This sermon is mostly about integrity: Do we believe what we say we believe about Jesus? Have we experienced the gospel as genuinely good news? If so, why wouldn’t we tell others about what we’ve experienced? Yet most Christians would rather undergo a root canal than initiate a conversation about their Christian faith! Why is this? And what can we do to change?
Have you heard of Penn and Teller? They’re a comedy-magic duo famous for outlandish and often squirm-inducing magic tricks. I used to watch them on Letterman when I was in college back in the ’80s. They’ve been around a while, and they’re very good at what they do. Penn Jillette is the half of the duo that speaks. His partner, Teller, never speaks.
Penn Jillette
Anyway, Jillette is an outspoken atheist. I mean, he really, really doesn’t believe in God, and he wants you to know about it. Which makes it all the more surprising, several years ago, when he posted a video on his blog describing an encounter he had with a Christian businessman who, like other fans, met Jillette after a show. This Christian began by telling Jillette how much he enjoyed his work. He was sincere. And then he said that he would like to give Jillette a gift. And he handed him a new Bible—from the Gideons, I think—and said he really hoped he’d read it.
And I watched the video—Jillette was deeply moved by this man’s gift. So much so that even as he was describing the incident, tears were welling up in Jillette’s eyes. And he said something surprising. This man—who, again, isn’t anywhere close to becoming a Christian, at least right now—said that he doesn’t respect Christians who don’t share their faith with others. Christians who don’t do that thing that all of us Methodists promise to do when we join a United Methodist church. “I don’t respect it at all,” he said. He continued:
If you believe that there’s a heaven and hell, and people could be going to hell, or not getting eternal life, or whatever, and you think that, uh, well, it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward… how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize them? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? I mean, if I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming to hit you, and you didn’t believe it, and that truck was bearing down on you, there’s a certain point where I tackle you. And [eternal life] is more important than that! Read the rest of this entry »
I am a naturally anxious person. Given the large role that anxiety has played in my life, as I now see, I’m embarrassed to say I only realized this fact recently. A therapist gave me some helpful advice: Be on guard, every day, for occasions in your life that produce anxiety. Every day, he said, given my particular programming and hardwiring, there will be opportunities for my anxiety to express itself—loudly. Every day!
Yet I’m still surprised when anxiety comes. It sneaks up on me nearly every time—so much for standing guard! But when it comes, at least—after a requisite amount of panic—I am able to say, “There you are, old friend. Welcome back.” And the anxiety becomes less menacing and more cartoonish. I can see it for what it is, in all of its irrational glory.
An archival post this week by Will McDavid at the Mockingbird website has also helped me. He traces the epidemic of anxiety in our culture to our modern, scientific worldview. As he explains in the post, modernity has given us extravagant confidence in our ability to perceive reality: This worldview tells us that everything we can know about reality, we can know through our five senses—and our emotions. Descartes had something to do with it, which you can read about in the post.
The bottom line is this:
There is now in place a law of perception – for something to be real, we must grasp it fully. Subordinating truth to the measure of the knowing subject—haven’t we all been there? ‘Prove it!’, or “I just have to see it for myself” are expressions of our need to experience truth directly; in a church setting, this often means a need to feel something during the Eucharist, or a need to feel close to God. To say we can be close to God without feeling that way is a gracious word, but to us a counterintuitive one.
How different, McDavid writes, is the biblical worldview. As David writes in Psalm 139 (emphasis McDavid’s):
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
The Psalmist not only asserts God’s geographical omnipresence, but also he discusses God’s omnipresence with regard to human perception. David’s meaning of “darkness” here likely includes times of suffering and personal hardship in which God may not seem to be present or active, as in John of the Cross’s “Dark Night” of the soul. Although the Psalmist perceives only darkness, he can nonetheless objectively confirm and be comforted by the fact of God’s equal presence in that which seems darkness and that which seems light.
The psalmist can “objectively confirm and be comforted by the fact of God’s equal presence in that which seems darkness and that which seems light.” That’s what I need! The obstacle that most often impedes my ability to do this, however, is a tendency toward what McDavid calls a “fetishization of emotionally knowable spiritual experience.” While I’m not Pentecostal, I tend to think that spiritual reality is true only inasmuch as I feel it.
As I’ve blogged about before, I fall victim to the scheme that Uncle Screwtape describes to his nephew Wormwood:
Whenever they are attending to Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the actions of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.[†]
† C.S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters” in The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperOne, 2002), 195.
In 2 Kings 19, Judah’s King Hezekiah is afraid for his kingdom: He has watched Assyria lay waste to one nation after another, including, by this point, the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Now the king of Assyria, Sennacherib, is threatening to do the same to the Southern Kingdom.
Hezekiah prays a desperate prayer for God to intervene. God answers his prayer through the prophet Isaiah, who shares with Hezekiah the word that the Lord spoke concerning Sennacherib (from 2 Kings 19:21-28).
“She despises you, she scorns you— the virgin daughter of Zion; she wags her head behind you— the daughter of Jerusalem.
“Whom have you mocked and reviled? Against whom have you raised your voice and lifted your eyes to the heights? Against the Holy One of Israel! By your messengers you have mocked the Lord, and you have said, ‘With my many chariots I have gone up the heights of the mountains, to the far recesses of Lebanon; I felled its tallest cedars, its choicest cypresses; I entered its farthest lodging place, its most fruitful forest. I dug wells and drank foreign waters, and I dried up with the sole of my foot all the streams of Egypt.’
“Have you not heard that I determined it long ago? I planned from days of old what now I bring to pass, that you should turn fortified cities into heaps of ruins, while their inhabitants, shorn of strength, are dismayed and confounded, and have become like plants of the field and like tender grass, like grass on the housetops, blighted before it is grown.
“But I know your sitting down and your going out and coming in, and your raging against me. Because you have raged against me and your complacency has come into my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth, and I will turn you back on the way by which you came.
I find this passage to be a powerful and incredibly comforting message of God’s sovereignty. Sennnacherib believes that he’s been calling the shots, yet he hasn’t done anything that God hadn’t “determined” and “planned” from “days of old.” The very God whom Sennacherib has been mocking is leading him like a domesticated farm animal.
Lest I be accused of divine determinism, I see nothing here to suggest that Sennacherib isn’t acting freely, including the freedom to work great evil, for which he will be judged: it’s just that God, knowing “before all worlds” what Sennacherib would do in these circumstances (“I know your sitting down and your going out and coming in”), has factored Sennacherib’s freely chosen actions into his own plans—to work around them and through them to accomplish God’s purposes.
Needless to say, if God works his sovereign plan even through his enemies, how much more so through his beloved children?
Think of how this applies to our lives. No adversity we face has taken God by surprise. As with Hezekiah and Judah, God has “factored it in” and will redeem it. If only we’ll believe it!
Notice also that this isn’t the neutered God of mainline Protestantism who does nothing with evil except suffer it alongside us. God is active. Indeed, he is the main actor in its midst.
Does this thought not reassure you and comfort you? It does me!
Saul of Tarsus was an unlikely candidate for conversion, a “hostile witness” against Jesus who had no prior reason to believe that Christ was resurrected before meeting him on the road to Tarsus. While Luke doesn’t present Paul’s conversion as a template for everyone else’s conversion, we all must be converted. This sermon explores a few things that our conversions must have in common with Paul’s.
Filmmaker Oliver Stone has a new movie out this weekend about Edward Snowden, the former U.S. spy and computer genius who leaked top-secret information a few years ago and fled to Russia. Right now, many Americans are arguing over whether Snowden is a hero, who deserves a presidential pardon, or a traitor, who deserves life in prison—or worse. One thing’s for sure: If he leaves Russia, he’ll be arrested immediately and brought back to the U.S. to face trial. If he stays there, he’ll be safe. The U.S. doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Russia. As long as he’s there, the Russians aren’t going to do anything to help us bring him to justice.
Believe it or not, something similar is happening in today’s scripture: A Pharisee from Tarsus named Saul has gone to the high priest in Jerusalem to get extradition papers to arrest Jewish Christians who have fled government persecution in Israel and are now living in Damascus. Saul is trying to extradite these Christians, to arrest them, and bring them to justice in Jerusalem.
These Christians didn’t leak top-secret information, obviously. But they have spread information that the government in Jerusalem considered very subversive: that this man Jesus, who was tried, convicted, and executed for treason and blasphemy, didn’t stay dead: he was resurrected instead, and now thousands and thousands of people are joining this Jesus movement known as “The Way.”
This movement must be stopped, and this man Saul, who later was re-named Paul, is just the man to do it. Read the rest of this entry »
The apostles faced a problem in Acts 6: One faction in the church was grumbling that their widows were being neglected in the distribution of money and food. What were the apostles going to do about it?
As I say in this sermon, this kind of grumbling is a sin. It goes against Jesus’ own words about forgiveness and reconciliation. But the grumbling—alongside the logistical problem which gave rise to it—wasn’t the biggest threat the church was facing in this crisis: the biggest threat was that the apostles would be distracted from their main calling, the ministry of God’s word and prayer.
Does our church reflect this same priority and why does it matter? That’s what this sermon is about.
Just last weekend, my beloved Yellow Jackets of Georgia Tech played football in Ireland against Boston College. There was an article about the game in the Irish Times. The author pointed out that American football is growing in popularity in Ireland, although it pales in popularity to something called Gaelic football—not to mention in comparison to that sport that the rest of the world calls football, which is soccer to us. One challenge that many people outside of North America have to overcome in order to enjoy American football, according to the author of the article, is that there are “many stoppages” in the game. Isn’t that funny? There are many stoppages. The reporter marveled at the rock-star status that these student athletes enjoy in the public, as well as the huge salaries that these college coaches receive. He also wondered why so many people were passionately interested in a school’s football team when they didn’t themselves attend that school. But I especially liked this part:
A Boston College defender tries to tackle Justin Thomas. As if!
The fans’ intensity became clear early on when I was warned that Georgia Tech must always be referred to with the ‘Tech’ part included and never simply as ‘Georgia’ – that being the name of their fiercest rivals University of Georgia. Apparently it’s something akin to referring to Manchester United as Manchester City.
My point is, while we have much in common with the Irish; while we speak the same language; while many Americans—including players on both teams—are descended from the Irish, there is much that separates us culturally.
A similar dynamic is going on in today’s scripture. In verse 1, we’re told that a “a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews.” Who are these two groups? Like the Irish and Irish-Americans, they are two groups that had much in common: The Hellenists and Hebrews shared the same ethnicity. They were ethnically Jewish. They both went to synagogues and worshiped in the Temple. And now they both had become members of the same church; they were both followers of Jesus Christ. Read the rest of this entry »
For the sake of his contrarianism, my Old Testament professor in seminary, the late John Hayes, enjoyed telling his class of incredulous mainline Protestants—many of whom rarely used the word “sin,” or did so only in non-traditional ways—that Leviticus was his favorite book of the Bible. Why? Because it takes sin deadly seriously. It demonstrates the costliness of sin.
He had a point—and one with which Fleming Rutledge, author of Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, would sympathize. In one chapter, she examines the cross of Jesus Christ through the lens of blood sacrifice in the Old Testament. Of the sacrificial system described in Leviticus, she writes:
Basic to the ritual is the idea that atonement for sin costs something. Something valuable has to be offered in restitution. The life of the sacrificed animal, together with the sense of awe associated with the shedding of blood, represents this payment. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb. 9:22). The blood represents the ultimate cost to the giver. There is something powerful here that grips us in spite of ourselves. The use of the phrase “blood of Christ” in the New Testament carries with it this sacrificial, atoning significance in primordial sense; we cannot root out these connections even if we wanted to.
Leviticus 5:14 maintains that one who sins must bring a guilt offering to the Lord “valued… in shekels of silver.” Note the emphasis on assigning value to the offering. The suggestion is that there should be some correlation of the value of the offering with the gravity of the offense. If the supposed sacrifice is just something we are getting rid of, like those old clothes in the back of our closet that we haven’t worn for years, then restitution is not made. Anselm’s word “satisfaction” seems right here, wth its suggestion of comparable cost. We are familiar with this notion; we are infuriated when people who have committed great crimes get off with light sentences. The trouble is that there is no adequate punishment for a truly great crime. How could there be any offering valuable enough to compensate for the victims of just one bombing let alone genocides of millions? Anselm’s point is one again apposite: “You have not yet considered the weight of sin.” The obvious conclusion, explicitly drawn in Hebrews, is that the sacrificing of animals just isn’t enough. One of the simplest ways of understanding the death of Jesus is to say that when we look at the cross, we see what it cost God to secure our release from sin.[1]
The trouble is that there is no adequate punishment for a truly great crime. Indeed, as Rutledge points out in a footnote, blood sacrifices in the Bible cover only “unwitting sin.” There was no sacrificial provision for “high-handed” or deliberate sin. See Numbers 15:30-31: Israelites are to be “cut off.” Indeed, see Hebrews 10:26-31, where the author alludes to this scripture in a stern warning to potential backsliders. (By the way, isn’t this one of the most frightening passages of scripture in the New Testament? It should give pause to any of us who so easily presume upon God’s grace.)
Rutledge’s point is, as a matter of justice, anything less than the blood sacrifice of God’s Son Jesus would be inadequate to remedy the problem of sin’s guilt. We intuitively understand this, as she says, whenever we see “people who have committed great crimes get off with light sentences.”
And yet, as she points out, blood sacrifices and guilt offerings, no matter how costly, are also “light sentences.” They were never meant to be otherwise. They were meant to symbolize both the costliness of sin and the sheer graciousness of God—which itself prepares us for God’s sacrifice on the cross. Contrary to the widespread stereotype, God always related to God’s covenant people on the basis of grace.
None of this will be persuasive to anyone who does not already know himself to be within the sphere of God’s grace. In view of the widespread notion that the Old Testament is all about sin and judgment, there is an urgent need in the church for more intentional teaching of the enveloping grace in the First Testament. God’s redemptive purpose in electing a people (Gen. 12:1-3; 17:1-27) was put into effect long before the giving of commandments and ordinances. God has already told them, You are my people. God has ordained the means whereby we may draw near to him. The ordinances of the Torah are not a catalogue of tribal customs. They are gifts from the living God.[2]
If we miss this point, then we won’t understand, for example, Paul’s argument in Romans. We might wonder instead what was wrong with God’s original covenant with Israel, such that they, too, are under God’s judgment. Why couldn’t Israel have its means of atonement through the Law and we Gentiles ours through Christ, and both groups be fine?
Of course, many Christians already believe that, unfortunately. If so, they need to read Rutledge’s new book.
1. Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 245-6.
I wrote the following for my church’s weekly email blast.
As I’ve mentioned before, I like to listen to podcasts. And you won’t be surprised to know that I often listen to podcasts related to church and Christian theology.
In the past week, I’ve heard two podcasts about formerly prominent Christian clergy who’ve now lost their faith. [ed. note:here and here.] It breaks my heart. I can’t help but wonder if their training for ministry adequately prepared them for the acute spiritual warfare that accompanies a call to pastoral ministry.
I pray that the Lord will bring them back to their senses.
In both cases, these former pastors cited unanswered prayer as one important reason for their abandoning the faith. One of them wondered aloud, for instance, why God would fail to grant a prayer request for a dying child. If God won’t answer even that prayer, he asked, why would he answer any prayer? Unless, of course, there were no God.
Very smart Christians have offered good answers to these kinds of questions. And on my blog, I’ve tried to do so as well.
For whatever reason, however, unanswered prayer hasn’t been a big challenge for me. Even in instances of profound grief, which I’ve experienced firsthand, I have a sense that God is with those of us who are suffering and is working for our good—even when he doesn’t give us what we pray for.
In general, my experience with prayer agrees with William Temple, an Archbishop of Canterbury from the 20th century. He said, “When I pray, coincidences happen. When I don’t, they don’t.”
Besides, given what the Bible, including the red-letter words of Jesus, teaches about prayer, who am I to complain? I know I don’t pray often enough or with nearly enough persistence. I’m sure there are many prayers that God would answer for me if only I would pray them, or if only I wouldn’t give up on them so easily!
Here’s a frightening thought: How has my own ministry been hampered by a lack of faithfulness in prayer?
I shared this fear on my blog last week, and a friend helpfully cited Paul’s words from Philippians 3:13: “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.”
Amen!
I’m grateful that many of you have joined me these past few weeks in praying each day for our new :44 service, which begins this Sunday. Will you continue to make prayer your top priority?
Or if you’ve tried and failed to do so, pray that the Holy Spirit would give you the power to change.
Your church needs your prayers. Your pastor needs your prayers. Your friends and loved ones need your prayers. You need your prayers!
When it comes to financial giving in church, the Bible doesn’t say what we pastors want it to say: We want it to say, “Thou shalt give a tithe, or ten percent of your income, to support this church.” But notice in today’s scripture, the first church’s generosity is completely free and joyful. Why is our giving often so different? This sermon explores this question.
I don’t think you would consider me someone who is irrationally afraid of heights. But I certainly have what I believe is a healthy fear of them. So you can imagine how I felt last month when I read about a man named Luke Aikens. He became the first person to skydive without a parachute or wing suit and live to tell the tale. It was broadcast live on the Fox network. He jumped from 25,000 feet and landed in a 100-x-100-foot net—about a third of the size of a football field. It was suspended 200 feet off the ground.
Aikens jumped 25,000 feet without a parachute—and lived to tell the tale!
Whether we’re afraid of heights or not, I think we can all agree that that seems crazy. But not so fast… The 42-year-old Aikens has been skydiving since he was 16. He’s made about 18,000 jumps in his life. He’s practiced this particular jump for a couple of years—using special parachutes that he opened at very low altitudes—landing on targets much smaller than the net he landed on last month. And a crew down below rigged some high powered lights on the ground that would indicate whether he was on-target or off-target—so he could make adjustments in the air. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m preaching on Acts 6:1-7 this Sunday. I selected the scripture originally because I thought it something important to say about Christian service. And of course it does. But I’m more convicted at the moment about what it says about prayer. This bit of commentary from N.T. Wright got to me:
The fact that they mention prayer in the same breath [as teaching and preaching the word of God] in verse 4 is highly significant. Of course, all Christians are called to pray, to make time for it, to soak everything that they do in it. But the apostles cite it as a reason why they can’t get involved in the organization of daily distribution to those in need. That implies, not that those who do the distribution can do without prayer, but that the apostles must give themselves to far, far more prayer. Here, along with the challenge to a ministry of teaching and preaching, is a quiet but explosive hint to all leaders in today’s and tomorrow’s church.[†]
† N.T. Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One (Louisville: WJK, 2008), 100-1.
