a little offensive bible reading for your day

I am getting through Numbers as best I can on these bleak mornings and am finally up to chapter 30. I always feel that a book should be over by chapter 30 and yet so many of them go on for another 30 after that.

Numbers chapter 30 is a long instruction about vows. If a man makes a vow, says The Lord, he shall keep the vow or the oath to which he binds himself. He shall do, says God, all that proceeds from his mouth. That is the substance of verse 2. Verses 3-15 cope with the eventuality of a woman making a vow. 

There are at least two interesting things to notice about a woman making a vow. First, it's terribly complicated and fraught. You can see a whole ancient household being thrown into turmoil upon discovering that their young teenage daughter has gone to the tent of meeting and promised something stupid. Or, I can see an old couple bickering vociferously because she vowed something and he didn't really want her to. Look out across every marriage everywhere and you can see how complicated something as "simple" as a vow can become. The text reflects the fraught trauma of familial life.

Second, how old the woman is and her status as a daughter or married woman are important. If she is young and unmarried and living with her father, her vow is handled a certain way. If she is married her vow is handled a certain way. If she is widowed or orphaned, that is a different matter. I say 'handled a certain way' but really it just means that if she is yet unmarried with a father, or married with a husband, that is, neither a widow nor an orphan, her vow can be nullified by either her husband or her father. The father or husband can "oppose" her and then her vow no longer exists.

Well, thought I this early morning, that's not very fair. I mean, I know women are stupider, certainly Matt, as everyone knows, is my intellectual superior, but I have a relationship with Jesus and if I want to make a vow, I should be allowed to make a vow, mumbled I to myself this morning.

But then I listened to the chapter again and heard the hint of something I thought I'd heard before. If the father or the husband "in the day that he hears of it" "says nothing" the vow stands. The text identifies particularly if she makes a "thoughtless utterance". So, let me get this straight. Young girls and married women sometimes make "thoughtless utterances" or promises they don't have the means or intention to carry out. If their husbands or fathers hear about it, those husbands and fathers have the opportunity to rescue their daughters and wives from the consequences of those words. But, and I bet this happened a bunch, sometimes fathers and husbands heard about it and couldn't be bothered, and then the woman was stuck with doing whatever she said she was going to do.

Hmmm. I wonder where we've see any thing like that in scripture before?

I'll go ahead and tell you in case you haven't read it before.

Much longer before this chapter in Numbers, in that primordial dust up in the garden, Eve had to stand around wrestling with Leviathan while Adam, Who Was With Her, kept silent. He didn't say anything. He didn't do anything. She sold herself away to the devil and he joined in. If ever a vow or an oath should have been "nullified" or "opposed" that was the moment. 

This happens so so often in marriage. The woman is wrestling her way along, trying to oppose evil and love God, and the man, who is supposed to be studying the law and protecting her and bringing her close to God, is standing around doing nothing and saying nothing. In the church, she signs the family up to do everything and he leaves as soon as the service is over to watch football, or he doesn't come at all. She exhausts herself, and usually out of love for Jesus, and he can't be bothered.

But here, in Numbers 30, is a glimpse, a foreshadowing, of the correcting saving grace of the second Adam who didn't stand around saying and doing nothing but finally went out to battle Leviathan himself. God offered  under the law, a picture of a good father and a good husband who would hear and stand with the woman, and protect her from Satan. And I bet some fathers and husbands did avail themselves of this chance to love and protect their women. Just like there are plenty of vigilant fathers and husbands who are with wives and daughters and who are more like Jesus and less like Adam.

Is it "fair"? Well, it wasn't fair of Adam to abandon Eve. And it's not fair of Jesus to rescue you and forgive you for the stupid vows you make, but he does. So I'll take Numbers 30 as a blessing and get on with my day.

sermon from sunday: john 1:1-16

Lord, I pray that you will focus our minds and hearts on the great gift you have given us in your Son Jesus. I pray you will help us to receive this gift and carry it out into the world. Amen.

John 1:1

In the beginning

John the evangelist means for you to hear

in the very first line of his gospel

the first line of Genesis.

In the beginning,

God.

We are not next to the manger,

there are no shepherds here,

no Herod,

no wiseman,

no star.

We are beginning before everything came into existence,

when there was only God hovering over the face of the deep.

In the beginning there was only God.

And God spoke.

This is where John begins,

that primordial ancient first moment.

But so much has transpired since then.

We have hundreds of pages of history recounting the destruction of that original creation.

Now, at this moment,

In the beginning,

John wants you to be both at that first moment

but also thousands of years later at this second moment.

This is a new creation.

Watch how John builds just in this first verse 

In the beginning--creation

Was the Word--tuck this aside for a moment

The Word was with God--the Greek is more nicely rendered

'face to face' with God

looking at him,

like two people look at each other when they are talking,

two people who care for one another,

facing,

not eyes drifting up and around and away,

scattered,

uninterested,

that would be me when I'm talking to my kids--

shh, I'm on Facebook.

No, God and the Word are Face to Face.

They have communion with one another.

They understand each other.

This means they are distinct from one another.

Then the final note in the line,

The Word was God.

The Word was there in the beginning.

The Word is distinct from and intimate, face to face, with God.

The Word was God.

So what is the Word?

John is uses a Greek word, Logos.

The Greeks,
you might remember,
had a pantheon of gods,
a dizzying array of interesting deities to appease.
Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Apollo.
Each god had something they did for humanity.
They were distant,
living in the clouds of mount Olympus
but they interfered and meddled in the affairs of man.
They were not the embodiment of all that is good and pure and true.
They were glorious, but they looked and acted awfully human.
As the Greeks went along some of them noticed,
Heraclitus for example,
that in spite of the capriciousness of their gods,
there was an internal order to the physical universe.
There must be an omnipresent stabilizing influence or force that holds everything together.
Not a personal or knowable god,
but a force inherent within many of the attributes we find within God.
Heraclitus called this force the Logos.
John takes this word
Logos,
and uses it as a capstone for his own Hebrew knowledge of God.
God, John knows perfectly well,
is not just an impersonal rational force.
God is a Being who has not a body like men,
he cannot be seen because he is so holy.
He is in himself the definition of all that is good,
true, holy, beautiful, right and just.
And, moreover,
he is a covenant making God.
He relates personally to his creation.
Part of this relating is self revelation.
God reveals himself to his people primarily through language.
He spoke in creation and all things came into being.
He spoke to Adam and Eve in the garden.
He spoke to Noah and Abraham and Moses 
and Isaiah and Daniel and a whole lot of other people.
With words.
That were then written down.
Moses, for instance,
hearing words from God,
took an pen and wrote them in books.
These words were understandable.
It was possible to hear the law,
understand it
and then try to do it.
When you failed,
it would be clear that you had so failed
and clear what you needed to do about it.
God was not a capricious malleable manipulable impersonal force.
No, his words formed the world and the character of Israel.
God communicated through language that he wanted Israel to know and follow him.
To be face to face with him.
But Israel treated God like a capricious force whom they did not know.
They treated him like a stranger whose language they didn't understand.
Now consider the ordinary first century Jewish person
sitting in church next to the ordinary first century Greek person.
You're all stuffed in together in some catacomb,
the Romans are raging over the face of the whole earth,
you've been invited by a friend,
some guy gets up to read the gospel.
He holds it up and announces that it's God's Word,
and he unrolls it and says,
'In the beginning was the Word, Logos,
and the Word was face to face with God,
and the Word was God.'
Both of you together
Jew and Greek,
have your sandals shocked off of you.
The Logos, the rational force that holds the universe together,
is with God,
so distinct from him,
but also is God.
The Greek is shocked that the Logos is a relatable divine figure,
the Jew is shocked because it sounds like there's two gods when he knows there's only one.
The man reading the gospel continues to read, verse 2
"He was in the beginning with God."
So the Logos, the Word, is a he.
He was always there,
distinct from God,
because you can't be with someone if you are him.
Not an emanating avatar spirit force
but a person, a being.
Just as a little aside
it isn't any accident that our post post modern worldview
makes it hard for us to accept
The Word of God.
Both the book and the Person.
The attack on language,
the undermining of the ability of people to believe that they can know what words means,
that it doesn't matter what a person intends to say
it matters what you the hearer hear,
you can pour any meaning you want into any word because language is in itself incomprehensible.
This undermining of language is so subtle.
We can’t really know what the Bible means,
you might have heard someone say,
you interpret it one way,
I interpret it another.
It’s such a huge lie.
God designed you to understand words
with the ultimate plan that you would know and understand The Word.
So the Word was there in the beginning.
Not his beginning, our beginning.
Verse three, All things were made through him.
Not by him.
All things were made by the Father through the Son.
The verb, were made, indicates a one time thing--
this is the initial moment of creation.
The Father created through the Son, the Word.
Then John flips it around to the negative,
And not anything was made that has been made.
Has been made is perfect tense,
it indicates the going on of things.
This is what Paul has in mind in Colossians 1:17 when he says,
"and he is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
The Word is the Rational Logical Person,
not force,
whose power and will hold all things together.
The continuance of the created order is through the Word.
As you carry on with your everyday life
God is holding all things together through the Word.
As you go to work,
pay the bills,
scrape snow off the car,
waste a few hours on the internet because someone is wrong,
scramble to do something important you forgot,
muscling your way through each day,
so often a prisoner, a captive to your own mind,
your own world,
your own 'reality'
your very existence is in the palm of God's hand.
Or rather, in his mouth, his Word.
That you continue to draw breath is because he is exerting his power so that you will.
Do you ever worry that when you cry out to God in prayer
your voice is lost in the empty abyss of chaos and disorder?
I read after Mother Teresa died
that she had gone much of her adult life without feeling the presence of God.
But she didn't let that feeling inhibit her knowledge that God was there and true.
Without him, the Word, was not anything made that has been made.
Verse 4 And in him was Life.
It doesn't say,
In Him was death,
even though I always assume that to be the case,
assuming that God is out to get me.
No, in him was Life.
In creation God designed Adam and Eve to live forever.
Not a circle of life that includes death.
No, an unbroken line of life from your conception to all eternity.
Death is a shattering of God's creation.
The Word is Life.
That is why, when death was meted out on the one who is Life,
not only was the whole cosmos shaken,
death itself was shattered.
And his Life was the Light of men.
John loves all his words to have two or three meanings.
I think he means every kind of light here.
Real physical Light.
It was the first thing created.
And when all the lights go out, the Word will be the only light.
But John also means spiritual light.
His life was the light of men.
His life brings light to our spiritual darkness.
The light shines [present tense] in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
The darkness has not destroyed the light.
It is not hard to feel sometimes like the darkness is awfully overcoming.
I've been reading Job over and over again accidentally all month--it's a long story--
and the darkness of his suffering is so immense.
He cannot heal himself.
He cannot get his children back.
He cannot get away from his grief.
He is helpless.
It feels like a great black cloud that can't ever lift.
Until God breaks in at the end of the book.
The darkness, however huge, however black, cannot overcome the light.
The cross, the moment of the greatest most profound darkness
could not prevail against the light.
The Light of the Word that lives in you through the Holy Spirit
cannot be overcome by your own darkness.
Sometimes we try to put out the light,
or we shove it in a corner.
But there's no wick that will eventually end,
no oil that will run dry.
You can't flick a switch.
You cannot destroy it.
Better not to try,
however painful it's illumination is.
I wish we had several weeks to spend on John the Baptist in verses 6-8
but there’s just one point I want to draw out.
Matthew 11 records John's disciples coming to Jesus to find out if he, Jesus, is the Messiah.
Jesus says this about John, verse 7 "what did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? Vs 9 a prophet? Yes, and more than a prophet....
Truly I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist."
In other words, John the Baptist is the greatest person ever to have lived.
Not Job, not the guy down the street, not you, no, John the Baptist.
And how well does the best person ever to live measure up to the Word?
Look over at verse 27. John the Baptist says of himself "I am not worthy even to untie his, Jesus’, sandals."
The lowest of the low, a slave or a servant would be the one to untie everybody's sandals.
But here, the greatest and best person ever John writes, verse 8 is Not The Light.
Verse 9 the True Light, the Word
This light was coming into the world.
Now watch the word World.
He was in the World--I think he means the physical created material world.
And the World was made through him--it belongs to him. He owns it.
But the World--now it narrows down to mean People--did not know him.
Not intellectually know.
No, Know like Adam knew Eve.
The world wouldn't be with him, face to face.
Then it narrows some more.
He came to his own people,
people he had made and revealed himself to,
had spoken with by the words of his mouth,
and his own people would not receive him.
They treated him like a stranger whose language they didn't understand.
I ran across a website last week set up by homeschooled children
who hated being homeschooled.
And hated their parents.
Boy, if you want to keep me up at night
tell me stories of children being irreparably estranged from their parents.
That's what we did to the light that came into the world.
We should have known him because he made us and spoke to us.
We did recognize him
but we chose to treat him like his language is incomprehensible.
This is so tragic.
But, verse 12, to all who did receive him
To be allowed to receive the light after having once rejected it.
To believe on his name. And not just the name.
The name encompasses the whole person.
To believe on his name is to believe in him.
To trust him, to accept him, to be face to face with him.
To those who are willing to receive him,
not like a stranger, or a guest,
but like your parents on Christmas Day, with joy and relief.
To those who believe in him he gives them the right
We're talking legal right, like in a court of law,
but the word indicates also something like authority.
He gives them the Authority to become children of God.
Not children born of blood, the old creation way, 
Nor of the will of the flesh--not by anything you can achieve or decide to do on your own
Nor of the will of man--nobody else can do it for you
But of God. God gives the right.
Verse 14
The Word became flesh.
God, the Word, became human.
The word flesh is just as it sounds, physical.
He didn't just look like a person.
He became a real person,
and his name was Jesus.
And he dwelt among us.
He pitched his tent.
Tabernacled.
Just like in the wilderness of Sinai when Bezalel and Oholiab
fashioned the Ark and the Tent
and then God,
in his glory descended
dwelt
in the tent sitting on the wings of the cherubim overshadowing the ark.
The Word tabernacled in a body
dwelt,
walked around,
ate dinner in the evenings,
spoke words.
And we have seen, says John, his glory,
the glory as of the only son--the unique, the single, the only--son of the father.
The people of Israel saw the glory of God in the cloud that led them through the Red Sea.
They saw the glory of God covering the mountain.
When Solomon consecrated the temple the glory of God filled it.
On the mount of transfiguration Jesus unveiled his glory for the inner circle of disciples.
But I think John means even more than that.
The glory of God, the Word was fully present in the flesh of Jesus.
When you saw Jesus walking around you saw the glory of God.
Vs 15 is important but it will have to be for another year.
Vs 16 From his fullness we have received grace upon grace.
The incarnation of the Son, the Word, the taking on of a body, was enough.
It was the fullest most complete revelation of God.
You take all the ocean of words that is the revelation of God in this book,
God's perfect revelation of himself,
that none of his words come back empty or void,
and you pour all these words into The Word,
into Jesus the Son
and nothing is lacking.
It is full.
There is a full complete revelation in Jesus for you to know to him, God, face to face.
You look at him, the Light,
and you receive more grace than you can ever ask for or imagine.

my sermon from yesterday: pentecost

We're going to be in Leviticus 23 and Acts 2 this morning. 
So let’s pray together.
Merciful and heavenly Father, we praise you for incorporating us into the mystical body of your Son, Jesus Christ, and making us heirs thorough him of your everlasting kingdom. Help us this morning to see this gift more clearly and to give ourselves over completely to the work of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Long ago,

after rescuing the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt,

God gave a series of feasts to help them commemorate

and remember how great their deliverance had been,

but also to be a picture of what he would do thousands of years later.

These pictures are prophetic. 
So you're a person in first century Jerusalem.

You've wandered around with Jesus for the last year.

You're one of the 120 that comprise the broader group of disciples

at the time of Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem on the Sunday before Passover.

You're an observant Jew,

so, looking at Leviticus chapter 23 verse 2

you keep the Sabbath.

You don't work on Saturday and you go to synagogue on that day. 
Second, you keep Passover.

Verse 5,

In the first month,

the very month that God delivered the people out of Egypt,

on the fourteenth day of that month,

as the sun is setting,

the Passover begins.

That's when Jesus celebrated the meal together with the twelve.

Then on Friday,

as hundreds of lambs without blemish were being slaughtered in the temple-

-imagine the noise and the stench,

the blood running down the altar

into the stream the runs underneath the temple and out into the city—

at that very moment

Jesus hung on the cross

and his blood flowed down.

The fifteenth day, verse 6,

is the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

Not only does your bread not have any leaven

but there isn't even any in your house.

If you are a woman

you have scrubbed every inch of your house

and washed every single solitary piece of clothing

to keep the commandment to get rid of the leaven.

Why?

Because leaven is a picture of sin.

A little bit goes a long way,

spreading itself through the whole loaf.

Jesus is the unleavened bread,

he is without sin.
So then you have to rush around

and prepare to keep the Sabbath

because from sunset on Friday

to sunset on Saturday

you can't do any work.

You don't want to anyway

because Jesus' body is lying in a tomb

and you're exhausted with grief.

What comes next?
The feast of first fruits is next.

So way back in the early spring,

if you are a man and you hadn't been following Jesus around,

you would have planted all your crops,

barley and wheat especially,

and around the time of Passover,

the first barley shoots would be just ready.

Verse 11,

You cut them

and bring them tied into a loose sheaf

to the temple that Sunday,

after the Passover Sabbath.

What does Jesus say about his death before he dies?

John 22:24 Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies,

it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

Inevitably, necessarily,

the grain that falls into the ground

will rise out of the ground.

The loosely bound sheaf of barley is a guarantee of the harvest to come.

Jesus walked out of the grave

on the day

that the sheaves of barley were brought into the temple.

Paul writes in first Corinthians 15:20

'But in fact Christ has been raise from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man, Adam, came death, by a man, Jesus, came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all day, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ, the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.

Jesus, the first fruit,

risen,

is the guarantee of future harvest,

in this case,

of us rising again when he returns in glory.

It is inevitable. It will happen. 
So then what happens?

Verse 15.

You shall count seven full weeks from the day after the Sabbath, from the day that you brought the sheaf of the wave offering, that's Resurrection Sunday.You shall count fifty days to the day after the seventh Sabbath, that's another Sunday, today, the day of Pentecost. Then you shall present a grain offering of new grain to The Lord. You shall bring from your dwelling places two loaves of bread to be waved, made of two tenths of an ephah. They shall be of fine flour, and they shall be baked with leaven, as first fruits to The Lord.

This is the Feast of Weeks,

called Pentecost on the New Testament,

the celebration of the wheat harvest.
So now let's look at Acts.

The whole group of disciples, numbering 120,

are altogether in one place.

The place is probably the house that has the upper room

where Jesus celebrated the Passover.

Everyone in Israel

is bringing their two loaves commanded in verse 15

to the temple.

The disciples are praying and singing

because this is the forty ninth day after Jesus rose again.

And that day has changed everything for you.

Ten days ago, on a Thursday,

Jesus left you again ascending into heaven,

shouting down from the cloud that everything would be fine,

just wait for the Holy Spirit,

which was very confusing.

But because he told you to go wait that is what you've been doing.

Every day, in the temple and in each others homes,

with the other believers, waiting. 
So then, on the Feast of Weeks,

which we call Pentecost,

as you're all praying and singing,

there is the sound of a mighty wind,

like a hurricane force gale.

The sound of a mighty rushing wind.

The wind during the Exodus drove the water back all night

so that the people could pass through the sea on dry land.

Ezekiel was told to prophecy to the breath,

the wind,

and say,

let these bones live,

and the valley of dry dead bones was filled with living people.

Jesus spoke with a Pharisee very late at night,

and said, 'the wind blows where it wishes and you hear it's sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with the spirit.'

Nicodemus, likely standing in that room,

should have heard the sound and known what was happening.
Then the tongues,

as of fire,

descended on the heads of each of the disciples.

The Lord spoke out of the fire to Moses

to call him to work to free the people of Israel.

He appeared as a pillar of fire at night to lead them through the desert.

Here tongues,

as of fire,

alight on the heads of those in the room,

all the believers in the whole world gathered in one place.

No one is excluded.

All see and receive the sign.

This is the baptism of the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised in Acts 1:9.

So, then

verse 4,

they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues,

as the spirit gave them utterance. 
So, in short order three amazing things have happened.

There has been the sound of the wind,

the appearance of fire

and now they are all speaking in other languages as the Spirit leads,

and here it becomes a little unclear in the text

but it seems like they are propelled out onto the streets of Jerusalem

because Luke describes the various people who are out there, verse 5.
Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem, devout men,

that means men who fear God and who are paying attention,

Devout men from every nation under heaven

and at the sound they all came together—

So they heard the sound and it drew them

and then they were bewildered,

confused,

because each one was hearing them,

that is the 120 disciples,

speak in his own language. 
Let's pause for just a second and clarify under what circumstances the Spirit came. 

What were the disciples,

the 120, doing when the Spirit came?

they were together worshipping.

Did they know and perfectly expect how and when and what was going to happen? 

Did they play any kind of big organizational roll?

No.

the Holy Spirit came to them when it was the right time

After thousands of years of preparation.

They didn't summon him by the excellence of their prayers.

They were obediently waiting and he came when he was ready..

I am belaboring this point

because I think sometimes we get confused about the Spirit.

We know God the Father and Jesus don't depend on us to do their work,

but when we come to the Spirit

we think it depends on us praying in the right way

or being in the right place at the right time

Then we somehow get the Spirit to give us what we want

knowing that the Father would never give it to us.

Suffering with Jesus,

but glory with the Spirit.

But that's not true.

The work of the Spirit and of Jesus and the Father is the same work—

the redemption and sanctification of human beings for the glory of God.

The Father wants you to be saved and to be holy

and so the Spirit brings it about

through the work of the Son.

They all have the same end goal because they are One, they are God.
But the Holy Spirit does his part of the work in three stages.

First, he regenerates you.

He brings you alive where you were once dead.

We see this in John 3.

You are first born of the Spirit which allows you to see the kingdom of God.

Then you submit yourself to Jesus in faith

and the Holy Spirit comes to live in you.

The technical word is 'indwell'. 
For some,

the point of being indwelt by the Spirit isn't particularly experiential.

I don't even know the exact moment this happened for me.

Matt, on the other hand,

can tell you a whole story about what it was like for him.
Which brings us round to the third stage of the Holy Spirit's work

and to the word 'fill'.

Those who were all together in one place were 'filled' with the Holy Spirit.

It implies that they weren't before.

To be filled, there has to be a lack,

there has to be some room. 
The Holy Spirit moved in to your dark cold stone like heart

and set up his little fire there to burn

and try to shed some light on the subject,

that is you,

he's in there, that's called indwelling ,

but he could take up a lot more room.

He would like to fill you.

So

often,

at the initial point of faith

some big things that are killing you

need to go right away.

But after that,

his work is much slower.

One room at a time,

one dirt pile at a time.

And this is where you cooperate with him,

this is where the filling comes in.

Sure, he is going to have to pry some things out of your vice like grip,

but other things you're going to give him

and then you'll have more room for him,

more room to be filled with him.

And as he fills you,

guess what kind of experience it is?

The best word to describe it is the dreaded word 'Submission'.

You submit,

you yield,

you give in to the work of God in the person of the Holy Spirit.

It is an experience of joy and forgiveness and letting go of grief and hurt,

but it is also an experience of doing some things

you might never have done before,

or doing some things you don't feel like doing,

or doing some things that seem really beyond you.

Why? Because it’s not just you doing them,

it's the Holy Spirit doing them in and through you.

You can make it harder by not cooperating,

or you can give in,

cheerfully doing what God calls you to do.
The birth of the church,

this moment where the disciples are spit out into Jerusalem

in an amazing rush,

preaching the gospel so that everyone understands,

people of so many languages

who are going to go all over the world with this news.

What is being fixed here that was horribly broken?

Remember, at the Tower of Babel,

how language was confused?

Now the confusion is made into understanding.

Now all the languages speak to the glory of God.

So they rush out and the church suddenly becomes huge.

They baptize 3000 that day.

You think you're tired now,

doing whatever it is God has given you

to make the Kingdom of God real to this city?

Imagine if 1000 people walked in and we had to do hospitality,

coffee hour

integration into mission groups

discipleship

and then also cleaning the kitchen floors

and the bathrooms.

So let's tie in the harvest and the Feast of Weeks/Pentecost.

Remember the barley first fruits were brought in bound in loose sheaves,

but not so the wheat harvest.

At Pentecost, the birth of the church,

the wheat is picked and beat out for the grain

and then the grain is pounded,

milled into flour

and mixed with water and leaven,

that's right, guess what there is in the church?

Sin.

There is sin here.

It's being gently removed but it’s here.

And then heat is applied

and the grain is forged into a loaf of bread.

All warm, and comforting,

bread,

except when you think about the pounding and the mixing and the heat.

And it's being all together in one loaf.

This loaf is also called Jesus' Body.

A body where everything is connected.

Your decision to sin affects everyone else

just like my decision to sin affects you.

It's not Easy. Sometimes it's very Hard.

But, Jesus says, 'nothing is impossible with God'.

He can and he will make us holy.

He can and he will spread the gospel through us to the world.

He can and he will make us alive together in himself.

But he's not a battle ax.

He brings light to you and woos your cooperation.

He wants to fill you with himself.

He wants to use you to build up his kingdom.

He wants to use you to bring healing to other people.

He wants to use your prayers,

your conversation with him,

to bring about his plans and his desires.

He wants to be with you.

And he wants you to be holy. 
Just like the first fruits,

the resurrection of Jesus is a guarantee,

this harvest,

the gift of the Spirit,

is a guarantee, an inevitability.

Paul explains in Ephesians 1:13-14,

in him, that is Christ, in him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.

Sure, there's the beating out of the grain

and the pain of the fire

as we are forged into a loaf,

a body through the one Spirit

with Christ as our head.

And it's messy

because the leaven is all mixed in,

but this isn't the ultimate harvest.

We are still planting seed.

We can work and be filled up because we have the guarantee,

the Spirit,

alive in us.

……………let us pray.

my talk at IV this evening

It is so good to be with you this evening.
I am honored, may I even say, humbled, to have been asked.
Won't you join me first in prayer.
Oh Lord Christ, give us your grace, tonight, and yourself. Make us to see you, first, and then to know you, and then to be changed to be like you. Amen.
So, of course, the theme for tonight is Radical Humility, but my own title,or operating thesis is
Letting Yourself Go For A Taste of Glory.
I expect you've heard a lot of the word Radical over the past many months. I am not going to cope with this word much because I believe that the Christian Worldview, that is, the lens that God, through the Bible gives us to interpret and shape the world and our lives, is essentially radical. And it is so because of the word I do want to talk about, and that is Humility. This might strike you as a Bad word. Certainly, anyone who has been a Christian for fifteen minutes or more knows that he ought never to pray for humility because God will surely take him up on that request. So, what is Humility, first, and then how might we understand how it, as a virtue, or an idea, could change us, and certainly the world.
The word Humility comes into English from Latin where it meant 'of the earth'. We might use the word 'grounded' in a similar way, or the expression, 'down to earth'. The classic Christian definition of Humility is that such a person correctly understands his or her real situation
before God and others. A humble person neither thinks too highly nor too lowly of him or herself but has a right understanding of who he is, of what she is worth. A grounded person, we might, say, not flighty nor arrogant nor down on the self all the time. But this definition is surface and cursory. The virtue, the good personal quality of Humility is actually at the very heart of the Christian life and that it is because it is something profound and real inside of God.
So we will go there in circles, closer and closer in, and in.
When I came to America from Africa for a short six months when I was sixteen, I ran into a kind of thinking that really shocked me. This is probably going to sound judgemental but please, don’t judge me. One of the very basic central qualities of being an American, as far as I could make out,
is that Americans are equal with one another, and in that equality, guaranteed certain rights, certain qualities of life that are grounded in being alive, in being a human person. We hear a lot about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but in my six month American sojourn, I learned that there were a lot of others--
the right to be talked to a certain way,
the right to make a certain amount of money,
the right to properly packaged food in the store,
the right not to be cut off on the road,
the right to respect and dignity,
the right to the latest kind of shoes or hairdo or jeans,
the right not to be dissed,
the right of students not to be given too much work by their teachers,
the right of teachers not to be hassled by their students.
In church I discovered the right of some to a particular pew,
the right of the usher to stand in a particular place,
the right of teenagers in the youth group
not to have to put up with each other's stupidity (that's a nice word for it).
These are all inalienable rights. I was shocked by this because I had just come from a place where easily accessible clean water was by no means a right, but a hope, in some cases a privilege, a desire, and, when gained, a source of real gratitude. Before you cry out that clean water is a right for every human person, I want to bring in the question of God, which will lead us to the question of you, of the potential Christian. My hope is that you will feel a dissonance between where you feel you ought to be, or rather, who you ought to be, and where or who you actually are.
So I hope the lovely person who knows all about technology can flash up a passage from the Bible.
How many here have read the Bible? All of it or some portion?
This great book, the Bible, brings us very close to the character and nature of God--who he is, what kinds of things he has done, what relationship he has with creation and with us. This text here, is from Philippians chapter two. Paul, a follower of Jesus, was in prison when he wrote this. He had traveled around the Roman Empire and spread the news about Jesus, which we will get to in a moment, and as a result of this work, he had been taken and put under house arrest, waiting for a proper trial. This is a letter he wrote to one of the churches he had started in the city of Philippi. He was worried about this church, and the other churches he had started. He wanted to be with them to teach them more about Jesus but he couldn't be there. He longed for news. He prayed for them all the time. He was stressed out. And so he wrote this letter. In the opening greeting he calls himself a Servant of Jesus Christ. The Greek word is better rendered Slave. Someone who doesn't even own himself, but who is completely subject, in this case, to Jesus. Paul is anxious and worried for the Philippians because, on the one hand, they aren't getting on with each other. Their relationships are stressed and troublesome. Some women are bickering all over the town and pulling everyone in to the argument. They aren't functioning together. And, on the other hand, they are being hassled and persecuted for believing in and following Jesus, for being identified with Jesus, as Christians. Some have probably been killed, others have been imprisoned or tortured. This group of people, the church, is struggling internally and being persecuted externally.

Paul has a solution for them. It's not going to be the solution we might have. We might say, who makes a better argument? Or, let’s bring in a mediator. Maybe we can come together to resolve our differences. Let’s have a program to help everyone deal with their interpersonal relationships.
And for persecution, maybe the Philippian church should sue, or get together a human rights commission to cope with this grave injustice. Obviously, death is a violation of human rights. No, first Paul comforts them.
So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love,
any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy,
The 'if' might better be rendered 'since',
since there is encouragement in Christ,
since there is comfort from the Love of Christ,
since you have participation with Christ in the Spirit,
since you have affection and sympathy,
You have all these things if you know and love Jesus, you have encouragement, comfort, love, the Spirit, affection and sympathy. You may not feel it, but if you are in Christ, you have these things
therefore, Paul writes,
complete my joy by being jof the same mind,
having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.
Be all on the same page with each other.
Having the same love,
the same accord,
the same mind--
not picking one person from amongst you and getting behind that person,
but rather having the love of Christ and all having it,
having his mind, his world view, and all having it. This will complete Paul's joy. It will make him deeply and totally happy. And then, being all on the same page together, the page of Christ, then we can
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.
Conceit might be rendered 'vain glory' or 'empty glory'. Let me just pause and say that every time I read this, it sounds ridiculous to me. Do nothing from selfish ambition. Nothing at all. Count others more significant than yourselves. Okay. Sure.
Except that I’m the center of the universe. So my thought life, my actions, my vision for life, my world view... how many times have I said ‘my’? Who could possibly be more significant than me? And yet Paul says blithely, like its no big deal, Don't act selfishly.
Don't grab and take what you want from the candy bowl of life.
Don't do stuff to make yourself feel awesome
don’t keep working on having 'good self esteem',
don't wake up in the morning and think,
what do I need to do to make myself happy, satisfied and successful today, but
In Humility, in a grounded and real way, Count others as more significant than yourselves.
Not that you look at yourself and then at other people and beat yourself into a pulp of inadequacy
because a low opinion of yourself still counts as pride. You’re still thinking about yourself. You’re still at the center. Its still love. It may be sick, twisted dysfunctional love, but that’s what it is.

Still, its a great burden, isn’t it?
Whether you loathe yourself or are pretty satisfied, it’s still all you all the time, lugging your ego around, sheltering it from harm and trial and despair.

Instead of that, says Paul, count others and their needs more highly, see that their needs as surpassing yours. I’m supposed to have learned this, I’m pretty sure, through having a lot of children. I wake up every morning not only with a lot of my own need, but a to do list the size of that black board, and then the needs of a lot of little children insert themselves upon me to be more important than my own. Paul goes on,
Let each of you look not only to his own interests,
but also to the interests of others.
He's not inviting you to be a busybody, to 'be up on all the news', but that if someone needs something you set yourself aside and attend to that person. Not to make yourself feel good, to build yourself up but because its not even about you at all. This is impossible.
It is.
I've tried and I can confidently say that this manner of life is not only hard but virtually impossible. We are By Nature oriented towards ourselves. We are the center of our own worlds, our own world views, or own moral systems. To get out of that and live another way is impossible for you. But it is not impossible for God and that is who Paul is going to describe now.
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God,
Form means here, in Greek, the full essence and nature of God, in other words, who Christ Jesus, who is God,
did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,
The Greek for 'grasped' might also be rendered 'seized'. Not just sort of grasping on to something, but seizing it, taking it forcefully. Paul is painting a brush form of two men,
Jesus, who did not grasp at equality, which, being God, was certainly his right, and Adam, our ancient ancestor who reached out and seized the fruit in the garden, the fruit that was supposed to make him Like God, Equal with God.

We are all spiritually in the likeness or form or Adam, reaching out to take what we can get-- like Black Friday shoppers of the soul, we rush in and crush each other to seize the latest item from the shelf, taking love or respect or credit or whatever it is we think we need.

The opposite of this is Jesus who did not grab anything
but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant,
being born in the likeness of men.
He was in the form, he was God, but he took on the form of a servant, or slave, doulos.
He was born in our likeness. We are made in the likeness of God, now he is born in our likeness, a man. And what kind of man? A servant, a slave, someone who is subject, who is lowly, who is abased, who is of the dust.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
By the time of the writing of this letter, the cross was still an image of utter shame, of humiliation.
I have a lovely latticed cross hanging in my school room that Matt carved for me. It stands for me as a symbol of love, of hope, of forgiveness. On the two cross beams, while I was yet thrashing around grabbing what I need, taking what I can get, shoving people out of the way for my rights,
this person, Jesus, who did not take what he was owed, who put aside the glory and honor of being God, and came to earth who was born, which, let’s not cast a glow of beauty and wonder over that, the business of being born is humiliating--both for the mother, I'll just speak for myself, and certainly for the baby, naked, helpless.

This person, God,came into total poverty, born not at Wilson Hospital with a phalanx of knowledgeable medical staff, but on the floor of an animal holding pen to a humiliated and despised teenage mother. And from his birth he went on to travel with a group of outcasts and potential trouble makers.

If you had the whole world in your hands, would you solve all the world's problems this way?
This humiliating beginning and life culminating with the greatest shame a human could suffer in the first century in the roman world. Jesus was wrongfully accused of blasphemy and sedition, he was illegally and unjustly tried, he was flogged, a torture which killed some, and was finally nailed and hung up high on two pieces of wood and left to die. He did this, Paul says, obediently. God the Father asked him to do it and and he did. Willingly.

I gaze up at my lattice cross sometimes while I am screaming at my children or whining to myself about Binghamton's foul foul weather. My life is such a trial. As I struggle under the burden of myself, because that is what we're talking about, the self--myself, yourself--we labor to hold ourselves together, to be successful, to do our duty, to love and be loved--Jesus came to take that burden away, to bear it for us. He counted our need as surpassing his own glory. He came to lift it up and carry it away.

Paul is asking that we then, who have had the great burden of self lifted up and healed and loved,
that we do this for one another. We count the other’s needs as greater, as surpassing, and that we lay aside ourselves first for Christ, then for each other. But this vision is not interminable suffering, humiliation and then death on the cross. No, because of what Jesus did,
Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Jesus didn't die and stay dead. He died and destroyed death. After being dead a couple of days, Jesus, man, and God, in one person, was too big for death to hold on to. Death itself broke apart
and Jesus walked out of the grave and showed himself to his friends and eventually went back to be with the Father. He is in glory. He is highly exalted. And if you are in him, if you have let all the burden of yourself fall away and took hold and grasped him, then you live in his glory. The heaven where he lives is alive in you. You aren't laboring on alone, you really do have the comfort of Christ, the encouragement of Christ, the love of Christ, the mind of Christ, the surpassing glory of Christ to cover over you and satisfy you. So now, after this work of Christ, whereas before you could not count a single other living person as more important than you, now your glory is Christ
and you can seriously care for others along the way.

You can see that followers of Jesus who carry in their minds and hearts the virtue of humility are no wilting irritating obsequious boring wall flowers who do everything that everyone tells them to. Humility is the nature of God, loving us. Humility is God giving up his glory to come and rescue us from sin and from death. Humility is who God is. He wanted you so much that he was willing to lay aside everything to give you life.

You might see why Christians getting snappy with each other, or not caring for one another is so loathsome. Why those of you who profess to love Jesus, but have not totally let go of yourself, of your plans, the habits of your mind, the attitudes of your heart, need tonight to say a sorry to Jesus and turn around and go back to him.

For those of you who are hearing of Jesus for the first time or in a new way, I said at the beginning that I wanted to talk about letting go of yourself for a taste of glory. In giving your life to Jesus, it is not into the hand of someone who is thinking only of himself. When you give yourself to Jesus, it is to a person who has demonstrated, by the payment of his own life, that he loves you, and that he has the power to care for you. Not only so, but the power of his care and love is covered over with his surpassing and inexhaustible glory.