Spirit of Truth

In the summer of the year, 58 years before the arrival of Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar took a legion of 5000 troops and invaded the Celtic lands of Gaul, modern-day France. Caesar soon found himself in a major war, with his army eventually of some 30,000 troops fighting a hundred fifty thousand Celtic troops which had been raised by the leaders of the Celts, a mysterious group of warrior-priests known as druids.

According to Caesar, the druids practiced human sacrifice, sacrificing criminals in oak groves at night to their pagan gods. Of course, Caesar practiced animal sacrifice, sacrificing animals to his pagan gods. Over the course of a five year war, Caesar was able to defeat the druids and their army of men. Many of the remaining Celts eventually migrated from France to the mountains of Spain, the western part of France, and over the waters to those islands called Britain and Ireland. We know them as the Irish, the Welsh, the Scotts, and the Bretons. They continued to migrate, and many of their descendants are in America today, our neighbors, perhaps even our family.

As they moved, they took their customs, changed their customs, but the old ways often came with them. One of their customs was to make huge bonfires on a night about halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, to offer sacrifices to their gods on that night, and to go door to door in disguise collecting food and fuel for the bonfires and sacrifices. Those who did not give were considered heretics and pranks and practical jokes were played upon them. The earliest Christian priests in the Celtic areas chose to remember the departed saints on the next day as All Saint’s Day, All Hallowed Day. And so the celebration of the Celtic festival of Samhain gradually became All Hallow’s Eve, Hallow’s Eve, Halloween.

1 Samuel 28:5-8, 11-23, 31:1-6; Ephesians 6:10-13; Mark 5:1-20 
Today the month of October in our American culture becomes a time when the stores are full of orange and black decorations, fire against the night, when orange pumpkins are lit, when candy treats are shared, when horror movies are released in the theaters and play nightly on television, when bonfires are lit and wild parties happen. It is often a night of drinking and debauchery, which only begins when the children are safely home with their haul of candy.

“But it’s all good fun”, you say. “The witches, the zombies, the scary clowns of the night are all in fun. None of this is real.” Well…Let’s go back in time to the Old Testament, to the time after David had killed Goliath, but Saul was still king of Judea, and Samuel, the great prophet, had recently died…

The time is about a thousand years before Jesus Christ would arrive on earth.

Israel’s enemy, the Philistines, the people who lived in the area today known as the Gaza Strip came together and brought their army to a camp on the border with Israel. This day, David and his men were part of the Philistine army. King Saul gathered together the army of Israel, and they made camp nearby. But King Saul, looking at the Philistine army grew afraid. As the King, he’d be expected to lead the charge.

So King Saul asked the priests what God advised. But the Lord did not answer Saul in dreams, or by prophets, or even by the Urim, the black and white identical stones that the high priest possessed and drew out of a pocket when someone asked the Lord a question. So Saul, the man who had actually chased the mediums and spiritists from the land, asked his servants to find him a medium to consult.

And they pointed him to a woman who lived in the village of En-dor. For you Star Wars fans, this was not the forest moon of Endor. It was the village in the Holy Land, known as En-dor.

Saul disguised himself and went to the woman’s house. He asked her to bring Samuel up from the grave for him, which she did. Saul and Samuel spoke, with Samuel delivering the news that the Lord had become Saul’s enemy because of Saul’s disobedience, and he and his sons would be killed the next day.

And so it happened. King Saul and his three sons died the next day in battle.

You see, in Leviticus 19, God had told the Israelites not to turn to mediums or consult spiritists or they would be defiled by them, with the reminder that God was Yahweh, their God. A chapter later, God tells the Israelites, that whoever turns to mediums or spiritists, God will turn against that person and cut him off from his people. Later in the same chapter, God tells Israel to stone mediums and spiritists, and in Deuteronomy, Israel is ordered not to practice divination, tell fortunes, interpret omens, practice sorcery, calst spells, consult a medium or a familiar spirit, or inquire of the dead. In fact, Moses says that God is driving out the nations from the Promised Land because of these "detestable things."

The Law that God gave to Moses was very clear about these things. In modern terms, we are to avoid fortune tellers, Ouija boards, and all forms of fortune telling, psychics, and mediums. As others have written, "Why would we want to get to God through a sinful, dead individual, when we have Jesus as our direct mediator?"

King Saul violated these commands, and King Saul died. As far as the Bible goes, mediums are very real.

But what about evil spirits?

Our reading from Mark is also very clear.

Jesus and his disciples travel by boat to the region of the Gerasenes, the area on the southeast side of the Sea of Galilee. There they encounter a guy who is possessed by an evil spirit. He runs around naked, has superhuman strength, he cuts himself, he lives among the tombs and he’s always crying out and screaming.

When he sees Jesus, he immediately recognizes Jesus, and calls Him “Son of the Most High God.” When Jesus asks the spirit his name, the man replies, “My name is Legion because we are many.” A legion was the name given to the 5000 man strong division of the Roman army. So apparently there were many evil spirits in this man.

The demons beg Jesus not to send them away, but instead send them into a large herd of 2000 pigs. So Jesus gave the demons permission to enter the pigs. The spirits enter the pigs, the entire herd runs down the bank into the sea and are drowned there.

Now there were men who were tending the pigs. Remember that pigs are not clean food by Jewish law – so these men were not Jewish. A good Jew of the day never ate pork. There was no need to raise pigs. These men were involved in something they should not have been involved in.

The men reported what had happened, so a bunch of people came to see. Jesus was there, the man who had been demon-possessed was sitting there, dressed, sane, and what is the reaction of the villagers? They are afraid. The eyewitnesses told what had happened and then the villagers began to beg Jesus to leave them alone. They were used to the possessed man being possessed. What scared them was that Jesus had power over those spirits!

As Jesus was leaving, the guy who had been demon-possessed begged Jesus to let him be with Him, but Jesus told Him to tell his family and friends what God had done for Him. And the man did just that.

And this is not the only demon- or evil spirit-possessed person in the New Testament. Now there are some skeptics who think that spirit possession was simply a way of speaking about epilepsy in ancient times, but epilepsy was also known. This was something different.

Twenty years ago, a missionary who was serving in Haiti came to visit us through our church. We talked late into the evening, and he told stories of demon-possession which he had personally witnessed. We haven’t experienced them much in the US, for we have basically been a Christian nation, but the Catholic Church in the last ten years has begun training a tremendous number of priests, at least one per diocese, in exorcism because people dabbling in the occult often find themselves with someone else in their head.

The Apostle Paul put it in perspective in his letter to the Ephesians, Chapter 6:

Finally, be strengthened by the Lord and by His vast strength. Put on the full armor of God so that you can stand against the tactics of the Devil. For our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the world powers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens. This is why you must take up the full armor of God, so that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and having prepared everything, to take your stand
Paul saw that behind the scenes, there is a spiritual war going on. We walk down the street, we drive to the grocery store, and we pass homes where men and women, late at night, are terrified because they are fighting demons and evil spirits in their lives. We might think of these spirits in modern, scientific terms – as chemicals that trigger the pleasure centers of the brain, as drugs, as dope, as alcohol or heroin or pot.

But looked at spiritually, through the lens of a Bible whose writers clearly believed and warned about evil spirits and demons, addiction is just a sanitized word for spirit possession, for when a spirit of addiction takes control of someone’s brain, the person is no longer in charge. Those of you who have been addicted and recovered, those of you who have smoked cigarettes and stopped, those who are alcoholics in recovery, it was fun for a while and then it became a dark shadow on your life, didn’t it? You did what you did not want to do…and you didn’t do what you wanted to do. The chemical forced you to into a slavery.

Have you spent time talking to someone who is addicted to hard stuff? Have you a relationship with them? Isn’t it easy to tell that they are being controlled by someone or something that is not working for their best interests? Men and women who were great children suddenly begin to lie and scheme and steal and do crazy things at the command of the evil spirit that now controls them. They can dry out, they can go to rehab for a month, they can get the chemical out of their system, yet at the slightest excuse, they are back to their old habits. Because the evil spirit has not left their bodies.

Yet, take that person and have them choose to go to AA or Celebrate Recovery, and something may happen. Because the first step of AA is to announce that we have a problem, that the chemical has taken control of our lives and our lives can no longer be managed by us. We must bow down and turn our lives over to God as we know Him – to Jesus, and let Jesus take control of our lives. And this applies to any problem that is too much for us.

We are all born with a natural spirit inside us. The natural spirit is weak, and can easily be overwhelmed by outside spirits. Spirits of addiction, of anger, of violence, of hatred, of lust, of depression. These spirits can take control of us if we are not careful. Sometimes the gateway is a chemical. Other times the gateway is messing with the occult.

Or we can choose to invite the Holy Spirit into us. The Holy Spirit is stronger than any of those evil spirits. And so we are protected by the Holy Spirit of God which usually comes to us at baptism.

How do we know when a spirit is speaking to us whether it is the Holy Spirit or an evil spirit?

The Holy Spirit is always looking for our long-term good. The Holy Spirit will not recommend an action which is against Scripture. Thus, regularly reading the Bible or listening to it – did you know that at biblegateway.com you have the Scripture read to you in your favorite translation? That’s one word – biblegateway.com

Regularly reading or listening to the Bible will allow you to determine whether or not the spirit speaking to you is the Holy Spirit or another more sinister spirit.

And so we go back to our basic concept.

Our purpose with church is to connect with God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. This is how we are justified with God and saved from God's wrath. We are to learn to follow the path of holiness by reading the Word of God and listening to the Holy Spirit. This is how we are saved from our own foolishness.

C.S.Lewis, in his Preface to The Screwtape Letters – an excellent book about how easy it is to let false spirits lead you from your salvation – Lewis wrote that there are two equal and opposite deadly mistakes that Christians make when dealing with devils and evil spirits. The first mistake is to assume they don’t exist. The second is to become overly interested in them. Either mistake will lead to great sorrow. 

So Christians are conflicted. Shall we avoid every aspect of Halloween, closing our doors and turning out the lights? Or shall we "go with the flow" of the culture, decorating big in orange and black, in witches and black cats? Neither. There is a middle ground. We can be aware of the danger, but like people who will reach out into a rapidly moving stream to rescue others, we can begin to pull others out of the danger.

So as the Halloween trick-or-treaters come to your door, recognize they are children who are having fun. Give them candy – and maybe give their parents an invitation to our Sunday afternoon children’s group and parent’s group at 5:00 pm. Give us the chance to meet them and lead them to a deeper knowledge, a knowledge of a Holy Spirit that is not evil or scary, a Holy Spirit that leads us to all knowledge, a Holy Spirit that proceeds from God the Father and God the Son, who is Jesus the Christ. Use Halloween as a chance to make friends.

And as you make new friends, as you love your neighbors, you will begin the task of leading your neighbor and their family to an eternal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. And you? You will be blessed once again.

Pray for God to forgive you of the things you’ve done wrong. Pray for God to send people to you this week who need to hear from God and the Holy Spirit. Pray for God to give you the words to speak to your friends, neighbors, and family. Pray for those friends, neighbors, and family. Pray for them by name or by their house. And give praise to the Holy Spirit who saves us.

Following Christ

After the Passover weekend of the year 33, when Jesus was crucified, died, and resurrected, Jesus talked with His disciples. Note that He didn’t just “appear” to them, He talked with them. He ate with them, actually cooking breakfast for a group of them on the shore of Galilee. He explained Scripture to them, He gave them the Holy Spirit, and He gave them a couple of ongoing commands.

First, He told them to return to Jerusalem and wait for power to come to them. And He told them to make disciples of all groups of people, to baptize them, to teach them everything He had commanded.

And so they did. For they had stopped being students of Christ, and had become disciples, followers of Christ.

Acts 8:4-8, 14-17; 2 Timothy 3:10-17; Luke 13:22-30 
My son Andy has done some research. He found that the Jewish educational system at the time of Christ had three parts, sort of like how our educational system has elementary school, middle school, and high school Here’s how it worked:

When a boy – and it was almost only boys who were educated this way. Whey a boy was between 3 and 5 years old, he began to go to school. There was a single subject that was taught – Torah, the Law, the first five books of the Bible. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The boys were taught the contents of these five books in detail.

Why? Because the Torah, the Law, was not only the basis of their religion, it was the basis of their government, and almost everything written in Hebrew was heavily based upon it. It was civics class. It was social studies. It was language. It explained how the world operated like our science classes would. It even had Numbers! And because books were so expensive, each of the five books of the Bible costing several months average pay – nobody got a copy. Instead, they memorized the five books.

Memorized? Yes! They memorized Genesis, they memorized Exodus, they memorized Deuteronomy, and they even memorized Leviticus and Numbers! I don’t know about you, but I had a hard time memorizing that short speech we call The Gettysburg Address in middle school!

But I have seen this today. A few years ago, at a home school graduation ceremony, I saw a mother tell her daughter, “Remember always this scripture:” And then, she proceeded to recite from memory the complete 8th chapter of Romans to her daughter. It can be done. We don’t memorize because we can always find a Bible, but they lived in a time when they needed to memorize. And so they did.

When the kid turned about 11 or 12, if he was in the top ten percent, he went onto the second stage and memorized the rest of the Old Testament. The rest went home to begin learning a trade, to be apprentices to their fathers or uncles. The academic learned the differences between Isaiah and Jeremiah, between Psalm 42 and Psalm 43. He learned Obadiah and Malachi. And once again he memorized.

Then, the very top students got a try out for a Rabbi. The Rabbi asked them questions to determine what they knew, how well they had studied, and whether or not they were serious students. If accepted, they would follow the Rabbi as a disciple, learning the discipline of the Rabbi. Disciple. Discipline. Get it?

All students were expect to support their Rabbi financially, like tuition. Some Rabbi’s were fairly lenient in how many students they took on, looking for the money. But the best Rabbi’s were very selective in who they took on. Jesus was almost unique, because He looked for His students and picked them out, rather than having them come to Him. Jesus said, “Follow Me!” rather than, "Okay, I'll let you follow Me."

And there was a saying. “May you be covered by the dust of your Rabbi!” Rabbis walked from place to place. The best students, the most passionate disciples walked closest to the Rabbi as he walked and stirred up the dust of the roads. That dust settled on them. Thus, the best disciples were the ones who followed closely with their Rabbis, hearing everything, learning everything, doing whatever the Rabbi did. These were people like Peter and John, who followed Jesus closely. John even leaned against Jesus as they lie around eating on the floor, the way people normally ate in those days. John leaned on Jesus at the Last Supper, he wanted to hear everything.

After Jesus returned to Heaven, Peter and John began loudly preaching what Jesus had taught them. They had followed Jesus closely enough to get covered in His dust. They were arrested, warned against preaching, released, and began preaching loudly once more. They healed people just like Jesus had. Peter was arrested again. An angel led him out of prison. The number of Jesus followers grew like crazy, and soon conservative Jews began to persecute them. One man was named Saul – who later adopted the name Paul.

The Apostle Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, after Jesus had returned to Heaven. Paul had been persecuting Jesus followers, for Paul was a top notch disciple of the Rabbi Gamaliel, the most well-known Rabbi of his day, a man who is still widely respected for his interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures. Paul was his disciple, and for Paul, all this talk about Jesus being the Son of God was blasphemous, so Paul went house to house, throwing Christians into jail or having them stoned. He even got permission to chase down followers in Damascus, he was so zealous to do what he thought was right in God’s eyes.

But he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, was struck blind, and asked by Jesus why Paul was persecuting Him.

To Paul’s credit, he realized that only the Son of God could indeed come back from the dead to chase Him down. After being baptized, Paul went into the desert to study for several years. And when Paul came back, the world would never be the same.

Paul had been a top notch student. He had all of the Old Testament alive in his mind. And so, he sat and thought. A lot. Jesus spoke to him. And it all came together for him and he began preaching when he returned to Damascus.

For his entire life, Paul had tried to be a good man. He had learned the Law very, very well, and he had tried to follow the Law. Yet Paul knew that he could never follow the Law perfectly – he had tried and failed, although he had done better than anyone he knew.

But then, he went back to Genesis and realized that Abraham had been declared righteous by God, not because Abraham had been particularly good, but because Abraham had believed God when God promised that Abraham, a man nearly a hundred years old without children, a man with a wife almost as old as he was, would be the father of a great nation. God had declared Abraham righteous simply because Abraham had faith in God and God’s promises.

And so Paul put these two ideas together - Abraham’s righteousness and Paul’s imperfections - with what he knew about Jesus. And what came out was the same understanding that the other disciples had been told by Jesus.

There is a real difference between what most churches today teach and what the early church taught. Today, we mostly teach that coming to church will give you ideas for living life that are better than the ideas that the culture gives us. And that’s true.

Today, we are likely to focus upon the moral teachings of Jesus, since they are the most obvious difference between the people of Christ and the people of the world. The world today in America follows the idea that each person has the right to act as he or she chooses within very broad limits. If you don’t physically harm me, if you don’t steal from me, it doesn’t much matter how you act.

Christians today often focus upon whether a certain behavior is “right”. We care about how others act, because deep down, we believe that bad actions are contagious, that bad actions in one way imply other bad actions that may hurt us. Let me take one specific example.

Fred may smoke marijuana. Now Fred may be a very responsible marijuana smoker, only smoking in his own home, when only his adult friends are around. But most Christians believe that Fred is acting in a way which is contrary to God’s will – Fred is sinning, and damaging the temple of the Spirit which is his body. Fred, though, believes that how he treats his body is none of our business. 

And so most Christians focus upon getting other people to stop these “bad actions.” And this comes out in our conversation – “Church will help you to change for the better”, we tell Fred when we talk with him.

But, you see, Fred doesn’t feel like he needs to change. And so Fred doesn’t want to come to a church where people are trying to change him, just as we don’t want to be around people like Fred who are trying to convince us to smoke pot. 

(I personally don’t care if you smoke pot – it is between you and the Holy Spirit, just as my issues are between me and the Holy Spirit. We all come to Jesus and the Holy Spirit with a laundry list of issues and sins, dozens of bad habits. The Holy Spirit is perfectly capable of helping each of us walk through those issues, one-at-a-time, in the order that we need to work through them. The Spirit is much more capable of dealing with each person's sins than I am. But I am concerned that you try to follow Jesus and listen to the Holy Spirit. For the Spirit will eventually convict you of all sin at the appropriate time. Now if you come to me and tell me that you are trying to quit smoking pot, I'll help you, offer suggestions, and generally nag you as much as you want me to so you can walk away from what you and the Holy Spirit have decided is sin.)

But you see, by focusing upon the Law and morals, we’ve missed the point of Christianity which the earliest Christians understood. We've missed the Big Deal!

Christianity did not take off because a bunch of people suddenly realized that there was a new, moral way to live and this was better than the way they were living. Most of the earliest Christians were Jewish. They had grown up with the Law, they already knew the Law, they followed it as well as they could, they recognized that the Law was there for a reason and they knew it, and they mostly loved it. After all, how many people are there around us who do not recognize that laws against stealing and murder are good laws?

But the early Christians also recognized that they could not follow the Law perfectly just as we recognize that “nobody’s perfect”.

The Good News of Jesus Christ had very little to do with a new, moral way of living. It ultimately led to that moral way of living, but that was not what got people excited.

Instead, the early Christians were excited because of two things:

First, Jesus had brought Lazarus back from the dead. John’s Gospel makes it very clear that the huge crowds that followed Jesus into Jerusalem that Palm Sunday were excited because they had heard about Lazarus being brought back from the dead. A bunch of people showed up at a banquet for Lazarus held just outside Jerusalem the Saturday night before they entered town. The crowd thought, "If Jesus could bring Lazarus back from the dead, there was hope that Jesus might be able to do that for us!" And despite the temporary setback that was the crucifixion, Jesus then showed that He was alive for evermore, and could be counted upon to bring us back from the dead. People did not have to die eternally – now they could live because God loved God’s people!

That still works today. People still get excited when they realize that our physical death is not the end, that Jesus has promised to bring His followers back to life someday, and His track record has shown that Jesus still performs miracles. That's why people are so open to hearing about God and Christ at funerals and when deathly ill in the hospital.

The second thing that excited people 2000 years ago was the Holy Spirit. Those people did not just get a dull news bulletin: “Man claims to be God, is killed, and then resurrected. Claims anyone who follows Him will be resurrected. Story at Eleven.” 

No. They found that when they decided to believe the story, when they decided to turn control of their lives over to Jesus, when they decided to be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, adopted into the Holy family, they received the Holy Spirit and changes happened in their lives. They began to hear that voice, that soft whisper of the Holy Spirit. When they listened to that voice, good things happened. It wasn’t the Law, which said, “If you don’t do this, you will be evil and die offending God.” It was a voice that said, “Let’s live! Do this and be blessed!” 
They traded in the old rule book of the Law, intended for those who were spiritually children, and listened to the Holy Spirit who was now riding in their hearts, speaking to them, giving them the power to do good. And they found that they wanted to change, where before they resented change. They found that the model of Jesus Christ, a man who walked in dust like they did, was a model that could guide them.

And yes, they began to love the Law, they began to love Christ, they began to love the Holy Spirit, and they began to love God rather than be terrified of God. And they were joyful, excited, and people joined the movement everyday. People were saved right and left.

But, you see, the Law – the way of living – did not lead them to that joy. It was the recognition that God loved them despite their behavior, not because of their behavior. And so they did not talk about following the Law – they talked about following Christ. They did not talk about the dangers of sin – they talked about the joy of an abundant, eternal life. They did not talk about the difficulties and necessity of following the Law every day – they talked of the wonderful life spent speaking with God and listening to the guidance of the Holy Spirit every day.

You see, they did not talk of giving up anything. They spoke instead of gaining something wonderful.

You’ve heard it said that Christians are killjoys, boring, the new word is "buzzkillers". That’s because we’ve focused too much over the last fifty years on stopping people from doing things they enjoyed.

We need to go back, back to the early church and focus more on the joy of an abundant life spent with God, Christ, and Holy Spirit in an eternity that has already begun for most of us.

When you are talking with someone who is considering Christ – or has even decided to visit this church – keep these three thoughts in mind:

1. Our job is to connect people to God through Christ and the Holy Spirit. 
2. Our second job is to learn to read the Word of God and listen to the Holy Spirit. 
3. We can’t be the Holy Spirit for another person – the Spirit is perfectly capable of speaking to that person of their sins, their problems, their issues. 

When you talk with someone, look for their need – what they think their need is. Are they looking for comfort? Are they looking for a good set of friends for their children to play with? Are they looking for friends for themselves? Are they looking for someone who will be friends even if their family has gone crazy?

Don’t look at their sins – we don’t want God looking at our sins, do we? Look at their needs, their hurts, and their fears – and tell them how Christ has helped you with your needs, your hurts, and your fears. Pray with them – right then and there. Pray with them in person, over the phone, - don't wait! -  and be a good friend who shows them love and compassion, hospitality and hopefulness, joy and life. That’s what it means to follow Jesus, after all.

For the early church, particularly the Apostle Paul, realized that it is the Holy Spirit, speaking through us, that draws people into friendship with us, into the church, into God’s kingdom. It is not a vague, faceless church. It is not a promise that “Christ will change you.” No. It is that Holy Spirit that we are all trying to listen to, guiding us to the people who need Christ, speaking through our lips words of comfort, friendship, and love that bring people to Christ.

If you want to truly follow Christ, a good way to grow close to Jesus, to get His dust on your clothes  is to do like He did. Make a list of twelve people who do not yet have a church home as far as you know. Pray for those people. Begin to speak to them regularly – weekly or monthly – about the things of Christ. It can be as simple as mentioning something you found during your personal bible reading. It can be mentioning something you heard from one of my sermons – or even something from a radio sermon. Begin praising God to your twelve, telling them the good things you’ve seen or heard God do. In this way, you’ll lead them – and they will begin to receive some of that dust of Christ that has stuck to you. 

For the best way to follow Christ is to lead others to Christ.

Am I Saved?

A few years ago I visited a guy at the hospital. He had gone into the hospital with pneumonia. He was a devout Christian, a man who had led people to Christ after an early life spent in an alcoholic haze. But he had come to know Christ and He had changed. But he had continued to smoke cigarettes, and over the years the smoke, combined with the previous damage done to his heart and blood vessels from the alcohol, had made his heart very weak. And while being treated for the pneumonia, he had had a heart attack – one of those severe attacks like you see on television, where they found him in the floor without a pulse, performed CPR, got the crash cart, and finally got his heart beating again. He woke up in the ICU, which is where I talked with him.

He told me of a vision he had had while his heart was stopped. He had seen Hell. There was the smell of burning flesh, there were demons carrying around saws, and people were screaming in pain. My friend was terrified, and told me that I needed to let people know.

My friend was able to get out of the hospital and made it to church a few more times. He even had two more episodes of heart stoppage and being brought back. Eventually, though, his heart stopped for good, and he transferred to the church of Heaven. His funeral was a real treat to do, for everyone knew of his multiple brushes with death, and his faith in Christ. There were tears, but also tremendous joy, especially among the people who had known him in his early days. For everyone knew that he was saved for eternity by Christ.

Acts 8:4-8, 14-17; 2 Timothy 3:10-17; Luke 13:22-30 

And that is a question that is important for all of us. Are we saved for eternity by Christ?

It is a difficult question, for when we look at the culture around us, we find all sorts of answers to this issue.

There is one part of the culture that says everyone lives forever, especially if they believe in the existence of God. And that part of our culture says the only requirement to make Heaven is to be good. “Good people go to Heaven, bad people go to Hell” That’s what our American culture tells us. We even have angels on television working extra hard to be good enough to stay in Heaven.

But what is "good enough"?

Many people say “God loves everyone. That’s what we learned in Vacation Bible School. He wants everyone in Heaven, so He’ll take me. After all, I didn’t kill anyone, I’ve only stolen a few pencils and paperclips in my day, the only criminal record I have is a couple of speeding tickets, so I must be good.”

Or they point to someone on the nightly news and say, “At least I haven’t killed someone like they did.” Or “At least I didn’t set off a bomb like that terrorist.” Or, “At least I don’t beat my girlfriend like he does.” Or…you can fill in the blank. They judge themselves versus the worst people they know of and judge themselves to be "good enough".

“After all, nobody’s perfect, yet the culture tells me almost everybody goes to Heaven, so since I’m not a serial murderer, I’ll end up in Heaven.” By this standard, Hell is a very empty place, with only a handful of the terribly evil being tormented: Hitler, perhaps Mussolini, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, serial killers, the 9/11 pilots, Osama bin Laden.

In our Gospel of Luke reading, though, Jesus speaks of a narrow door to salvation: 

“Lord,” someone asked Him, “are there few being saved?”

He said to them, “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because I tell you, many will try to enter and won’t be able once the homeowner gets up and shuts the door. Then you will stand outside and knock on the door, saying, ‘Lord, open up for us!’ He will answer you, ‘I don’t know you or where you’re from.’ Then you will say, ‘We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets!’ But He will say, ‘I tell you, I don’t know you or where you’re from. Get away from Me, all you workers of unrighteousness!’ There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth in that place, when you see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but yourselves thrown out.

Other people say, “I’m not good enough. I drink almost every day. I smoke. I use foul language, I have an addiction.” They also judge themselves by the very best people they know of and condemn themselves to Hell. By their standard, Hell is very crowded, but these folk also believe that Heaven would be dull and boring, while all the party people would be in Hell.

And Jesus had comments for these people also, people who figured only a handful will be in Heaven: 

They will come from east and west, from north and south, and recline at the table in the kingdom of God. Note this: Some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”

Jesus points out that the people we think are most likely to gain Heaven might be the last people to reach Heaven - and vice versa. Some of the "worst" people will be the most likely to reach Heaven.

If I were to ask you, from 1 to 10, how good are you, what would you say? Are you a 7, an 8, a 9 even? Or are you a 3, a 4, a 5? Is there anyone who says they are a ten? No, of course not, for we are all aware of the times we’ve said something terrible to another, the actions we’ve done which were wrong, the lies and thoughts and deeds which, if revealed, would cause all sorts of problems in our lives.

How high a score do we need to get into Heaven? Do we need a five, a six, a seven, a 9.5? The answer, my friends, is not what the culture teaches. For the answer is a thousand points. Perfection. Something not achievable by us mortals.

So how are we saved?

Jesus died on the cross to show us that a man who was fathered by God can indeed be perfect, sinless, a man who will sacrifice for others he has not even met yet. That is the level of goodness we all need.

Yet we cannot be that good, even if we begin now, for we know we cannot even live up to our own standards of perfect behavior, let alone God’s standard. For Jesus raised the bar, telling us that our thoughts count. We found out that to hate our worst enemy is the same as murdering a friend, to lust after an online exercise diva is the same as adultery with our friend’s wife, to covet a pencil is the same as stealing a Cadillac. Our mind is just as important as our hands and feet in committing sin, and the small sin is the same as the great sin, there is no difference.

And so, we are hopeless, we are lost, we are damaged souls that cannot be perfect, and we are doomed to Hell, without God for eternity, burning, weeping, screaming in pain.

And so, we have to beg for mercy. We have to ask God to have mercy on us.

Which, thankfully, is exactly what God wants to hear.

For to God, the real crime, the great sin, is our refusal to acknowledge our weakness. Our great sin is pride, the inability to recognize that God is God and we are not. For we all want to control the world around us like little gods, not needing anyone, especially a God who is much more powerful and wise and good compared to us. We don’t want to admit our weakness and our need, for that means we become humble, losing our proud independence that we’ve had since we were teenagers and "we did it ourselves". God told us that God is a jealous God and the god that He most hates is the god of independence, the little god that is our ego trying to tell the Universe that "we don’t need anyone else, we’ll make it just fine by ourselves, and we certainly don’t want to bow down to a God that will accept just anyone!"

This goes back to the Garden, when a snake told us that if we would eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we would become like God, becoming, in essence, little gods ourselves. Little snake gods, hating god like the original snake in the garden. And that is what we humans became. And like that original snake, we grew a snakeskin of terrible behaviors that infected all the people around us with a black rot that turns them into snakes, also.

And God, who is so polite, will let us go into the great darkness of our soul, pretending to be so powerful, so independent, so completely without need…until the day we die, when we admit that we don’t know how to survive on our own.

But if we will admit we are lost without God, then we admit that we are not little gods and we bow our neck to the great living God, on God’s terms, God saves us. By choosing to kill our ego, admitting that we can’t survive on our own, admitting we aren’t self-sufficient little gods…we gain eternal life.

God’s terms of rescue are simple. Admit that Jesus is God’s Son and worthy to be followed…and then follow Him and His example.

This is our first step to being saved.

"What do you mean, is there another step? I thought that I just needed to believe in God and I’d be saved?"

That’s the first step. It’s not all. You will notice that accepting the special position of Jesus is critical, for when we accept that, we accept that either Jesus is special, divine and holy…or we accept that Jesus just showed us what is possible, while we were too weak to do what needed done. Either way, Jesus is worthy of being worshiped and followed. God wants us to accept the special place of Jesus in the Universe. As Jesus said, Jesus "is THE way, the truth, and the life. "

Is there another step? Yes. Although we have been saved from God’s wrath, we now need to be saved from our own foolishness…We need to be saved from our self-destructive behavior, some of which our culture recognizes – the chemicals we drink, smoke, inject, or snort…the food we eat too much of…the violence we do to others…But we also need to be saved from behavior that kills our souls quietly, behaviors that the culture encourages…like sarcasm, gossip, anger, revenge, sex without responsibility, impatience, put down humor, one-up-manship, self-pity, hoarding, nest-feathering, object worship, comfort-seeking, lust, greed, hatred…and the list goes on. We need to be changed from the inside out. We need to become more like Christ. We need to wash away our bad behavior.

Baptism is necessary. Baptism is needed, for it is easy enough to say, “I believe”, but now God asks us to do something mildly uncomfortable to prove we are actually ready to follow Christ. Jesus was baptized…we must be baptized to follow Him. We must publicly step forward, tell people of our belief, and then get wet to show we are serious about this following of Christ.

And when we do this, God changes something in our heart as hands are laid on us and the Holy Spirit enters us. As our Acts reading tells us:

When the apostles who were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had welcomed God’s message, they sent Peter and John to them. After they went down there, they prayed for them, so the Samaritans might receive the Holy Spirit. For He had not yet come down on any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.

When we receive the Holy Spirit, a setting is changed in our hearts, a switch is flipped in our souls, a piece of black rot is surgically removed by God, a rot that we received from other people who had the rot who got their rot from other people clear back to Adam when Adam chose to disobey God and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We have that rot removed.

Before, we might do good deeds, but we did them for selfish reasons. We might give a thousand dollars to the mission, but we did it so other people would look at us with respect. We did it so we could influence others. We did it so we would respect ourselves. But after our baptism, with the Holy Spirit guiding us, we do good deeds because they are the right things to do.

After baptism, we can walk the path of holiness. This path of holiness is like a path through the foggy woods that is our life. It is a misty path that separates us from the world and leads us toward God. Sometimes it is easy to see. Sometimes, it almost fades away as the fog grows heavier and the path becomes less well-worn. Some days we will walk down the middle of the path, for many people have walked this portion of the path and it is easy to see, the sky is clear, the sun is shining. Some days, we miss the path in the fog and walk off in the weeds, straying far from the path, hearing the call of the world and the culture and mistaking them for the good, joyful calls of God’s bluebirds…but in reality they are the calls of the ravens of death. Yet with careful attention, we can come back to the path. A good church will help you stay on that path, but it is also important to look at the path as described in scripture every day, to speak to God and listen for the Spirit’s still, small voice leading us to the joyful woods. Yes, it is critical to listen when walking the path and become attuned to the Spirit’s voice calling us up the path.

This understanding of salvation is a key difference between Methodists and Baptists and Catholics.

Catholics believe that salvation comes only to those in the Catholic church, who receive the seven sacraments at the appropriate times. There is no path, only the need to stay connected every week in the church.

Baptists fall into two basic categories.

Southern Baptists believe “Once saved, always saved.” They believe that your belief is all that is necessary, that going to church is a duty, that you made the choice once and for all, and that God will not let you leave. Their path is an eight-lane highway with walls on either side and barbed wire to keep you on the path. They say of the person who turns back to evil, “They were never saved to begin with.” So how do you know if you are saved?

The Free Will Baptists believe that you are not walking a path, but a tightrope over the fires of Hell, that one slip can deliver you to a fiery end. Every week, they are back at the altar, being saved again and again. The Free Will believe that if you walk under the proverbial falling piano, you look up, and you use the Lord’s name in vain, you are doomed because of that one, final action as the wrath of God comes crushing down on your soul as that piano crushes your flesh. It is a tightrope to walk, staying sinless at all times.

Strict Calvinists believe that God decided before the beginning of time who would be saved - and who would not be saved. We have no choice, only the ability to discern which group we are in.

But Methodists, beginning with John and Charles Wesley, believe that the path is sometimes narrow, and that all will leave the path from time to time, if only to decide that we don’t like the taste of the paw-paw fruit we saw growing beside the path, or we don’t like the taste of mulberries or summer persimmons. And then we step back onto the path. But we allow for those rare individuals who stray so far from the path that they never want to return, those who walk away from Christ, never to return again, because we believe that our Heavenly Father gave us a choice in the garden, and we still have that choice even today. Yet, we need not be worried about ourselves, for if we want to regain the path, the path is there for us to find again. If you are worried about whether or not you are still saved, you are okay. It’s only those who are no longer concerned, who don’t care if they are saved or not that are lost again.

You will remember that it is through our initial declaration of belief that God declares us not guilty of the crime of disobedience. The technical term for being declared "not guilty" is that we are justified when we turn to Christ for salvation, choosing to follow Christ rather than be in rebellion to God. And so we are justified solely by God’s mercy, God’s grace, not our action, for God acted first, setting the present of salvation on the table in front of us 2000 years ago. Our only choice, our only action is whether or not to pick up the present and walk with it. At that point, we are saved from God’s wrath.

But you will recall that we needed to be baptized to begin the process of being saved from our own foolishness. For the Holy Spirit is absolutely necessary as a guide to change us from who we have been to who God wants us to be, allowing us to shed our self-destructive behaviors like a snake-skin and exchange them for new life-giving behaviors.

And so we come along the path to the Bridge of Assurance. For all people walking the path gained the path in the first place because they recognized that they needed the path to walk upon, that Christ and baptism and God’s grace were what was needed to get them upon the path, and that they were not good enough by themselves to find the entrance to the path, but needed Christ’s help, baptism, and God’s grace.

But after some time on the path, we tend to forget how we got there, and so we begin to leave the path to make our own way through the forest of life, relying once again on being good enough for Heaven, and we remember that we haven’t been particularly good and so we despair. We worry. We wonder if we are truly saved. Our snakeskin begins to grow again. We need assurance of our salvation.

John Wesley was raised in a pastor’s home with a godly mother. He learned to read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew by the time he was seven. He went to Oxford and became a priest in the Church of England. He brought food and the Bible to prisoners and the poor while he was in college. He became a missionary to Georgia in the new American colonies and then went home. On the ocean, there was a storm, and John was terrified of dying. But there on the ship were some Moravian missionaries who were simply calmly singing hymns while the ship heaved and the waves ran down the deck. He knew they had something he did not have. For John was terrified that he had not been good enough for God.

A few months later, back in London, a Moravian friend invited John to a bible study on Aldersgate Street. He reluctantly went. Listening to the "Preamble to Martin Luther’s Commentary on Romans", he felt his heart "strangely warmed" as he realized that God had already saved him, that he was on the path, and that, rather than waiting to condemn John, God loved John and wanted to save him, indeed had already saved him.

That night at Aldersgate, John Wesley had his assurance and his ministry took off from that night. Soon, he was preaching to thousands and tens of thousands of people joined the Methodist Movement because John no longer had a terrible fear of God, only the fear of respect for the Creator of the Universe that loved him so much He had sent His own Son to die for John.

So we come back to the question: Are you saved? You ask God, “Am I saved?”

Here is how we know.

First, have you told God that you are weak, that you have done evil, and asked for God’s forgiveness?

Next, have you made a commitment to follow Jesus and told others about that commitment?

Third, have you been baptized and received the Holy Spirit?

Fourth, are you beginning to walk down that path of holiness, reading scripture, joining with others in a group discussion of scripture and the difficulties of walking the path, listening to the Holy Spirit, changing from the person you were into the person God wants you to become?

If so, you are saved. Relax. If not, talk to God, make the commitment, get baptized, and find a regular Christian group to join with.

But how do we walk down that path?

Here's one idea:

We all have heard about the tithe, the tenth of our income that is our goal for supporting the church. But have you ever considered what a tenth of your time for the things of God is?

Seven days, 24 hours, is 168 hours a week. 16 or 17 is a tenth. Do you spend sixteen or seventeen hours a week on the things of God? Reading scripture, teaching young people, speaking of God to family, friends, and neighbors, working in church ministries? Do you praise God in song, praise God at the grocery store, praise God in conversation? Do you pray? Do you read Bible commentaries, watch educational movies about Bible themes, do you write godly postings for Facebook or do godly crafts that will make people think about God?

There are many things we can do. I know a man that makes wooden crosses for Easter services, another who joins in flood relief teams. I know a woman who crochets Christian wall hangings and then sells them at Christmas time for others to decorate their homes. I know of a man who makes wooden furniture, sells it, and gives the profit to the Salvation Army.

Could you spend your time supervising a basketball league at the church, could you lead a Christian fabric arts group? A prayer, a scripture reading and three-minute devotional every meeting, then the rest of the time in crafting and prayer. Would you like to lead a weekly Christian aerobics group, with Christian songs to dance to? How would you tithe your time to God?

All of these help us walk down the path of holiness, for the person on the path gradually changes from a student of Christ…to a follower of Christ, imitating Him, …to an apostle of Christ, telling others about Him and His love.

If you have not declared yourself to be a follower of Christ, come to the altar and attract my attention – we’ll do that today. If you have not been baptized, come to the altar and we’ll plan that baptism. If you are on the path of holiness and stumped as to what to do next, get in touch with me and we’ll talk. If you need assurance of your salvation, or received that assurance today, come to the altar and we’ll talk.

For God wants to save all people through God’s grace, not our goodness…will you look back at today as the day you were saved – and were assured of it?

Amen.

Why Does God let Good People Die?

The year 33 was an eventful year in Jerusalem. During Passover Week that spring, Y’shua of Nazareth, a traveling preacher who was descended from King David, had come into town at the head of a huge procession of people. He had spent time in the city, in the Temple even, and the crowds had loved His teaching. But later that week, the authorities arrested Him on the charge of claiming to be equal to God. He was arrested, beaten, interrogated, and handed over the Roman governor with a request for his execution. And that afternoon, he was crucified as “king of the Jews” by the governor. The Romans, unable to pronounce His name properly, called Him “Jesus”. His followers seemed to melt into the crowd, disappearing like morning fog in the desert.

But the rumors began a couple days later on Sunday morning. Jesus was alive again, and was telling His followers that because He lived, they would also lived. And the word spread that Jesus had defeated death.

Soon, His followers were declaring with confidence that Jesus had come back from the dead. They claimed He taught them for forty days and then went to Heaven. They claimed He was God Himself walking upon the earth. And many thousands of people believed.

Job 14:1-12; I Thessalonians 4:13-18; John 5:19-30
Soon, a young man named Stephen was debating conservative Jews in the streets, showing them that Y’shua of Nazareth was the long-predicted Messiah, the Savior of Israel. Then, one day that summer, the crowd could not take Stephen’s words any longer. They grabbed him, took him to a spot, and began to stone him. Stephen, a devout earlier follower of Jesus died that day, speaking loudly on behalf of what he knew to be the Truth – that Jesus was the Son of God, God walking on earth in a complex way, believing that Stephen, too, would come back from the dead, and this had given Stephen his courage to stand as the stones were thrown at him…

Over the centuries, people have believed that Y’shua of Nazareth – Jesus – was indeed God’s Son. They took Him at His word that He had defeated death. They listened to His words that people who followed Him would have eternal life, a life beyond the grave. Some of those people died violently because of that belief – others died peacefully in their sleep. But for most of them, someone was near them who loved them, and prayed that God would not take them away. Someone prayed that God would allow them to live a bit longer on this earth. Yet they died.

Why does this happen?

Why does God let "good" people like Stephen die?

We try to explain it in many ways. “God needed another angel”, we say. “God wanted grandmother with Him” “God decided to take Grandpa.”

But we hurt. We asked God to leave Grandpa, yet Grandpa died. Grandma died. Even Ole’ Yeller died – despite our prayers. And we prayed hard, we prayed harder than we ever thought possible – and they died.

Why? What did we do wrong?

There are those on television that tell us if we only had faith like a mustard seed, our prayers would be answered. There are those who tell us that we must just have faith and anything will be given to us. There are those who look at us after we have prayed through the night, our tears soaking our pillow, our eyes puffy and red – and they tell us we did not have enough faith in God – and we feel guilty because there were times during that long night when we did doubt, so it must be our fault.

But there is a problem with this idea. It treats God like a video game puzzle to be solved. Get the right words, the right combination of prayers, and God will open the doors for us. This idea makes us far too powerful and God far too weak. It ignores the fact that the Bible says God grants our prayers when they “are in accordance to His will” – not when they express our will.

It is a fact that, as far as we know, no one has lived over a hundred and eighty years since the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jeanne Calment holds the official record, living in Aries, France for 122 years, from 1875 to 1997. Three men have claimed to be 146, 163, and 171 years of age, but these ages can not be verified. Everyone dies. Everybody dies. Everybody becomes a body.

The only questions are “when?” and “why?”

I can’t answer the “when” question for any particular person. I’ve seen people struggle about “pulling the plug” and who expect Momma to die in a few minutes. And then Momma lives for another couple of months. And I’ve seen Momma die right away. I had a neighbor who came home on hospice. After eighteen months, they took him off hospice. One evening, a couple months later, he went out, got on his riding lawnmower, and died ten minutes later, mowing on flat and level land. We don’t know and certainly don’t have any control over the time someone transfers to the Church of Heaven.

According to the Book of Job, “Man born of woman is short of days and full of trouble.” And “Man’s days are determined and the number of his days depends upon [God].”

So, can we accept that God has determined our days far ahead of time? God does determine our final hour and can change it at will. But is it possible that God has a much bigger plan working than what we can see? After all, God plays thousands of years ahead – setting in action plans that began centuries ago to result in events in our lifetime. 

Sometimes a death isn’t about your loved one that just passed on – or even about you. Sometimes it is about the nurse or doctor who was watching quietly from the corner as you sang “Amazing Grace” to Grandma while she was in her final coma. I have seen so many funerals change so many lives, leading people whose hearts were stony icy walls to God suddenly melt and talk to me at the funeral dinner about how they were reconsidering their positions, how they were planning on taking their families to church the next week. Biblically, you may remember that a young man named Saul was watching Stephen as he died. Saul, who would later become known as Paul, the greatest apostle and church planter in the history of the church. Stephen's faith at his death surely affected Saul/Paul deeply.

But we also should recognize that death was not in the original design for this world.

In the original design, we walked in a garden with fruit growing on the trees and bushes. There were two trees in that garden – the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eating from that second tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil led to our fall, with the punishment being banished from the garden so we could no longer eat from the tree of life, the tree that kept us living. And it was after that we saw our lifespans begin to shrink from nearly a thousand years to the seventy, eighty, or ninety years that we have today. All people die – death was not in God’s original design, but death was the result of disobeying God.

Why should God care so much about our obedience?

Imagine the face of the nicest older person you know…the sweet old man or woman who is always pleasant, who greets you with a smile, who is always a joy to be around. They did not get to be that way naturally – they practiced. They practiced for sixty, seventy, or eighty years. And they probably listened to the Holy Spirit, read their Bible, prayed, and listened some more to that Spirit.

Now imagine the scowling face of the most terrible older person you know… the one who is always crabby, never has anything nice to say about anyone, the one who gossips and gripes and cuts people down all the time. They also did not get that way overnight – they have practiced. They have focused upon themselves for sixty, seventy, or eighty years.

Now imagine both of these people after practicing for ten thousand years in eternity. The sweet man or woman is now angelic, saintly, almost Christ-like. And the terrible person is demonic. Hell, while it has its share of fallen angels, does not need fallen angels to be a terrible place – only selfish people who refuse to bend the neck to God, and who have continued to practice being selfish for hundreds and thousands of years.

This is why God cares whether or not we will follow His Son’s path, learning from His Son’s example. For the slightest character flaw, after a thousand years of self-focus, will be magnified into something terrible, but, given enough time, a willing disciple of Christ can change from the most evil personality into someone pleasant and attractive to be around. How good we are today is far less important than whether we will choose to follow Christ, whether we can be taught. So to God, the goodness or badness of a person doesn’t matter in the short term, for God always has the long term.

And we can see this when we look at the entire list of 613 laws in the Old Testament. All of us break them repeatedly – we have enough trouble truly following the basic ten commandments without slipping. And God is perfect. If we can rate ourselves as good or bad, we might give ourselves a seven or eight. But God rates as a thousand, and asks us to be a thousand, not a ten. Our self-given eight might beat another's seven, but does that really matter when perfection is a thousand?

And so, when we adopt God’s perspective, we see that none of us are particularly good. It is only in relation to other humans that we try to boast of goodness.

Some people live much shorter lives. And these young deaths are particularly distressing to us – particularly if we consider these young people to be “good” – which, as we have just shown, they are not – only relatively to the people around them.

But our Christian faith and the promises of Jesus tell us that those who choose to follow Jesus will join Him after the earthly death, to live in a just land, a wonderful place where the tree of life grows beside the waters of New Jerusalem, a place where we can live eternally and enjoy that life. And this is where those people who know Jesus go to.

Our problem with death is that we are selfish. We were comfortable with these other people, they brightened our day, they lifted us up, they did things for us – and so we grieve when they die. WE miss them – they no longer care. WE want them – they have what they want. Our loss is not defined by the interaction between God and our loved one – it is defined by our history between ourselves and our loved one – we aren’t so concerned about them – as about us!

I know people who have allowed their lives to be defined by another’s death. They lost their father or mother at an early age and they never moved past it. They lost their Grandmother years ago and they are still angry at God about that. They lost their husband or wife a while back, and it still hurts.

Yes. It hurts. We blame the one who died, we blame God, we blame ourselves for not doing more. But death entered our world through the sin of Adam – we could be like the guy who said that as soon as he gets to Heaven, he’s going to look up Adam and punch him in the nose!

Death entered our world through Adam. Furthermore, the first death of a human was when Cain killed Abel and Abel's blood cried out to God from the ground. A human caused the first human death - not God. And this is the world we live in. God doesn’t “take” someone from us, God doesn’t “need another angel” – we don’t even turn into angels when we die. God doesn’t say one day, “I think that I want to punish John Doe, so I’ll kill his mom today.” God grieves about death just as we do – except God was much closer to our loved one that we were. God's grief is much deeper.

For example, we saw that Jesus cried at Lazarus’ tomb, even though He knew He was going to raise Lazarus in five minutes. Death was not in the original plan – but death had to enter the world if we were to have the freedom to choose, if we were not to be God’s little robots. Death entered when Adam chose to disobey God. And every person born since then has been in rebellion to God.

Now, we must look at death through God’s eyes, through the perspective that says that 20 years – or 90 years is but a blink of an eye compared to eternity. If you ask a fifteen year old how long life has been, they’ll say both very short and very long. If you ask a ninety year old how long life has been, they’ll say both very short and very long. It is a matter of perspective – soon enough, we’ll join our parents and grandparents and all those who have died before us with Christ – it will be a long time, it may be decades – and it will also be a blink of an eye.

Good people die because all people die. Adam’s sin led to death’s arrival. Our real problem is that we aren’t expecting death – we live in a world where we pretend death doesn’t happen to those near us.

We may pray and ask for several years more for our loved one; we may pray and ask for healing. But ultimately, the mature Christians recognizes the wisdom and goodness of God and asks for their loved ones to be healed, in this life or the next, and accepts that God knows what is best for them…and for us, although it may be hard for us to see and understand for many years.

A man died and the wife asked “How will I ever make it? He did everything for me“ And God said, “You depended too much on Him. It is time for you to learn to walk and do while depending upon me.”

You see, the life that left our world at the Fall entered the world again when Jesus chose to teach us, to speak to us about Father’s love for three years and then to show Father’s love by self-sacrificing Himself, a man who was perfect and sinless willingly dying where we should have died. Because He was fathered by the Holy Spirit, Jesus was of God-stuff, of infinite value. Because He was Mary’s Son, He was fully human, and His death meant something to humans. 

If He had not died on the cross, then truly, we would have had no hope. But because of His death and resurrection, we can look forward with confident hope, for we are like Him. The entire story of Jesus, indeed the entire Biblical story, is the story of God working out a way to make death meaningless without removing our ability to choose death over life, something that Adam choose to do. God has been working ever since Adam to remove death from the human condition. And God has succeeded.

We, too, have been born of woman and, if baptized, have the Holy Spirit of God in us. And so we, too, who follow Christ, look forward in hope to a resurrection in a new and improved body, living eternally with Christ.

But we need food and drink to sustain us. The blood of Abel soaked into the earth and contaminated the earth, so all food grown on the earth is spiritually contaminated by the blood of countless humans who have been killed by other humans.

And so Christ gives us His body and blood that we might have spiritual food and drink, having the spiritual antidote to the poison of the blood of Abel, replacing the spiritually tainted earthly molecules of our body and blood over time with the holy molecules from His body and blood, this sanctified bread and this holy grape juice. And so we have Holy Communion, as God's antidote to death. Will you join in this festive meal that celebrates the life that arrived with Christ?

Amen.

Why do We Have Rituals in the Church?

Many of you may have noticed by now that I like to read. Those who helped unload us at the parsonage really understand that just from the volume of books. And one of the areas I like to read is history. I like history because it helps explain much of what is happening in our world today. If looked at carefully, it explains a lot about what is going on – particularly in the church.

This is the third sermon in our series “Answering Tough Questions”. This sermon is focused on ritual in the church – why do we have it? What purpose does it serve?

Leviticus 4:13-21; I Corinthians 11:23-26; Matthew 26:26-30 
One part of history that I really enjoy is the English Civil War. I realize that most of you haven’t heard about it, because our high school history courses don’t mention much about it. But it had a tremendous effect upon the course of American religion and the differences between church worship styles – which is why I bring it up today.

The English Civil War of the mid-1600’s was sort of a left-over war fought after the Thirty Years War almost destroyed Europe. There were two sides in the conflict. On one side were the Cavaliers, mainly Catholics and high-church Anglicans who supported the King. On the other side were the Roundheads, mainly Puritans led by Oliver Cromwell, who supported the Parliament – the English Congress. Eventually, the Roundhead Puritan army won, the King was killed, and Oliver Cromwell led a democratic dictatorship until he died of pneumonia about eight years later.

Besides the question of who was in charge – King or Parliament – the war was driven by the fight between Catholic and Puritan views of church. Catholic churches in those days were highly decorated works of art. Around the sanctuary, one would find multiple statues representing great scenes out of the Bible – particularly the Stations of the Cross, a series of about a dozen statues and paintings which gave the story of the last day of Jesus’ life on earth. Large musical organs were present to provide musical accompaniment. These churches possessed finely decorated stained glass windows, once again with artwork showing biblical scenes. And for a group of people who mostly could not read, these statues and paintings and stained glass art provided a way to understand the Gospel. This tradition went back to Solomon’s Temple, where God commanded Solomon to have great ten-foot statues, covered in gold, with fancy decorations placed inside the Temple. Even the Tabernacle, the tent where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, had been carefully decorated with blue pomegranates and other symbols according to God’s commands in the days of Moses.

Oliver Cromwell, the lead of the Puritan Army, did not see things that way. Cromwell followed the views of the reformer Jean Calvin, who had tossed most Catholic ideas out the window. And so, Cromwell considered these decorations to be idols which needed to be destroyed. Cromwell believed that people had begun to worship the statues and paintings and organs more than God. And so in Cromwell’s churches, there were no decorations, no statues, no stained glass, no paintings. In fact, there was no use of gold or silver or even brass. No organs – perhaps no musical instruments at all. Nothing was allowed except a plain wooden cross at the altar, for Cromwell feared that people would worship anything that was “pretty”.

The two sides were fighting mainly over the issue of who was in charge, King or Parliament, but because the fighting was so intense, so comprehensive, so many people were involved, the religious questions began to separate the people. After all, who would think that a question of church worship style or the decorating style of a church could lead to war between two groups of devout Christians?

We can still see the effects of the war of our churches. Calvary is an example of a Cromwell decorating style church, while Mt Clare is about halfway to the Catholic style.

Related to all this was the question of how a church service should go. And this influence on a church service has split the American churches ever since. I personally think it is sort of silly. Can’t we move back and forth between worship styles from week to week?

At one end is the Catholic Church, which exercises great central control over every word spoken during the ceremony. In fact, a Catholic priest whom I met while teaching told me that in many ways, the Catholic church considers itself unified by the liturgy, the exact form of the service – what some people call “ritual”. Of course, when we realize that the Catholic Church considers itself the one, true and universal church, and we realize that splits have occurred throughout history from the Catholic Church expressly because local priests decided to preach on their own, it makes sense that the Catholic Church through the ages has moved to keep those splits to a minimum by central control.

In a Catholic church, there is a huge book called a Missal which contains several services for every day of the year. Not only are scripture readings and prayers specified for Sundays, but for each day of the week, with morning, noon, evening services at least, and possibly more. The responses of the congregation at each point is specified. In fact, this exchange between the priest and the people has a special name. It is called “liturgy”, which means, “The work of the people”. Even an outline of the short sermon is provided for the priest so he will interpret the scripture in the correct, “Catholic” way. All is carefully controlled. And this basic system is followed by Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, and Episcopalian churches.

The good in this system is that over about three years, every important part of the Bible is taught. It is easy to come up to a certain basic level of knowledge in the Catholic Church, because the details specified mean everything is covered. The use of regular liturgy sets those words deep into our hearts and minds and means that they will come out under times of stress. “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again!” Holy Communion is emphasized, with Communion being the core, central part of worship.

The bad in the system is that after about ten years, hearing the same short sermons every few years, the same prayers, the same words said gets dull. It is difficult as a normal member of the congregation to move to a deep understanding, because it is like every sermon is geared for an eighth-grader. Eventually, we want more.

At the other end of the spectrum are many Baptists and Churches of Christ. The pastors of these churches basically wing it through their services, with extemporaneous prayers composed on the spot, a single scripture reading which may be very long – or just a verse or two. The sermons are the high point of the service, usually long and detailed.

The good is that people recognize that prayer should become an outpouring of our heart toward God, that there is time allotted for a deep investigation of a piece of scripture – or even a topic. Things can change from week to week, which gives a feeling of excitement to the service – what’s going to happen this week?

The bad though, is that pastors tend to focus upon their favorite areas of the Bible so other sections get ignored, the beauty of prayers that have been worked on over the centuries is never heard, and the strength of repeated liturgy never hits our souls.

I’ve heard people talk about how one particular system or the other is best. And it’s usually the one they’ve experienced the most in their life, the one they are used to, the one that has become comfortable because they’ve been there so often. For both systems have strengths and weaknesses. Both help in some areas and hurt in other areas. So isn’t the best system a system that blends the best of both systems?

And so we come to the Wesley system, the balanced system developed by John Wesley and those who followed in the Methodist movement. There is a certain amount of liturgy. After all, the Methodist church is a 1700’s spin-off of the Church of England, which spun off the Catholic Church in the 1500’s. But the Methodists are also heavily influenced by Calvin’s idea that all people are in ministry and can be directly influenced by the Holy Spirit. Another influence was Wesley’s understanding that salvation is not just a matter of joining the church, but requires a series of personal decisions as we move closer to Christ. Although Wesley was always an Anglican priest, loving the ceremonies of the high church, he also understood that his movement was embraced by Welsh miners, Irish farmers, Yorkshire sheep herders, and English factory workers. His Methodist system involved ritual – but it also involved Bible education and working in small groups to become holy, walking together away from sin.

The idea is to walk between the two extremes. There is a certain degree of central control provided as resources – a hymn book, a book of worship, a high level of training provided for most pastors. Yet, while the central church provides resources, it is up to the pastor which resources to use.

Most Methodist pastors use a “lectionary”. This is a three-year cycle of scripture readings for Sundays and special church days, typically with four readings for each day – Old Testament, Psalm, Epistle, and Gospel. The readings cover the most important aspects of the Bible. A Methodist pastor, while encouraged to follow the lectionary most of the time can leave the lectionary. You may have noticed that I followed the lectionary from July through August, and now I am leaving the lectionary for this series of sermons.

We are to have a balance between formal prayers taken from the lectionary, and extemporaneous prayers composed on the spot. Although we have a history of Holy Communion occurring once a quarter in some churches, this was because of our history of having circuit-riding pastors come by only once every few weeks. Now, most of our churches have communion every month and many are moving to weekly communion, particularly at the larger churches where the pastor doesn’t have to dash out the door to another church. We try to balance our reliance upon Communion, Holy Scripture, and preaching to effectively worship Christ.

Our sanctuaries vary from pretty plain to highly decorated, with most being somewhat decorated. In almost all of these issues, you will see that the Methodist church attempts to take the good without becoming absolutely rigid in our rules. We want to have the good and reject the bad. And so we are in between in the use of liturgy – what many people call “rituals”.

Why do we use any rituals at all?

In short, we use ritual because they are scriptural - did you notice that the reading from I Corinthians 11 is one of the basis for the Communion liturgy? - and rituals are effective at teaching certain things. They are good for certain things – and yet an over reliance upon them is bad for us. Balance is the key.

Have you ever noticed that in our world we have rituals for many things? Perhaps the simplest are the rituals that are used in our schools and in our sports. The “Pledge of Allegiance” is said in almost every school, almost every day. I suspect that you can recite that Pledge by yourself, with no problems. The “Star-Spangled Banner” is sung at almost every sports event. You may not be able to sing it, because it is a difficult song to sing, but you know the words, don’t you? At baseball games, what happens between the 7th and 8th innings? In Atlanta, at Braves games, the crowd sings “Take me out to the Ballgame.” Every game. 

We have rituals in our families. When our children were younger and living at home, before they went to bed, we had “hug, kiss, and a prayer”. They each got a hug, a kiss, and a prayer said over them before bed. And something was wrong if that ritual did not happen.

Even at our weddings and funerals there is liturgy. “In sickness and in health” “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust”. Words that are strong and powerful because we have heard them so often. 

Thirty years ago, there was a trend toward writing your own vows at weddings. How many people remember those vows? Few do – yet “In sickness and in health” remains because we recognize the words, repeated at so many weddings.

Many people have come to my wife or I to get married, and it is sad to say that most of them have only seen weddings performed on television. Have you ever noticed that television wedding ceremonies only take a couple of minutes? In a real wedding prayers are said, scripture is read, a sermon is preached, and marriages are blessed, for we want to call the attention of God and all the people to the ceremony, to bless this marriage, and to make it memorable.

And it’s the same with funerals – It must be a Hollywood custom, because all Hollywood funerals are performed at the graveside, in perfect weather without any canopy, and they only take a minute or so.

Yet, a wedding is worth a fifteen minute ceremony, or even a forty-five minute ceremony with Communion if you really want the full treatment. And a celebration of a life is worth forty-five or fifty minutes, isn’t it, with those traditional words and scriptures read. It’s how we truly recognize that something important has happened – a life has ended and someone has moved on to eternity.

A friend of mine pastored a small church in Ohio. It being the second church on the charge, the pastor would arrive with the service already under way. Eventually, it would be time for the Gospel reading and the lay leader would walk down as the pastor walked up from the congregation. Where they met, they would bow to each other. My friend was curious how this ritual got started.

An old man spoke up. “Well, preacher, years ago the exhaust pipe from the old potbelly stove ran across at that point where you bow, so they had to bow down to get under the pipe. And when they upgraded the heating system, it just felt right to keep on bowing.” They recognized that the bow had come to mean something deep and important.

Rituals, you see, become a source of comfort as they teach certain deep truths. The Pledge of Allegiance teaches a loyalty to the country, the singing of the Star-Spangled Banner teaches that American persevere through difficult times, the “hug, kiss, and a prayer” tells our children that they are loved and God is there. Our repeated words during Communion teach us what Communion is all about.

Yet we have also seen people who get hung up on the liturgy, on the ritual, to the point where they cannot function outside the ritual, like the person who cannot sleep if they have not brushed their teeth, had a drink of water, and checked every door in the house to see if they’re locked.

The history of liturgy and ritual in the church goes back even before the church. Our first reading from Leviticus contained a detailed command from God about exactly what to do when a particular sin happened. Did you notice the detail?

13 “Now if the whole community of Israel errs, and the matter escapes the notice of the assembly, so that they violate any of the Lord’s commands and incur guilt by doing what is prohibited, 14 then the assembly must present a young bull as a sin offering. When the sin they have committed in regard to the command becomes known, they are to bring it before the tent of meeting. 15 The elders of the community are to lay their hands on the bull’s head before the Lord and it is to be slaughtered before the Lord. 16 The anointed priest will bring some of the bull’s blood into the tent of meeting. 17 The priest is to dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle it seven times before the Lord in front of the veil. 18 He is to apply some of the blood to the horns of the altar that is before the Lord in the tent of meeting. He must pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar of burnt offering that is at the entrance to the tent of meeting. 19 He is to remove all the fat from it and burn it on the altar. 20 He is to offer this bull just as he did with the bull in the sin offering; he will offer it the same way. So the priest will make atonement on their behalf, and they will be forgiven. 21 Then he will bring the bull outside the camp and burn it just as he burned the first bull. It is the sin offering for the assembly.

God gave Moses the first rituals. And in the New Testament, Jesus gave the disciples the basis for our most important ritual, Holy Communion. Listen to what Jesus said:

26 As they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take and eat it; this is My body.” 27 Then He took a cup, and after giving thanks, He gave it to them and said, “Drink from it, all of you. 28 For this is My blood that establishes the covenant; it is shed for many for the forgiveness of sins. 29 But I tell you, from this moment I will not drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it in a new way in My Father’s kingdom with you.” 30 After singing psalms, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

We have the single loaf of bread, broken and passed around. We have a single cup from which we are commanded to drink. We have the singing of psalms, particularly Psalm 118 before they left the supper.

And then, Paul reinforces this command,

23 For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: On the night when He was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, 24 gave thanks, broke it, and said, “This is My body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.”

25 In the same way, after supper He also took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant established by My blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.

The liturgy, the words, which we use for Communion are standardized in the United Methodist Church, but once again, we have the liberty to vary from the script for special occasions. Have you ever wondered why we have, in our hymnal, detailed patterns for worship, for Communion, for baptism, for weddings, for funerals? I have an entire other book called the United Methodist Book of Worship that has special services in more or less detail for other times of the year. 

In all of this, you’ll see we strive for a sense of balance between total liturgical ritual – and totally free form. Let’s look at one issue: Prayers.

When all the prayers are free-form, we learn that some people can pray and others cannot. If we have the guts, we learn how to pray free-form to God.

But if some of the prayers are written and said by the entire congregation, there is power in that all the people are praying that same prayer together. We learn that it is okay to write out a prayer ahead of time if we get tongue-tied. And some prayers, like the one we repeat together each week before the Scripture – those prayers we memorize, which helps us move into a position where we are ready to listen to the Word and the Spirit, where we are ready to be changed by God.

In another way, baptism is a ritual which we are commanded by Christ through His example. There are many ways we could join a church. We could sign a piece of paper, we could have a pin stuck onto our chest, we could run up a particular hill, climbing to the top, we could learn to recite a particular tongue twister. But Christ chose baptism. Additionally, through the ages, people thought it important that certain vows were exchanged between the person being baptized and the congregation and God. It seemed to help make the event a bit more special.

And so, when you see that we are using a piece of liturgy, a reading, an extra piece of scripture, a special ceremony in our worship, understand that your pastor included this because there is more to our worship than just a sermon or a song. Over the thousands of years since God first spoke to Adam, we have come up with thousands, if not tens of thousands of ways to turn back to God and remember what God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit have done for us. Some will be familiar to you as we sing a song that you’ve sung for years. Others may be new and different and may make you feel a bit uncomfortable simply because they are new, or because they take you back in time to another church where you weren’t comfortable.

Around the world, people worship with gold and silver, carrying huge crosses down the aisles. Around the world, other people worship to the sound of Southern Gospel music. In a village in Switzerland, people worship to the sound of guitars and chants. And in Korea, eastern music fills the ceremony as 800,000 people come together in the largest church in the world.

I have participated in services with organ music, with bluegrass music, with hymns from the 1500’s, with orchestra and choir, - and without any musical instruments, just with a liturgy paper, trading reading and response as we focus our minds on what the Son of God did so many years ago, when He voluntarily went to the cross and died there instead of us so we could live with Him forevermore.

Understand this – our goal is to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit in all we do as we try to understand this great mystery of God. Sometimes, the Spirit says, “repeat after me.” Sometimes the Spirit says, “Look at what another servant developed two hundred years ago. Use it.” And sometimes the Spirit says, “Dance like David did!”

Give thanks for the many ways we thank God for God’s love today. Step up and pray a prayer of forgiveness for someone who has hurt you. Walk up and sing a hymn by yourself. Tell your neighbor about what God has done for you this week, this month. Take an opportunity to pray for yourself and for a friend, neighbor, or family member. Come forward to speak through the Spirit to the Father that sent His Son to die just for you…and me.