rich’s blog

This is the third introductory sermon in the whole “Christianity & ?????” Series that we’re working through at SRBC.  Enjoy it.    

Framing the Issues #3: Partners in Being

Introduction:

You know some message titles are lame and meaningless:  Remember the one called “Another Sermon on Mark” I gave a few months ago?  Yeah me neither.  Boring title though, right?  

 

The title of today’s message has a lot of meaning, actually.  It’s the third part of an introductory message that gives boundaries to, and serves as a resources for, the various things we’ll be talking about in the coming weeks–sex, drugs, rap (you thought I was going to say rock and roll, didn’t you?).  I had originally thought of the title of today’s message as something like “resources for living Christianly.”  Which isn’t bad–I mean it does sound sort of like a manual you’d put somewhere so you don’t lose it, but then not find it until you move–but it was where I was going, you know.  

 

As I thought about last week’s message, though, which highlighted that our most basic task as Christians is to become just like Jesus, which is a sort of all-encompassing way of living ethically, a Christian virtue ethic–we are supposed to take on JEsus’ Character and practices, and everything to the depths of our souls and so live like him, as he lived no matter the situation we find ourselves in–which takes some time.  I suggested–which is a polite way of saying promoted entirely–the idea that we need to always ask not “what should we do”—focusing on our actions–or what will happen if–focusing on the consequences–but “how should I be”–focusing on ourselves, and our way of being in the world; which will have consequences, and necessarily result in actions, all of which should be good.  SO the primary ethical question is how should i be?  And the “right” way to be, the “good” way to exist, is for us to be just like Jesus no matter what.  So that’s what I suggested, took about 40 times as long, but there you go.  

 

So I figure we don’t want to know about the resources we have for living Christianly, we want to know what resources we have for being alive–but being alive like Jesus, not just living like a human.  

 

And then I wondered, you know the things I’m going to talk about today–the Holy Spirit, the Church, Scripture–is “resources” a fair way to refer to them?  I mean what do we do with resources?  We use them up, right?  If we begin to think about the church and the Spirit of God, and scripture as resources we may find ourselves using them and using them and using them up to get all the benefits we can get out of them until, someday, they just don’t seem to do the trick anymore, don’t seem to cash out very well, and so may very well just move on.  

 

I don’t want to be a dealer, a pusher, and help us to be users, who come to these things like addicts looking for a quick fix to carry us until we need another one. We can’t come to each other, or scripture, or the Spirit as things to be used, consumed; we need to come to these three great gifts, and see them as partners who we join with in our attempts to become like Jesus.   

 

It’s hopefully clear that I’m not saying sometimes we are desperately in need, and all we know is our need, and we come to the Spirit, and each other, and Scripture consumed with need; God honors that.  But we can’t take hits off of these things only when it’s convenient, and then ignore them until something drives us to them again.  So partners to join with, not resources to use up.  

 

Cool?  Partners in being–being, of course, becoming, of course, like Jesus.  This morning we’ll explore these three gifts, and be challenged to consider what we think about them, and what’s at stake if we don’t join with them. 

 

Let’s pray:

 

Prayer:

Father, thank you again for this time; help us to become people who are like you, king, please.  Be with ours who aren’t here with us; thank you for the blessing of all those who are here now.  Take away my voice if I mislead us; and well up your Holy Spirit within us.  Receive this message and the attention of our hearts as offerings to you.  In Jesus’ name: amen. 

 

The Spirit:

 

Annie Dillard Introduction:

Annie Dillard talks about a sparrow she saw at an air-show, that twirled and danced and spun around, as though it was mimicking the airplanes above it.  She confesses she feels the same way when she looks at the great artists; that she wants to paint when she sees Rembrandt.  And there are other things: we want to sing when we hear a choir, we wa.., sing when she hears opera done well, spend time gardening when she looks between the mountains and the ocean.  

 

Don’t all of us?  Really?  When things are at their best, they are inspiring; You know the word “inspired” right?  It means “to be breathed into:”  

 

We talk about “being inspired” when something catches our hearts and souls so deeply, that it breathes into us a motivation we’ve never had before.  It breathes into us a purpose and a hope and a desire to live or do something, to sacrifice everything so that we can just be around whatever inspires us.  The problem is that this sort of inspiration only lasts for a little while; the air show ends and the swallow goes home.  We leave a museum or the theatre or auditorium or campgrounds and end up back at home, shut the book we’re reading, file out of some big gathering and a couple of hours or days or weeks pass and we have simply lost our inspiration. 

 

John: 

There is a passage in John, where Jesus breathes upon the disciples and says as he does so “receives the Holy Spirit.”  I cling to this passage.  Because I am easily inspired; some people aren’t.  I am.  But I just as easily lose my inspiration as I do receive it from something.  Jesus in this passage says that his followers are inspired–they are breathed upon–but not in some temporary way.  In a permanent way; they have access, all the time, to the “breath of God.”  The Spirit of God. 

 

The same Spirit that was there at creation; the Spirit that was present at the birth of Jesus; the Spirit that at Jesus’ baptism tore the heavens and ran loose in the world, and came to Jesus in the form of a dove at his baptism, empowering him and filling him and enabling him to act in all the ways he acted…and the Spirit is given to us as well. 

 

I’m talking about being permanently inspired; permanently motivated and breathed into, to live a life that is deeper and more meaningful than the typical life of most people.  That’s something I want, man, you know?

 

Problem:

There’s a major problem with all this Spirit business, though, which is basically that we just don’t really have a way to talk about the Holy Spirit that’s all that meaningful. 

 

I mean, even this whole inspiration metaphor, does it really connect?  How meaningful is it when I tell you that you are permanently inspired; do you feel that way?  We don’t, do we?  We feel bored, most of the time.  

 

I’m talking about the Spirit as the “breath of God” and that’s pretty typical; we talk about the Spirit as though the Spirit of God is an “essence” or a “gas” or something.  We talk about being “filled with the Spirit,” but stop there, usually, because we don’t know what else to say, or even what we really mean when we say that.  We’re uncomfortable with Holy Spirit talk.   

 

The Bible:

And the Bible tells us that the Spirit is our counselor, our comforter, our prayer partner: God in us, with us–in a way that those who don’t follow Jesus, “the world,” John calls them–simply cannot see.  As we spend time with the Spirit, depending on the Spirit’s comfort, the Spirit’s counsel, the Spirit’s power, our character begins to change–we actually begin to become like Jesus.  Something of God happens, you know how you start to act like your friends when you hang out all the time?  You start to use the same lingo they use, you start going to the same places they go, you start to like things you thought were totally lame before they were your friends; changes happen in your life, right?  As we spend time in this relationship with God who lives among us, and within us–albeit God in a form we cannot see with our eyes–we’re told that simply the exposure to the Spirit starts to change us; something happens over time, in the space between the Spirit and ourselves, so that our lives begin to deepen and our character begins to change and love, and joy, and peace, and patience, and kindness, and goodness, and gentleness and self control just spring up in our lives the way exposure to the sun and the rain cause plants to grow: it just happens. 

 

And it’s mysterious, but no more mysterious than plants growing, knowing when to seed and when to sprout; no more mysterious than spouses or friends of many many years starting to sound and look alike.  

 

Holy Ghost:

We lost something when we left behind the language of the “Holy Ghost.” I mean I know that we hear “ghost” and it’s scary and spooky and all that; forget that stuff.  But there are also other things that we think about when we think of ghosts, particularly “ghosts of” someone; we think of a somebody, right, of a “being” who acts and speaks and is in continuity with the person who was alive.  The Holy Spirit isn’t the Ghost of the Father or of Jesus; Jesus isn’t dead.  

 

But hear me: the Holy Spirit is a lot more like a ghost than the Spirit is like a gas.  The Holy Spirit, we say, is a “person”–not meaning that the Spirit has a “body” like we’ve got, but that the spirit acts, and thinks, and feels, and urges, and loves–the Spirit has a will, and wills to be our partners; desires to speak to us, desires to counsel us, desires to lead us, and love us, and train us, and be that person who, after minutes and months of time spent together, situations faced together, we begin to look alike–and the change isn’t on God’s side, folks.  

 

See the difference?  A person can come alongside you, whisper to you, love you, give to you and lead you and help you; gas gives us indigestion.  People inspire us; not essences.  The Spirit isn’t a robot, dressed like God, that we turn on and off when we have a need; the Spirit is God; one of the greatest gifts offered to us in our faith is the Holy Spirit living in us.  For some of us, this person is an acquaintance or even a stranger; a weird stranger we feel uncomfortable around, for the rare saints among us the Spirit is more like a spouse than even our spouses are.  

The author James Carrol talks about being “haunted by the Holy Ghost”–which is a powerful image to me–haunted by God, interrupted by God, pursued and personally addressed by God, the Holy Spirit; and not always when it’s convenient for us.  And inspired by God to live like the one who we say we are all supposed to become like.  

 

Spirit: Conclusion for now

So what, right?  We’ll talk more about the “so what” at the end this morning, but let me suggest that we need to be thinking about ways we can position ourselves to deepen our relationship with the Holy Spirit; we need to invite this Holy Ghost to haunt us; and that might mean choosing to spend our time in particular ways, adjusting our lives to this partnership, just as we adjust our lives for our best friends, or adjust our lives when we get married.  

 

We need to discover ways to talk about the Spirit that highlight how the Holy Spirit isn’t just a gas–or a “breath” that inspires us, isn’t something to be “used” like a vitamin, but is a partner who lives inside us, offering us input into our lives and the power of a loving, strong, capable, well-networked friend whenever we ask for it. 

 

The Church:

Introduction:

But Jesus says that the Spirit isn’t just in us individually, singularly and personally–the Spirit is in us together.  Paul’s letters are almost always addressed to people–not a person; his insights, his wisdom, his clarification about what it means to be a Christian, his articulation of the life that we are supposed to live–Jesus’ life–it’s almost always addressed to people in a group.  The simple, basic truth of following Jesus is that you do not do it alone. 

 

And it is really hard for me not to get frustrated or dismayed when I hear that passage from Paul that was read to us this morning, because sometimes it feels like church is so far away from what Paul describes when he says that we collectively are Jesus’ body on earth; that somehow, we’re not just supposed to become just like Jesus; but together, all of us here, present a picture to the world of what Jesus’ body is like.  

 

Paul says, “If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”  He says the Spirit we just talked about brings us together into “one body”–a group where slave, and free, jew and non jew–elsewhere in galatians he says Male and female–that the shared experience of us being found in Jesus, and becoming like him, is the most basic thing about ourselves–more basic than our race, our ethnicities, our genders.  

 

And this isn’t something subjective; this isn’t something we might feel; Paul is saying that this is objective fact; what is most true about each of us is that we are Christians becoming like Christ, joined together to be like Christ together, acting as Jesus to the world and loving, loving, loving; and when you hurt, I hurt, when you are honored, I rejoice: independently of how I feel about it.  

 

We need to begin to really understand that our realities, our lives, are affected by one another.  Do you almost see it?  If I hurt, you are hurting, because we are a body together; if you are caught up in joy, we are affected by it.  This is reality; fact–it doesn’t matter how we feel about it, when we have joined into a church, our souls become affected by those within it.  So when Paul says in another book “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep, live in harmony with each other, don’t be haughty, but associate with the lowly, never be conceited it all makes sense; of course, “Why would I be conceited towards you when your life affects my life?  Why would I spurn you, tease you, antagonize you, hold onto bitterness and anger, decide you’re not worth my time, avoid things you’re involved with, say things about you that imply you’re cold, or mean, or thoughtless, or shortsighted or immature, why would I spread information about you when you haven’t told me I can, why would I put doubt in the mind of others as to your character when your experience in living affects my life; when your process to becoming more like Jesus, and the highs and lows and victories and failures that you experience really do have an effect on me.

 

Realizing:

But I am not here to talk about our failures.  What I want you to know, each of you, is that you are important here.  Indispensible, really.  I want us realize that we are a body–Jesus’ body until he comes back–and if we don’t show up with all of ourselves–show up as a person who was made by God out of love, and lovingly has been offered this place to grow in becoming more like Jesus all the time–if we don’t live out this life of faith together, and bring all of ourselves–our sins, and our shames, and our weariness, our vision and passion and overflowing hope or our fears and troubles and despondencies to one another, then the hope and promise of what the church can be will end up unfulfilled and empty. 

 

Has anyone ever been able to strong arm on their own their way through life?  Much less follow the way of Christ, which is a hard way; becoming like Jesus is a difficult thing.  When someone is “self-made” it’s no joy; it’s tragic, and lonely, and a small picture of the isolation the devil wants to spread throughout the world.  I need you all; need you to become more like Jesus and need your help that I might become more like Jesus, I need you to sharpen me and call me out when I am living in ways that are not good; need you to say to me, “What you said hurt, and I’m telling you this because I value you and want to rejoice together again.”  I need you to forgive me seventy-seven times; I need you to not antagonize me, and to tell me if I’m antagonizing you.  We need to be people who trust each other; who believe what Paul says, that our lives affect each other, and sharing them with one another is one of the greatest things we can do to help us become more like Jesus. 

 

We cannot become like Christ if we are only surrounded by people like us; this is why we don’t have small groups that are only for x, y, or z populations: if you’re older than me, I need your wisdom, if you’re younger than me, I need your enthusiasm.  I mean, we get this don’t we?  We know this.  Our attempts at becoming like Jesus in every way will fail unless we decide to open ourselves up to one another.  But how has knowing it helped?  How has knowing this enabled you to risk, and trust, and deny all the meanness or smallness or hardness in your heart, and open yourselves up to the body God has allowed you to be a part of? Has having this knowledge changed at all the way we interact with each other?  

 

Church: Conclusion for now

So what, right?  We’ll talk more about the “so what” at the end this morning, but let me suggest that we need to be thinking about ways we can take this knowledge we have about how safe and nurturing and powerful a partner the church is supposed to be for us; and turn it into experiences together that challenge and nurture us into becoming more like Jesus.  I want to suggest, too, that those among us who are best positioned to help turn this knowledge into experience are those who have experienced the church as it’s supposed to be, have tasted it’s power, have been carried and loved by people who are being like Jesus, and as a result have become more like Jesus themselves.  

 

But let’s turn to the last partner we’ll look at this morning, one of the three great partners we have in helping us become and be like Jesus more and more and all the time.  Scripture.

 

Scripture:

So The Holy Spirit; the Church; and now scripture.  

 

I’m sure no one is keeping count, but all I’ve done this morning, if you’ve noticed, is talk about what scripture tells us about the Holy Spirit; talk about the ways scripture says the church is supposed to be, supposed to think of itself. 

 

Scripture underlies everything we do as Christians.  It does it in a pretty subtle way, though, honestly; because for those of us who have believed into Jesus, have cast our lots with him, and joined into the People of God, who have realized that the life we are called to is a life marked by love and becoming more and more like Jesus all the time: our reality is determined by scripture. 

 

This means that for us the Bible isn’t just one long story about God and creation and people and the supernatural, it isn’t just one long book that has insights into the problems and joys and troubles and wonders and meaning of life; it isn’t just a book filled with promises that tell us how special and valuable and important we are to the maker and lover of every living thing.  When we say that the bible determines reality–hear me, determines reality for us, we are acknowledging that the world offers a lot of ways to understand life.  There are a lot of ways to understand what it means to be alive; but we acknowledge, as Christians, that the Bible is our main reference point for figuring that stuff out. 

 

You know, the stuff that happened with the early church really happened–even all the lame stuff like rich people in the church getting drunk at communion, the guy who started living with his stepmother; bad stuff.  The stuff that happened with Jesus, really happened–even his rising from the dead.  The stuff that happened with Israel really happened; all the miracles and all the failures.  The Bible gives us the narrative of humanity’s story; and more than that, it tells us what it means to be alive from God’s perspective on things.  And it’s authority comes from it’s witness to God’s work in history, God’s work through Jesus on behalf of everybody you’ve ever cut off in traffic or sat next to in church.  There’s no other thing like scripture in the entire universe that reveals more to us about what it means to live.

 

Ethics:

And last week we talked about how our primary ethic, our primary system for defining what’s good, and right, for choosing to act in good and right ways must be summed up in the call for us to become like Jesus; that what is right and good is developing that good character of Jesus, by totally identifying with him, totally becoming like him, being him wherever we find ourselves.  But sometimes we are faced with moral quandaries, right?  Should I do x, or y?  Scripture should be a place where we go for wisdom and insight into how to choose between two different actions.  Sometimes we have to think about the end result, the consequences of our behavior; and scripture should be a place we go to learn about the results our behaviors and choices might have for us and others.  

 

But scripture cannot become a textbook.  Who wants their understandings about good and evil, about what humanity was created for and where we’re going, about the complexities of life and death, about spiritual realities–God as a wise, merciful, loving creator and the painful antagonists that have set themselves against him–all this stuff; who among us wants these sort of understandings to shaped and formed by our 10th grade french books?  By car repair manuals or cheat sheets?  Those are lame things to use as information sources on what it means to live; but we often treat the Bible the same way we treat these sorts of things.

 

Scripture; Conclusion for now: 

We’ll talk more about this in a moment; but if the question is how do we attend to scripture in such a way that it becomes a partner in our attempts to be like Jesus, I think we have to do what Christian Mystics have talked about for hundreds of years, and that is to be read by scripture.  Does this make sense at all?  Not to read scripture in order that we can find some sort of handy tip we can pull out later and put into use. We need to come to Scripture with all of ourselves–our weakness, our shameful or honorable moments, our slow-moving or rushing or stalled transformations into people like Jesus, and allow the Bible to confront us with it’s story of God’s work in the world.  We have to do this. We have to allow our misunderstandings about what it means to live well and our misconceptions about how unimportant or unlovable we are to be challenged and transformed by the narrative that we can only find in the Bible. 

 

When Paul says that scripture is God-breathed, you know what he’s saying, right?  He’s saying it’s inspired.  It’s record of so much that God’s people have been up to, that God himself, as a person, did for us, when we come to it, and allow ourselves to be read by it–challenged and corrected by it, taught and rebuked by it–then we do become, as paul says, “complete,”–a word that means “proficient, capable”– “equipped for every good work.” 

 

So if these are our partners–the Spirit, the Church, each other, and Scripture–how do we interact with them so that we might become more like Jesus. 

 

Toward a more complete Being:

We’ve already mentioned some things.  We talked about how we must engage with Scripture in a way that opens ourselves to its story, and allows its authoritative perspective on what it means to live to challenge us.  We can treat it like a text book that we have to memorize information from; or we can treat it like the true, real story of life itself, and let that story confront us, challenge us, transform our perspectives and our passions and our souls until we begin to experience and see life, reality, in a new, really real way. 

 

We talked about how we need to acknowledge that when we joined ourselves to Jesus, our lives became connected to the lives of our fellow Christians; and that when church happens, when Christians group together, their lives become affected by one another; they are only as strong as their ability to love each other, and only as weak as their decision to float on the surface of each others’ lives.  I suggested that it might be appropriate for those of us who have really experienced the love and nurture and care and sanctuary of the church to be the ones who help promote this stuff in each others lives, and be the ones who call out bitterness, and disregard, and fear, and avoidance, and competition and all the other unhealthy sinful behaviors or feelings that we bring with us when we try to live life together.  

 

And I’ve been trying to think of some sort of unifying theory behind how we should begin to engage with these partners in the ways I just mentioned, and I really think it has a lot to do with both how we use the time God’s offered us, and whether or not we are willing to invite transformation. Time and Invitation. 

 

Time & Risk:

It takes time to enter into the narrative of scripture so deeply that it begins to challenge and change your perspectives on what it means to live.  And we have to invite Scripture to change us, challenge us, teach us by inviting challenge, and change, and teaching.  We have to come to scripture and say to ourselves “Okay.  I want to be changed here.”  And we ourselves have to accept the invitation to let down our guard, and be transformed. 

 

And we have to invite people into our lives.  We have to invite people to help us, invite people to pray for us, to trust us, to teach us; and it takes time to reveal our souls to one another–time to trust each other to do so, but even time to communicate about what’s going on in our lives.  We have to invite others into our sufferings, which will affect them anyway, and invite people into our lives, and into our hours and days, and we have to begin to spend those together. 

 

And it takes time to build a relationship with the Holy Spirit through prayer, through listening to God in a quiet room.  And we have to be people who invite the Holy Spirit to guide; invite God to haunt us, with all God’s loving personality, and passionate care for us.  

 

And of course, as our relationship with the Spirit begins to deepen, we find scripture begins to confront us in new, exciting ways all the time; we find that we become more willing to love each other, to support and cherish each other’s lives.  As we spend time in Scripture, our perspectives on the world being formed by it, we begin to discover new truths about the Holy Spirit, we begin to understand what strengths God has given us in each other.  As we spend time inviting each other into our lives, we begin to realize how the Holy Spirit works through the church for us, we begin to see how Scripture has formed and informed others, and learn from their lives.  

 

These three partners move around us as though we’re dancing, and the more time we spend with them the more amazing the dance gets; you know: Stomp the Yard stuff, something impressive. 

 

And ultimately, people of God, over time, and over greater and greater invitation of these three partners into our lives, we each of us begin to look a lot like Jesus.  We end up moving toward a more complete being; becoming more like Jesus all the time.  And that spreads and spreads into each others, into the world; this isn’t just a nice picture of what could happen; it is a promise of what does and what will, as we are haunted by the HOly Ghost, as we are read by Scripture, and as we are loved and love the Church God has given us. 

 

Prayer:

Lord, help us. Help us to partner with the gifts you’ve offered us; help us, at the end of our days, to be ones who look and act and think and love just like you.  We need you to invite scripture’s challenge, need you to invite others into our lives, need you to invite the wise, capable, discerning friendship the Holy Spirit wants to develop with us.  And we need you to help us claim our time, and use it well, in the pursuit of the ever-growing, ever-deepening dance we are a part of with these three gifts.  In Jesus’ name: Amen.