And: Forgive Us

 July 14 2024

Acts 3:11-26

         One of the things that I can now admit about my humble beginnings in ministry is that I was terribly naïve. When I began, I honestly thought that everyone who came to church and sat in the pews, Sunday after Sunday, were people who had to, at some point, figured out the gospel message and became people who loved Jesus. How surprised I was to find out that such thinking was horribly optimistic. I say this because of experiences I had, like the one where I went to visit a man who was in his nineties at the local nursing home. After I had visited him several times and started to build a friendship with him, I noticed on one visit, as we talked, he began to get teary eyed, and told me that he had something he wanted to confess. Being that this was during my first time in ministry, I was rather shocked. So, I just listened, as this dear saint admitted to me that he had committed a great sin when he was younger, a sin so awful, in his eyes, that he was certain that God could not just simply forgive him for such an act. I wasn’t sure how to respond, yet I through the Spirit’s leading, I found myself telling this man that whether he realized it or not, God had already forgiven him of whatever he had done, because the blood shed at the cross is the once for all sacrifice for all of the worlds sins, even this man’s sin that he had carried around for years. Yet he was not the only person who had difficulty believing that God’s grace is greater than all our sin. I vividly remember serving on a three day retreat, where on Saturday night there is a time for those who participate to quietly ponder the greatness of God’s grace and love. As the spiritual director for the retreat, I would watch for those who needed someone to pray with them, and I saw that there was an older lady who sat all alone, crying softly. So, I went and sat next to her and asked if there was anything I could lift up in prayer. She replied, that she had committed a grave sin when she was much younger, something that she had done to someone else that she was absolutely certain God could never forgive her of such a sin. And again, I found myself replying that her sin had already been forgiven upon the cross. No more did she have to lug that heavy burden of her sin around with her, she could and she must lay it down at the cross. I sat there thinking that this women had spent years sitting in a pew where she heard perhaps thousands of sermons, and celebrated numerous Good Friday’s and Easter yet she had not realized that God’s grace is absolutely greater than all of our sin, even what we know to be so terribly wrong. I could go on to tell you of a young man, raised in a good Baptist family, who found himself addicted to pornography, a sin which he too, could not believe that God’s grace and forgiveness could simply cover over. It took many weeks of praying and talking about the amazing grace of God until at last he accepted the forgiveness of God and he, at last came home running to his Heavenly Father. He is now set free from his addiction, happily married with two kids and he serves as a missionary in Argentina. Yet this present he now lives in could only happen when he was able, through what Jesus had done for him, to let go of his past, for good. So before I even begin to take a deep dive into the forgiveness of God, I am going to pause here to ask you if you are carrying around some sin you committed in your past, something that you are just certain our God can not forgive, please today hear the good news that our Heavenly Father has given us Jesus, his only Son, to be the once for all offering of peace for those near to him and to all who are far from him. Now is the time to set those sins you carry down at the foot of the cross, and see how the blood of Jesus covers over every single sin that is laid down there. 

         You see, as we consider how the early church sprang to life after the Holy Spirit came with showers of blessings, we must remember that this new life needs the right environment to thrive and grow, and that environment is one of forgiveness. As we have looked at that wild day in the church called Pentecost, what has made all of the frenzied activity understandable is knowing that all of what happened is God answering the cry of the Lord’s Prayer. The promise that Jesus gives to us, found in the eleventh chapter of Luke, that the fulfillment of fervently praying the prayer that he taught to his disciples would be the sudden appearance of the Holy Spirit. As the disciples cried out for their Heavenly Father, the Spirit of adoption gave them certainty that God was indeed their, Abba, Father. As they prayed that their father’s name be made holy, the Spirit came to them at their baptism and raised them into resurrection life, into that place of peace that is beyond our understanding. The holiness of God is that he alone is able to bring us to that promised place where we can find rest in him alone. Then, as we cry out for the Father’s reign to come, the Spirit leads us into the freedom found in his light and truth. This brand new church was taught by the apostles, as they took prayed and taught what Jesus had given to them, so that the church grew in their relationship with their Heavenly Father. And as the church broke bread, celebrating the Lord’s Supper together, and became a community bound by love, the church experienced a life of living together in God’s promised peace. You see, they knew that they were indeed free for there you see, there is nothing in this world that can keep us from growing ever closer to our Heavenly Father and with each other, for his love endures and goes on forever. 

         Well out of this prayer to our Heavenly Father comes our response. Our desire becomes that God give us, today, to be life for someone else. This is where God created us, so that our life is always in the service of life, always concerned with the life and welfare of others. This is how this prayer that simply says, “Father, your name be holy, your reign come. Give us today, make us to be the fitting substance of bread for someone else.”, creates and forms the church through cooperating with the Holy Spirit. But the prayer is not finished because as Jesus taught us the prayer continues, saying: And forgive us our debts. And we will forgive the debts of others. And do not bring us to hard testing. Three sentences all beginning with the word, “And”, as if to say, these three should be expected to be present when the church is made present through the Holy Spirit. Here in this gathering that cries out for their Heavenly Father, that his name be holy, that his reign come, here where those who pray cry out to be given as an offering to their Father, there must be found the forgiveness of debts by God, and the forgiveness of the debts of others, and a plea to be kept from a test where we might fail our Heavenly Father.

         Luke, I believe, in his account of the early church gives us teachings that help us know just what we are praying when we ask our Heavenly Father to forgive our debts. This is what we find in the third chapter of Acts, which follows on after the spectacular events of Pentecost. In our scripture for today, we find that Peter and John have, through the power of the Holy Spirit, brought healing to a man who has been unable to walk for years. So of course people notice and soon there is a crowd forming around Peter, and John. Peter wisely takes this moment to address those who have gathered there about the forgiveness of God. Peter wanted to be perfectly clear that neither he nor John had any power to heal this man; no, this healing came to him in the name of Jesus. I imagine a hush came over the crowd when they heard Peter say his name because the name of Jesus caused them to remember just what they had done. And if by chance they had forgotten, make no mistake, Peter is going to most certainly remind them. Whereas, God had glorified his servant Jesus, Peter tells them that they, on the other hand, had denied this one called Jesus. How could they forget that they had desired a murderer instead of desiring the one who is now known as the first born of the living, the Holy and righteous one of God. And Peter continues, telling them that now is the time for all people to place their faith in the name of Jesus. So as it becomes clear that Luke here is teaching us about the petition, “And forgive us our debts”, then what should also be clear to us is that when we hear the call to place our faith in Jesus name, we should remember the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer where we are called to make this name holy. And we know that God is holy because he alone can create in us hearts that rest in his perfect peace. So when Peter tells us that now is the time to place our faith in the name of Jesus, he is in effect saying that now is the time for us to be certain that the peace that we crave so terribly is only found in the name, in the holiness, of Jesus. When Jesus, the first born from the dead, raises us up with him into resurrection life at our baptism this is when we enter into the place of God’s promised peace. So when we say that we have faith in the name of Jesus we are stating that only in the name of Jesus, this name in which we were baptized, only here can we find the peace that all of us crave.

         We have to understand this connection between this peace and God’s forgiveness because Peter, in addressing the crowd, tells them that now was the time to get right with God, to accept his forgiveness and receive his favor and welcome. But in order for them to experience the freedom found in God’s forgiveness, Peter tells them that they have to repent.  To repent is to have a change of heart or mind now that we know that Jesus is the first born from the dead. In other words, they had to change their minds as to what they trusted to give them peace. What people often turn to in order to find peace in this world is either fight, flight or fantasy. The people of God rejected Jesus in favor of a murderer because they believed that peace would only come through a hard fought battle with the Romans not by a man dying on a cross. They firmly believed that peace could only come with a fight. But sometimes, though, people seek peace through the avoidance of conflict, they take flight, withdrawing to some safe place where they can hide out in their own personal heaven here on earth. Yet, for some, they instead turn to flights of fantasy, through addictions and pleasures,  just to escape the nagging unrest for which they have no answer. You see, none of these are the answer because the peace we crave can only be found in friendship with God, not by fighting for it, taking flight or filling our days with fantasies. This is where God’s forgiveness desires to bring us, into a friendship with God.  The first step in this friendship though, is to for us to admit that the peace, this rest and contentment that we long for, this can only be ours in the name of Jesus. It is only when we stop looking at the world for answers that we  will, at last, be willing to turn toward God, just as Peter instructs us, “Repent therefore and turn again…” Here we have to ask, just where are we turning? Peter says that if we turn, then we will have times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord. Unfortunately, this translation does not catch the very personal nature of what Peter is speaking about. You see, where we turn toward is none other than toward the very face of our Father. The image Peter gives to us is one a child who stubbornly refuses to turn toward their parent so that they might run into their arms and rest. Yet, Peter insists, now is the time when we should do just that; now is the time we should turn and come before the face of our Father and find peace in his presence. The people gathered around Peter that day, upon hearing of the face of God, would have perhaps thought of the blessing of Aaron, found in the sixth chapter of Numbers, that was said over the people as they were leaving their worship at the Tabernacle. This blessing goes, “The Lord bless you and keep you safe. The Lord make his face shine upon you and his grace be upon you. The Lord’s face be turned toward you, and may he give you peace.” The disciples though may have also remembered that this is one of the blessings that Jesus said would be ours, that if our heart was pure, if we had faith that peace is only found with God then we will be blessed by seeing God, by being in a face-to-face relationship with God, you might say. As we we stand there before God we find that, as Peter tells us, God blots out our sins. This is the hope heard  in Isaiah 43:25, where God promises his people that he will blot out their transgressions and remember their sins no more. Can you see how such a promise can fill us with an indescribable peace? This blotting out of our sins though, is spoken of here in a way that is so very personal, as if we were to understand that God gently cleans us up as we come before him. One of my favorite authors, Larry Crabb, in his book, ‘The Pressure’s Off”, says that this coming before the face of God is like when we are in school and we get word that the principal wants to see us. There is a fear that comes over us as we wonder just what we have done wrong. Yet when we arrive at the Principals office, he simply invites us in. So there we are, as is normal when we are young, standing before the principal, with our runny nose, our dirt-smudged face, and torn clothes from playing too rough on the playground. Yet none of this keeps the Principal from exclaiming to us, “You look wonderful!So good to see you! Then the Principal gathers us up in his arms, and he begins to sing over us in love, just as we are told God does in the third chapter of Zephaniah. The Principal is overcome with emotion as we, Principal and student, are at last together. And when we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror hanging there in the Principal’s office we see that our nose has been wiped, our face is clean and our clothes are new and we have no idea how any of this has happened. I believe, this is one of the best descriptions of what we mean when we say that God blots out our sins. Can you understand why Peter says that when we come into the Fathers presence we experience times of refreshment. No longer does anxiety choke the life out of us. No, now, we can breathe easy knowing the amazing love that God has for all of us. Peter then, goes on to instruct us that, yes, Jesus is coming back and in this time of waiting we are to obey him because he indeed is the prophet whose words must be heeded. So, yes, as forgiven people who have come before God, we go forth, our hearts at peace from being overwhelmed by the Father’s love for us, ready to obey, and love just as the Father has first loved us. So we praise God that his forgiveness, leads us into friendship with him and as friends with God, we go forth in peace, a peace that is ours to enter into again and again. To the glory of God. Amen!

Consumed:Give

 July 7 2024

Acts 2:44-47

One of the many things that catches people off guard about the church is that they never have stopped to consider that the early church began and grew without any kind of written Bible. I mean, we are so used to somehow believing that their just can’t be a church without first having a Bible in our hands. Yet as we have looked at what happened right there when the church began, we see that the sudden astonishing sprouting up of the church happened without any printed material, no Bibles, no tracts with the Roman road on them, nothing of the sort. In fact, it would be hundreds of years before there was anything resembling the Bible’s we hold in our hands. No, what the church had from the beginning was a prayer. You might say that the church has always had a prayer. This is at least what Luke is trying to get us to understand. Luke wants us to be sure that we know that the promise that Jesus made concerning the Lord’s Prayer, that this prayer will be made real to us by the coming of the Holy Spirit, this is what happened on Pentecost. This promise, found in the eleventh chapter of Luke, comes to life here in the second chapter of Acts. The only way to make sense of all the strange activity that happened there on Pentecost is by knowing that everything that is happening is God’s answering the fervent prayer of those disciples gathered in that upper room in Jerusalem. The prayer they prayed is what we know as the Lord’s Prayer which in Lukes account is pared down to its bare essentials. For Luke, the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples is simply, “Father, may your name be holy, may your reign come. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts. And we will forgive the debts of others. And do not bring us to hard testing.” A mere few words yet they are words that bring down to us the power from on high that we know as the Holy Spirit. 

So, those first disciples, after being taught by the risen Jesus for forty days, were eager to know the Father as Jesus had spoke of him. They too wanted to love him and to be in a living relationship with him. The single burning desire of those gathered in that upper room before Pentecost was the cry for their Father. They desired that their Father’s name be holy, that his reign come. As this prayer is cried out, what becomes obvious is that each petition builds upon the other. Through the Spirit we are adopted into the Family of God, able at last to say, Abba, Father. The name of our Father is vindicated as being holy when we rise into the peace of Christ, this new life in resurrection power given to us at our baptism. In the power of the Spirit we are led into the freedom found in the truth and light of the body of Christ, the fellowship of the family, brothers and sisters crying out to God our Father.

So, with all of that being said, we at last are ready to discover how the Holy Spirit fulfills the petition of the Lord’s Prayer which states, “Give us this day us the fitting substance of bread”. Yes, this sounds very different than what we are used to praying yet this is the very best way to understand the intentions of Jesus when he taught this prayer. 

         You see, just as we may never have considered that the early church was gathering of people who had no Bibles, so too we do not often consider just what it is that we are praying for when we pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” At this point you might push back a little because does it not seem obvious that in this petition that we are just praying for our daily bread, you know, the things necessary for life? Yet, what has not been considered is that this daily bread, what we call our daily provisions, is this something we actually need to pray for? The reason I say what might sound like a strange question, is that Jesus taught that we can expect our Heavenly Father to give us everything we need even before we even ask for it. This is what Jesus says in the sixth chapter of Matthew, where speaking about all of our anxiety about our daily provisions, Jesus assures us that all of the things we need, the food we will eat, the drink that will quench our thirst, the clothes we wear, all of these concerns Jesus tells us are needs that our Heavenly Father already knows about. And isn’t  this what we should expect from this one we call our Heavenly Father? I mean, that’s just the way its supposed to work when you are a child in a nice, normal family. I mean, I never remember having to ask for something to eat, or for clothes to wear. I could expect that my parents would provide the necessities without my having to beg for them. So if that is the way it is in our earthly families why should it not even be even more so in God’s heavenly family. So, perhaps, if we can count on our Heavenly Father to provide all we need without our even having to ask for it, then maybe this petition in the Lord’s Prayer just might be asking for something far different then we think. 

         Perhaps we should understand this petition, “Give us this day our daily bread”, as being a sort of statement of faith whereby we are stating that we believe that God will be the sustainer of our life, today and always. Yet we have already vindicated God’s name as holy, so we abide in the peace we have in the resurrection of Christ. If our eternity is secure then we have to ask ourselves just why should we have any uncertainty about the present? You see, if the prayer builds one petition upon another then what also happens is that each previous petition proves as a test as to whether our thoughts on the following petitions are true or not. So far all we know is that what is normally assumed about what we pray when we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”, does not seem to be what Jesus had in mind when he taught his disciples so long ago.

         Maybe  the best way to discover just what this petition is all about is to look at how the Holy Spirit fulfilled this petition. There is no doubt that Luke wants us to see for ourselves how the Holy Spirit has taken this petition and done something far more than one could ask or imagine.  Luke uses this phrase, “day by day”, that is used in the Lord’s Prayer to mark off this last section of the second chapter of Acts.  Luke is saying this, “day by day”, found here at the end of Acts 2 is to be compared to the, “day by day”, found in his Lord’s Prayer which is very interesting. Now above this section of the second chapter of Acts that is marked off by this phrase, “day by day”, is one of couple of sentences that causes us with our modern sensibilities to squirm because it speaks of being together, having all things together, of selling all of one’s possessions and belongings, and then giving to everyone as anyone had need. But what Luke wants us to understand is that this common life is directly connected to these, “day by day”, activities of those who who had been consumed by the holy fire. It was these day by day activities, this was the Spirit moving among the early church, answering their cry to, “Give us…”

         As we look at how the Holy Spirit led those early believers, we see that he first led them to attend the Temple together. The Temple of course, was the place of worship, yet further, the Temple was a place of sacrifice because the worship of God was only possible through the blood, the life standing in place of the sinful self. It is quite understandable then that Luke also mentions that the Holy Spirit led these new converts to continue to be about the breaking of bread. They were to remember Jesus, how Jesus was the bread of life who was given for the life of the world. They were to also remember how his blood was poured out upon the mercy seat to be the way home to the Father. As they gathered around their tables for communion they also shared their food, doing so as Luke tells us, with exceeding exuberance. In the Greek, it is the kind of joy that makes you jump and shout but I’m unsure how you do that when you eat, but nonetheless, fun was had by all. Then Luke uses a word only found here and nowhere else, a word which literally means, without stones. Now Luke uses this word in conjunction with hearts so anyone who knows their Old Testament knows where Luke is going with all of this. Back we go to the thirty-six chapter of Ezekiel , and as we read, further past the part where God says he will vindicate his name, there we find the promise God makes with his people, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh…”. Luke was saying that here were those people Ezekiel had spoke of, the very people of God who had undergone this holy surgery, their hearts of stone had been taken out, gone for good, now replaced with a hearts that pulsated in the power of the Spirit, able to love with a new love. Now all their hearts could do was to praise God and give grace to all people. Is it any wonder that the Lord added day by day, the number who were being saved?

         So after we read Luke’s account in this second chapter of Acts it is clear that this petition we normally know as being, “Give us this day our daily bread”, is not fulfilled by the Holy Spirit in any way that we would have considered. What actually helps us to understand how the Spirit fulfills this petition is to look again at what Jesus really said, words that are difficult to make sense of yet this understanding is very important us in our search for what we are praying for. The words Jesus spoke were more like this:, “Give us this day, us the fitting substance of bread”. After you say it one time you see why they stuck with “daily”! But you have to wonder why Jesus chose such odd phrasing when he taught his prayer? Perhaps what might help us to understand this petition better is to consider just what it is that we are we asking our Father to give to us? What if we were to put put the emphasis on us instead of bread when we prayed this petition? What if we asked our Heavenly Father to give, us, this day, that our desire is for us to be something akin to the right amount of bread, something that could be for someone else just what they need for life? You see, when we know that each petition builds upon each other then as we have entered into a love relationship with our Heavenly Father and have experienced the wonderful peace of Christ, the Son of God, and we find a freedom that is ours in the Spirit of truth, what we may not have realized is that we have been caught up in the very life of God-Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This life of God is quite simply a life of giving. The Father so loved the world that he gave his only Son. The Father gives the Spirit through the Son. And as we read in the ninth chapter of Hebrews, it was through the eternal Spirit that Christ offered himself without blemish to God, the Father. This offering of God is what is proclaimed through the offerings of the Temple and through the elements of communion where Jesus offered up his very self, his very body offered up, his very blood poured out, because this is his who he is, the God who simply must give. This giving of our God is what stokes our passion. We rejoice that he gave his Son for us. We are amazed at the Spirit that is given upon us. Yet we want more than for God to give to us. We desire passionately to become like this God, givers in our own right, givers who give and give no thought about how how they give, or how much they give, just giving with utter abandon just like God. We know that God alone is worthy to give ourselves completely to because he alone found us to be worthy to give himself completely to, to give all of himself, for us. So, yes, we pray, God, come and be our consuming passion; be for us our one desire, so we might be for you, as Paul puts it, a living sacrifice, because as he explains this is just the only logical worship in light of the great mercies of God.

         You see, God has always wanted to bring people to this place, this place where the people who searched for life might find it. The poor who cry out to God for help are to have their prayer answered by those who pray the prayer that their Lord has taught them. These are the ones who ask their Heavenly Father to give them to be the fitting substance, the exact provision for what is needed for the next person in need, to be for the next person what they consider to be their, “bread”. Day by Day, as we enter into what Jesus has done for us, as we remember how his body was broken, for us, how his blood was shed for the forgiveness of sins of the many, we are to be aware of this new life that we have now entered, the very life of God which is marked by sacrificial giving. As the bread, which represents the body of Christ, is lifted from the Lord’s table, so too we too ask the Lord to take hold of us, to lift us up out of this world. Jesus then takes and blesses the bread, and we remember that in our relationship with the Father we are blessed with life in his eternal kingdom. Jesus then takes the loaf and he breaks it, and so too our wills must be broken for only in this way can we, like the bread, be given in the manner of Jesus, for the life of the world.  This is the logical worship, this offering of ourselves, the very reason we inhabit the Father’s house with praise and our hearts pulsate with life and love. No, longer are we able to stand by unmoved by the plight of the lost, and lonely, the hurting and the hungry. As the Father gave Jesus, we cry, “Father, give me!” Give us Father, to be just what is needed right now to bring light and life, wholeness and healing in the world right where we are at!” I really believe that this is what those folks were praying as the sun was setting that fateful Pentecost day. And I believe that God most assuredly, was answering that prayer. I mean, doesn’t it sound like God was doing his own summer of love thing there in downtown Jerusalem? Sure it does! But Luke wants us to be absolutely certain that this selling all that we have and holding all things in common only happens with a lot of prayer, a lot of worship, a lot of trips to the Lords Table, a lot of intense Christian fellowship, day by day. Yes, it can happen because it did happen but it only happened because the early church became consumed in their passion for what had been promised to them in the Lord’s Prayer. So, yes, we can keep praying this petition like we have always prayed it, asking to be given bread but what if we instead asked our Heavenly Father to give us, this very day, to be for someone else just what they needed today to get through life? Father, yes, please, give us, today! Amen!

 

Consumed:Reign

 June 9 2024

Acts 2:42-44

         How many of you can remember drivers-ed classes? Do you remember thinking that there was a lot more to driving then you could ever imagine? Perhaps one of the hardest parts of driving, for most people, was getting your feet to operate the pedals. (And this was without having to learn how to use a clutch and a manual transmission so most of us should be thankful for that.) I mean, just getting the hang of how to speed up and slow down in a way that didn’t get people killed was kind of a big deal. Perhaps one of the hardest aspects to learn was to just use one foot for both the accelerator and the brake. For first time drivers it is a real temptation to let your left foot stomp the brakes and the let your right foot to step on the gas. But there is probably no more dangerous way of driving. I had a friend who never did give up this bad habit and one day when he was in his seventies, drove his car into a store front in downtown Dover. Luckily, no one was hurt but my friends confidence in driving was never the same, and it was all because he couldn’t stop using one foot for the brake and one foot for the gas.

         Well, in our spiritual lives, we often do something very similar to this dangerous practice of driving with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas. We love to hold on to that quote that tells us that if the Son sets you free you will be free indeed, the equivalent of stepping on the gas, but then be so unsure of what to do next that we stomp on the brakes by now trying to keep a list of do’s and don’ts. Or we may just believe we can now just do whatever we want, now that we are free because God’s got us covered yet to do so just places you right back to where we started. So this kingdom life is as difficult, it seems, to figure out as it was for us to figure out how to drive. I mean, just what do we do when the Spirit answers our prayer and we suddenly find ourselves able to spiritually move in ways we never thought possible?

This is what we are taking a look at, at how the Holy Spirit was poured out upon the world on Pentecost. We are told that the disciples entered into a time of intense prayer.The prayer they cried out was the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer in Luke’s version that simply goes, “Father, your name, holy; your reign, come; give us the amount of bread that is fitting for us today; and forgive us our sins; and we forgive those who are indebted to us; and do not bring us to trial.” After Jesus taught his disciples this prayer he further taught them that the answer to this prayer was the Holy Spirit given to us by the Father through the Son. This is why this series of messages is called, “Consumed”, because these disciples were consumed in their passion for God to answer their cry. These disciples were desperate for what only the holy fire could set loose in their life. You see, only the Spirit can fulfill our hearts cry for our Father because only the Spirit is the Spirit of adoption, the very one who brings us home to live forever with our Heavenly Father. Jesus took upon himself our place in death, tasting death for all of us, so that we might be able to live where he has always lived, there in the presence of the Father. Through grace, the Father receives us in and he blesses us with the promise of an eternal inheritance. 

         Well, the Holy Spirit not only answers our cry for our Father, the Spirt of Holiness is also the only one who can bring peace to our hearts.This is what God promises to us in the thirty-sixth chapter of Ezekiel where God tells Ezekiel that his name would be vindicated as being holy when he would take his people from among the nations and bring them into the land God had promised to them. This promised land was always supposed to be more than just a plot of ground but was instead to be a place where the people of God would find rest and peace, where every day could be said to be like a Sabbath. This is the holiness of God, his being able to draw people to himself and create within their hearts a peace and confidence that just cannot be found anywhere else on earth. The power that produces this confidence is the power of God’s holy love. God’s love removes our fear, and when our fear is gone then faith can enter in. This is what is being proclaimed every time a person is baptized in the holy name of Jesus. In the name of Jesus a person rises up out of the water in the power and confidence of the resurrection; in the holy name of Jesus there is indeed, peace.

         Now it is very important that we begin to see how the Lord’s Prayer is structured so that each petition builds upon what has come previously.This means that we can expect that the reign of God to be centered upon knowing God as our Father and having the peace of Christ in our hearts. With that in mind we must be at least slightly intrigued at just, how will the Holy Spirit fulfill God’s reign and rule our world? The surprising answer is found in this idea of freedom. It sounds strange, perhaps, to say that God alone rules with freedom yet this is very much what we must understand about where our Father desires to bring us. We also need to know that when freedom is spoken of in the New Testament it is not referring to one big, free-for-all, where anything goes, hardly. No, freedom is more about being able to move, to go, without anything being able to stop that movement. We hear this in what Paul writes in the third chapter of Second Corinthians. There Paul speaks of how a veil, we might say a blind-fold, was placed over the eyes of the people of God, because their hearts were hardened. What caused their hearts to turn to stone was that they were people under the Law under what Paul called, “the ministry of condemnation”. It is easy to understand what Paul means, isn’t it? We all know that the minds of those who are law abiding people are focused on judgment, deciding who is in the right, and who is in the wrong, who measures up and who clearly has not made the mark.These are the people who begin to believe that, in the hands of the right people, the perfect life outlined in some perfect law is actually possible; and, of course, they are those right people. It is these law abiding people that Paul describes as being those who are completely in the dark about what life is all about. And when you are in the dark there simply is not much freedom, is there? But all is not lost because Paul goes on to say, that only through Christ is that blind-fold lifted and people can indeed see what real life is all about. Life is not about condemnation unto death but instead it is a welcome into life by our Heavenly Father. Life is not about some do’s and don’ts that need marked off of a check list. No, life is about a loving relationship with your Heavenly Father, joining him and our brothers and sisters in the blessing of the world.

         So, there is no freedom to be found if one somehow believes that life is all about trying to accomplish some long list of moral choices. Such law mentality is centered on judgment and condemnation which divides people into neat little categories tearing apart the living unity of the family of God. If we pray for the reign of God to come and somehow believe that this means that we are able to become good, law abiding citizens well the Spirit may desire to set you free, stepping on the gas, but you will be in the dark, pumping the brakes and going nowhere.

         So if we want to be free then we had better not somehow believe that it is going to happen by following a set of rules. No, instead of judgment and condemnation we now can find freedom in the welcome and grace of our Heavenly Father. Yet there is another way that people pump the brakes in their experience with the Holy Spirit. In the eighth chapter of John, Jesus says to some people who had believed in him that if they were truly his disciples they would know the truth and the truth would set them free. Now, this was unsettling to hear Jesus tell them that contrary to what they had thought of themselves, they were in fact slaves. They were slaves, Jesus tells them, because they were bound to sinning, which seems kind of confusing, doesn’t it, because, after all, they were called disciples of Jesus? What helps make sense of what Jesus is saying here is for us to know that Jesus explains, in the sixteenth chapter, that sin is to be defined as not believing in Jesus. So these disciples were now being told by Jesus that they had a problem with  believing in what he said. Jesus, says to them, that they had instead listened and believed in the devil, the very father of lies. As Jesus told them, if God were their Father, then they would love Jesus. Here is where the problem lies. You see, if we say God is our Father, then we must love Jesus and to love Jesus is to love the peace for which Jesus gave his life to bring about. So when Jesus says that their father was really the devil, the father of lies, he was saying to them that they refused to believe that the only peace to seek after was the peace that was brought about through the holy love of God which loves all people equally, all of the time. How very different is the lie the devil tells us that peace only comes with the elimination of ones enemies instead of peace occurring by being reconciled with ones enemies as Jesus did with us upon the cross.  

         So we can not pray for the kingdom life and receive the Holy Spirit only to turn back to try and live life in a law abiding mindset bent on keeping a list of rules. To do so would be stomping on the brakes just when the Holy Spirit is gearing up to go. No, we must know that now life is all about the welcome and grace of the Father which brings us into a family of blessing. In the same way, if we pray for the kingdom life and receive the Holy Spirit and refuse to trust that the only real peace that this world can know is through the holy name of Jesus, then again the Spirit will desire to propel us forward all while we have the brakes all locked up.

         The Holy Spirit counters these attempts we make to brake by being the Spirit of truth. Now in our modern understanding, truth is like a statement of fact, like two plus two is four, this is a fact, it is the truth. But in the days of Jesus, to say that something was the truth was to say that it was real, it could be seen, and touched and heard. So to say that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth means that the Holy Spirit brings about a new reality that can not be denied; it is undeniably the truth. In this new true reality, God rules through freedom that is found in his light. It is the Holy Spirit who brings people into the light, the light of the welcome of our Heavenly Father and the light of the peace found in the holy name of Jesus. This is what Luke records at the end of the second chapter of Acts.They did not merely devote themselves to the work they were doing, no, they were people continually doing these actions with intense effort. Luke wants us to get this image of what truly free people look like, a hive of busy people focused with clarity of purpose, moving in the freedom that is found in light. They were immersed in doing just four activities, the apostles teachings, the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayer. The apostles teachings simply meant that the disciples who had been taught by Jesus had now become his spokespeople, teaching others just as Jesus had first taught them. Most certainly this meant that they instructed those who had been baptized on Pentecost the basic, core teachings of Jesus. Whereas Luke has scattered these teachings through out his gospel account, Matthew has those teachings in what is called the Sermon on the Mount, found in the fifth through the seventh chapters of his account. What is very interesting is that at the very center of those core teachings is where Matthew places the Lord’s Prayer. This confirms that the heart of what Jesus taught is his prayer and the foundation of that prayer is the cry for our Heavenly Father. So it appears that the apostles have gone from praying the Lord’s Prayer to now, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, they are teaching others about this prayer and how they should pray this prayer also.You see, the way into freedom is to know the prayer to the Father and praying fervently that prayer. To hear and  experience the welcome and grace and favor of our Heavenly Father over and over again leads us ever into light and life.

         In a similar way, the Holy Spirit fulfills our cry for the reign of God to come by bringing us into the freedom found in the peace of Christ. Freedom and unity seem to contradict one another however the peace of Christ brings about the seemingly impossible. We are told that the people on the day of Pentecost were intently focused on the breaking of bread and fellowship. The breaking of bread is another name for what we call Holy Communion, where the one loaf, representing the body of Christ, is broken so that the many people who make up the body of Christ might be made one. As Paul says in the second chapter of Ephesians, Jesus himself is our peace, he has made us one, and has broken down in his flesh the wall of hostility that divided us. Those of us who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. This is what is remembered every time God’s people gather around the Lord’s table. Here, out of this peace of Christ grows the communion and fellowship of the saints, the true witness to the truth that the peace of Christ is the only peace, for it is the peace that testifies to a holy God.

         So this is what the reign of God looks like, the freedom of people knowing and growing in their relationship with their Heavenly Father. The reign of God looks like people living in the light of the truth, that the peace of Christ is the worlds only peace for it is a peace that has come out of God’s holy love that was witnessed upon the cross. Here in this reign we discover freedom in the Spirit, a freedom to where we can grow ever closer to our God and to each other in a movement which the world will never be able to brake check us. To that let us give God the praise! Amen!

 

Consumed:Holy

 June 2 2024

Acts 2:29-41

         Its funny how, because I grew up on a farm, I think of planting corn and making hay during this time of year. But lately I have been thinking about my buddies in prison because it was around this time of year that the Kairos team would be meeting getting ready to head back to Belmont Correctional.I often get asked if I had any concerns going inside during the times our team would do weekends or visits, and I have to honestly admit that I always had a sense of peace when were serving at Belmont. I vividly remember the first time I went as part of the Kairos team. I thought I would quite naturally be apprehensive or nervous. Yet quite the opposite happened because when I entered into those prisons walls a great calm came over me; I never got over that feeling. What I sensed in those first few moments of being there was that God was not just already present with us but also, I sensed that he had been preparing everything in advance for us. So it seems that God is able to bring peace even there behind prison walls.

         As we continue to try and comprehend this experience of Pentecost by knowing that this experience is an outflow of the Lord’s Prayer, God’s ability to bring peace to our hearts does not seem to be evident. Yet if we look at our scripture for today as the fulfillment of the second petition of what Luke has recorded in his account of the Lord’s Prayer what we find is that there is more to our scripture than meets the eye.

         The second petition of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke’s account of this teaching of Jesus is simply, “Your name holy.”As we saw last week, the prayer begins with the title, “Father”. So here we discover that our Father in heaven has a name and this name is holy. In the version of the Lord’s Prayer that most of us were taught, the first few petitions say, “Our Father, who art in heaven; hallowed be your name.” For most of us, we may have never considered that when we pray that our Father’s name be hallowed what we desire is that the reputation of our Father, who resides in heaven, is that his reputation, his unchanging character, is known as being holy. This has much the same sense as when we might say that we are concerned if someone were to ruin our good name. God, too, is concerned that his good name, his holiness, could be ruined thus affecting how he might be thought of by those who do not know him.

         So we can relate to this concern that God has that his name not be dragged in the mud; we don’t want that to happen to our good name either. The problem is that it is difficult to define just what does, “holy”, mean? Most of us have met, or at last, know of someone who was what we call, holier-than-thou, haven’t we? You know, those whose nose is tilted slightly up with their eyes gazing down at us because they have surmised that they hold the moral high ground. Is this what, “holy”, means, this keeping of strict rules which make us stand out as moral and upright people? Is this holiness, this special quality that people want you to know that they have? It seems as if holiness is just another means of dividing the world up, you know, those who are holy over here and the rest of you, over there? 

         It becomes apparent that we need to understand just what is meant by this term, “holy”. What helps us to unravel just what it is that we are praying for, what we know the Holy Spirit will bring to fulfillment, is knowing that this petition is actually a scripture verse from the thirty-sixth chapter of Ezekiel.  Ezekiel was a prophet of the people of Israel. When God’s people were thrown out of their land at the hands of the Babylonian army and forced to march hundreds of miles into exile, Ezekiel went with them to be the spokesperson for God in this situation.  Here in the thirty-sixth chapter, God tells Ezekiel, “I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned . The nations will know that I am the Lord, when through you I vindicate my holiness. I will take you from the nations and gather you from the countries and bring you into your own land.” God is going to justify his claim that he alone is the holy God and he is going to do so by gathering his people and by bringing them into their own land. Of course, God did bring his people back from exile in Babylon to live in Judaea yet even so, the people never felt as if their exile had ended. You see, what God tells Ezekiel he is going to do has a deeper meaning than just bringing his people back to the land that he had promised to them. You see, the promised land represented a place of rest and peace for God’s people. In the ninety-fifth Psalm, God speaks of those he had rescued from Egypt who, in the end rebelled, against him. God says of them that for,…”forty years I loathed that generation and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways.”Therefore I swore in my wrath, “They shall not enter my rest.” The writer of Hebrews, commentating on this verse, says that this Psalm holds forth the promise of a coming Sabbath rest for the people of God. This rest, this is what I believe that God is referring to when he tells Ezekiel that his name will be known as being holy when he gathers his people from among the nations and his people come to rest in their confidence of God. God’s people are to be known as people who have peace through their faith in him. This is something that only a holy God can do.

         When we begin to understand what it means for God to be holy then it is not much of a leap to see that the name of Jesus is the holy name of God.Consider the promise of Jesus from the twelfth chapter of John, where he states, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” This is exactly how God said that he would vindicate his claim of being holy. Then, in some of his last words to his disciples, Jesus tells them, from the fourteenth chapter of John, “Peace I leave you, my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” Here then the name of God is made holy through these actions of Jesus, his willingness to be hoisted up upon the cross to draw all people to him so that all people might be given the very peace of Jesus that steadied him as he carried that cross. 

         As the disciples prayed there in that upper room for their Father’s name to be holy who could have guessed how the coming the of the Holy Spirit would bring this petition to fulfillment. The Spirit came upon Peter and through God speaking through him, those who had gathered around the confusion of that upper room heard the story of how Jesus, yes, the very Jesus that many in that crowd had wanted crucified, was now seated on the very throne of David. God had indeed not allowed his Holy One to see corruption just as David had prophesied in the sixteenth Psalm. No, this Jesus, God’s Holy One, had been raised from the dead and had been exalted to the right hand of the Father on high. From there, Jesus had poured out the Holy Spirit just as the Father had promised would happen. So, Peter concluded, this Jesus that those in the crowd had crucified, this is indeed the Lord, God’s exalted king.

         Suddenly, those listening to Peter understood exactly where they stood with God, being the very people who shouted for God’s chosen king to be killed. Their lives, you might say, were caught in the crosshairs. Luke records that when what Peter had said landed on them like a ton of bricks, their hearts were cut to the core. This was an obvious reference to the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy where Moses told God’s people that their exile would end when, “…the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring so that you will love the Lord your God with all of your heart and soul.” Suddenly those who cried, “Crucify!”, were now pleading to know just what they should do. They knew that they were deserving of death, justice demanded at least that for the killing of God’s anointed exalted king. Yet, even though the air was thick with the presence of God, they were found instead to be very much alive. What sort of mercy is this that the judgment of death, that was surely theirs, was now suddenly gone and in its place was the gift of life. Their hearts, so enamored with the desires of this world, needed this flesh which bound them to this earth, this needed to be cut away so that through the the grasp of the Holy Spirit they might be bound to heaven. They publicly needed to proclaim what they had experienced using the act of baptism.  They had to be seen as being plunged down into the waters of death, this dying to this world and this age. Then they needed to be raised up out of the water, up out of death, to be drawn into the kingdom life given to them through the Holy Spirit. Their baptism was done in the name of Jesus. In bearing the name of Jesus they vindicated the holiness of the Father because he alone can raise the dead to new life, this is the very foundation of the peace that he promises us. This peace is given to us through the Holy Spirit who, as Paul teaches us in the eighth chapter of Romans, is the one who gives us life and peace. So we could say that this kingdom of God is brought about through a promise of peace not, as earthly kingdoms are, through a declaration of war; this is the very holiness of God.

         When we consider the holiness of God we must wonder just what is this power that brings forth a kingdom through peace? The answer we find through out scripture is that the power which brings us into peace is none other than God’s holy love. No where is this better stated than in the first letter of John, at the end of the fourth chapter where we hear, “By this does this love of God reach its goal in us so we might confidence, an abiding peace, on the day of judgment because as God is so also are we in the world. There is no fear in love, but rather the result of God’s love is that it casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment and whoever fears, for this one the love of God has not accomplished what that his love is capable of doing. We are to love precisely because God first loved us.” You see, the holy love of God is our very hope on the day of judgment and because God, in his mercy has chosen to give us life in place of our sure death, we must ask, just how can fear remain in us? And when fear is thrown out then faith, this confidence, this peace we have with God, can flood our soul. From this place of peace then is where love can at last, begin to grow and flourish in us. So to ask that the name of the Father be proven holy by us means that we are asking that the Holy Spirit bring us to be people of a peculiar peace, a peace, as Paul says, that passes all understanding.

         When we can at last make this connection between, “holy”, and, “peace”, then as we consider the first two petitions of Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, “Father, your name, holy.”, it should come as no surprise that Jesus would teach about what the end of such a prayer should be. In the fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus teaches, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God.” Here we have, first, the blessing of our Father which Jesus says is ours when we join him in building his kingdom through peace. The blessing that follows this making of peace is that we will have absolute certainty that we are sons of the Father who stand to receive an eternal inheritance. So the peace which comes through the the certainty of our eternity is here connected directly to our being those who are busy using all that they have been given to make peace. Is it becoming clear that if we refuse to be peacemakers that we will then have no peace about our future with the God of all peace and in the end we will be consumed by anxiety and worry instead of being consumed by the holy love of God. You see, as we look at this Pentecost experience and wonder at why the longing for kingdom became a passion which consumed them, we can know that it is the holy love of God which is the fuel that sets ablaze the fire of our heart. In the peace which God’s holy love creates in us we must endeavor to follow our Father’s lead and give all to make peace. Yet, such an undertaking seems fairly overwhelming in a world of overflowing with controversy and conflict. Perhaps we should start small, maybe with just one person, and simply do one thing- encourage them. This is what the writer of Hebrews tells us that we can do to increase the peace in someone’s life as we here in the third chapter, “Come alongside of someone and speak courage into their hearts as long as it is called, “Today”,that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” The lie of sin is that there can be no solid ground on which we might stand, no real place of peace. But we have been raised with Jesus, we stand on resurrection ground and here there is no greater place of peace to be found. So as we speak words which tell of a holy God, a God who has loved us with his holy love ,a God who draws us into his perfect peace, to someone whose heart is troubled, this is when we too will remember our God and our peace will abound. We must hold on to the words God spoke to Joshua as he entered into the land which represents the peace of God: Be strong and courageous, do not be terrified for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Take these words and go in peace. Amen. 

 

Consumed: Father

 May 26 2024

Acts 2

         As I thought about Pentecost I remembered a story which is very much a Pentecost story. It has been almost twenty years ago that I found myself suddenly out of work and in need of employment. So I put out resumes and waited as one does, but I just couldn’t sit around waiting for something to happen so I helped a local church do some building projects in anticipation of opening a community youth center. This church already had a ministry to the the growing number of Hispanic immigrants so the person in charge of that ministry, Marlin, was often around as I worked on the various projects I was doing. Many times at lunch time Marlin would invite me to eat with him. Now it was inevitable, I guess, that one day when Marlin called and said lunch was ready that there at the table with us was a young Hispanic man. I have to admit, I do not know a lick of Spanish and this young man, I’m pretty sure knew very little English but Marlin helped us to get to know each other. I found out that he had walked over a thousand miles to be sitting at that table with us. He had left his home, his family, in search of a better future for them. He was hoping to find a job and to work hard so that he could send as much home as he could. Being out of work, I could very much relate to his desire to provide for his loved ones. I respected his willingness to defy the odds in order to give his family a better life.

As we continue to explore what happened on Pentecost in this series of messages entitled, “Consumed”, it may be surprising that this simple lunch conversation with someone who was vastly different from me in so many ways, this was very much a Pentecost experience.  Perhaps as you listened to the scripture for today you may have heard mention of how the people of Pentecost, those simple fisherman from Galilee suddenly were able to speak a multitude of languages, that this is what I might be referencing in my story. As true as this might be, the real reason I thought my lunch with my Hispanic friend was a Pentecost experience was that there at that first Pentecost, something deeper, and more profound was discovered, something that when we understand it changes forever the very way we encounter one another.

As we said previously, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost was preceded by those in upper room fervently praying what we know as the Lord’s  Prayer. In the eleventh chapter of Luke, Jesus teaches on how we as his followers are to pray. This prayer is our asking for the life of the kingdom, that life which is victorious over death. Those in the upper room that day had spent forty days being taught by the one whose life had indeed conquered death, the one we know as Jesus. Here was one speaking to them who had been most assuredly dead yet here he was living among them, teaching them about the kingdom for the kingdom life was his indestructible life. Yet, Jesus did not just teach them about the kingdom, no, he also instructed them to pray and not just to pray but they were to be consumed in their longing for the kingdom. They were to remember the promise of Jesus as found at the beginning of the eleventh chapter of Luke, that when they prayed the Lord’s Prayer, you know, Father; your name, holy; your kingdom come; give us today the right amount of bread we need; and forgive us our trespasses; and we forgive the debts others owe to us; do not bring us to testing. Jesus ends his teaching on the Lord’s Prayer telling us  that when we pray this prayer anticipating an answer, this is when the Holy Spirit would arrive. You see, it is the Holy Spirit who gives  us this kingdom life that we long for. So it should be no surprise that indeed, after a time of unrelenting prayer, there at the festival of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came in the most incredible of ways.

Today, in this second installment of these messages called, “Consumed”, we are going to discover just how the Holy Spirit fulfills our hearts cry, for Father, because, after all this is how the kingdom prayer begins. When we look at what Luke records in the second chapter of Acts, we find that as the disciples were there together, they heard the sound of a mighty wind coming from heaven and this roaring windstorm filled the whole house. To those who knew their scriptures as well as the disciples did they must have recognized that this was the sound of beginnings, the very first sound, of the Spirit hovering, as a bird flaps its wings stirring up the wind as it goes. So here it was again, that same cue that signaled a beginning, a new creation being brought forth from the chaos of the old creation. Yet what appears to us as being chaotic, this strange fire from heaven, lighting upon each one present, this was, in fact, the very ordering at last of God’s highest creation. This fire was the fire consuming a sacrificial soul, this unified passion for the Father, his name, holy, and his reign to come.

When the Spirit came upon the chaos of the old creation, it appears that his presence has just created more chaos, so many voices chattering in different languages by those who previously were unable to do so. Yet, this was not disorder at all but rather these voices were a sign pointing to a new creation. You see, this speaking of different languages by these former fishermen and tax collectors, was a reversal of the story of the Tower of Babel as told in the eleventh chapter of Genesis. There, when the all the people of the earth came together to make a name for themselves by building a giant stairway to heaven, God came upon their construction site and made a confusion all of the languages that the people spoke. Then God took and scattered these people all over the world. So, here on Pentecost it is as if God is saying that the age of babbling at each other is over, now has come the time to bring back together what had once been scattered. This was yet another mark of the new creation. The reason why God said that we are to now come together across all languages, tribes and nations is that the solution God had put forth to reverse the curse the world is under had at last been accomplished. This solution of God, found in the twelfth chapter of Genesis, is to call a man named Abram and through him and his descendants, all the families of the world would experience the blessing of God. The descendants of Abraham, the people of Israel, had failed to be the bearers of God’s blessing for they too were people under the curse of sin. No, the world had to wait for the arrival of Jesus, the descendant of Abram, now Abraham, who would be, at last, the true Israelite, who would take the curse upon himself and bear it unto death. You see, only by first eliminating the curse could the blessing of God flow out to every family on earth.

         And just what is this blessing, we might ask? To discover the answer we have to keep in mind that in the Old Testament, the blessing was a gift given by a Father to his oldest son. When a Father would bless his son they could expect to receive the full abundance of the richness of the Father, his inheritance and much more. In much the same way, the blessing our Heavenly Father is our inheritance, the hope of one day experiencing the full abundance of our heavenly Father’s riches which is his love for us. You see, through Jesus, the love which our Heavenly Father has always loved his Son, a love which was even before the very  foundation of the world, this love is now ours, and the home where are welcomed into is none other than the home of the Son of God, our Lord Jesus. This eternal home that awaits us is our anchor of hope for the present and the faith we can hold onto for our future; this is blessing, the blessing which undoes the chaos of the curse.

         This blessing that has come through Jesus, the descendant of Abraham, is the life of standing in the grace, the welcome, of being with Christ before the Father. The God who brings this life to us is the God we know as the person we call, Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit, Paul tells us in the eighth chapter of Romans, that is our Spirit of adoption, the assurance that we are no longer orphans, without any hope, no faith, and no future, but instead, through the Spirit, we have the certainty of knowing God as our Father. In that same eighth chapter of Romans, Paul states that through the Spirit, we cry, Abba, Father.  Here Paul is speaking of how when Jews and Gentiles begin the Lord’s Prayer, their cry for their Father sound very different from one another yet, we are assured that it is the same Spirit that is at work. The Spirit answers this yearning all of us have to be united with our Heavenly Father and to know his blessing.

What greater way could God communicate to us that language no longer must separate all of the families on earth than through his actions of Pentecost. Across the barriers of language, we are invited to come together in this life given to us by the Spirit, the life where can find a home with Christ and our heavenly Father. This is a life of blessing given to all, and in this blessing we are all equals. This is what Peter spoke when the words of Joel were uttered by him. This prophesy of Joel foresaw the day when God’s promise to Abraham to bless the whole world would become a beautiful reality. The blessing upon all families becomes, in these words of Joel, the Spirit poured out on all flesh. This coming of the Spirit, we are told, will be accompanied by all people becoming prophets, and young men and old will see visions and dreams. Yet, we have to wonder just what is this prophecy trying to say to us ? Perhaps the answer is found in our knowing that prophecy is, as explained to us in the eighteenth chapter of Deuteronomy, the very words of God being formed in a persons mouth. The Spirit, as we already witnessed, caused the barriers of language to come crumbling down between everyone so that all might speak of the mighty acts of God. So too, here the barrier between us and God also has been crossed so that God now is able to speak not only to us but through us. 

In this new creation in which the Spirit hovers above, the word that speaks order into the chaos is the word that the Spirit speaks through us, and the words we now speak to each other become the very words of blessing. When we cry out for our Heavenly Father, the Spirit reaches out to us and brings us to our Father’s side. Yet what the Father desires of us is that we speak his language, to follow his lead and be people who bless others just as we have been blessed by him. This is the very reason why Jesus went to the cross, to take upon himself the curse which for so long had kept the world from experiencing God’s promised blessing. This is wonderful news for us yet what this also means is that if we refuse to be people of blessing  then we are stating, in effect that, the work of Jesus upon the cross meant nothing. It is simply impossible to claim our Father’s blessing of an unfading eternal future yet here in the present refuse to be a blessing to others. We could say then that our longing for our Heavenly Father comes with expectation that we will work with our Heavenly Father so that all the families of earth will at last experience blessing. So for us to pray, “Father”, means that the Holy Spirit answers this cry by bringing us to know each other as brother, as sister, those who work together in the family business of blessing others.

This blessing of our Heavenly Father, given to us through the Holy Spirit, cannot be simply left behind when we go out into the world. In all of our interactions together, maybe just sharing lunch, whatever we might be doing, we must hold on to this: if God is our Father then he is most assuredly every other person’s Heavenly Father as well. This person we meet may not have heard what Jesus has done for them. They may be someone who has never heard that they have a Heavenly Father who is longing for them to come home. They may not know that this Father only desires that every person be blessed with an eternal inheritance; perhaps for them this gift remains theirs to discover. Yet, maybe the way this person can receive this blessing of their Heavenly Father is simply for a brother or sister to treat them as one of the family. The greatest blessings, as Pentecost shows us, are the blessings of having our voice be heard and  the blessing of being spoke to with love and respect.This speaks to the wisdom of our Father who knows that life is just better, together; this is what being blessed is all about. So, beyond the curse which divides, the life giving Spirit brings us into a love relationship with the Father, a relationship where we know each other as brothers and sisters. This is the blessing which unifies us, the blessing that stokes our passion and causes us to be consumed with a longing to be home. But for now, we must go forth and seek to bless our brothers and sisters, listening with attention and speaking to them with dignity, always, for to them the Father gives his blessing.To the Father’s honor and glory! Amen!

         

         

 

 

         

Consumed:Life

 May 19 2024

Acts 1:6-11, 2:1-4

         The other day my Dad and I carpooled with a young man to go to a Mens Breakfast. As we were chit chatting on the way there, it was mentioned that May 6 was Ascension Day. Most people don’t realize that, for the Amish, this is a Holy Day, that is observed by a worshipful attitude so for them it is a day of rest much like a Sunday morning. Now that might surprise people, it surprised the people who were staying in our AirBnb because their plans to shop in Amish country came to a screeching halt, at least for that day. Yet what surprised me even more was that the young man who was driving, upon hearing about Ascension Day, looked at us as if we were speaking of same strange weird holiday he had never heard of. Now, I know that this young man has been involved in church for most of his life yet here he was very much surprised to learn that Jesus ascended into heaven forty days after Easter. He admitted that he had never heard that this is how Jesus got to where he was right now. He had just assumed that when he rose from the grave, he rose up and never stopped rising up until he hit heaven. Well, needless to say, Dad and I were rather dumbfounded and we tried our best to set him straight.

Now, you too might be wondering, just what is the big deal about knowing that there is a holiday that the church observes called Ascension Day? Does it really matter if we know that the risen Jesus spent forty days after Easter teaching the disciples before heading home? The importance for us is, as Jesus tells us in the sixteenth chapter of John, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” You see, right from the beginning of his ministry, when Jesus came to be baptized in the Jordan river, John prophesied that this Jesus, that he had baptized, this was the one whom the Holy Spirit had rested upon in the form of a dove, this Jesus is the one who had come to baptize with the Holy Spirit. In other words, if we have not come to the part in the story where Jesus floods the world with the presence of the Holy Spirit then the story of Jesus is not finished. So yes, Jesus did not just zip off to heaven just to get out of town; no, Jesus waited forty days before he ascended up to the Father so that the Holy Spirit might be given to us in the name of Jesus.

We understand, almost instinctively, why Jesus needed time to prepare his disciples for the coming of the Holy Spirit, because can’t we admit it, we too need time to prepare ourselves for his coming. I mean, we have some reference to knowing God as our Heavenly Father because of having fathers. We also can relate to Jesus because, hey, he’s one of us, a real living human person who just happens to be God as well. But then we come to talk of the Holy Spirit and for most of us our eyes glaze over. There just is no connection for us to help us to begin to understand this God who is a mystery and a riddle. This is why we might say that the Holy Spirit is the God who makes us rather uncomfortable just because he is so hard to get to know and to relate to. And honestly, it doesn’t help that when we read the story of Pentecost it comes across to us as come episode of Stranger Things, or some weird sci-fi movie. I mean, they heard the roar of a storm yet we are told that no one felt the wind moving; there were flames of fire and yet there was nothing burning. There were people suddenly speaking languages they had never known before this day and others who heard strangers speak to them like the folks back home. There is added to this, an accusation that these followers of Jesus have become day drinkers followed by Peter suddenly able to keep his foot out of his mouth long enough to give a sermon for the ages. So, yes, the coming of the Holy Spirit brings with him a lot of questions, and too often we never take the time to find answers to those questions.  What we can say about the Holy Spirit is that it would be wrong for us to somehow believe that he is so other worldly that he has no real purpose for this world that we live in. Nothing could be further than the truth. No, as we look deeper into this admittedly very different story we find that the coming of the Holy Spirit is really more about the ordinary rather than the mysterious, more about the every day than the coming day of the Lord.

         So, lets go slow and try and figure out just what this day called Pentecost, with the Holy Spirit’s appearing, is all about. Perhaps the best place to begin is to know that this holy day we call Pentecost has been selected for this moment by God for a very good reason. When we go searching for that reason we find, in the twenty-third chapter of Leviticus, that Pentecost was a harvest festival, the festival of what was called the first fruits. These first fruits are, as the name implies, the bringing before God the very first fruits or grains of a families harvest. God instructed his people that before any grain could be harvested or made into bread, a portion had to be taken and ground into flour and made into two loaves of bread. The family would then wrap up the bread, select the other other required sacrifices that had to be made and then begin their pilgrimage to the Temple at Jerusalem so they might offer their gifts to the Lord. All of God’s people knew that this festival of the first fruits was to happen fifty days from their celebration of Passover, thus the name Pente(fifty) cost. The purpose for this festival was so that the people of God might show their faith in God because they were giving God the very first and the very best of their crop. Through their sacrifice they were stating that they had confidence that the God who had graciously provided the first portion would give them the remaining harvest and make it meet all of their needs. 

So, once we begin to understand this festival of Pentecost a little better, then we can also understand why Jesus spoke to his disciples about the kingdom of God for forty days before the celebrating of this festival. The disciples were to realize that they were to going to be the first fruits of the coming kingdom. I have to believe that when Jesus told his disciples stories of the greatness of life under his rule, he did so that those who were listening might long for God’s kingdom to come. It reminds me of a quote by Antoine St. Exupery, who said that, “…if you wanted to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give  orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea” This is exactly what Jesus was doing, teaching them to desire passionately the unshakable life that can only be found in the kingdom of God. This life was not some far off fantasy but was instead, the very One who was seated with them, teaching them. Here was none other than the very One they had witnessed being nailed to a cross, the one that they had seen go into the tomb and had remained in that grave for three days. But here Jesus now was, and he was very much alive. His is the life that conquered death. How can we not imagine that the disciples longed to know more about this life, a life that seemed to be the fulfillment of what they knew had been promised in the book of Isaiah. There, in the twenty-fifth chapter, God promises his people that one day he would make, “…for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And the Lord God will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. Our Lord God will swallow up death forever and he will wipe away the tears from their faces…”. How long they had read these words and believed them to be nothing more than someone’s wild imagination. Yet here the disciples were, sitting and eating around the table with the risen Jesus, the image found in Isaiah becoming much more real to them. 

Well, when those blessed forty days with Jesus had come to an end, Luke tells us that Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father. The disciples returned to the upper room, and there, Luke tells us, that the disciples devoted themselves to prayer, and as we are told, in most accounts,  they were of one accord. This, unfortunately, simply does not convey what happened in that upper room. No, what was actually happening is that this little group of disciples were becoming unified in their passion for life, this kingdom life that Jesus had taught them about. You might say that they were consumed with longing for the life that consumes death. We have to wonder just why were they so consumed with passion for this kingdom life and to satisfy our curiosity we are going to take the next few weeks looking at this Pentecost experience.  

One thing we do know is that the power that fueled the passion in that upper room came through prayer. The prayer that became their heart’s cry was the same prayer that Jesus had taught to them when they had asked him how they were to pray. I believe that Luke wants his reader to remember this teaching moment because this passage found in the eleventh chapter, explains so much about the experience of Pentecost. In Luke’s account of the Lord’s Prayer, he begins with the disciples watching Jesus pray. They had to be curious as to just what it was on his heart. So they wait for him, and, when he returns to them, they muster up the courage to ask Jesus to teach to them how to pray like he had prayed.What catches us off guard about Lukes account of this teaching of Jesus is that his version of the Lord’s Prayer is quite a bit different than what we are accustomed to praying  Here in Luke, Jesus gives us a very stripped down version, stating only “Father; your Name be holy; your reign come; give us each day the right amount of bread that we need; and forgive us our sins; and we forgive all indebted to us; and do not bring us to testing.” Yet this is not all that Jesus teaches us here because he goes on to tell a parable about the certainty we can have that God will answer what we are crying out for in the Lord’s Prayer. We can be certain of God answering our prayer not because of how great a friend we are with God; no, God answers this prayer because he is a God of honor, a God known to always be true to the promises that he makes. Therefore since the certainty of God to answer this prayer is based on his character alone, we are free to ask, and keep asking, and we can be sure God will give to us what we are asking for. We can seek and keep seeking, in the certainty that we will find what it is that we are searching for. We can knock, and keep on knocking, and at last, we can be certain that the door will open. Jesus then goes on to tell of how even earthly fathers know how to give good gifts to their children, so how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” Here, Jesus catches us off guard, doesn’t he? We began praying a prayer for God’s kingdom to come and Jesus says that we should be passionate in praying this prayer. Yet when Jesus comes to wrapping things up, he does not say that the kingdom we have prayed for will be given to us. No, Jesus, out of the blue, says instead that what we will be given to us is the Holy Spirit. What Jesus wants us to do is to realize that when we cry for the kingdom it is the Holy Spirit who is given to us. The reason for this is that it is the Holy Spirit who gives to us this kingdom life that we plead for. So, what this means is that in praying the Lord’s Prayer we can know that the Holy Spirit will assure us that God is indeed our Heavenly Father. In the presence of the Spirit, then, we will know that the name of God is holy. And in the power of the Spirit we will be certain that the kingdom of God has at last come upon the earth. The Holy Spirit is the one who convinces us that our Heavenly Father will, every day, give us all that we need for life. In the Spirit’s presence we will be embraced by the Father’s mercy and through that same Spirit we will join our Father in the healing of our world through the forgiving of those who are indebted to us. And lastly, in times of trial, the test meant for us will be lifted from us by the Holy Spirit who will speak for us. This kingdom life then is given to us by the Holy Spirit who is the life giving God who gives to us the very life capable of swallowing up death forever.

The disciples remembered this teaching on prayer that Jesus had given to them and they cried out in desperation.They were unrelenting in their passion  to receive this indestructible kingdom life.They asked, and they sought and they knocked and they pounded on the doors of heaven pleading for the kingdom to come. They longed to be one of the first to draw resurrection air into their lungs. Just as the first fruits brought to the Temple by the people of God were gathered in before the full and final harvest, here in that upper room were those who could be considered to be the first fruits, the first of those given kingdom life, given to them even before the day of the full and final harvest at the end of the age. 

          The day of Pentecost then, helps us to know who we are. We are to know ourselves as being the first fruits, the first whose lives are consumed by our passion for the coming kingdom of God. We are to be the ones who plead for the kingdom in prayer before God. We are the ones who seek out where the kingdom life is being given through the Holy Spirit, the life giving God. We are the ones who knock and keep on knocking for the doors to heaven to be opened so the Spirit might come upon us like a mighty wind. What we must not forget is that the first fruits given on Pentecost were given as a sacrifice consumed by fire upon a holy altar. So too, in that upper room, those who were the first of the first fruit, were also consumed by fire, but this fire came roaring down from heaven as the Holy Spirit fell upon the altars of their hearts. Their experience cry’s out to us, and asks us, are we ready to be consumed in our passion for this kingdom life, this life that will one day swallow up death forever? I believe that Pentecost experience is an experience that is still out there waiting to be given to all who are willing to pray, and pray with passion for the kingdom life to be our life. Oh, Holy Spirit, precious giver of life, give us this life, always. Amen!