Monthly Archives: May 2012

27

May. ’12

Babel Undone

Acts 2:1-13

The arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, an event that birthed the Christian church, seems like a long time ago. But strangely enough, to grasp its relevance for today we have to go back much further in time, to the beginnings of recorded human history.

I cannot give you an exact date, but I’m pointing us toward a time about 3,000 years before Pentecost, nearly 5,000 years before our current day. That is the most likely setting for the story of the Tower of Babel. The problem identified in the Babel story finds its fix in the Pentecost story.

Some people read the Tower of Babel story as a highly symbolic myth designed to communicate truths about God’s expectations of humanity. Others read it more literally, as a record of a key event in human history. Either way, you get to the same lesson, and the same link to Pentecost.

The traditional interpretation of the Babel story is that God becomes angry because the humans are trying to reach into heaven. There’s little biblical evidence for such an interpretation, however. Instead, God seems concerned about the humans’ potential for clever mischief, the kind that ultimately leads to idolatry or nonbelief.

In this story, bricks are to these people what the Internet is to us—cutting-edge technology allowing them to experience the world in new ways. Until humans figured out how to make fire-hardened bricks, they were limited to primitive stone structures. Brick-making technology allowed for the construction of ziggurats and other relatively large buildings that led to the development of the first cities.

Although the story probably doubles as a primitive critique of urbanization and the idols we find in city life, God doesn’t have a problem with progress per se. It’s more a case of God being concerned about the humans getting ahead of themselves and forgetting who they are, children of the Creator. So God confuses their language (Babel and babble sound alike for a reason) and scatters them across the earth, slowing them down before they reach a danger point.

Now shift your minds forward 3,000 years in time. Out of that scattering, the Israelites, God’s chosen people, have arisen. Christ has come among them, been crucified and resurrected, and before ascending into heaven has promised his followers will be “clothed with power from on high.”

As promised, the Spirit falls on the faithful. And with divinity present in them and among them, they find themselves with a surprising gift. The language barrier established at Babel breaks down in Jerusalem. Suddenly, people who look like a bunch of uneducated hicks are empowered to speak the message of Christ freely to a polyglot crowd.

“Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?” people in the diverse crowd ask. “And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?”

The answer to that question lies in the work Christ has done. By sacrificing himself for our sins, he has restored the relationship between God and humanity. Rather than slowing us down, God is now letting us use divine power and wisdom to speed ahead in our development and understanding of the world, in the process spreading the word of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

Lord knows, the fetters are off. Here we are, less than 2,000 years from the birth of the church. We have covered the planet and connected ourselves in ways the early church could never imagine. With a little money, any of us can fly, and we’ve pooled our resources to send men to the moon. We split atoms in ways that can make abundant energy. (Of course, we could also blow ourselves to smithereens.) And what’s happening with digital technology is astounding.

In the span of an hour recently, I had two conversations via the Internet, one with a friend in the Czech Republic and another with a friend in Brazil. (In terms of readership, this blog isn’t what I would call widely read, but I was surprised to learn it will now be translated into and published in Portuguese through my Brazilian friend’s church.) The communication I accomplished in an hour would have cost a pastor at Cassidy UMC a lot of time and a small fortune just four decades ago.

Despite all our advances, we face the same basic challenges our ancestors saw when they figured out how to bake bricks in a kiln nearly 5,000 years ago. As we learn and morph, will we stay in touch with God? Will we cling to our original purpose, to worship and serve the one who created us?

It’s something to think about as we post on Facebook or tweet on Twitter. Even in these environments, are we the people God wants us to be? Can people see the face of Christ in our avatars?

During this most recent technological explosion, we are blessed to have the power of God available to us, even within us. The Holy Spirit wants to guide us brick by digital brick. We simply must open ourselves to the Spirit’s guidance in all things old or new.

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20

May. ’12

Peace Be with You

John 20:19-29

If you’ve been a regular the past few weeks, you’re aware we’ve been focusing this Easter season on some of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. I’ve not been concerned about keeping them in any kind of order; we’ve seen the risen Jesus at the tomb, on a beach, traveling a road, and in all his glory in heaven.

This is the last Sunday of Easter, and I want us to go back to the Gospel of John, looking at one more of those early resurrection appearances. We should hear a message similar to what we’ve heard in previous weeks, but it’s time to also talk seriously about whether we’re going to respond to what we’ve heard.

In the 20th chapter of John, beginning at the 19th verse, Jesus appears to a terrified band of disciples. Mary Magdalene has told them Christ has risen from the dead, but the news has given them little comfort.

Certainly, these disciples were afraid of the Jews and Romans who had crucified Jesus. It’s also likely that they, having failed Jesus in his time of need, feared what the risen Christ might say or do.

The door to the room where they huddle is locked, but a lock is no barrier for a body that has defeated death and is now indestructible, infused with the unrestrained power of the divine. Jesus appears and tells them repeatedly, “Peace be with you.”

All of Jesus’ key disciples are present except Thomas, who refuses to believe in the appearance until “I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side.”

A week later Jesus appears to Thomas with the same message: “Peace be with you.” He even invites Thomas to touch the scars. And of course, Thomas believes.

“Peace be with you.” There is so much of importance in this story, from the nature of the resurrection to the need for the Holy Spirit to the importance of faith. But that simple assurance from Christ, “Peace be with you,” is the church’s rallying cry.

Somewhere in our community, there are children who fear each day because they face abuse, hunger or neglect. The true church, acting as Christ’s body on earth today, finds them, rescues them, feeds them and loves them, bringing the peace of Christ to their lives.

Somewhere in our community, there are people suffering a crisis of identity, people who feel they have no value because they lack a job, a family or a relationship. The true church finds them, tells them they are first and foremost children of God, and again, the peace of Christ is present.

Somewhere in our community, there are sinners, hard-core sinners, sinners who believe their evil is so great that nothing can be done to redeem them. They feel they can only fear or smirk at the church.

The true church tells them the work of redemption already is complete; as Jesus tells the woman caught in adultery in John 8, “Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” And like the cowering disciples, these sinners find that in a faithful relationship with Christ, there is no condemnation, only peace.

Somewhere in our community there are the mentally ill, the substance abusers, the unwed mothers, the prisoners, the sick, the dying. To all of them, the true church finds ways to rely on the Holy Spirit and creatively say, “Peace be with you.”

Do you know what happened to Thomas after he saw and believed? Early church writings indicate he traveled as far as India telling people about the risen Christ. That would mean he traveled farther than any other apostle.

When your doubts are replaced by the peace Christ brings, incredible things happen. We are not to “rest in peace” while in this life. Peace is a gift to be shared with others.

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14

May. ’12

Woolly Jesus

Revelation 1:9-18

Life seldom goes as planned. In fact, I wonder if life ever goes as planned.

You may have seen an Associated Press story last week about a pilot named Denny Fitch. Back in 1989, he was riding home in an empty seat on a United Airlines DC-10 bound for Chicago.

While in the air, the tail engine on the jet exploded. Shrapnel from the engine sliced through all three of the jet’s hydraulic systems. When Denny heard the explosion, he made his way to the cockpit to see if the flight crew needed any help—after all, he also was a flight instructor for United.

Turns out they needed the help. They pretty much had lost all control of the plane, except for one option: They could make the jet go up and down, left and right by increasing and decreasing power to the remaining wing engines. Denny sat down in the only available space, the floor, and helped steer a jet carrying 300 people in this crude manner toward Sioux City airport, their best option. That’s where the jet crashed, but in a somewhat controlled manner; half the people on board survived.

In an interview for a documentary, Denny talked about the unpredictability of life: “What makes you so sure you’re going to make it home tonight? I was 46 years old the day I walked into that cockpit. I had the world ahead of me. I was a captain on a major airline. I had a beautiful healthy family, loving wife, great future. And at 4 o’clock I’m trying to stay alive.”

Denny was in the news again this past week because he died of cancer at 69. When he was younger, he probably had not planned on that happening, either.

That’s how life goes. Bad things happen in a broken world where sin and its biggest effect, death, still have a hold. If you’re going to accept that fact, it helps, I think, to have lived life for a few decades, if only because you have time to see plans go awry.

As a very young man, I probably got a little cynical about the world. I spent about a decade as a newspaper reporter, mostly covering crimes and disasters. As a police reporter for the Knoxville Journal, two stories, one the first night I was alone on the police beat and the other on one of the last nights, bookended my psychology for awhile.

The first news event involved a drunk driver who decided the best way to elude a pursuing officer was to turn off his headlights. He crossed the center line and drove head-on into a Toyota packed with teenagers. The drunk and a passenger died; so did a 15-year-old girl who was ejected out the side window of the Toyota. The other teens were seriously injured.

I had a police scanner, was in my car very nearby, and arrived just a couple of minutes after the pursuing officer started calling for help. It was not a scene I want to see again.

The last one was an accidental house fire that killed three people, including a 6-year-old girl who died on the sidewalk while the firemen who had rescued her from the fire frantically worked to help her breathe. The firefighters needed counseling after that one. Again, not an event I want to repeat.

I’m not sure which is more disconcerting, the evil humans inflict on each other or the evil that just happens because some force of nature like wind or fire smacks us down. Both can make us question God’s presence. I certainly did for awhile.

And of course, you don’t have to be a crime reporter, a cop, a soldier or a doctor to get to a place where you ask such questions. We all experience events throughout our lives that can wear us down.

It’s hard to make it to adulthood without losing to death someone you love. And then there are the other pains we experience. We love someone but are not loved back. We dream about our children’s and grandchildren’s futures, and they decide to go a different direction than what we had dreamed, showing us the brokenness of this world can touch them, too. Our careers jump the tracks, despite how hard we work. We feel like we’re careening out of control.

Whoever he was, John, the John who wrote down what we now call the book of Revelation, must have felt he was careening at some point. We don’t know much about him, but he tells us he was persecuted. For some reason he was on the island of Patmos, most likely in exile because he had professed belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

But then he saw the woolly haired Jesus, and everything changed. His suffering and his disappointments had context.

John’s vision of Jesus was a little different than our Gospel-inspired images. “I saw one like the Son of Man,” John writes, “clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force.”

Don’t be too literal when reading Revelation, but don’t discount the power of symbolic speech, either. This is the glorified Jesus, the post-resurrection Jesus. This is humanity blended with deity and purified to the point of holiness. Power, strength and authority radiate from the Savior, and darkness, death and evil shrivel in Christ’s presence.

This vision, and other visions in John’s Revelation, remind us that the world is not out of control, even if it seems so for a time. Christ came for a reason, to set the world right. His resurrection is the first sign of the work being done today, the restoration and healing of the world.

God is in control, and if you follow him through belief in Christ, you are in control. Do you want to know how to take control?

Tell the story of what Christ has done. No, don’t just tell it, declare it. When you see brokenness, declare that the woolly haired Jesus rules. Remind those around you that God’s power is in the world.

If you really believe in the resurrected Christ, trust that the story transforms those who hear it delivered in a loving, faithful way. And may it transform you, too, regardless of what you endure.

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07

May. ’12

Interrupted by Jesus

Acts 9:1-9

Paul experienced a blinding, thumped-in-the-noggin’ conversion, but it was the kind of conversion that gives us hope for people hard-headed about accepting God’s grace.

Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus was quick and violent, but no more quick or violent than his persecution of Christians. An up-and-coming Jewish Pharisee, Paul was on his way to Damascus with letters allowing him to bind and arrest the Christians he expected to find there. Instead, he ran into the resurrected Jesus.

As a Pharisee, Paul lived by a basic tenet, that we must follow God’s law to the letter to be right with God. But the startling intensity of the encounter gave Paul immediate insight into an important truth. Because of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, it’s possible for God to call undeserving sinners “righteous” despite their sins. We only need to accept the free gift.

The rest of Paul’s story involves a 180-degree turn in beliefs and a straight march into fervent grace-centered Christian preaching, church planting and eventual martyrdom. Paul became the apostle most responsible for spreading to the Gentiles word of Christ’s offer of salvation.

Sudden turnaround conversions like Paul’s have happened throughout the history of the church, and they still happen on a regular basis today.

Historically, several people who became great church leaders have had such experiences. In 386, the man we now call Augustine of Hippo abandoned the life of a 4th century party boy and began to pray to what he assumed was a very angry God. While praying and weeping in a garden, he heard the voice of an unseen child singing an odd phrase: “Pick up and read, pick up and read.”

He picked up a copy of the book of Romans he had been carrying with him and opened it at random, his eyes falling on what we now number as Romans 13:13-14: “Let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

After this moment, Augustine devoted himself fully to the Lord and helped turn the early church toward a deeper understanding of the importance of God’s grace.

Martin Luther, the trigger of the 16th-century Protestant movement, credited his willingness to take a stand for the authority of Scripture to the strength he received from a powerful eureka moment he had experienced earlier in life, one in which he finally understood the power of God’s grace.

And most of us in the Methodist church have at least heard references to founder John Wesley’s sudden “Aldersgate experience,” where he realized that salvation is a gift from God, something that can only be accepted, not earned.

While in seminary, I was blessed to see a room full of people have one of those aha moments where a deeper understanding of grace is revealed—where people who are striving for righteousness learn instead to accept what God is doing in the world through Jesus Christ.

Helen Musick was an experienced youth ministry instructor who terrorized the Asbury Theological Seminary campus each semester with her midterm exam.

Youth ministry. Sounds easy, right? Make the kids some popcorn, light a candle, sit around and sing “Kumbaya.”

Nope. Not in Helen’s class. Oh, we learned that youth like the popcorn-candle-Kumbaya thing now and then. But we also had to learn in great detail the biblical, theological, psychological and sociological reasons underpinning their likes and dislikes.

And every last bit of that background was on the midterm. One of her victims from an earlier semester told me, “Dude, be happy if you get a C.”

The day of the exam, I did not feel ready. Neither did most of my classmates. Helen handed out the thick exam packets face down. She then uttered the dreaded words: “You may begin.”

When I turned mine over, I was immediately perplexed. The first few pages were Bible verses, all having something to say about God’s grace. My first clear thought: “I don’t remember her saying anything about Bible verses on this test.”

As I flipped further into the packet, I received my second shock: I was certain I had been handed the “key,” the copy she would use for grading purposes. The answers were all there, in her handwriting.

I looked up to tell her of the mistake, and noticed for the first time that all of my classmates looked as confused as me. Helen had big tears in her eyes.

“For half a semester, I’ve been trying to get you all to understand God’s grace,” she said. “And it’s clear after half a semester that many of you still don’t understand.”

She went on to explain that she had set up the midterm exam as an example of how God’s grace works. It was a real test—the grades would go into her grade book. But everyone would get a score of 100.

We did have to do one thing. We had to put our names on our tests. We had to claim the perfect score as our own, even though we had not earned it.

Interestingly, a couple of students got angry. They had studied hard enough to win an A, they believed, and they thought it unfair that everyone was getting an A. We spent some time gently discussing the older brother in Luke 15:11-32.

Most of us were relieved. As best as I could tell, I might have scored a C on my own—maybe as low as a D.

That’s grace: getting an A from God even when we deserve to fail. I hope all of you learn the lesson gently, incorporating it into your life with ease.

But if not, may the resurrected Jesus whack you really hard, even blinding you until you understand the truth. Accepting grace is that important.

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