Closing Statements

And the conference is tomorrow!  As such, here, in its totality, is my entire case against a so-called Biblical sexuality.

1) In a culture where death by lynching was an accepted reality even 60 years ago, where not only could people opposed to outlawing lynching run for office openly, and where such people who practiced it are called “Grandpa” instead of “inmate”, it is the duty of any Christian in such a culture, indeed any human being with the barest sliver of a conscience, to hold those who declare an entire class of people sinful, evil, unnatural, or condemned by any Divinity, especially in instances where the so-called offenses are consensual in nature and result in no harm to person, property, or the social well-being, to the strictest standards of political, legal, and spiritual accountability.

2) Because of the nature of the current debate over homosexuality and the current culture that the debate is found in, those in a position of leadership or social influence who declare homosexuality to be ungodly and sinful must have the burden of proof.  If they wish to convince the Church that the loving God whom created all of Mankind and its sexuality would condemn an entire people as sinful, tell them their base identity evil, and force them to deny themselves the very happiness and fulfillment that their hetero brothers and sisters have or risk their immortal soul, they must do so under the strictest scrutiny.  As a Church called to enact Justice and Peace, we as followers of Christ have no other moral option but to insist that they must do so by proving beyond all reasonable doubt, yes, all reasonable doubt, that such is and has always been the case within the Christian religion.  The damage and loss being asked of LGBTQ people for no other reason than the personal discomfort of those against their way of life demands no other standard.

3) Those for Biblical Sexuality cannot remotely meet this burden:

                a) The Bible neither understands itself as a rule book nor the Word of God

b) Jesus the Christ, whom the Bible refers to as the True Word of God, is the final authority within the Christian religion, and his recorded ministry does not involve the subject once.

c) Homosexuality is a modern term important only to a modern world.  Ascribing a 19^th century concept to 1^st century and earlier works would be dismissed as an anachronism in literally any other area of human scholarship.

d) Any and all understandings of the Bible condemning homosexuality come from cultural bias not interpretive diligence, extending even to irresponsible if not deliberate mistranslation.

i) The early chapters of Genesis are poetry and counter-myth, not a chronicle of actual historical events.  Any argument relying on the story actually revealing how God made anything is fallacious.

ii) Homosexual Anal penetration was a common method of shaming in the ancient world, almost always done by heterosexually married men.  Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned because they were xenophobic rapists, not immaculately dressed interior designers or restaurant managers.

iii. Leviticus 18 and 20 lists Old Testament sexual offenses generally, the vast focus being on familial couplings not homosexual encounters.  Even then, “thou shalt not lie with a man as a woman” only covers one sexual position with one gender that mimicked, again, war-time rape.  To say that all homosexual encounters would be outlawed from this verse, and thus an abomination, is at best a stretch

iv. As this is the whole of the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures on the subject at hand, noting that the KJV has triple the texts on unicorns than it does on homosexuality, we now turn to the New Testament.  As Christ, again, had no words on the subject, we must bypass the gospels and, yes, even the Book of Acts for our next text.

v. Paul in his epistle to the Romans does call homosexual acts “para physis” or against nature this has two problems.  The first problem is that nature for Paul’s time is not “all of nature” but “individual nature”.  Also, God goes against nature in grafting the gentiles into the people of God later in the same epistle so it is very difficult to say that going against nature is necessarily an evil thing.  Lastly it fails utterly to understand Paul’s entire argument.  The entire point for chapter one of Romans is found in chapter 2, “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.”  That Paul is quoting a Roman speech or oration and then using it to call out the hypocrisy in the Roman church.  The subject literally does not get brought up again.  Once more, Paul is not saying that homosexual relations are sinful and natural, he is saying that Romans say it is sinful and unnatural and yet are doing them anyway.

vi. While other verses in Paul’s letters are translated to talk about homosexuality, the fact is the words in question are largely unknown and have not been proven.  The words in question are incredibly rare and there is no text, either within the New Testament or even the Greek in which the New Testament was written, that shows any connection between those words and homosexual urge, inclination, or practice.

vii. The actual translation of Jude 1:7 is “Sodom and Gomorah and the surrounding cities indulged in gross sexual immorality and went after the flesh of others (or flesh of strangers) are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of era-long fire.”  None of the words used in this verse have any evidence to back their use to refer to what is understood to be homosexual activity.

viii. And all of this ignores the fact Eunuchs were widely understood to have homosexual tendencies, yet they are clearly included to the Body of Christ without question (Acts 8:27-39) and the fact that David is described as having “romantic love” for Jonathan, the same word “ahabah” used to refer to the feelings of the lovers throughout the Song of Solomon.  It also fails to the Church did not have much to say on the subject of same-sex relationships until over a thousand years later and indeed produced same-sex wedding liturgy.

ix.  All these facts show unequivocally that the belief that the Bible supports one and only one sexuality is simply non-sensical.  If an individual community feels strongly that homosexual relationships are bad then we as their loving brothers and sisters in Christ advise them strongly not to have one.  The facts presented here show that the Biblical Sexuality camp cannot meet a burden of clear and convincing proof or even the preponderance of the evidence, let alone the fierce standard of beyond any reasonable doubt as this situation warrants.  As such, the entire church needs to act like it.  No reasonable and ethical person can continue to uphold such draconian, damaging, and unfounded beliefs as this and we as a Church need to reflect this reality.  Anything less is to slander and make base the very Sacrifice that founded us.  Amen

The New Through the Eyes of the Old

Good morning!  I’m afraid I have to start off my sermon with an apology, today.  You see, normally when pastors write a sermon we do so with certain goals in mind.  Our hope, in the end, is to glean a relevant message from God out of the Scriptures and then do our level best to hit you square in the heart with it.  You see, to live in this broken and sometimes all too ugly world of ours is to have our hearts harden, to have them darken and grow cold.  It becomes all too easy to withdraw from the world, to ignore the needy, to turn our backs on the vulnerable and defenseless, to focus only on our own selfish wants.  It is for that reason, I think, that we as Christians know it is in our best interests to gather into community often and hear a message that tenderizes the heart.  A message that brings light to the soul even as it warms the cold places of our spirits.  It is for that reason that I need to apologize, however, because I have no intention of giving that kind of sermon.

                I have no intention of giving that kind of sermon not because I don’t feel it is important, that we as human beings don’t need to be deeply intentional about the state of our hearts, but because our text today requires something different.  Indeed, I feel if I preached such a sermon I would do a grievous injustice not only to you but to our lesson as well.  Ladies and Gentlemen, something absolutely remarkable happened with the institution of the New Covenant, and when Christ declared that he was giving us the keys to the kingdom it really was a groundbreaking and unheard of thing.  Coming from the religion of Judaism, a religion that told you what to wear, what to eat, and where to worship, a religion that regulated almost every area of human life; to have Jesus tell his disciples, both the apostles and us living today, that we have the keys, that we now are trusted as the highest officials in the kingdom, able to set policy, and make important decisions as to life, faith, and even worship all on our own.  We can choose what hymns we sing, what holidays we will follow, secular or otherwise.  We can create liturgy, and decide for ourselves what foods we ought to eat.  Yes we have Communion and Baptism, but even with these the particulars of when, where, and with what have been entirely left to the faithful.   But all this freedom comes at significant price, we have the freedom of choice, but we are also held responsible for what we do choose. 

To be responsible requires that we be very intentional with our choices, that we be thoughtful about what we do and why.  This means not only being aware of the advantages of what we have chosen, but also being very careful not to ignore the flaws that come with it either.  On point for our lesson today is our community’s choice to preach solely from the gospels.  I want you to know I agree with this decision wholeheartedly.  It makes us supremely Christ-centered, and deliberately keeps the gospel the focus of not only our worship but our lives as Christians.  I would not have it change for anything, but as a minister called by God under this system, I must tend to its flaws.  The flaw of preaching only from the gospels is that when you need the Old Testament to understand the gospel, the temptation is to do without.  By focusing only on a small portion of scripture it becomes really hard to show you what a passage means given the whole of the Scriptures.  And when really Big Picture things are happening in our gospels, Big Picture things that took several books in the Old Testament to articulate, we miss them, and we skew our reading of the gospel because we haven’t preached on anything else. Such is the case with our gospel lesson today.

                Now, as a pastor, I could have ignored all that.  I could have simply ignored the big picture, I could have stuck to our chosen method of simply writing an emotional sermon that only considers these few verses out of context from the much larger history of Salvation.  I could have hit you square in the heart, pounding the pulpit and shouting, “WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?  ARE YOU WILLING TO SACRIFICE FAMILY FOR CHRIST?  HOW DOES GOD KNOW IF HE’S FIRST IN YOUR LIFE IF YOU HAVEN’T SENT YOUR OWN MOTHER TO THE CURB FOR HIM?”  I could have done that, I could have written a sermon that punched your right in the solar plexus.  But that isn’t the point of this passage, and it would have been irresponsible and unfaithful of me to preach that sermon, though indeed at this point as Americans we all have heard it preached.  I could co opt the small picture presented in this gospel to my own selfish ends, but I am not going to do so.  Instead, what I am going to do is to help you see the part of the story in light of the whole, to the flower the mind in addition to stoking the embers of the heart.

                Often times when Jesus is doing something that seems out of character or just odd for him it is indeed because there are Big picture issues at work.  The Old Testament prophets held out a fervent hope that the new covenant would move away from a restricting religion to a relationship of conscience.  That instead of a thousand rules to enforce the externalities of faith there would instead be loving hearts that have no need of them.  The prophet Hosea proclaimed loudly that God desires mercy, not ritual sacrifice, and the acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.  The prophet Micah shouted from the mountains, “The Lord has shown what he requires of you, he has shown you what the rules are…to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”  But of them all perhaps Jeremiah articulated the point best, when, in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem, and as the last nail in the coffin of the old covenant was about to be struck, he offered this unrelenting vision.  “Israel will survive saith the Lord, and the covenant I will make with them will put my Torah in their minds, and it will be written on their hearts.  No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another, “Know the Lord,” for they will all know me.”   

                Now, when you reached the New Testament, when you read the words in the gospel that said, “I am giving you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, whatever you bind or loose on earth will be bound or loosed in heaven,” in that moment you may have heard much.  You may have heard 16^th century European theology, you even might have heard the voice of Mrs. McGullicutty, your old Sunday School teacher, but what you didn’t hear was the clamoring joy as the hopes and dreams of generations of Israelites were fulfilled.  It was here!  The time came!  The faithful no longer need to be broken under the law, no more is righteousness found in keeping such a cornucopia of rules.  With the coming of Messiah, the anointed one, humanity can at last enjoy the firstfruits of choice!  The saving work of God had not been in vain!

                But just as you would not have seen the Old Testament in that gospel lesson, just as you might well have read that verse and not realized all that those few words brought into being, so also might we miss the culmination of so many Old Testament hopes in the passage that lies before us.  Just as the prophets proclaimed the coming of a New Covenant of Freedom and Conscience, so also they too proclaimed the coming Kingdom of God.  Isaiah declared with boldness,

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him— the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord— and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked. Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist. The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the cobra’s den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

            Neither was the prophet Daniel silent, “And in (those days) the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all the kingdoms of mankind and bring them to an end, and it alone shall stand forever.  And, “There before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.”

                So when we read our passage, when we see Jesus saying, “I have not come to bring peace but the sword,” we are confused, we scratch our heads, and we are tempted to move on, but what we are missing is the culmination of what generations of prophets foretold.  Jesus is saying “How can you not interpret the present time?  The promises of God are being fulfilled before your very eyes!  I am here!  I am the foretold One!  I am the branch of Jesse.  With Justice I decide for the poor, with righteousness I judge the needy.  I slay wickedness with my words and I am the One who establishes the kingdom where tears are no more.  But make no mistake, I am not here for peace at any cost!  The Father did not lead the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt to abandon them to the oppression of either Rome or Jerusalem.  My mission is not the elimination of a tyrant but the elimination of tyranny.  Every oppressive system, every government, every religion, that breaks my people’s backs will be hauled off in chains before me when all is said and done, and because of this, because there is so much at stake, expect the people who rely on those systems, who benefit from misery and despair, expect them to absolutely come out of the woodwork because of everything that I am doing. They will not be some far off Lord, they will not be strangers or aliens living in your midst, they will be your mother and your father.  They will be your brothers and sisters, they will be very people that you hold most dear.  They are the ones that will side with the enemy and they will do everything in their power to get you to do the same. 

                You see my friends, just as we in the New Covenant are enjoying the firstfruits of freedom promised to our ancestors so also do we see the Kingdom of God working diligently in our midst, but it means that we must be diligent.  We live in a very special time, a time when the promises of God our unfolding in ways never before seen, and because of that we must be wary.  Both require faithfulness and intentional obedience to Spirit of God among us.  Let us resolve to be careful in our actions, to be discerning in our words and in our relationships.  If we say we serve the Lord of Freedom, a Christ who teaches us how to act rather than telling us what to do, then let us be sure we act in such a way that all the forces of misery and oppression count us as implacable foes and let us do so knowing just who might turn on us in that fight.  Keep to what is good, steel your spirits for what is right, and do so knowing the battle has already been won.  No matter the evil or the ugliness, Good will overcome.  Amen.  

A Matter of Heart...

          What is this?  Is this Church?  Why isn’t everybody in pews?  Where’s the organ, the chancil, and the altar?  What about the sanctuary and all those other hard to remember terms they don’t teach in seminary?  And what about those funny guys in the long dresses?  How can this be worship?  How can this be Church?

                Well, sometimes things are not always what they seem, and just because it isn’t what we are used to, doesn’t mean it isn’t just as true.  But mistaking something for its trappings, getting fooled by the outside and not looking within is something we as humans will always struggle with.  We don’t like change, we don’t like it when differences crop up into our lives.  Between bills, work, family, and all the drama that gets put into that mix we like things to stay the same, we like things the way we are used to, the way we can handle them.  Humanity’s been like that since Adam and the fall, and it was no different for people living in Jesus’ time as it is today.

                Most people don’t really appreciate how different Jesus’ ministry was, how so very radical  compared to what was going on at the time.  I want you to imagine yourselves as Israelites living in Palestine, as 1^st century Jews living within walking distance of the Holy City. The temple and the synagogue are the biggest contact points of your faith, the places where you fully embraced your identity as Jews.  The synagogue was where you learned about your ancestral religion: Your learned what to eat, what to wear, and what to do.  The temple, however, was where you most publicly proclaimed your identity and where you performed the most important rites as an Israelite.  Here the Day of Atonement was performed, here the sacrifices and the various offerings were made to absolve all Israel of her sins.  Here was where you were supposed to meet God.

                But not all of your fellow Jews are happy with things the way they are, indeed the strife with your countrymen is almost equal to the strife you feel with your Roman conquerors.  In the first century there are four major divisions of the Jewish faith that you must contend with, all quite different from one another.  There were the Sadducees, the ruling class of Israel.  Surprisingly secular believers, they do not believe in angels or spirits nor do they really believe in an afterlife.  They pick and choose from their Bible, taking the verses they like and conveniently excluding what they don’t.  Only the first five books of Moses were Scripture to them, you see.  Cutting out ¾ of your book means cutting ¾ of your responsibility and where life would be at odds with the Prophets, the Prophets could simply be discarded.  Still, while deeply flawed by power and compromised by convenience, it must be noted that these are the only Jews among your people who are not racist, that do not believe Gentiles are bad simply because they are gentiles and by extension they do not believe Jews are good only because they are Jewish.

In addition to the Sadducees, however, there are the Pharisees and they are not so far from our evangelical movement.  They are a Scripture driven movement, a missionary movement, and a grass roots association interested in keeping the Scriptures central in the daily lives of their fellow Israelites.  No one person leads it, no organization heads it, rather it is rallied by its charismatic preachers who often decried their government and were quick to advocate war against foreign powers.  Their adherence to the whole of Scripture often makes them legalistic, obeying the bare words on the page but caring little for the spirit in which those words were given, but at the same time you will be hard pressed to find a Jew more openly living their faith or more interested in relieving the suffering of their people than this group.  

After the Pharisees are the Essenes, Puritans and End Time Believers.  They believe most of the country has fallen into horrible sin, so they do not mix with the common Israelite, seeing them as too tainted, too unclean for Holy Living.  They have removed themselves from society and live in the desert far away from the false government and the false religion that have taken on God’s name.  When God comes to judge their nation, it is their intention to be “Left Behind”, looking forward to the destruction of the temple and the coming of a great teacher.

There are also the Zealots, a group of Jews who feel that the only response to an unclean and gentile ridden government is its violent overthrow.  They were inspired by the Maccabees, the Jewish generals who threw off gentile oppression and foreign entanglements by the sword.  These are your constitution party members, the liberty lovers and the militiamen seeking to return their society to its perceived origins.  They are believers in their weapons and are fervent in their opposition to their government, but they are also the Jews most willing to give their lives in defense of their friends.

But finally, there are the people like you and me.  People who are somewhere in the middle, perhaps seeing one side or another but in all honesty just trying to eek out an existence that both gives credence to your people and shows faithfulness to your God.  You know the Temple isn’t perfect, you know the flaws of your leaders, and you know the dangers of losing your way of life, but it’s also all you’ve got to work with.  And so you work, you live, and you wait.  You endure the times and raise a family, doing your best with what you have…that is until someone comes along and shows you a better way.

And that someone comes…a man, a lowly carpenter’s son, rumored to be of illegitimate birth.  He is a rabbi, but he is not like the other rabbis.  He has no education, no formal training.  He didn’t apprentice himself to another teacher like the others did, he simply took up the mantle one day and, shockingly, people listened.  But people did more than listen, they followed.  They followed by the thousands.  And when this rabbi took disciples, he didn’t take the cream of the religious crop.  He didn’t go to the Scriptoriums, the religious schools for their best students, he took everybody.  He took fishermen, tax collectors, Zealots!  He even taught women!  And what did this man teach?  He taught that the root of all evil was neither Sadducee nor gentile, but the love of money and power and any Jew was quite susceptible.  He taught that gentiles were not an enemy of the religion or the state and they were indeed capable of great faith.  He taught the Temple was about to be judged and replaced with nothing, that the new holy community could be comprised with just two people without any buildings or sacrifices for sins.  He taught that there are no unclean foods and that working on the Sabbath is not necessarily against the law if those works are for good.  He taught that the Scriptures are Holy and Good, but they need filling to be complete.  But more than any of that, in a land of schisms and disagreements, in a land more and more given to violence this rabbi taught that Peace was the answer, that love for neighbor was the solution, that simple faith in God even unto death was the way.

                Now, all of you may be wondering, what in the name of the Holy of Holies does this have to with our gospel text?  Well, I’ll tell you.  As a Jew or even a Gentile in the first century the question arises, indeed begs to be asked how then is this Jesus still a Jew?  How can this sect of Christians still consider themselves part of Judaism when they will eat any food, have no use for temple or sacrifice, are willing to include gentiles into the people of God, and understand their Hebrew Scriptures as now secondary to the message of the gospel?  Yes, this Jesus might be important, indeed he might be the most important man who ever lived, but how can Christianity be thought of as having Jewish roots?

                And the answer is that appearances can be deceiving.  What looks one way can in fact be another and THAT is a theme that Luke deeply addresses in his gospel.  Luke begins his tale as a Gentile would.  Important people, people of divine importance, are often heralded before-hand.  So important is this Jesus, however, that even Jesus’ herald John is heralded beforehand.  Yes, this all occurred as a gentile would think fit, but these heralds are not gentile, they are Jewish.  Jesus and John are born to Jewish parents.  John’s father is a Jewish priest and Jesus’ parents have him circumcised and presented at the Temple according to Jewish law.  The inherent Jewishness of the Jesus story is hammered home time and time again and the relevance of the Jewish scriptures and their filled-full-ment in Jesus is not some outlying afterthought or a tangential footnote, but is central to the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people.  Indeed, where the story seems least Jewish, it in fact shows quite the opposite.  Joseph and Mary are recorded in Luke as obeying the Roman census.  Most jews rebelled at every census, but Joseph and Mary did not.  Their scriptures told them to obey the gentile king, to pray for them and indeed intercede for them while under their rule.  The Prophets proclaimed this, and Mordecai in Ruth lived this, even to the point of seeking royal permission to defend themselves against Haman and their enemies.  Joseph and Mary were not less Jewish for obeying Caesar; they were in fact more Jewish than all the rest of their countrymen.  And so it is for this part of the story, Jesus having just proclaimed the faith of a centurion now goes into Nain and raises a widow’s son, just like Elijah the Jewish Prophet did so many centuries before.  But unlike Elijah, who raised a gentile widow’s son, Jesus goes to the Jews and returns a Jewish widow’s only son back to her.  God has indeed returned to bless his people.  They were not left out.

                So yes, things changed.  The trappings of the past, the trap-things, the outside appearances that ensnared, yes they were discarded but the heart was no less true to its heritage.  God is not an exclusive God.  Claiming the Gentiles did not mean dismissing the Jews, and the blessings of the future in fact did not include the cursing of the past.  Both were upheld and one did not happen at the expense of the other.  So it is with us.  So often we look at the future and we see great cataclysmic change.  We look at our society and our children. We say “look how different it’s all going to be”…except it’s not.  2000 years from now we will still be silly, ridiculous humans in need of Jesus, but I will not lie to you, my friends, things will look different.  We will have a different president, we will live in a different world.  Our children will grow, they will not be exactly like us and our church will look very different in the years to come.  It’s only looks.  God is the God of the old and the new, and he gives the same heart to them both if we ask Him.  So yes, things will change, just not really.  And we can take heart in that.               

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.