gentile no ill will and was willing to burden itself, even endanger itself, for your benefit.

                And we find as we read into Luke’s story further that the goodwill shown by Mary and Joseph that day God would simply outdo.  We find that though His own people were typically inhospitable, that though none would share or even give up their own room for a pregnant woman and her family, that though it was amongst a people who had no more room for their king than a stable and a feeding trough, God bore them no ill will.  He came anyway.  Though the Jewish faithful had been groaning for centuries for a return of the Davidic King, it is both shocking and despicable the only honor reserved for those of the line of David was apparently that of a shut door.  But when God sent his angels it was not to punish, it was not to rebuke, but it was to proclaim the coming of the Messiah with Joy.  And the shepherds, unclean vagabonds and thieves to a proper Jew of the city, it was to them that the angels came.  Those who had been ostracized, those who were looked down upon, they were not missed.  In fact they were given a special invitation.  Though there was many a reason for God to be angry and incensed, rightfully indignant and in a mind to punish, it is the Incarnation, the birth of God as a human being, that we find God’s true character – Love.  God bears mankind no ill will, it is we who bear ill will for one another.    

         And so our gospel is like our lives this Christmas season.  We too live in a world that chooses to be harsh and inhospitable.  We too live amongst an unforgiving people who seem to always find a reason to have no goodwill for their fellow man, people who see the lives of their brothers and sisters as worth so much less than even the briefest false feeling of righteousness.  These people are absolutely in the world, but the good news is that we don’t have to be like them.  Just as God chose not to make mankind his enemy that fateful night 2000 years ago we can do that too.  We can choose to be like God, we can choose to leave the world of anger and fear and pride behind, we too can enter our suffering world with both love and joy.  We can choose to love people different than us, to respect and show kindness to people with whom we do not agree.  Through this we can have Peace on Earth!  This is not merely a numb and impotent phrase we tell ourselves this time of year.  It is not a set of tinsel-colored blinders we put every December the 25^th, it is a promise made by the Maker.  Peace on Earth is not only possible, but because of the work of Christ it is the inescapable reality. 

                Ladies and Gentlemen, the world is in turmoil.  It is suffering and in despair.  The violence and the hate of this past year have made it forget the very real hope we have for a better tomorrow.  It threatens to turn the Peace and the Joy of this Day into a mockery.  It will not succeed.  It will not succeed because we know of a better way, a way that answers anger with kindness, hate with love and fear with Peace, a way that began with God extending a hand of friendship and goodwill to an undeserving people that 1^st Christmas morning.  May we inject the world with that same Christmas grace every single day of the year.      

Amen and Amen.