Simple Christianity pt 2: "God"

It’s an awesome task for a preacher to take on a subject so weighty as “God.” Theologians have written books and books on the subject of how to understand and respond to God so it seems a little risky for me to try to talk about God in the short time we have this morning.

My task this morning isn’t to convince you of some new theological truth about God. And that wasn’t what Jesus talked about either when he talked about God. Rather, Jesus when he would talk about God always tried to demonstrate to those who would listen that God was a lot closer than they thought and cared a lot more about there lives than it might seem to them. If I do nothing else this morning but help you to see that God is a lot closer than you think and that he cares deeply and intimately about your life, then I will have succeeded in today’s message.

In fact, our first impression when we talk about “God” is so often confusion. On the one hand we know that the images of God that one might find on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are just that – images or impressions of the artist Leonardo Davinci. A white bearded muscular God with outstretched arm to touch the hand of his created man – Adam.

Take that image a step further and we have the image of God that many of us had when we were teenagers. Imagine the same grey bearded God with one hand outstretched while the other readies a thunderbolt poised to hurl down at those who rebel sinfully against the creator. Come on now, admit it! How many of us when we were growing up had THIS image of God – the God whose sole purpose was to keep count as if on some divine chalkboard the number of times we danced, smoked, drank a beer, or said what our moms considered a “bad word.” How many of us STILL have that image?!? Confession time!

The activity that most brings into focus the kind of God we worship is Prayer. Have you ever thought as you prayed where God was when He listened to your prayers? Or how your prayers actually made their way to God? Did God read your mind when you prayed or did you need to speak out loud? If God knows what you need before you ask him, then is it necessary to pray? Or how about this… if God knows what you need before you pray and if God is in control of every part of the universe and can make anything happen, do we really need to pray and do we really need to do anything at all except just sit back and watch God make everything happen?!? Dizzying, isn’t it.

You’re fortunate this morning that we’re going to cut the proverbial Gordian knot, going through many strands right down to the core – to the essence of who and what God is as we continue our sermon series on “Simple Christianity.”

And let me say outright that this is a very, very, very (did I say “very”?) practical question – with huge import for our spiritual life. How we think about God and who we think God is carries a lot of weight for how we live our lives. Let me say that again, because it is incredibly important. What we think about God matters very much. And how we might describe God to ourselves and to others is a very practical matter. It might be the realm of theology (which translated literally means “words about God”) – but let’s not kid ourselves – our answer to the question, “Who and what is God” could completely change your life today and change it forever! So this morning, if you’ll allow me, I’m going to take up just a little it of your time as we reflect together on who and what God, well, …. IS.

As a friend of mine said the best place to start is at the beginning! Turn in your Bibles to Genesis, chapter 1, verse 1 – the very beginning of the Bible. If you’re having trouble finding Genesis, it’s right before Exodus. Look with me how it starts out. “In the beginning, God.” Now for the purposes of our talk this morning we could stop right there. “In the beginning, God.” If we were to read on, we’d read about how In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth – and then how God separated the waters from the land, light from dark, stars from sun and moon and then created plant life, the fish of the sea, animals and then as if he didn’t have enough on his hands to worry about – he created man.

The Hebrew Bible, though, is always very meticulous in the language chosen and so it very carefully places God at the beginning of all things – before the world, before the heavens, before the creatures, before humanity. “In the beginning, God.”

Let’s reflect on the importance of that statement for just a moment. It may be the most important phrase in the Bible. Human beings like to play with that verse a little bit, don’t we. There are lots of things we would just love to place at the beginning – in order to give priority to them or honor to them or just simply because we’d rather see them come first. So we might come up with a list of “in the beginnings…” In the beginning…money. In the beginning… my work. In the beginning… relationships. In the beginning… status. In the beginning… my needs. In the beginning… ME! I wonder if the Biblical author of Genesis – some believe that Moses himself wrote these words – actually thought that human beings needed some help remembering and acknowledging who was at the beginning.

The Bible contains so many examples of human beings vying for position at the beginning and usurping the power and authority of God. The section in Genesis that begins with “In the beginning… God” ends in chapter 11 with those living on the plain of Shinar building a monument to themselves – otherwise known as the Tower of Babel. “Nothing they plan to do will be impossible to them,” God says in 11:6 – or so they think – and so to help them understand how much they depend on God he “confuses their language” so that they can’t understand each other as they attempt to build.

Unless there is a common bond – a central core – something always gets lost in translation, doesn’t it. A guy had a similar question and did something fun. He took the song "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," typed it into the computer, and translated it into German. Then he translated it back into English to see if anything got lost in the translation. You know the song:

Take me out to the ballgame. Take me out to the crowd. Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjack. I don't care if I ever get back.

Let me root, root, root for the home team. If they don't win, it's a shame. For it's one, two, three strikes you're out at the old ballgame.

He translated it into German and then back into English. Well, something got lost in the translation. It sounds a little militant, like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Execute me to the ball play. Execute me with the masses. Buy me certain groundnuts and crackerstackfusig. I'm not interested if I never receive back.

Let me root, root, root for the main team. If they do not win, it is dishonor. For there are one, two, three impacts on you at the old ball play.

Not quite the same thing, is it!

And it still holds true today – the areas in the world where there seem to be the least amount of cooperation and progress are those places and countries where there are literally hundreds of languages spoken. Lest you think God did this simply to punish –remember the words at that lead off Genesis – “In the beginning… God.” All throughout scripture, God reminds us that all life begins with Him. All human endeavor, rightly devised, begins with asking ourselves the question – is this what God wants? Does this fit with God’s plan as I understand it? Is MY will submitted to the perfect will of God? Now imagine being a member of a community where the whole community is actively seeking to submit to God’s will in their life. Is that picture one of chaos and confusion? Or is it one of perfect harmony?

God’s nature is what it is. That sounds like a truism, doesn’t it. Something that is obviously true. Turn in your Bibles to Exodus, chapter 4 where we find the story of Moses and the burning bush.

What excited me as a young child reading this story in Sunday School was the cool pyrotechnics. I can’t tell you the number of times I wanted to go into our backyard as a child and light one of the bushes just to see if OUR bush would burn indefinitely like Moses’s bush did.

But even with the fire that never burned out – the center of this passage of scripture is again, God. God’s the one on center stage. In fact, after capturing Moses’s attention with cool bush trick – he commands Moses to get past his fear of the Egyptian pharaoh and go and tell the Pharoah that it’s time to let the Israelites be free from their 400 year slavery.

Moses doesn’t consider himself to be that much of an eloquent speaker – or so he says – and so looking for some sort of calling card he asks God in 4:11, “Who am I that I should go to Pharoah and bring the Israelites out of Egypt.”

“I will be with you,” God says.

Moses’s responds – and you can tell he’s trying every way he can think of to get out of this task – well, let’s say that I go to the Israelites and tell them about the bush that burned and that I’ve come to free them from slavery… who exactly should I tell them sent me?

It’s at this point in the narrative that God gives the name that he will be known by. In most of our Bibles, the word is translated simply “The Lord.” But in the Hebrew the word used consists of a simple four letters which sounds like “Yahweh.”

“I am who I am,” God says – which is how Yahweh can be translated or alternatively, “I will be who I will be.”

Now it might seem almost sacrilegious to mention the pop-singer-icon Madonna in the same sentence with God – but just hang with me for a second. If you were to ask Madonna “who are you, Madonna” – you’d get a different answer depending on which “reinvention” year you’d caught her in. In the eighties she was the material girl. In the nineties, she became Dick Tracy’s side-kick. More recently, she’s experimented with different kinds of spirituality. Who is Madonna? Who knows? She changes with the culture. Likely, she doesn’t even know who she is.

But God, in the form of a burning bush says that he simply “is who he is.”

I have to tell you how I encounter that statement. One of the things that is most frightening about the world we live in today is how fast-paced change occurs. Gas prices two years ago were still under two dollars. Five years ago, we were still innocently pre- 9/11 disaster. Ten years ago, we were just discovering what the Internet could do. Fifteen years ago – if you owned a cell phone you likely had to carry it in a backpack it was so big. If we could have seen into the future fifteen years ago and what our lives in America would be like today – how many of us would have opted to find some deserted island somewhere?

But God, who has remained with the Israelites for 400 years of Egyptian captivity and is now readying His leaders to deliver His people proclaims with the voice of certitude and truth – I AM WHAT I AM. In Moses’s time, this perhaps would have been understood as – Pharoah’s come and go, Moses, armies conquer and then are vanquished, nations rise and fall, crops grow, are harvested and then return to the soil, cities develop and then are razed to the ground – but I – Yahweh – your God, Moses – I am what I am. I exist beyond this fleeting change you see before you. I am what I am.

Never could a message be more timely for us today. Because you see, things in Moses’s time didn’t change near as rapidly as they do today. And if you’re like me you’re reaching out for some anchor, some point of stability in your life that transcends all the things we know in the end are merely… fleeting. Like I said last week, we hear the voice that there is something better, something more permanent, something more loving and joyous – a voice that strikes our heart with a chord of harmony and authenticity. The voice, in spite of all that is fake and in flux around is sounds very real to us. It sounds, in fact, much more real than even our own lives at time. And the reason that it sounds so very real is because “I AM WHAT I AM.”

Jesus was asked that question. He was. “Who are you, Jesus?” The Jews ask him in John’s Gospel, 8:25. They wanted a name, they wanted a label by which they could pigeon-hole Jesus – and Jesus evades the question by talking about how he is only doing what he has seen his Father doing and that if they were “legitimate” children of God – they’d hear God’s voice clearly and do what they see the Father doing.

The Jews become indignant at Jesus – they don’t want to be told that they aren’t hearing God and because they can’t hear God they don’t really belong to God.

But Jesus has been in the Father’s presence and has heard from the Father and has seen the Father and is ministering and living and teaching as he has observed his father, minister, live, and teach. In fact, for Jesus – God is the beginning, God is the great “I am.”

“When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am the one I claim to be and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.” (Jn 8:27-29)

Again, the Jews ask – Who do you think you are, Jesus – telling us that we don’t belong to God and that we are following the devil. You must be demon possessed they tell Jesus! Who do you think you are!

And then Jesus delivers the crushing blow. He tells them precisely who he is and by whose authority he is teaching. “My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me… I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born, I am!” (JN 8:54b, 58)

In the next sentence it says that the Jews picked up stones to stone Jesus. For them, Jesus had just uttered the greatest blasphemy. He had equated himself with God. “I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born, I am.” “I am who I am.” I am one with my Father.

If you study world religions, Christianity stands apart from the rest in at least one major respect. Judaism says that we come to know God through the Torah – the teaching of the law. Islam says that we know God through the Koran – the dreams that were given to Mohammed in a cave on the Arabian peninsula. Hinduism says that we know God through myth and story about minor gods and goddesses as they reenact in story the drama of life. But Christianity… Christianity says that the way we know who God is and what God does is very simple. We don’t have to have a PhD. We don’t have to attend a thousand seminars or go to hundreds of conferences. We don’t even have to be able to read. We can know God simply by knowing the son – Jesus. For in Jesus, we see the son who is a perfect mirror image of God, the Father. Jesus DOES what he sees the Father doing. And for Jesus… in the beginning, there was God. And for Jesus, God is the great “I am what I am.”

Do you want to know the heart of God at its very essence – at its most profound depths? Come to know Jesus. And what does it mean to know Jesus? It’s to know Jesus as Jesus is revealed to us through the gospels about his life. It’s to know that Jesus loves. It’s to know that Jesus heals. It’s to know that Jesus sacrifices. It’s to know that for YOU, Jesus died. It’s to know that against hope – Jesus was resurrected from the grave.

My friends, this very morning we can put aright the things that are out of place in our lives. We can. We can respond to God’s voice to reorder our lives so that in how we live our lives and in the decisions we make – God is at the center and God is our anchor – the great “I AM.” Our God is not far away off in the heavens gathering dust on a cloud. He is right here, right now, in this place where we as the body of the faithful have called out to him in worship, word, and prayer.

And God has made it easy for us to restore our center in Him. He’s given us his son, Jesus, in whom we can place our total faith and trust.

And you know what Jesus says will happen when we do that? When we look to his life and see the embodiment of the voice of God – the perfect mirror of God’s love… do you know what will happen?

“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” (John 37-38)

Streams of living water will flow from within him. Or her. I like that. I don’t want my life to be a pond that stagnates. I want my life to be a river of living water. Water that nourishes the lives of others. Water that gives life to those around me. Water that flows swiftly and powerfully into the larger river of God’s love. And all we have to do is believe as we see the person of God reflected in his only son who gave his life for us.

1 Corinthians 3: "You are the Temple"

WEDNESDAY NIGHT PRAYER AND PRAISE
"1 Corinthians 3: You are the Temple."
by Pastor Jay Hutchens

All of us have enjoyed having teachers that have given us some good instruction in our past. Somewhere along the way, someone taught us to brush our teeth. Someone taught us to begin to speak and to read. Someone taught us how to dress ourselves. We’ve been taught more difficult things as well. Some of us have had to learn a bit of American history along the way. Some have had to learn long works of literature. Many of us have struggled with trignonometry, algebra, and even – yes, calculus. Yuck!

We can probably even remember the person or more likely, persons, who taught us what we believe about Jesus. Much of my own religious education took place in the Sunday School at a small church of Christ in New Orleans where Mrs. Starr, Mrs. Huffman, Mrs. Laguna, Mrs. Hutchens, Mr. Keaton, Mr. Bergeron and many others took pains to make sure we had some knowledge of what scripture taught.

We could likely even generalize a bit further and identify groups of our teachers rather loosely in terms of “schools”, couldn’t we. Some of us have learned at the “charismatic” school, some at the “social gospel” school, some at the “conservative” school, others at the “liberal” school and still others at what they call the “fundamentalist” school. Each of our teachers and each of our various traditions or “schools” has had a tremendous influence on how what we believe, how we worship, and what words we use to describe what God is doing in our life today. This is not a bad thing at all, as a matter of fact. It’s the way the church is and to my way of thinking adds to our rich diversity and our great ability to minister with spiritual influence to a great many people in our community.

Paul – who had studied as Jerry mentioned last week – at the feet of the well known rabbi – Gamaliel – knew the importance of a good teacher. We detect from Paul just a small dash of pride when he talks about having studied Jewish law with Gamaliel in Acts 22:3 in his speech to the crowd just after being arrested in Jerusalem. They knew who Gamaliel was, they respected him, and knew that Paul having studied with him was no intellectual light-weight.

It’s with an entirely different spirit though that the Corinthians have begun to rally behind various teachers and leaders at their church. And it angers Paul that they would become some manner of hyphenated Christian – a Christian who finds his or her identity in some teacher or teaching other than the crucified and resurrected Jesus. Paul is so upset by this in the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians that he can barely contain himself and comes to use what would seem to us as unusually impolite language to communicate the message to quite simply – GROW UP!

1Co 3:1 Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ. 2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. 3 You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men? 4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere men?

What is Paul doing here? His line of thinking is this. First, if the Corinthians are going to act like children, he’s going to talk to them like, guess what… children! Secondly, if in their presumed maturity they are going to quarrel and bicker and be jealous of who learned from whom – which one has to believe resulted in some sort of hierarchy as to who was the most knowledgeable or most righteous of the bunch – then Paul is going to name this for exactly what it is – “worldly” behavior. No doubt Paul is remembering the words of Jesus himself about who would have precedence in the kingdom of God.

Mk 10:41 When the ten heard about this, they became indignant with James and John. 42 Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 43 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. 45 For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

To be a leader in the mold of Jesus (and this is certainly what Paul is arguing) means that you will be the greatest servant of all. It’s the Gentiles – the heathen – the “worldly” who clamor after positions of power and authority. But as Jesus – and Paul – state definitively – “not so with you!”

For who are these human leaders? They are only those who have been appointed to the task of teaching by God and in doing so are fulfilling their small role in God’s larger plan of salvation.

1Co 3:5 What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. 6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. 7 So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. 8 The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. 9 For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.

For Paul, the purpose of those whom the Corinthians have been rallying around is simply to fulfill the task God has assigned him or her. Because the loyalty of Paul and Apollos and others is to God – so too – should absolute obedience and loyalty of the Corinthians be not to their teachers, their schools, their special way of being a Christian – but to God alone and as he will argue – to Jesus alone.
Paul’s role has been to help lay the foundation. He is a “fellow-worker” with God alongside Apollos and Peter (or Cephas). But make no mistake about it – neither Apollos or Peter nor Paul is the foundation. Jesus is the foundation of the church.

1Co 3:10 By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. 11 For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12 If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, 13 his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. 14 If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. 15 If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.

Perhaps the reason the Corinthians are rallying behind their favorite teacher is because they want to honor what that teacher has done. And there is honor to being a “fellow-worker” with God. But the work itself of building the church is God’s. Our own work will one day be shown for what it is. If build on the foundation of Jesus – it will stand. In the end, the work will be tested and we will see whether or not Godly materials were used to build on the Jesus foundation.

This passage is difficult because we don’t know exactly what Paul means when he says that “he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.” It likely means that if built with materials not supplied by God then the builder – whose intentions are good – will be saved though he suffer the loss of that which he has tried to build. In other words, don’t get too attached to your particular builder because in the end the day of judgement will show the worth, not just of the builder who will be saved even though he may suffer loss – but will show the worth of that which is built. And what’s the building that Paul is referring to? It’s the Corinthians themselves. They themselves will stand before God on the day of judgement and have to be refined through fire as it were.

In the next passage, Paul says this outright.

1Co 3:16 Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? 17 If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.

The building that Paul is describing in verses 10-15 is not just any building. It’s a special kind of building. A holy building. In fact, it’s a temple. And using a vivid metaphor here, Paul reminds those individual Christians at Corinth that THEY are the temple of God. If some seek to destroy that temple through divisive teaching, through jealousy and senseless quarelling then that person will be destroyed by God himself. That’s pretty scary if you think about it. If you are a destroyer of the body of Christ, you will become God’s target for destruction. These are very strong words on a very serious matter.

Rather than suffer that fate – the fate of being on the receiving end of God’s righteous wrath – because you are puffed up in your knowledge and in doing so have become divisive – it would better for you to be a fool. In verse 18, Paul picks up on the theme he’s been using all through chapters one and two.

1Co 3:18 Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a “fool” so that he may become wise. 19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness”; 20 and again, “The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.” 21 So then, no more boasting about men! All things are yours, 22 whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, 23 and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.

What’s the foundation? What’s the core? Who is at the center? Jesus and Jesus alone. If we belong – not to some school or sect or special way of interpreting Christianity – but to Jesus alone then we will belong to God. As Paul will say at the beginning of chapter 4 which Jerry will cover next week – the leaders of the church, the planters of the church, the teachers are only servants of God. They are mere men and women fulfilling their appointed role in God’s plan. The foundation upon which we all must build our spiritual house is Jesus and Jesus alone.

I want to close with that thought of Paul. All of us have come from different backgrounds and have sat under different teachers at various points in our lives. They have been wonderful men and women that have faithfully served God by teaching us and others how we can best serve the Master. In the end, how we will be tested as Paul says in our reading tonight will be with what materials WE USE to build this spiritual temple. Will we build upon the foundation of Jesus lovingly and compassionately submitting to one another out of reverence for Jesus? (Eph 5:21) We will be known, I believe by the measure of submission and love and reverence we show. These things will endure any test we undergo. These things will also be the framework for incredible healing and power in God’s kingdom as we minister that kingdom here in our community.

Simple Christianity pt 1: "The Voice"

by Pastor Jay Hutchens

There are lots of reasons for wanting to do a sermon series on “Simple Christianity.” If we survey the religious landscape of even our own community, we discover how varied is the understanding of what is meant by term “Christian.”

Too often, the word itself has led to endless arguments and debates with groups defining themselves as the ones who have the “right” understanding and labeling others either as ignorant or as outright heretics.

It seems to me that lacking some understanding of the basics of our faith – the things upon which we can all agree – simply serves the purposes of the enemy. Isn’t it the case that when we disagree over technical points of doctrine – we don’t leave it at the disagreement – but there is always a measure of suspicion about the motives, the education, sometimes even the character of the person who disagrees with our own understanding of Jesus and his ministry and teachings.

C.S. Lewis – the great public theologian – who was a convert from atheism to Christianity as an adult – talked about his own task in describing to his radio audience something he called “Mere Christianity.” He said, “Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only service I could do for my unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times."[1]

My own interest in talking about “mere” or “simple” Christianity is in fact, not theological, but missional. Having studied philosophy in college and then spending several years in seminary earning a Master’s degree – the thing that strikes me the most about religious education can be summed up in a phrase we’ve all heard – the more you you know the more you know how much you don’t actually know.

So if more and more education or more and more training isn’t the answer – and if the more you know about church history, theology, and counseling leaves you with more questions – then what is the answer? That question hit me hard after seminary when I left the classroom and entered the ministry of the church. And I have come to believe that the early Christians – the very first Christians, in fact – weren’t paralyzed in their ministry because of a lack of knowledge of the faith and deep theological questions that for them went unanswered.

As a matter of fact, the New Testament describes a church that was not paralyzed at all, but explosive in its growth – adding three thousand new converts on the day of Pentecost after what would seem to be a very simple message from the mouth of the apostle Peter. For Peter said this, “God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father, the promised Holy Spirit, and poured out what you now see and hear… therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”[2]

Peter begins and ends with the resurrection of Jesus as God’s ultimate act of divine power and saving grace in human history. It’s the same message that Paul the Apostle many years later and completely across the Mediterannean Sea in Athens, Greece would echo in Acts 17, “But now he commands everyone to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”

Like we said again and again on Easter Sunday – if you believe in the resurrection of Jesus – then that belief has some significant consequences for how you live your life. If you believe in the resurrection – like we said – your life can never be the same again – IF you believe that the resurrection of Jesus actually happened.

I say that my interest is missional because I see at the heart of Christianity the same heart that Peter and Paul saw – the affirmation of God’s creation and of life through the divine act of resurrection – the divine act of making alive that which was dead, of restoring to health that which was sick, and restoring to wholeness and completeness that which was broken.

This is at the core of our faith. All else rests on our belief that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. If this belief isn’t part of our way of experiencing God and the world, then anything else you might believe about Jesus simply doesn’t matter.

Paul commented on those who found the idea of Jesus’s resurrection difficult to swallow when he expressed, “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and vain.” (1 Cor. 15:14)

What was so important about belief in the resurrection? Why was it so core and so essential to the heart of Christianity?

I stumbled across the answer to this question in doing pastoral work with hundreds of people who have listened to sermon or sat across my desk, or simply caught me in the coffee line – in reading books and reflecting on what the authors were describing – but more important than that were the thousands upon thousands of conversations I’ve had with people inside and outside the church that have led me to the conclusion that –

Deep inside of us is the feeling that something’s not as it should be. Sometimes, it’s just a feeling – a hint, a voice that something’s amiss in not just our individual lives – but in the world. Perhaps we see all that the world is capable of being and we wonder to ourselves, just why it is that the world isn’t that way. We have glimpses in our lives to relationships of genuineness and authenticity and real family and then we are exposed to incredible pain and hurt that comes out of our family systems.

Or after knowing a time of peace like we experienced in the 90’s, war comes and we see the violent images on television or the internet of dead children – dead through no fault of their own but caught in violence that even our best philosophies can’t seem to explain or give comfort to. We simply know deep down in our hearts that innocent children dying whether through tsunami, war, or human accident is just simply not the ways things ought to be. We are offended, we are hurt, in a small measure – while not taking away from the pain of the victims – we share in that pain – we hurt FOR them in our hearts. Something here seems very, very wrong to us.

The feeling may be much more personal than what I’ve described thus far. Life may have been difficult for you and deep down you know that you were created for something so much better and more meaningful than what you’re experiencing right now. You battle depression – because sometimes all you can think about is why your life turned out the way it did while others around you seem to be so blessed and happy. Why do you battle addiction? Why do relationships seem so hard for you? Why does it seem that you never have money? Why did YOU come from a dysfunctional family? Why is it that YOU can never get ahead? And it may be that the feelings of being lost and never at home in the world always hover over you.

Each one of us – no matter where we come from, how educated we are or how well off we may be – have experienced at some time in our lives the disconnect – the disconnect from others, the disconnect from ourselves, the disconnect with the way the whole universe seems to operate. We’ve looked up to the stars and wondered quietly or out loud – does this life really amount to anything at all? And after we’ve screamed and shouted until our throat hurts and after we’ve jumped up and down and become angry and mad lashing out at anything or everything or wasted ourselves away in defiance until we can no longer move – at that moment when we finally collapse and are quiet… we hear a voice.

It comes at first as a voice of sadness. Sadness for all that has been lost during that time the scales covered your eyes. Sadness for all the brokenness and hurt and pain you’ve gone through. Sympathetic sadness for all those who are suffering even now because they don’t have eyes to see or ears to hear. It’s a tragic sadness, really. It’s tragic because… again, deep down, we sense, we are aware that it doesn’t have to be this way at all.

But in the end, the voice is a simple one. One that calls gently to us back to some hidden wholeness that we always sensed was present – a sign of God’s prevenient, nurturing grace. It’s a voice that speaks healing words to our soul – “Be still,” it says, “and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10).

My prayer for you is that you would become attune to this voice calling you back to a world that is set aright, where peace and justice matter and prevail. Where community is real and people mean what they say and when they say they love you and each other – it is not as the world loves, but deeper, more joy-filled, and meaningful.

This is my prayer for you because I believe that we need to be comforted by the voice of God we hear. Hearing the voice… discerning the voice of God… means that we must do a little bit of training – training that involves learning how to tune out the other voices we hear – the other messages, the worldly messages, that communicate to us values that aren’t really values at all. It’s hard training because the language we have learned from the world is all around us each and every day. We hear it spoken from every corner and we hear it spoken so much and so articulately that it sounds natural to us. We’re comforted by the language, the voice of the world because it’s what we’ve come to know. And it has even the sound of ultimacy to it – until God’s voice intercedes and intervenes.

This means that we have to first recognize that the language and voice of the world is not the natural language of those who would hear God. The enemy has won nine-tenths of the battle for our souls if he can just get us to accept the way he talks about life and the world as real.

Think about this because it’s so important. If the enemy can get you to think about other people in terms of how they fit into your agenda – the enemy has won. If the enemy can get you to define the word “success” by how much money you make or how much you do or accomplish… then the enemy has won. If the enemy can get you to define your life in terms solely of the present moment, focusing solely on your present pain, present happiness, present comfort, present desires without any thought for the eternal… then… the enemy has again won. If the enemy can get you to focus all the time on your wounded-ness – and continually think how much you deserve because life has been so unfair to you – then, the enemy has won.

Don’t let the enemy define how you think about your life. “The thief,” Jesus says in John 10:10, “comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

That’s why Jesus frequently talks about those who have ears to hear, because not everyone has been equipped to hear the voice of God when God speaks, or when God whispers, or even when God screams with prophetic shrillness into our lives! The prophet Jeremiah proclaims with characteristic loudness, “Hear this, you foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear: Should you not fear me? declares the Lord. Should you not tremble in my presence?”

Having ears to hear the word of God as it is spoken and revealed into your life, requires having your ears opened to God. We can’t do the opening, but we can surrender ourselves in such a way to God, so that God can perform the work of giving us eyes to see and ears to hear.

Have you noticed how often in scripture Jesus is healing blindness and deafness? There are always many levels to Jesus’ miracles of healing. When he heals the man who his deaf and dumb in Mark 7, one wonders if the attention is on the fact that a miracle has occurred or if the man can now hear and can now “talk plainly” as the text says in 7:35.

Isn’t this the miracle we desire most of all? To be able to hear plainly the voice of God and to be able to speak plainly about things in this life that really matter? To know and speak and communicate in the language of love that God spoke when by the “Word”[3] the universe of was created? This is the word we desire to know. This is the language we long in our hearts to speak.

My friends, the only way to learn a language that heretofore has been foreign to you is to immerse yourselves in it. I had to learn this lesson the hard way when I was an undergraduate. I had taken four years of high school French. When I entered Texas A&M, I was pretty cocky that I was going to place out of French. I took the entrance French test and failed it! Failed it after four years of having to learn to twist my mouth around in a myriad of unusual configuration just so I could perfect my French pronunciation!

As if to show the French faculty what they could do with their test, I enrolled in beginning German. Like French, I struggled for several semesters through German basics, German reading, German pronunciation which always sounded like you were trying to cough something up! Finally, my last semester of German I actually traveled to Germany where for six weeks we traveled the country and lived with a family where we weren’t allowed to speak English. In that kind of environment, you soon become bored of pointing at things to get people to respond and eventually through immersion in that language environment, you’re forced to actually start speaking and understanding the language. The sad thing for me was, it was in my sixth week of study that I finally began to pick up the language so much so that I began to actually dream in German. Frightful thought.

The voice of God which is heard in God’s language of love is learned the same way – through immersion. Oh you can do like I did with my French – you can dabble in it. You can do just what you have to do to get by in class. You can memorize just enough vocabulary that you can pass the quizzes. And in doing that you’ll get out of it pretty much what you put in.

If we are earnestly desiring to hear the voice of God plainly and clearly, then quite simply we must be in the places where the language is spoken. I had to actually go to Germany before I could become “immersed” enough to learn German. On this earth, God has formed communities of believers who gather and speak to each other the language they’ve heard God speak to them. Isn’t that incredible? That when we sing or pray or preach we are rehearsing out loud what we have heard God say to us as a faith community.

And what happens when we speak differently? We find ourselves thinking differently and then even behaving differently. The world changes for us because we have changed our definitions about some pretty basic things. Life becomes for us the life that God so graciously grants us to laugh, to have joy, to know real love. Love becomes sacrificial and “other-oriented” rather than selfish and self-seeking. Work takes on the character of a “vocation” or as the latin word is translated – a “calling” whereby we are called to fulfill a divine purpose by how we spend our time during the day. We aren’t just receiving a paycheck but we are giving back to this world a measure of love, and grace, and mercy by what we do.

And ultimately, we listen to and hear and then speak the language of the resurrection. It’s a different kind of language than what we’re used to… to be sure. Everyday, we should rejoice in the fact that God so loved the world that he… well you know the rest. There is LIFE when we listen for God’s voice. There is HOPE and RESTORATION and HEALING inside of the community that practices together the language of God, indeed what we have come to know as the WORD of God. Like Paul and Peter and a whole cloud of witnesses that have gone before us – we discover that there is life after death and because of that death cannot rob us of our deep joy when we respond to the call of the creator to come, be still, and know that he is God.

You know, I’m on a mission. I am! It’s not a mission to get everyone to agree with my theology. It’s not a mission to “convert” others to my point of view. No. I’m on a mission of healing. I want, like Jesus, to open up ears so that people can hear…not my voice…my voice just wants to sing a grander song… but the voice of the creator – a creator who chose to speak his saving word through his awesome, loving, divine and human son – Jesus Christ.

And I suspect this is true. That if ears are open to God, then the sheep will hear His voice and desire so much to be in His presence. My friends, THAT is a Christianity that is “mere” – that is in fact, “simple.”

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[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 6.

[2] Acts 2:32-33, 36

[3] John 1:1-2