The Mess is the Message

     Cheyenne and I love church signs, or maybe I should say we love to hate them.  I guess I hate them because given the opportunity to publish the Gospel before the whole community, it seems like such a waste to post some moralizing aphorism, or some encouragement to fix your life, or just some play on words whose actual meaning is nearly nothing.  On the other hand, some of what I consider my best efforts at delivering the message of grace have been inspired by the mess the church has made of delivering that message.  So we saw one recently that I found interesting.  It said, "Your life can be either a mess or a message.  Which will it be?"  And my thought was, "Why can't it be both?"

     And Jacob arose that night and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed over the ford of Jabbok. He took them, sent them over the brook, and sent over what he had.

Jacob had just finished running from his father-in-law who he had cheated.  When this story starts he is trying to escape from the wrath of his brother Esau, Genesis records for us how Jacob stole, lied, and cheated Esau, and we can fairly assume that there is quite a bit more lying, cheating, and stealing that Jacob did that isn't recorded.  Jacob is the Supplanter, his older brother has some things that are His, some are His because He is the Firstborn, some His actions have earned Him, but all of them are rightfully His, and Jacob's story is the story of him taking from his Elder Brother.  Jacob is the Deceiver, he is a con artist, a past master of half-truths, omissions, and outright lies.  Jacob is playing me in this story, and you too.

Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. Now when He saw that He did not prevail against him, He touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jacob’s hip was out of joint as He wrestled with him. And He said, “Let Me go, for the day breaks.”
But he said, “I will not let You go unless You bless me!”
So He said to him, “What is your name?”
He said, “Jacob.”
And He said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Genesis 32

 If there is any confusion, the Man wrestling Jacob could beat him at any time with essentially zero effort, He is the Angel of the Lord, the name the Old Testament gives to God when He manifests Himself to men, in other words this is none other than Christ Himself.  So how is it that Jacob prevails?  How is it that Jacob, who runs from basically every one else in the story, decides to pick a fight with the Lord of Hosts and comes out on top?

Realistically there is only one answer:the Lord throws the fight.  The story doesn't record how the fight began, but based on our Lord's other fights I think that Jesus picked the fight.  In the words of Tyler Durden from the great movie Fight Club, "I want you to pick a fight with a total stranger, and I want you to lose.`  Christ spent the last year of His life goading the Pharisees into a fight, they didn't want to fight Him but He kept taking shots at them until they had no other choice but to fight Him, a fight He planned to lose.  I think that the best way to find His reason is to look at the effect He produces.  In both stories the effect is that Christ blesses the one who fought with Him and prevailed, and I think that that is the reason that He picked the fight.  He goads cowards into fighting with Him, so that they will demand a blessing from Him, and He can grant us what He has always wanted to but we have been unwilling and therefore unable to receive.

Jacob the Deceiver, is Israel the Prince of God.  The Mess is the Message.  Jacob is us, obviously.  We are the Mess.  A famous church sign not that long ago read, "God hates fags."  And what is interesting about that message is that they are right next to the most interesting, enlightening truth in the universe and just barely miss it.  If I were to argue with them I wouldn't try and prove them wrong.  I would instead show that their arguments prove rather more than they intend them to.  For every verse that says God is angered by homosexuality, there are ten that say He is angered by adultery, and another pile that show how upset He is by sabbath breaking, and a pile of other things.    He hates all sins, but not one sinner, not one fag.  So, my not quite so snappy church sign would say something like, "God has a lot of good reasons to hate fags, very good reasons, honestly God ought to hate fags, and He ought to hate me because I am an adulterer and other things just as bad.  But He doesn't.  I can't explain why except to say that He loves us."  The Mess is the Message.  Jacob is Israel.

Paul says that, "He has confined all under sin, that He might have mercy on all."  Being a sinner is the necessary condition for receiving grace, the only prerequisite.  But it isn't that Jacob becomes Israel.  Jacob was always Israel.  And the surprising thing about this story is that there is another Christ figure in Jacob's life, Esau.  Esau, the older brother, the father's favorite, the one who has all of the things that we lack, the one who does all things well, the one we have supplanted.  From the womb I, Jacob, you have been the Lord's parasitic twin.  All that we have, we have stolen from Him, but His complaint is not that we have stolen but that we haven't stolen enough.  We need to move up from petty theft to refusing to let go of Christ until He gives us His blessing, His birthright.  And if the only way to get us to demand His blessing is to lose a fight to us, He is cool with that.

Our story about Jacob began with him trying to return home, and finding his elder brother seemingly standing in his way.  He imagined his brother as an obstacle, Jacob was right in seeing himself as a prodigal, but he was wrong about the elder brother in his story.

Then Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau his brother in the land of Seir, the country of Edom. And he commanded them, saying, “Speak thus to my lord Esau, ‘Thus your servant Jacob says: “I have dwelt with Laban and stayed there until now. I have oxen, donkeys, flocks, and male and female servants; and I have sent to tell my lord, that I may find favor in your sight.” ’ ”
Then the messengers returned to Jacob, saying, “We came to your brother Esau, and he also is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him.” So Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed; and he divided the people that were with him, and the flocks and herds and camels, into two companies. And he said, “If Esau comes to the one company and attacks it, then the other company which is left will escape.”
Then Jacob said, “O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, the Lord who said to me, ‘Return to your country and to your family, and I will deal well with you’: I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies and of all the truth which You have shown Your servant; for I crossed over this Jordan with my staff, and now I have become two companies. Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau; for I fear him, lest he come and attack me and the mother with the children. For You said, ‘I will surely treat you well, and make your descendants as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.’ ”
So he lodged there that same night, and took what came to his hand as a present for Esau his brother: two hundred female goats and twenty male goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, thirty milk camels with their colts, forty cows and ten bulls, twenty female donkeys and ten foals.

Jacob sends gifts to Esau, to pacify his imagined wrath, he makes plans to preserve his wife and children even if he himself fell into Esau's hands.

Then he crossed over before them and bowed himself to the ground seven times, until he came near to his brother.
But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept. And he lifted his eyes and saw the women and children, and said, “Who are these with you?”
So he said, “The children whom God has graciously given your servant.” Then the maidservants came near, they and their children, and bowed down. And Leah also came near with her children, and they bowed down. Afterward Joseph and Rachel came near, and they bowed down.
Then Esau said, “What do you mean by all this company which I met?”
And he said, “These are to find favor in the sight of my lord.”
But Esau said, “I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.”

He gets there and finds that the elder brother is running to meet him, has more or less killed the fatted calf for him and gotten the best robe.  Esau refused the gifts that Jacob offered him, because he hadn't come to receive but to give.  And now that I look back, can we really believe that Jacob stole from Esau and Esau had no recourse.  Is there a father that if he found out one child cheated the other wouldn't bring justice to his wronged child?  I am not saying that it didn't happen the way that it appears to in Genesis, but only that there is more to the story than we have seen.

The one who preachers the Gospel must be like Jacob, he must be the taker, the deceiver, the Supplanter,  but the one who hears the Gospel is made like Israel the Prince of God.  Only as sinners can we present the Gospel.  If we leave out the mess of our lives, then we leave out the message of His mercy to us.  Without the human story there is no divine story.

Giving and Taking

Now it came to pass in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin king of Syria and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up to Jerusalem to make war against it, but could not prevail against it. And it was told to the house of David, saying, “Syria’s forces are deployed in Ephraim.” So his heart and the heart of his people were moved as the trees of the woods are moved with the wind.

Our story begins with an invasion.  The ten northern tribes who had abandoned the Sons of David, and the Syrian king Rezin were getting ready to attack Jerusalem.  They had their army camped not far from the city, and the people of Judah and especially their king Ahaz were terrified.  God was about to graciously offer them some comfort.

Then the Lord said to Isaiah, “Go out now to meet Ahaz, you and Shear-Jashub your son, at the end of the aqueduct from the upper pool, on the highway to the Fuller’s Field, and say to him: ‘Take heed, and be quiet; do not fear or be fainthearted for these two stubs of smoking firebrands, for the fierce anger of Rezin and Syria, and the son of Remaliah. Because Syria, Ephraim, and the son of Remaliah have plotted evil against you, saying, “Let us go up against Judah and trouble it, and let us make a gap in its wall for ourselves, and set a king over them, the son of Tabel”— thus says the Lord God:
“It shall not stand,
Nor shall it come to pass.
For the head of Syria is Damascus,
And the head of Damascus is Rezin.
Within sixty-five years Ephraim will be broken,
So that it will not be a people.
The head of Ephraim is Samaria,
And the head of Samaria is Remaliah’s son.
If you will not believe,
Surely you shall not be established.” ’ ”

Isaiah was sent to comfort the king with the news that the invasion would fail and that his enemies would crumble, in short that his trouble was only for a season

Moreover the Lord spoke again to Ahaz, saying, “Ask a sign for yourself from the Lord your God; ask it either in the depth or in the height above.”
But Ahaz said, “I will not ask, nor will I test the Lord!”

Because He knew how weak Ahaz's trust in Him was, how weak all of our faith is, the Lord told Him to pick a sign so that the Lord could prove to Him that His grace was real.  But Ahaz did not want the Lord's grace, presumably he had already made plans of his own to deal with his problems. 

Then he said, “Hear now, O house of David! Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will you weary my God also?

God is gracious.  All the time in every way to every person.  It is an inescapable fact of His nature.  We often confine our thoughts to so called "saving grace", but it is worth remembering that every minute of every day what happens to each person is better than what they deserve.  God always goes above and beyond the call of justice.  Graciousness is more of a defining characteristic for Him than omnipotence or wisdom or eternity or whatever.  To know Him in any meaningful way always means knowing Him as a Provider, a Giver of Grace.  Isaiah puts it bluntly, God is tired of our rejecting His gifts.  Jeremiah says that the Lord is exhausted from rising up early and sending prophets all day to a people who will not listen.  Maybe He is frustrated at our sins and our trespasses and all of that kind of stuff, maybe He has had enough of our lovelessness, and faithlessness, and hopelessness.  Maybe.  But what the prophets continually harp on is that we won't take what He is offering.  The church wants to talk about the importance of giving, but the message of Scripture is that our problem is that we aren't taking enough.

The calling of Christians isn't to make contributions to the kingdom, deposits in our heavenly bank account, but to make withdrawals from Christ's account, the bigger the better.  Just as God is fundamentally a Giver; we are fundamentally Takers.  Our culture showers praise on giving and heaps insults on taking, because we are essentially poor.  We can't abide takers because we don't have enough already.  Maybe that is the root of our self-hatred?  We are disgusted by our own neediness and the way our urges to meet those needs by taking eventually become irresistible.  We want to see ourselves as having something to contribute, but the keystone of Christianity is our need for a benefactor.  To know yourself, you must know that you are a Taker.  And to know God, you must know Him as the Giver.   I remember being told years ago that Christians begin by receiving from the church but that as we mature we move to giving instead.  I wish I had known then what it meant to be one of the least, like a little child; I wish I had known then that Chesterton said, "We have sinned and grown older than our Father."  That kind of maturity is another Gospel, and it is no Good News.  Ahaz didn't want God's grace; He wanted to save Jerusalem himself, a way to advance the Kingdom of Heaven if ever there was one.  But what happens when we reject God's grace?  It has been suggested that this is the sin of sins, that to reject grace is the final straw.  What happens in Isaiah's story?

Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.Curds and honey He shall eat, that He may know to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the Child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that you dread will be forsaken by both her kings. The Lord will bring the king of Assyria upon you and your people and your father’s house—days that have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah.”

And it shall come to pass in that day

That the Lord will whistle for the fly

That is in the farthest part of the rivers of Egypt,

And for the bee that is in the land of Assyria.

They will come, and all of them will rest

In the desolate valleys and in the clefts of the rocks,

And on all thorns and in all pastures.

In the same day the Lord will shave with a hired razor,

With those from beyond the River, with the king of Assyria,

The head and the hair of the legs,

And will also remove the beard.

It shall be in that day

That a man will keep alive a young cow and two sheep;

So it shall be, from the abundance of milk they give,

That he will eat curds;

For curds and honey everyone will eat who is left in the land.

It shall happen in that day,

That wherever there could be a thousand vines

Worth a thousand shekels of silver,

It will be for briers and thorns.

With arrows and bows men will come there,

Because all the land will become briers and thorns.

And to any hill which could be dug with the hoe,

You will not go there for fear of briers and thorns;

But it will become a range for oxen

And a place for sheep to roam.

The Lord's response when we refuse grace?  When we exhaust Him?  He stops offering.  He compels us to receive His gifts like the servants compelled the hobos to come to the wedding feast, I think that is the way the story went.  There is no end to the Lord's goodness.  We need to take from Him and no Father would allow His child to do without good that is essential to the child even if the child is a stubborn ass. 

But the sign seems a little unrelated to the problem.  Ahaz had an army camped at his door, the news that in some six hundred years a baby would be born must have struck him as rather irrelevant.  Is that why we refuse grace?  We have pressing problems and God's promise is pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye.  Before the child will even be born Judah is going to be carried off captive, the two nations that are threatening her will be similarly annihilated.  The world that the baby will be born into will be unrecognizable to Ahaz, God might as well promise that a baby will be born on Mars.  God is offering to provide for us, but His provision doesn't seem to meet our needs, any of them.  God tells Ahaz that pretty much everything he is afraid of is going to happen, but that it will be alright in the end.  We can see how to get what we think we need, what seems good to us.  A Messiah who might come in six hundred years and might come back any century now doesn't solve any of our problems.

God seems distant and incapable of sympathizing with us.  He is looking at this big picture of the whole universe and the microscopic details of our lives are beneath His notice.  No doubt He is a good god on the whole, looking out for the greater good, but we feel like maybe our life is small enough to slip between the cracks.  I mean He is looking out for the big things, Israel will have a future, the Coming Messiah guarantees it, but it looks like God's plan for Ahaz is not so sure, I mean all of the things that Isaiah tells him don't even start for sixty five years, probably after Ahaz's already in the ground.  His despair seems so reasonable.  In effect, Ahaz and us too, believe that as a Giver, God is fundamentally flawed.  He gives what is needed for the big picture, for the greater good, but the ones(us) who fall by the wayside are left behind.  God looks out for His Chosen Ones and the rest of us had better look out for ourselves.  Ahaz wouldn't ask for a sign because his view of God was that God's salvation was defective, and the sign that he was given seemed to confirm that.

But this distrust of God is what the sign was sent to address.  The charge that God is distant from us is met with a ringing answer, a single word that has resonated to past and future coloring the whole world.  Immanuel-God is with Us.  God is not distant.  He loves us.  And love never sacrifices the beloved for the greater good.  Love will wreak the big picture for the sake of the beloved.  Love will beat God Himself to a bloody pulp chasing one lost sheep, and a black sheep at that.  I don't know if Ahaz saw that, but I want us to.  The God who loves is a perfect Giver, He is in perfect sympathy with His brethren, He has lived a life like ours, been tempted like us, doubted like us, feared like us, He has looked up at His Father and felt the same loneliness and distance that we do.  And the whole world, visible and invisible, was made by this compassionate High Priest, nothing that is was made without Him, and all of His works, which is to say everything, physical, mental, or spiritual, resonates with the compassion that He has for the children of men.

We, are fundamentally Takers, and the Church condemns taking, because she is basically poor, just a Taker herself and afraid that anything that someone else takes from the Giver will not be there when she needs it.  We are all Takers and we all condemn taking.  Thus we all condemn and hate ourselves.  This is not a sermon on the importance of Giving, there is only One who has anything worth giving and He doesn't need a lesson from me.  This is a sermon on the importance of Taking, God does not condemn the Takers, He made us needy and filled us with urges to get what we lack that become irresistible eventually.  He condemns us for not taking what we lack from the only One who truly has it to give.  We are obsessed with giving because we are poor and needy.  He is obsessed with giving because He is rich and gracious.

The church has many flaws and I think that her hypocrisy and self-hatred over giving and taking is close to the center of the corruption.  If I could reform one thing in the church, to try and move them from Law and Sin to Gospel and Grace, I think that I would get rid of the collection plate, get rid of the sermons on tithing, and get rid of the "mature" Christians who contribute to the Kingdom, and if that meant getting rid of the institutional church then I can only think of Kierkegaard who said that in the world we live in anyone who tries to bring in Christianity looks like he is trying to abolish Christianity.  I don't believe that there is some action that we can take to fix the church, this is more of a thought experiment, I am certainly not recommending any action to anyone as one that will help the Gospel, He doesn't need us to save Him.  So, I would replace the offering with a simple basket at the doors of the church with a sign saying, "Give Freely, Take Freely".  I would replace the sermons on giving to the kingdom with encouraging everyone to take freely, to take advantage of the liberality of Jesus Christ.  And I would replace the "mature" Christians, with babies who eat food off of their Father's hand without any thought of making a contribution.

The People who Survived the Sword, found Grace in the Wilderness

We have talked before about Adam and Eve and how they fell.  It is, I suppose literally, the oldest story in the world, and so I am not gonna go through the story in any detail, but it is where we will begin today, even though it isn't where I plan to wind up.  The question that I want to start with is why.  Why would two people who had all of the goodness of Earth heaped up in front of them, and who enjoyed fellowship with God face to face give it all up?  We think of temptation usually as a desire for something, I am tempted by a Reese cup or something of that sort, but I think that their temptation and probably the roots of ours aren't like that.  It says that Eve saw that the fruit was desirable to make one wise, to give one knowledge of Good and Evil, and that that was why she ate it. 

I think fundamentally though, it begins with her conviction that God had something Good that He didn't plan to give her.  He was holding out on them.  She imagined that there was something Good other than God and His will for her.  To put it plainly, she determined that God was either incapable of judging what was best for her or unwilling to give her what was best.  She doubted either His wisdom or His goodness.  And she judged Good and Evil for herself.  And everything that she did Adam did too, except that Paul says He wasn't deceived.  He knew he was going the wrong way and he did it anyway. 

And what did they get?  Well they certainly got knowledge of Evil.  They lost so much goodness and gained so much suffering.  Losing good and gaining suffering because we have done wrong is known as "The Law".  By the Law, that is by getting what we deserve, is the knowledge of sin, as Paul told the Roman Church.  The Law at its core is the mechanism by which wrong is punished, it is simply the way the world works, known to orientals as karma or the Tao.  All humans know the generalities of the Law although they may miss out on some details.  The Law is God's covenant with creation, fittingly called the Old Covenant because it dates back to Creation.  We can see a certain inherent rightness in all of this.  It is good for Good to be rewarded and Evil to be punished, it is good at least to an extent.  That is it is Good for the Good, but it is Bad for the Bad.  

By the Law is the knowledge of sin, of Evil, but what about Good?  Was the fruit really just the knowledge of Evil or was it the knowledge of Good and Evil?  I have to think that Moses gave us its true name, but where is the Good?  God wasn't taken by surprise by Adam and Eve's choice, it wasn't unplanned, but rather as ugly and as sick as our lives have become, it is all part of the Creative act, it is part of the world that is Very Good.  The Divine Artist seems to have a fondness for painting with black.  I am aware that most Christian theologians shy away from anything that seems to make God the author of sin, but my creed says "Creator of all things visible and invisible" and John's prologue says the same thing, so I am forced to abandon the too subtle distinctions of the theologians in favor of the belief that if it is, and sin is, then it is made by the Good God and despite being the black on the canvas contributes to the beauty of the whole.  But how? What good can there even be for a sinner?

The evil came quite quickly and obviously but the Good was hidden in mysteries, it came at a great distance in wild dreams and impossible imaginings, and was only dimly seen even by the Prophets.

The following excerpts are taken from the 31 chapter of Jeremiah.

Thus says the Lord:
“The people who survived the sword
Found grace in the wilderness—
Israel, when I went to give him rest.”

Good that begins with evil, grace found in the wild wanderings of refugees.

The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying:
“Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love;
Therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.
Again I will build you, and you shall be rebuilt,
O virgin of Israel!
You shall again be adorned with your tambourines,
And shall go forth in the dances of those who rejoice.
You shall yet plant vines on the mountains of Samaria;
The planters shall plant and eat them as ordinary food.
For there shall be a day
When the watchmen will cry on Mount Ephraim,
‘Arise, and let us go up to Zion,
To the Lord our God.’”
For thus says the Lord:
“Sing with gladness for Jacob,
And shout among the chief of the nations;
Proclaim, give praise, and say,
‘O Lord, save Your people,
The remnant of Israel!’
Behold, I will bring them from the north country,
And gather them from the ends of the earth,
Among them the blind and the lame,
The woman with child
And the one who labors with child, together;
A great throng shall return there.
They shall come with weeping,
And with supplications I will lead them.
I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters,
In a straight way in which they shall not stumble;
For I am a Father to Israel,
And Ephraim is My firstborn.
“Hear the word of the Lord, O nations,
And declare it in the isles afar off, and say,
‘He who scattered Israel will gather him,
And keep him as a shepherd does his flock.’

Grace begins with Law, with sin being punished, with our being scattered and driven from our homes and our lives.

For the Lord has redeemed Jacob,
And ransomed him from the hand of one stronger than he.
Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion,
Streaming to the goodness of the Lord—
For wheat and new wine and oil,
For the young of the flock and the herd;
Their souls shall be like a well-watered garden,
And they shall sorrow no more at all.
“Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance,
And the young men and the old, together;
For I will turn their mourning to joy,
Will comfort them,
And make them rejoice rather than sorrow.
I will satiate the soul of the priests with abundance,
And My people shall be satisfied with My goodness, says the Lord.”

But why?  What is the root of this grace which is extended to us?  We know that knowledge of sin comes from the Law, but where does the knowledge of Good come from?

 “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah— not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

The New Covenant is not like the Old Covenant, if there was ever something to shout from a mountaintop that is it.  The New Covenant is not that Good gets rewarded and Evil punished, because as we have seen that is the heart of the Old Covenant.  But listen, the New Covenant is not like the Covenant which Our Fathers broke.  Now, we are not Jews and our Fathers were not lead out of Egypt, but the same covenant was first broken by our first Father and Mother.  If the Old Covenant was broken and the New Covenant is not like that, then it must mean that the New Covenant will not be broken.  And how can God be sure that even such inveterate sinners as we will not break this covenant?  Even the rather gracious terms of Eden's covenant were violated, so there must be something fundamentally different about the New Covenant, it must be unbreakable.  It must be that the New Covenant does not depend on anything that we do or do not do.  There is nothing that we can do that will break the New Covenant.  The Old Covenant was as breakable as the tables of stone that it was written on, but whatever abuses we pour on the New and Living Way, He comes to us again the third day.

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

The heart of the New Covenant is that which the Old Covenant could never provide.  By the Old Covenant is the knowledge of sin, of Evil, but never anywhere does the Law provide the knowledge of God, of Good.  And that, I think, is where the church has gone so wrong with the Law.  They say that when the only tool that you have is a hammer the whole world looks like nails.  Every problem that you have you solve with the hammer, by beating it.  It is sad that I have to paint the church as having the Law as its only tool but I do.  The church solves all of her problems with the Law.  Here is the way that we have reasoned.  We have the Law, and so we know sin, we know evil.  And if that is all that we know, then we must define Good, Righteousness, and ultimately God Himself, as that which is sinless.  Now that is true but it is the most incomplete of definitions, a straw on which we have built the whole edifice of Christianity, by making God the ultimate Law-keeper, ultimately nothing more than the Great Accountant in the Sky.  But worse than that, when we begin with Law, with the reward of Good and the punishment of Evil, and define Good and God from sin then fundamentally our definition is that God, and all Good, are things that we do not know.

The New Covenant says that all of us will know God, and will know Good, the unfulfilled promise of Eden will finally be fulfilled.  Those that survive the sword will find grace in the wilderness, the Evil will ultimately be the soil from which a greater good will grow.  But why?  What is the seed of the New Covenant that makes everything different?  "For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more."  It is the dismantling of the whole of karma and the Tao, the whole system of rewards and punishments, of Good People getting Good Things and all of the people in this room getting the shaft.  It is the judge letting the crook go, and we try and come up with a lot of fancy reasons why it is ok, why it is just for God to forgive sinners, but justice is something that belongs to the Old Covenant, and the only reason we can truly give for God to forgive sins is because He loves the sinner, the crook goes free because she is the judge's wife.  That is unjust to anyone who defines righteousness by the Law, but the knowledge of righteousness does not come by the Law but only the knowledge of sin.  The Law, the knowledge of sin, came by Moses, but grace, the forgiveness of sins, and truth, the knowledge of God, comes only by Jesus Christ into whom we are baptised and the New Covenant of communion with Him.

Me and Barabbas

Some of you have probably noticed that I have been in a pretty dark place emotionally the past few months.  Exhaustion and a depression that I have always struggled with without really knowing why left me feeling alone and I chose a very bad way to try and make things better.  I sought comfort from a woman at work.  I didn't admit to myself that that is what I was doing and by the time that I couldn't deny it anymore things had gone farther than I should have let them.  Way too far in fact.  By the grace of God the woman had more sense than I did and put a stop to things.

When I was left with no choice but to tell Cheyenne I went to my default solutions, secrets and lies.  I was embarrassed by what I had done and I was scared of what the consequences would be.  It took her a few days to drag the truth out of me and when she did I was shocked at her response.  Grace and forgiveness always leave me staring with a dumb amazement.  She is hurt terribly.  She may never trust me like she did before.  And I know she is still angry.  But her dominant reaction has been to extend as much grace and forgiveness to me as is humanly possible, or maybe more than that.

As we were talking through all of the issues that we have, because it happened during Passion Week, a strange topic came up.  A small incident is buried in the central event in human history and escaped my attention until Chey started telling me about the very subtle but powerful grace seen within.  It seems ridiculous that I never paid any attention to the only man in the world of whom we can say literally and with no ambiguity whatsoever that Jesus Christ died in his place.

From Luke 23 13 Then Pilate, when he had called together the chief priests, the rulers, and the people, said to them, “You have brought this Man to me, as one who misleads the people. And indeed, having examined Him in your presence, I have found no fault in this Man concerning those things of which you accuse Him; no, neither did Herod, for I sent you back to him; and indeed nothing deserving of death has been done by Him.  I will therefore chastise Him and release Him” (for it was necessary for him to release one to them at the feast).
And they all cried out at once, saying, “Away with this Man, and release to us Barabbas”— who had been thrown into prison for a certain rebellion made in the city, and for murder.
Pilate, therefore, wishing to release Jesus, again called out to them. But they shouted, saying, “Crucify Him, crucify Him!”
Then he said to them the third time, “Why, what evil has He done? I have found no reason for death in Him. I will therefore chastise Him and let Him go.”
But they were insistent, demanding with loud voices that He be crucified. And the voices of these men and of the chief priests prevailed. So Pilate gave sentence that it should be as they requested. And he released to them the one they requested, who for rebellion and murder had been thrown into prison; but he delivered Jesus to their will.

The tradition of a pardon being issued in connection with the Passover is only mentioned in the four gospels, so we don't know how it came or how it was perceived either by the Romans or the Jews, but I at least can't help but see a connection between the sparing of the Jewish firstborn remembered in the Passover and the sparing of a prisoner.  Humanity, as represented very ably by Pontius Pilate, is able to imagine the sparing of a good man, one who has no fault deserving of death seems to us like an appropriate recipient of grace, but Divinity, as represented by the chief priests, is determined to show grace to the least worthy recipient available.  Me and Barabbas.


 We have all thought about the incongruity of the innocent Messiah hanging between two thieves but what we usually forget is that there was supposed to be a third thief right in the middle, actually not just a thief but a murder and a leader of rebellion.  We talk about the differences between the two thieves on the two crosses, how one seemed to see the error of his ways and the other never did.  But we don't really have any idea what Barabbas thought about Christ or about himself, or about anything else.  Because the story isn't about Barabbas, and the Gospel isn't about us.  Barabbas didn't have a clever advocate, nothing that he said or did had any affect on the grace that was given to him, and we have no idea what happened to Barabbas afterward.  In fact, we don't even have any idea if Barabbas "accepted" what was done to him, for all we know Barabbas was a true zealot and wished to be a martyr to Jewish independence and the freedom of the Jewish religion from Roman corruption.  If God is going to save the worst sinners then he will have to do it without cooperation from me and Barabbas.

My sins and Barabbas' sins cause tremendous pain, they take us down into darkness and ultimately death.  And the only alternative is for someone else to take that pain, darkness, and death into themselves.  To forgive sin and show grace is a terribly costly choice, it means the good suffers in place of the bad.  When I was explaining Good Friday to Eliyana this week, she told me that she couldn't understand why someone would give their life for someone else, and all that I could tell her is that it will make sense to her someday when she is a mother, but maybe I should have said when she is a wife.  Grace leaves the 99 good sheep to rescue the black sheep.  Love reaches into the blackest pits of sin, depression, and despair to pull out me and Barabbas.

Caedmon's Call-My Only Hope

Good Unconditionally

Jeremiah 28 And it happened in the same year, at the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the fourth year and in the fifth month, 

So just to set the stage a little, this Zedekiah is the son of Josiah, who was the last "good" king of Judah.  Zedekiah was put on the throne after one of his brothers was king and carried off captive to Egypt.  The second brother to be king, gave away a lot of the people as slaves to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and looted the Lord's Temple to buy Babylonian protection, which didn't help much since Babylon invaded and he died in the siege of Jerusalem.  His son was king for a few months until the Babylonians took the city and the temple, plundered them both again for slaves and treasure and then installed the last king of the line of David, Zedekiah, as their puppet.  At this point Jeremiah has been prophesying a long, miserable Babylonian slavery for the last 30 years or so.  And into this, a guy named Hananiah decides to interject a message of hope.

[it happened] that Hananiah the son of Azur the prophet, who was from Gibeon, spoke to me in the house of the Lord in the presence of the priests and of all the people, saying, 2 “Thus speaks the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, saying: ‘I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. 3 Within two full years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord’s house, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon. 4 And I will bring back to this place Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, with all the captives of Judah who went to Babylon,’ says the Lord, ‘for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon.’”

God is going to fix this for his people, in fact their prayers have already been answered.  It is a nice message.  There may be a lot of clouds today but the Lord will bring us a better day soon.

5 Then the prophet Jeremiah spoke to the prophet Hananiah in the presence of the priests and in the presence of all the people who stood in the house of the Lord, 6 and the prophet Jeremiah said, “Amen! The Lord do so; the Lord perform your words which you have prophesied, to bring back the vessels of the Lord’s house and all who were carried away captive, from Babylon to this place. 

I would very much like to leave off here, and Jeremiah wanted to too.  We have all seen the guys on the street corner saying that God is gonna punish America for her sins.  They scream at us to repent but we can't help but realise that deep down they want us to suffer.  With so many of those guys I can't help but feel like the issue is more about our sins against the self-appointed prophets than against the Lord.  Jeremiah wasn't like that.  He really would have been happy to believe that this prophesy of Hananiah was true.  Jeremiah prophesied death and destruction to Jerusalem in the hope that somehow it wouldn't happen.  He endured the people's mocking and persecution so that maybe he wouldn't wind up sitting on a hill watching Jerusalem burn and his neighbors killed.  But the story doesn't end that way and we need to keep going.

7 Nevertheless hear now this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people: 8 The prophets who have been before me and before you of old prophesied against many countries and great kingdoms—of war and disaster and pestilence. 9 As for the prophet who prophesies of peace, when the word of THAT prophet comes to pass, the prophet will be known as one whom the Lord has truly sent.”

Jeremiah mocks the message of hope.  A few chapters ago he said, "Let the prophet who dreams a dream(the false prophets) tell the dream.  And let the prophet who has a word from the Lord tell the word.  What is the chaff to the wheat?  The word of the Lord will stand."  Anyway, Jeremiah doesn't believe Hananiah.  The story goes on, Hananiah can't convince Jeremiah, Jeremiah tells him that he will die before the year is up.  Hananiah dies two months later and eventually Nebuchadnezzar sacks Jerusalem, Jeremiah cries out his lamentations and lives out his days as an exile in Egypt.  But it is his words here to Hananiah that I want to look at.

Jeremiah says that the prophets always bring bad news.  When the Lord sends a prophet, they prophesy war, disaster, pestilence, and death, that is the formula straight through to John's Apocalypse.  Now he is unquestionably right, but he does leave something out.  Sometimes the prophets do talk about a better day.  There are plenty of prophecies about a beautiful time of millenial peace to come.  My favorite historian, Philip Schaff says that all of the heathen believed in a Golden Age in the past, that one of the great differences of Judaism was the hope of a Messianic Age in the future, the idea that there is hope for us.  One day the lion WILL lie down with the lamb, but we generally find that that day is not today.  There IS pie in the sky but we aren't in the sky.  We are here.  And there isn't that much pie in sight.  I want some pie now.  Hananiah wanted some pie now, all of the people did.  Jeremiah did too.  But there wasn't any pie coming.

So, what affect does the Gospel have on this bleak picture, this bleak world that we live in?  What does the Prince of Peace have to say to all of this.  "Do not think that I came to bring peace.  I did not come to bring peace, but a sword."  As far as prophets of destruction Our Lord set the bar rather high, in the Lord's words sure there is more peace and hope but there is a lot more suffering and darkness and death, and He is the first one to clearly teach on eternal suffering in the next life.  I don't think anyone of the prophets had the heart to bring that message until He said it Himself first.

Matthew 24:6 And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. 7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.
9 “Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name’s sake. 10 And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. 11 Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. 12 And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. 13 But he who endures to the end shall be saved. 14 And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.

At least with the prophets we had the comfort of knowing that our suffering was caused by our sin, but with Christ we are hated and persecuted innocently.  And yes He has great hope for us, explicitly placed at THE END, at least Jeremiah offered hope in 70 years not at the End of the World.

Whatever the Good News is, I don't think that it changes these facts.  There is Pie in the Sky and there is misery and suffering before then.  Those facts were clear before the Lord died and rose again and they are clear now, but none of those facts are the Gospel.  What then is News that can be unconditionally good without changing any of these rather depressing facts?

Jeremiah 24 The Lord showed me, and there were two baskets of figs set before the temple of the Lord, after Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had carried away captive Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and the princes of Judah with the craftsmen and smiths, from Jerusalem, and had brought them to Babylon. 2 One basket had very good figs, like the figs that are first ripe; and the other basket had very bad figs which could not be eaten, they were so bad. 3 Then the Lord said to me, “What do you see, Jeremiah?”
And I said, “Figs, the good figs, very good; and the bad, very bad, which cannot be eaten, they are so bad.”
4 Again the word of the Lord came to me, saying, 5 “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: ‘Like these good figs, so will I acknowledge those who are carried away captive from Judah, whom I have sent out of this place for their own good, into the land of the Chaldeans. 6 For I will set My eyes on them for good, and I will bring them back to this land; I will build them and not pull them down, and I will plant them and not pluck them up. 7 Then I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord; and they shall be My people, and I will be their God, for they shall return to Me with their whole heart.
8 ‘And as the bad figs which cannot be eaten, they are so bad’—surely thus says the Lord—‘so will I give up Zedekiah the king of Judah, his princes, the residue of Jerusalem who remain in this land, and those who dwell in the land of Egypt. 9 I will deliver them to trouble into all the kingdoms of the earth, for their harm, to be a reproach and a byword, a taunt and a curse, in all places where I shall drive them. 10 And I will send the sword, the famine, and the pestilence among them, till they are consumed from the land that I gave to them and their fathers.’”

The Kingdom does not come with observation, and the Good News doesn't change the circumstances of life.  Those in Jerusalem that the Lord had set His favor on, were not in the least exempted from suffering, in fact they were preeminent in misery.  They were made exiles and slaves, while the rest, the targets of the Lord's wrath, were left in relative peace and freedom.  But we want to be the good figs.  Why?  The difference is that the Good Figs have a piece of Good News that the Bad Figs don't.  The Good News is not in their future but now.  But no one can see it.  It doesn't make any earthly difference to their lives, it only changes everything.  It is the difference between a suicide and a martyr.  It is only the difference between being Judas hanging and Peter hanging upside down.  The only difference is that one is living in the regular old world and the other's whole world has been turned upside down.

There is a lot of "good news" in the world.  A prisoner being set free would be good news.  A debt forgiven would be good news.  A sickness healed would be good news.  We all agree that these are all just "little g little n" good news, and I contend that eternity in Heaven rather than Hell is still just "little g little n" sure it is good news but it isn't the Gospel.  How can I say that?  Because it is conditionally good.  It is good IF some condition is met.  It is good under certain conditions.  It is good generally, more or less.  It is only good IF.  But The Good News that deserves the big G and the big N and the definite article must be absolutely good news, must be good no matter what, no matter where, whether any conditions are met or left unmet.  In other words it must be good news whether the prisoner is set free or not, whether the debt is forgiven or not, whether we are sick or well, it must be so good that it makes all of the circumstances of life good.  It must be able to make the prisoner sing songs in the night like Paul, without any thought of being set free.  It must be able to do more than remove poverty and sickness, it must be able to sanctify them to make poverty the apostolic poverty of St. Francis.  It must go further than that.  It must be Good News even to the damned, or what is it that Our Lord preached to them?  What would be good news to a soul in Hell?  We may think that the only thing that could be good news to them is to be set free, but that is conditional good news.  Is there News that can make the soul in Hell sing like Paul in jail, without any consideration of release?

Well, Paul in the first chapter of Romans and John in the first chapter of his first letter try to summarize the Gospel for us, I think that accounting for the differences between the two men that they say very much the same thing.  And I think that their News meets this standard that it turns the whole world upside down and makes even Hell not merely acceptable but good.

Romans 1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”

What does Paul say?  He says that in the Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed.  He says that that is what is saving about the Gospel.

 1 John 1:5 This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.

Paul's Gospel is that God is righteous.  John's Gospel is that God is light and in Him is no darkness.  John is very unambiguous.  THIS is the message that He was given by God, it was this that was the core of his preaching to all the churches. It is not a message about us.  It says nothing about our present or about our future.  But it tells us everything about everything.  It tells us that everything that happens is the best that is conceivable.  It tells us that even the One who creates the worlds out of His imagination cannot imagine a better world than this one or a better life or afterlife for any of His creatures than the One He has given them.  I think an understanding of Paul's use of the term righteous and John's light makes it clear all that happens is not simply the best possible but the best that can even be imagined.  This life doesn't look that way to us, and I will go out on a limb and say that the next one won't either, whatever name you call it by.  But that is why the righteousness of God is revealed only to faith.