Peacemaking Together

We are called to be a missionary people. We are called to answer spiritual questions. People are asking different questions today. Peacemaking helps us answer contemporary questions. Peacemaking helps us be a people that are true, real, and beautiful. 

The church is the most overpromised and underdelivered product today. 

Christianity is not about what we do, it's about what we are. 

Expansive faith means that although the Bible is truth, it's not the only truth. Be open to science and art and philosophy. When we are open we build bridges to others. The Church is not a fortress we hide inside. We are called to go into the world - not to be the world but to go into the world - to connect, to love, to bring peace, to bring Christ into the world. 

The Hebrew word shalom means more that the absence of war. It is harmony, it is bringing love, light, and compassion to others. 

See people as people - do not see them as their mistakes, their sins, or their labels. 

Peacemakers are seen by the world as the children of God. How does the world see me?

The three tools of peacemaking are faith (mine is a broken hammer and some bent nails), love, and community. 

Love doesn't work as the only tool in your box. Richard Rohr says love is not love until you don't expect something back. Love is dynamic. 

You can't go backwards in life. The only way to deal with fear is to go forward into it and through it. 

Burdens should be shared. That makes them meaningful. 

What is God giving us to do as a community so that we can sow peace into the world? The mission starts with our commitment to this community. 

Spiritual Questions

One problem with sharing the faith is that evangelical Christians are answering questions no one is asking. But the Gospel is both a confrontation and an accommodation. We need to listen to the questions people are asking and see how the Gospel answers those questions. 

We need to balance confrontation and accommodation. We also need to make sure that are answers aren't seen as meaningless because they don't touch on the questions people ask. 

Every generation has different questions. Baby Boomers and those older grew up in a world where institutions were viewed as good. They live to work - career is tantamount. They underparented their children because schools did so much. They tend to be idealists and think problems should be solved. They experienced great social upheaval and they were last American generation to experience a great Christian revival (the Jesus Movement). They viewed truth as objective - there is the Truth. 

Key spiritual question: What is true?

These people are losing power in society. No longer largest cohort. 

Generation X is pessimistic rather than optimistic. These are the underparented. They do not view institutions as good. They work to live rather than live to work. They look to friends for identity - not society. First generation to experience postmodernism. They do not believe in objective truth. More comfortable with questions than answers. 

Key Question: What is real?

Millennials grew up in child-centered homes. Science and technology shaped them. They are not actually lazy. They are pragmatic and want to change the world for the better. 

Key Question: What is good?

Willing to partner with anyone, regardless of belief system, to reach their goals. 

Today's children, born after 2003, greatly influenced by the democratization of art. 

Key Question: What is beautiful?

What does the Gospel say to these questions? We need to think differently. We need to be peacemakers, carrying forward the incarceration of Christ into the world. We will measure our success, our spiritual authenticity, by how much good we bring to others. 

Three activities of peacemaking:

1. Refuse to objectify others. It is not a black-and-white world. Receive and love people regardless. Bring Christ to everyone. If we can't do this, our mission is dead in the water. 

2. Seek reconciliation. We need to be a mediating influence. What can I do to bring Christ into this place. 

3. Bring the Kingdom where it is not. If you see hungry people, violence, environmental damage, etc. - these are not of the Kingdom. 

How can we bring beauty to the world?

Art

The sermon is based on Matthew 25:14-30. We are invited to put ourselves into the story. It is the Parable of the Talents. 

Talents were worth a lot. Even one talent pretty much equals an average lifetime of earning. Looked at this way, the servant with one talent spent his lifetime of work avoiding any productive use of his talent. One translation has the master displaying disgust for the "play it safe guy who won't go out on a limb."

Not using my talents for God equals an absence of joy. We express love by using our gifts for God. 

The word talent in its present meaning came from this parable. That is way cool. 

Talent means "the natural endowments of a person." When we don't use our talents "we forfeit our own good."

God doesn't ask for more than what we are capable of doing or being. 

In the "divorce" between Catholics and Protestants, Protestants got the Bible and Catholics got everything else. We cannot lose the art - the beauty that saves the world. 

God is the Great Creator and our creativity is our imaging of God. Art is spirituality. 

Art is the expression or application of human skill and creativity. 

To create is to bring into being. 

Acting intuitively is acting on truth without conscious reasoning (instinctive). 

We are gifted with stories. We have a sacred duty to clothe the world in stories. 

Why don't we create? Fear. Creating and sharing what we create makes us vulnerable. 

Come what may, I will create today. 

Prayer is a right brain activity. It is creative. It allows God's creativity to be expressed through us. Contemplate where you allowed God's creativity to flow today and where you blocked that flow. 

"What we play is life." Louis Armstrong

Michelangelo believed every stone held a figure captive and he sent these prisoners free. When we create we set free the beauty in the world. 

We put ourselves into our art and into our story. 

The Wordless Art of Storytelling

How do you tell a story without words?Of course, given the title of the sermon, I immediately thought of dance, silent movies, charades, the movement of story. Photography and visual art sprang to mind as well; and, of course, illustration. Children's books show us how to tell a story without words.
We provide story as a subtext of life. We storify everything. Storification is what humans do - I think it is a reflection of the idea that we are made in God's image. Other species love, some better than us, but what are their stories? Do they also storify life?
Biblical stories have been extensively illustrated. That was how illiterate laity learned about God in the Middle Ages; hence, the centrality of Christian art. We largely lost that in the Reformation with the rise of sola scriptura. But, with the loss of art, we lost part of what made Christianity the "beautiful religion" to the early Russian tribes who chose to convert to Christianity because of its beauty.
Words, of course, have beauty too (I am a writer, after all); but I am with Alice in Alice's in Wonderland, who saw little use of a story without illustrations.
None of this has anything to do with the sermon - I am off on a tangent. But it's worth chasing this particular white rabbit, even if it doesn't have a pocket watch, in part because it meshes so well with the story I wrote for Tuesday.
Jesus was a god who told stories; but, Jesus also illustrated God without and beyond words.
Perhaps storifying our life becomes art when we live with intention and awareness.
"A poet is a person who takes words and does something with them, makes something personal and original out of them."
A person who tells stories with intention illustrates the nature of God.
"We are all illustrating a story, whether we know it or not." Our actions illustrate the words we use to tell the story of our life.

Living Life from the Inside Out

The pastor just returned from Estonia. When he travels, a conversation eventually come up about shrinking and aging churches and feeling disenfranchised within the culture. 

Evangelical Christianity rests on three pillars:

1. The Bible is God's revelation.

2. We are separated from God by sin. 

3. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the key event in the Bible. 

Evangelicals has grown and been enormously successful in the past century. They moved into the gap left by shrinking mainline churches. 

But now, something has changed. Unfortunately, Evangelicals created a bubble to live in that separated them from the larger society. This bubble was built on blessing and certainty. 

In viewing the Bible as immediately talking to us about our current situation, we misuse scripture. 

This bubble is collapsing today. It is no longer answering the questions people ask. It causes us to think about things differently and we become insular. 

The world rests on four pillars:

1. A new way of being human. One aspect of this is facing life and death on our own terms. The world views people differently and we need to understand that. Evolution and a scientific view of humanity permeates nearly all our attitudes. When we talk about being blessed as God's children, it doesn't resonate. 

2. A new way of understanding truth. Ancient wisdom has little place in a society where truth rests on scientific data. Even so, people are still interested in spiritual truth; but, they want truth that can be measured and demonstrated. If our bubble is based on the idea of God as someone who wants to make us happy, then we miss the mark. C. S. Lewis wrote about this. 

3. The morality of self-fulfillment. This is different from selfishness. It is the idea that we are meant to be the person we are meant to be and develop our talents. It is more than simply trying to avoid sin and be a good citizen. Think Parable of the Talents - the world convicts us for burying our talents. 

4. The collapse of the center and the sacred/secular compromise. We lost a sense of order and tradition in our lives when we separated the spiritual from the secular. 

We are in the third Great Awakening as a society, but it's not Christian. We need to come out of our bubble so that we can meet others and dialogue with them. We need to move beyond blessing and certainty and embrace mystery and mission. 

I get the image of a small child on the first day of school. 

The greatest crimes in life are committed by the certain. 

We need to live a provocative faith. Real faith is looking at the mystery, asking questions, and being open to change. In a world of certainty, faith is mental - in a world of mystery, faith is active. We can't cling to our certainty and avoid God's mystery. We cannot try so hard to keep God small because God cannot be put in a box or on a bumper sticker. 

Mission is living into that mystery. Study the history of Christianity, do not shy away from ancient wisdom and the experiences of those who are not like us. 

There are three priorities and values as a community are engage, transform, and respond. We need to live an expansive faith. 

Your spiritual life can only grow as large as your emotional life and Christian practices of prayer (many ancient) help with that. Spiritual directors can also be beneficial. 

We also need to be peacemakers. Do not objectify others, seek reconciliation (your neighborhood is your parish), and bring the Kingdom where it is not (do not be so focused on bringing people to church, let helping them where they are be your witness). 

The Power of the Resurrection

The Gospel is a very, very big story. The story is so big we cannot fully grasp it. It is like a diamond and our cultural perspective provides the tilt and angle by which we view the diamond. We cannot see all the facets at once; but, a good idea is to shift and reshift our tilt. This series of sermons was to try to shift our tilt to that of first century Christians. 

If Jesus died a bloodless death, would we still be saved? Yes, the point is the resurrection, as Paul said, if Christ has not been raised, then our belief is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:17). 

Sin is the problem with things. It is the force of death and destruction and entropy. The Resurrection is the solution. God solves the problem of sin relationally. The Covenant is not a condemnation, but rather an assurance of salvation. God as Christ fulfills both sides of the Covenant. 

How do you know this story is true? Yes, there's logical arguments and archeological evidence, but there's something else too. It's a knowing - or unknowing - it is the Holy Spirit in us. It is the experience of the Spirit - funny that, just what I was thinking about during the music. Whether nuerotheological or genetic or both or neither, I am wired to experience God in me and in the Cosmos. No matter how atheistic my arguments, that Presence is always there. 

Evidence of the Spirit is Life and Peace. It's a new mindset. 

Evidence of the Spirit is Assurance. What about my habitual fear, worry, and anxiety? I would like to let go of those burdens. 

Romans usually adopted adults to carry on a family name. In the ceremony, old records were burned and you became a new person legally. This is what Paul and his original readers thought about when they thought about adoption. 

Evidence of the Spirit is an ongoing connection with the Spirit. It is that feeling of compassion and love that overwhelms us. Paul may have been writing about tongues in Romans 8:24-27. 

Evidence of the Spirit is the Love of God. We cannot be separated from this Love (Romans 8:31-39). God wants all of us - no matter what we have done or what has been done to us - to experience that Love. 

This is the present day experience of the Resurrection. We too often settle for far less. Why? The overwhelming nature of this Love can be terrifying perhaps. Fear of losing ourselves? Are we misers afraid to spend our money (which is only an illusion) for something Real?

The Solution

Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week. Holy Week is a reminder, acknowledgement, and celebration of all that Jesus has done for us. 

Last week's sermon covered the problem of sin. This week's sermon covers the solution and how Jesus is the solution. 

Even though we are a culture that bases knowledge on science, we want to know what ancient wisdom has to say. But we cannot understand ancient truth in the same way we parse data. We have to take it on its own terms or we miss the point. 

Sin is more than our mistakes. Sin is a corrosive element in the world. Sin blocks us from the blessings and beauty of the world. Sin is like rust. It cannot be solved through rules or violence. It can only be solved through new life. Christ brought that new life. 

Christianity has various views on what the death of Jesus means. One view is that Jesus was the only perfect sacrifice and Jesus bore God's wrath for us. This is a very popular Protestant view today; but, it wasn't the view of early (biblical times) Christians. The primitive Church said Jesus overcame death and sin. 

The early Church (pre-Constantine) was persecuted and viewed worldly power and evil. Jesus overcame Satan through His death and resurrection. 

The next view was put forth by St. Anselm. The power of rulers came from God. Humans failed to live up to their purpose. We dishonor God this way. Jesus restored that honor. 

All these views are both right and wrong. It is a mystery. We cannot conceive of the whole of it. 

We need to go back to the beginning and revisit this issue. Culture in biblical times was relational and built on covenants. Marriage, friendship, business deals, and governance were all based on covenants. 

Covenants had three things in common:

1. They were binding. 

2. They depended on loyalty or faithfulness. 

3. Good relational partners were righteous. 

God's solution to sin is based on a covenant. In Abraham's initial covenant with God, God guaranteed both sides, all Abraham had to do was believe. The Law came later. It created culture and let them know what God was like. God's covenant in the Old Testament failed -- it was broken again and again. The sacrifices in the Old Testament were not about God's anger. They were also not the focus of worship. They were a way of restoring a broken relationship. 

Harkening back to Abraham, the broken covenant was a problem for God because God promised to see the covenant fulfilled. Enter Jesus Christ - a gift of God's righteousness to us. Jesus (i.e. God) healed the relationship we broke. Through Jesus God made certain the covenant succeeded, just as Abraham was promised. God fulfilled both sides of the covenant. 

Jesus is the righteousness of God AND our righteousness to God. God's love is not passive - its aggressive and demonstrative. It is so much bigger than the worries that consume us. It overcomes the corrosiveness of sin in the world. 

This brings us to the Orthodox view, Jesus came to heal the sickness of sin and bring us, healed and whole, to God.