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.