China

The pastor is talking about his trip to China and how things are for Christians there. Mao persecuted Christians because Christianity was seen as an outside influence and threat to communism (ironically also an outside influence). Things are once again getting bad. 

China has billboards dissing Christianity. If churches want a cross, they must also have photos of Mao and current president flanking cross. Students bound for college must sing a document denouncing Christianity. Christianity is not the only persecuted religion. 

Things are tightening up around the world. The groundwork for control is being laid. Governments now have tremendous surveillance capabilities. China has drones that sound like birds. 

Today’s sermon is based on Luke 15:11-32 -  The Parable of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal has become an archetype for our culture. Prodigal comes from the same root as prodigious - it denotes generosity - in that sense the father was prodigal with his love. 

The eldest son is groomed to take the place of the father. In business, he might say, "I and the father are one." Interesting to view Jesus’s words in this light. 

Jesus’s parables are designed to provoke you. If you read it and think it’s a charming story, then you haven’t understood it properly. 

The younger son is more than rebellious - he is a fool. Starving in the pig sty, he got a clue. Going home is a big risk. His father was within his rights to kill him outright. His father’s acceptance was totally against what the audience would have expected. The father pays the price for reconciliation. He shames himself and pays the price. 

God loves us the same way He loves Jesus and Jesus wants us to know that. 

When the elder son refuses to take part in the celebration, he shames his father. When the father goes out to remonstrate with him, he doesn’t use the normal honorific title for his father. He is not in the image of the father, he is in the image of himself, he is self righteous. Self righteousness is always steeped in the Law. When you use scripture to justify yourself and condemn others, then you are being self righteous. 

To understand a parable, understand:

1. The theme

2. The main character 

3. The audience 

The Pharisees were the audience for this parable. He didn’t finish the parable for them or foe us. We are called to embrace the unembraceable. 

Further Up, Further In (Diving Deeper)

Catch the C. S. Lewis reference? We have a guest speaker, Gini Downing, and she said God often speaks to us in odd ways. 

“Rest is a weapon” is a quote from The Bourne Identity. Taking care of ourselves is part of our Christian walk - it is not selfishness. 

In our hurry up world, it pays to remember that God is interested in the depth of our faith, so do not focus only on fast forward movement. That reminds me of the seed that fell on shallow rocky soil and grew rapidly but died due to lack of deep roots. 

Our spirituality is a journey, not a destination. The steps on the journey are not a to do list - they comprise a become list. 

Where is God? Too often we banish God to the back room of our souls. Why doesn’t he break out? Because even this stupidity is part of our journey. We want to run our lives, but God will not be contained. Ties back to Narnia again, God is not a tame God. 

The faith journey isn’t linear, it’s layered.  Epiphanies come in many forms. Sometimes they come as a question. Why do we suffer? “It is necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Jesus said this tenderly to Julian of Norwich in a vision. 

You are exactly where you are supposed to be. You are exactly where God will meet you. What role does sin play in this? I’m puzzled. 

We all live into our purpose. We live into a larger purpose. Dive deeper and the forward motion in our spiritual journey will take care of itself. 

The Way of Weakness

Power is a necessary evil. The Church speaks from weakness to power. The Church is at its strongest when it walks the way of weakness. 

In 2006, a man named Charlie went to an Amish school and killed many children and then himself. The Amish chose to forgive him and took dinner to his widow. She worships with the Amish today. 

Early Christians helped plague victims and changed the way Romans viewed them. The Civil Rights Movement and Desmond Tutu walked the way of weakness and changed the world. 

Biblical religion is grounded in weakness, not in paltry human power. 

If we experience God’s Love, we give it to others, God’s Love is not something we can selfishly hold and keep to ourselves. 

Worship God and do not be distracted by your troubles. The present may suck, but our future is guaranteed. In the middle of your difficulty, let go and let God, don’t be anxious. The peace of God will guard your heart. 

When Paul writes in Philippians about how God meets your needs, he’s not writing about worldly wealth. 

The parts of Christian history most cringeworthy is when the Church rested on worldly power. 

The Church grows best when it walks the way of weakness. 

When the Church has some power, it tends to want more. It is seduced by power. The Church becomes idolatrous and worships worldly power. We have to stop playing the harlot and putting our trust in any social institution, politician, or party. 

We change the world, we repair creation, by walking the way of weakness. 

The church as it is in America today is dying. It’s up to us what will take its place. Yes 

What is Maturity?

The life of Jesus in the past profoundly affects our view of our future and we live our present in light of that future. 

We are living in the middle of our salvation. 

In the present Christians mourn the evil of the world (blessed are those who mourn) and we seek to bring the Kingdom more fully here in love and meekness (blessed are the meek and those who hunger and thirst after righteousness). 

We live in light of that future. The Kingdom will be fully realized here in that future. Our citizenship is in Heaven (Philippians 3.17-21). 

Jesus will return and finish the task of salvation. There is no such thing as the "end times" set in the future. Biblically, we have been living in the end times since the resurrection of Christ. 

Jesus is ruling and reigning today. We are called to advance the Kingdom, not look for blessings in this life. Middle-class success is not the goal of the Christian life. Obedience is more than being "good" and not breaking the rules. 

If you live into this future, then you will encounter resistance - internal, external, and spiritual. If we live into the age to come, then we will encounter resistance from the age that is. 

Living into this future purifies us and takes the superfluous out of our lives. 

Christian life is living a life of trust. We are called away from certainty and into trust and that’s painful. 

What is Righteousness?

Just as children today are having a hard time becoming adults, Christians are having a hard time becoming mature disciples. 

The sermon is based on Philippians 2.19-3.16. 

Righteousness is covenant loyalty - it is keeping your word, honoring our promises. 

Every culture has words that have big meanings. Freedom - freedom from and freedom to - is such a word for Americans. In ancient Israel, righteousness was just such a word. Because these words have large and nuanced meanings, societal tensions arise over what exactly these words mean. 

Righteousness was a wonderful thing - it meant peace and it meant God was with you. But, the tension arises because we live in an unrighteous world and God’s righteousness can be obscured by that. Paul taught that Jesus IS the righteousness of God made manifest and this was the beginning of a new covenant. 

Today we have a profound lack of motivation. We find it hard to live lives of faith. Faith is trusting in the promises of God. Faith does not mean pretending to believe things we really think aren’t true. Faith means accepting the righteousness of Christ has been given to us and living into the presence of God in our lives. Faith impacts every area of our lives. 

Paul rejects the righteousness of the Law for the righteousness of Christ. Our futures are changed by what Christ did. Let go of trying to attain righteousness by our own behavior. 

It’s harder for us to see clearly into our future with Christ than it was for early Christians. 

What is Salvation?

The pastor’s grandmother was frugal because of her experiences during the Great Depression. She was surrendered to an orphanage because her parents couldn’t afford her and then adopted to be a servant. The past can affect us profoundly and change our expectation of the future. 

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus changes our expectation of the future. 

Our inheritance is the righteous rule of God. We can rejoice in this no matter our current troubles (1 Peter 1.5-9).

The Celebration of the Eucharist spans past, present, and future. 

Paul would not recognize the evangelical Christian idea of accepting Jesus and being saved at a specific moment in time. Philippians 2.12-13 show salvation as a process - something we work out. Salvation is life and the way life is lived. It transforms us and our life in the present reflects that. 

What is an Adult?

We live in a world of empirical truth; but, a life of faith is important. 

In traditional cultures, we find ourselves moving toward others. Adulthood comes when we enter into adult community. In modern societies, we have an unsituated self, finding ourselves and adulthood by separating from others. Both ways have drawbacks. The first brings shame if we don’t measure up and arrogance if we do. The second generates loneliness and insecurity. If we can’t deliver the identity we craft for ourselves, what have we got left? 

There is a third way. To truly be an adult we need a horizontal relationship with God, living in God’s Love, and vertically, sharing that love with others. Our adult identity is being in Christ. 

The Love of God is a living, vibrant thing that flows through your life. 

Christ emptied Himself of significance, taking the role of a slave, even unto death. This is important, because so much of our identity lies in feeling our significance. We should set aside our worries about our significance and live a life of service to others. 

Salvation isn’t to be lived just as something for our own benefit. It is meant to be shared - to be lived out for others. This reminds me of Beth Moore’s podcast exhorting is to sow our seed (spiritual nourishment) rather than just eating our seed. 

Our faith increases as we share it. Our own experience of the Love of God grows when we share that Love. 

The more space you make for the Love of God to flow through your life, the greater your experience of that Love will be. 

Nurture Shock

Continuing the book of Philippians. Today we will talk about Philippians 2:1-4:

Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. 

At the time, good advice was a typical part of friendly greetings. 

The Bible is time bound and timeless. Most of the Bible brings both together. We do not throw away the time bound part. You need time and the willingness to discern the time bound, the eternal, and how God is speaking to you today. 

In the early days of Christianity, we see the Holy Spirit come and push the Church forward. The Holy Spirit is doing something brand new here. The Holy Spirit stretches the boundaries, pushing us out of our comfort zone. 

As Paul goes out to plant churches, he brings two things: a message that was offensive to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, and the Holy Spirit. One way he knows the Holy Spirit is with him is that the message is accepted. 

The message must be embodied or lived out by the Church. The Church must be a place where the Holy Spirit dwells. 

The Body of Christ is led by God. Everyone has a gift or a role to play. Worship should be dynamic and members should love one another. 

These congregations are vulnerable because there is no strong leadership. God picks the vulnerable to lead. We in the Church need to value most the weak and the vulnerable. 

The Church must have unity. Unity is critically important. We are known by our love for one another. Is this how we love God?

Unity doesn’t mean we all agree on everything. Unity means we share or give all of ourselves to one another. 

Being in Christ should be our number one identity marker. This is hard. 

Life within the Church means living for one another in service and love. This is also hard. Our lives are busy and we no longer feel the need for one another. The need is still there, but we don’t take it seriously and this is killing us. 

Living a Life Worthy of the Gospel

Persecution of Christians around the world is going up. The persecuted have one thing we do not tend to have - clarity. They know the Gospel is meant to be lived. They know living the Gospel is not seeking worldly wealth, prestige, or power. They don’t seek governmental power because they know the government is against them. 

Here white evangelical Christians are the largest and most powerful voting block and this makes it hard for us to have clarity. This means we are of this world. 

We see the Church as one more purveyor of goods and services. God serves us - we don’t serve God. 

We need to accommodate - preaching the Gospel in a way people can understand. But we’ve gone too far in this direction and made an idol of God. We need to confront - but if we go too far, we become like Pharisees. In every age, the Church needs to find a balance between these two extremes. 

Exhortations don’t always call a person to do something they aren’t doing - exhortations are also meant as encouragement. See how Jonathan Edwards exhorted his children in letters to them. 

Philippians 1:27 is an exhortation to live a life worthy of the Gospel. The Gospel is not an accounting system - viewed only as Christ paying our debts. The Gospel is the story of how God came among us and what God did for us. Do not minimize it. The Gospel is too big for one interpretation. 

There are four interpretations of Atonement. The pastor sees it as God finding us because we couldn’t find God. The cross and resurrection is the victory of Jesus over death and sin. 

He brought up the restaurant that refused service to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. He said Paul would not have called for that. He said it would be better to have served her abundantly and then explain why she did so. 

Emperor worship in Rome was worshipping the State - it was patriotism. It was a way to bring far flung Romans together. 

The Gospel should be provoking tension in your life. Is it?

The Gospel, A Greater Reason to Live

Friendship today is all too casual. In the ancient world, friendship was a covenant, friendship was a matter of survival and held commitments and responsibilities. 

Paul’s friendship with the Philippians was actually a three-way partnership because God is a partner. 

Philippi was a very patriotic city, full of Roman citizens. A lot of retired military, etc., lived there. 

N. T. Wright wrote a great biography of Paul. I’ve heard Wright on "Unbelievable." 

Initially, Paul thought he would preach until the Second Coming. Then he realized he would be executed; but, he had faith that whatever happened, it ultimately worked to the good for him. There is reason to hope ... whatever happens. 

The Gospel is the story of what God did through Jesus to reconcile us to Himself. 

The Gospel is a greater reason to live because it is:

1. The story of the cross and resurrection. 

2. The exaltation of Jesus. 

3. The creation of the church. 

4. The reconciliation of creation. 

Nurture Shock, an Introduction

This new series is going to go through Philippians verse by verse. Philippians is a relational letter, giving us a view of Paul in relationship with friends. 

This will be a work of translation - of language and culture. 

The title of the sermon is based on a parenting book of the same name. Parents are unintentionally disempowering their children. The gap between childhood and adulthood - relatively new in human culture - is getting longer. Now we have adolescence and delayed adulthood. People spending longer in college, getting married later, starting adulthood later. 

Child-centered, non critical parenting actually crippled young adults - they fear failure and independence. 

Christians claim to live by a higher moral standard - but this is not borne out by statistics. (I just brought that up in class.) Sometimes, when we give all the credit to God, we negate our responsibility for living life well. It breeds a sense of entitlement. 

We live in a generation of church shoppers - looking at what services the church offers us rather than a community we belong to and serve. 

Christian television here is now beyond patriotic and nationalistic. It’s apocalyptic and talks of persecution. The pastor works in Eastern Europe. He’s seen persecution and it’s not here. 

We have created a pet god and this deity does not challenge us. We look at what God can do for us - not what we can do for God. 

Three things to glean from Philippians:

1. Downward mobility - Christian life is a self-giving proposition - we are servants. 

2. Suffering - Christian life is in conflict with the culture at large and this can cause suffering. 

3. We have a destiny, a good future we are building today - this doesn’t lead to an effortless life - it leads to a life of friendship with God. 

Philippians 1:1 - The word usually translated as servant actually means slave. 

Philippians 1:3-11 - This is a prayer. Paul has a friendship covenant with the Philippians. In this letter, Paul speaks as an equal - he never calls himself an apostle. 

Paul is writing from jail. In Roman jail, your needs were met by your friends. The Roman government did not provide for prisoners. Jail was somewhere you waited before sentencing - it was not a punishment. 

Paul’s needs were taken care of by the Philippians and he prayed for them. 

Read Philippians this week and put it in your own words. 

Find one thing you value highly and give it to someone in secret. 

Some Thoughts on the Age to Come

Life is a gift. 

The gift of life includes freedom. 

God draws us toward our destiny. 

Our destiny is not a place. It is a state of being - being fully a People of God - living in joy and grace. 

Jesus and Paul have different voices. Christians tend to focus on one or the other. 

Jesus focused on the Kingdom of God. Jesus welcomed all. If we focus on Jesus, we tend to be merciful. 

Paul focused on our Life in Christ. His primary ethic was how to be in the world, but not of the world. Those who focus on Paul’s voice tend to be more moralistic. 

As Christians, we need to blend mercy and morality. 

Comparing Jesus and Paul:

Both taught that life continues after death. 

Both taught that after death we will encounter a transforming judgment. 

* For Jesus, our obedience meant faithful obedience shown by the quality of our mercy to others. We embody God’s Love. 

* For Paul, we receive our due based on our actions (2 Corinthians 5.6-10). Paul focuses on building the Church - how well we build is based on how we treat others in the Church. 

Both taught there is an Age to Come after this transformative judgment. What we do now is shaping (or mis-shaping) us for that day. 

We all have a role in the Kingdom. We are all important. 

Both believe this life is a preparation for the life to come. 

Three conclusions:

Give your presence to the people in your life. Be present to them. Listen. 

Develop your soul. 

Give yourself away. 

Pentecost Sunday

We all encounter the Holy Spirit. Despite my struggles with faith, I find faith in atheism even more problematic because I have felt the Holy Spirit. 

For Paul, the experience of the Holy Spirit was very tangible and real and was the first fruits of our life to come. 

There is a lost letter between 1 and 2 Corinthians. It was delivered by Titus. 

The Holy Spirit is the Presence of God in us. Our teaching should be based in the Spirit, not in the Law. Our competence comes from the Spirit. 

In Paul’s teaching, there is a big role for suffering. The false teachers in Corinthians preached a type of prosperity gospel. Christians were blessed by following the Law. Follow the Law and riches, happiness, and only good things would come to you. 

The Law is good, but sin will use the Law against you. The purpose of the Law is not to give us a set of rules we can follow perfectly; rather, the Law’s purpose is to awaken in us a knowledge of the power and destructiveness of sin. Like in AA, it let’s us know we need God, we cannot make it alone. We must walk out into the unknown and live by faith. 

The Presence of God is not a tame thing. God messes with people. Like Aslan, “Of course he’s not tame. But, He’s GOOD.”

In Hebrew Scriptures, Moses wore a veil. A veil separated the people from the Presence of God. But, according to Paul, we (with the Holy Spirit) experience God with unveiled faces. 

How Transformation Happens

Aly is the speaker this week. Yay! The pastor is in Eastern Europe doing mission work. 

Living life from the inside out has three steps: engage, transform, and respond. 

We tend to think of transformation as a magical, all-at-once process; but, it’s not. 

We are always transforming - we can conform to the pattern of the world or be renewed in Christ’s image. 

Transformation is a two-part process. The first part is sacrifice. Sacrifice is part of thanking God. Sacrifice is our part of the covenant. God’s acceptance of our sacrifice seals the covenant. 

We always have to give something up to go somewhere else. Life is like this. 

Why does Paul say offer your bodies? The sacrifice we are called to is tangible. In Anatomy of the Soul, the author, Curt Thompson, states our bodies are part of the process. 

Our habitual thoughts and behaviors build patterns - well worn paths - in our brains. Offering our body as a living sacrifice to God allows the Holy Spirit to transform those patterns. But we work with the Holy Spirit to build new pathways. 

To be transformed, we have to offer up ourselves. 

The second part is discerning God’s will. The rest of Romans 12 is God’s will. Your homework for this week is to read and pray on that to do list at least twice. Pick one thing of that list to be your thing for now. Share this decision with someone. 

What will you sacrifice? What part of His will will you tackle first?

The Tension Between Sin and Love

We live in a time when there are radically different ideas about what it means to be a Christian. So what else is new? Look at the bloody centuries of conflict between Catholics and Protestant and Catholics and Orthodox. It seems that there have always been different kinds of Christians - in the earliest days Hebrew Jewish Christians, Hellenistic Jewish Christians, and gentile Christians had conflict. 

There is also a tension between sin and love. Sin, interwoven in the cosmos, is like cancer. It keeps coming back. According to Paul, the Law, meant to bring life, incites sin and brings death. Try not think about a pink hippopotamus. Humans actually are prone to break a law simply because it is a law. 

The experiment of the robbers cave (https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html) revealed human nature, community, and violence. The experiment had to be cut short. The moral: sin in its insidious way turns even the good to evil. In this case, a sense of community and belonging incites violence. The Milgram experiment shows how cooperation and obedience can lead to great evil. 

But, we don’t need science to tell us this, we have our own lives to bear witness to it. 

The other side of this, the hope in despair, is love. Philippians 2:5-11:

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death -- even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

There is evidence that this was a hymn early Christians used to say to one another. This was a proclamation, telling us who and what we are. 

God calls us to embody, rather than imitate, Jesus. We, as the Body of Christ, live within the Law of Love. 

We do not own the Love of Christ. We cannot keep it to ourselves. We must share it. This is a new twist on the Parable of the Talents - I need to think more about this.