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.   

     

How Now Shall We Behave?

Good morning!  Grace and peace to you all this 3^rd Sunday in the Lenten season.  It is indeed well into the Season of Lent and as such, I feel compelled to be honest with you: I really wanted to preach another sermon this week.  Oh, I had a number of things floating around in my head and after hearing Craig’s sermon last Sunday I thought I’d just spot off of him.  He brought up a number really excellent points and given our church’s mission to really grow this year I thought they bore repeating.  I still think that, but as so often happens Sunday’s plans wind up in Monday’s garbage can, and so I wound up writing a very different sermon.

                My friends, it is 2016, and in case the incessant ads, the mudslinging and the personal attacks haven’t made it obvious, it is most definitely an election year.  Let’s make no bones about it, a lot is at stake this year.  As a nation we must decide what to do about the so-called Islamic State, the Syrian refugee crisis, there is China and their ecological disasters, there is continued questions of global warming, what to do about Planned Parenthood, America’s Silent Prison dilemma, Marijuana Legalization, and racial tensions the likes we have not seen in decades.  Indeed, if there can be any adjective, any one word that can be used to describe the years 2015 and 2016, it is the word “Unrest”.  People sense that life is coming to a turning point, that we are on the verge of great change either good or bad.  Anxieties are very high and tensions politically, socially, and economically loom like a shadow over everything – neither the dinner table at home nor the water cooler at work is safe from it.  What has become even more evident to me this week, however, is that in light of these great questions we as Americans are taking every opportunity to treat one another like garbage.  In this week alone I have personally witnessed more blatant racism, violence, and self-righteous indignation than I have since my children were born, and I want to entreat you all as fellow Christians to have nothing to do with it.

                I remember looking up our gospel text early this week, and remember being struck with how incredibly apt it is for the times we live in.  You see the 21^st century and the first century were not really all that different.  Political unrest, danger from armed terrorists, failing religious institutions, corrupt people in power, and a culture’s dying way of life - All of these were just as much the terrible realities of 16 AD Judea as they are in 2016 America.  It is almost as if the times might change but people just never do.  And just as we face the same realities as they did so we see the Jews making the same kinds of mistakes we do.  Did the Jews of Jesus’ time sit down as family and truly seek good answers to their problems?  Did they join together across religious and political barriers, reaching across the aisle so to speak to make the world a better place?  No.  No I dare say they were just as prone to splitting into political parties and religious movements as we are, and in a world so full of differing points of view, with so many people with so many competing interests, the humans did then as the humans do now.  They blame.  They point fingers, the find someone, ANYONE, with whom they can say “See how life would be a virtual Eden if these people just…weren’t…here.”

                The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, Jesus has an opinion about this kind of behavior, and we find it in our gospel lesson for today.  In the ancient world, calamity and tragedy were often thought to have happened because of the person’s sin.  Even though the Hebrews had in their Scriptures the Book of Job which makes it very clear that sometimes what happens to people has absolutely nothing to do with a person’s own righteousness and relationship to God, people still come up to Jesus to point the finger.  “Jesus,” they say, “did you hear about those Galileans Pilate had executed at the altar, mixing their blood with the sacrifices?  How terrible they must have been!  Can you imagine the sinfulness of those men that they should die in such a way?  Imagine what the rest of the family is like.” 

                This last part is very, very important.  It is the unwritten understanding that would overshadow this entire conversation from front to back.  When we read these ancient texts with modern eyes, we must understand their culture is not ours.  Individualism as we know it does not exist in these ancient cultures. A son or the daughter is not a person unto themselves but they are the extension of their family.  If the son or daughter is evil or is guilty of sin, it is because the entire family is evil and guilty of sin.  You don’t have this kind of conversation with someone just to bring up an interesting anecdote; you bring it up because you are looking for a scapegoat; you are looking for living prey.

                But Jesus will have none of it.  “Do you think these men were worse sinners than all the others because they died in this way?  You think these people were garbage to be burned when the reality is it is your attitude that’s garbage.  This is not how God expects you to treat people and unless you repent you too are going to perish - only in a far worse way.  You think those eighteen random people who died when the tower fell were more guilty, you think those families were more despicable than any other living in Jerusalem?  Unless you all repent of your attitudes, you too are going to perish.  And let me tell you why.  A man had a fig tree you see, planted in his vineyard, and when he came to inspect it he saw that it has failed to yield any fruit for years.  He tells the manager of the vineyard to cut it down, because if it hasn’t born fruit by now it never will and it is just wasting soil.  But the manager pleaded with the owner, sir, let me pay special attention to it.  Let me dig around it and fertilize it.  Let me give it every opportunity to succeed and if by this time next year it still hasn’t yielded a crop then, yes, it deserves to be cut down.  

We are all being watched, Jesus says, we are all trees in a vineyard being inspected and indeed being specially cared for so that we can be as successful for the kingdom as possible.  It is fruitfulness; not purity, not righteousness, nor even being correct, that God is looking for and if we want someone to be worried about, Jesus says, be worried about that person you see in the mirror first.

Ladies and gentlemen, we think we have moved beyond these lessons.  We haven’t.  We think somehow we’ve become better sorts of people these past 2000 years but let me tell you the same issues that plagued them still plague us.  We think we have become the exception rather than the rule.  We aren’t.  We are still a people who would rather be right than be good and there is nothing, there is no one whom we will not grind into the dirt to get that feeling. 

I am Pro-life, like I suspect many of you are.  I do not doubt for an instant that an unborn human life is still a human life with its own rights and protections.  The child deserves to be recognized for the life that it is.  But I was challenged, you see.  I was challenged by my Pro-Choice counterparts and I realized something.  I wasn’t really pro-life.  When it came down to actually saving the lives of unborn children I in fact bore no fruit.  I could not point to one human life that I had saved.  There were no babies alive because of me, I did nothing to alleviate all the social pressures that our women go through when forced into the question of whether to terminate the pregnancy.  I could have stood up for equal pay, I could have stood up for a living wage so having an unwanted child wasn’t an economic death sentence.  I could have lobbied for more affordable adoptions.  Of the nearly 300,000 children in the United States that have no permanent home, only 7000 parents adopted in 2012, leaving a mother choosing between abortion or adoption with the terrible reality that her child might never find a permanent home. Tens of thousands of potential adoptees age out of our foster care systems every year, and with it the very large likelihood of never graduating school, never holding a job, and with roughly half of them falling victim to substance abuse.  I didn’t want to actually save babies, because if I wanted to do that I was given plenty of opportunity.  The end result of my actions was not to reduce the number of abortions in my country but to make young women feel alienated and abandoned when they needed a brother most.        

Now you may say to me, “But Keven, wait just one minute!”  I want you to stop, I want you to stop right there.  That feeling you have, that emotion that is making you uncomfortable right now, I want you to stop and look at it.  All those arguments you are mustering in your head, all those indignations you are feeling right now.  This is what Jesus is talking about, valuing our positions more than we value other people.  Just as ancient peoples valued the belief that a person can be judged by the family they belong to, so we value the belief that a person can be judged by the party they belong to.  We blame them, we turn our nose up at them, we judge them as unworthy because after all it is just so obvious how wrong they really are.  We do this for hours on end but never once do we ask the question, “Am I being fruitful?”

  Now I don’t care what side of any issue that you are on.  Pro-life, Pro-choice, Pro-business, Pro-Earth, less filling or tastes great – Every single issue we as humans side upon is just right enough to win followers and just wrong enough to earn enemies.  None of us is so without sin that we can pretend we don’t taint everything that we touch.  Ladies and gentlemen, it is not about who is right, it is about who is teachable.  It is about who is willing to be challenged into growing into something greater.  If we are so sure, so completely convinced, so thoroughly loyal to our particular understandings that we would sooner lose our soul than admit maybe the other side has a point – that maybe they are just as human, just as right and just as wrong as we are…well, guess what?  Jesus says we might just get our wish.  Unswerving loyalty and Unrepentence are two sides of the same coin.  If we want to be unswervingly loyal to someone, if we want to pour our hearts and souls into a cause that’s right,   Scripture is very clear on Who that is supposed to be and He cares far more about how we act toward each other in our disagreements than what those disagreements actually are.  Let us resolve to better this election season.  Let us stand out amongst the name-calling and the backstabbing.  Let us be an island of refuge from the destructiveness of self-righteousness, because no matter what side we hold or what philosophies we adhere to we realize that above all we are Christians first.      

Amen and Amen