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.

Finding Grace

     Protestantism began with Luther finding grace in the Epistle to the Romans where before he had only seen law.  Basically every truly Christian experience can be summed up by saying that grace was found in a place where previously only law had been seen.  The Reformation was almost entirely fueled by the discovery of grace in Paul's letters.  For 1500 years Paul's letters were read as ethical guideposts, as encouragement to do right.  And I still read them that way today.  In the Evangelicalism where I have lived my life nothing is more common than take a passage from Paul, to give a teaspoon of grace from it and then drop a ton of requirements and dos and don'ts.  These are always made to be not requirements for salvation or for God's love but things that all Christians or at least all "good Christians" want to do.  Leaving all of us who don't want to do them excommunicated, or at best on the outside looking in.  I have heard so much of these explanations of Paul that they are all that I can see when I read him.  I know that there is grace there and believe me I have looked for it, but either by my nature or my upbringing I can only find ethics there.

     So, a long time ago, I discovered grace where I wasn't looking for it.  When I couldn't find Christ in Paul and John, I found Him in Moses and Jeremiah and Hosea.  And it is real grace that He brought me, and while that grace is sufficient, I am not satisfied.  I want to reclaim the Homeland of Grace from the Law, or rather the pseudo-law.

From 1 Corinthians 6:   All things are lawful for me, but all things are not helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. Foods for the stomach and the stomach for foods, but God will destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power.
Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For “the two,” He says, “shall become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him."

This, I think, is a classic example of Pauline grace that we have turned into moralizing.  A typical sermon on this passage contains about two minutes of extolling evangelical freedom, then "edifying the brother" is brought in and we get about thirty minutes of advice on how to stop sinning and live right and build the kingdom.   And honestly, that is what it looks like when you look at it.  That is in some sense the natural interpretation of this passage.  But is that who Paul is?  Is that what the New Testament is?  It may be kind of stepping out on a limb but I am convinced that Paul is talking about more than morality here.  Yes, the Corinthians were sexually immoral, but I think that Paul was trying to strike deeper than that.  And I will risk being wrong and sounding like an idiot to find grace and hopefully show it to you.  So...

The first thing that it seems to me is wrong with the moralizing interpretation is that it underrates the significance of the way Paul begins this discourse.  "All things are lawful for me,"  We read this as if it says, "Yes Christ has set you free so that you receive no punishment for your actions", and if he was talking about human law that would be the meaning.  But for something to be lawful in the sense of the divine law, not only carries no punishment but it carries positive blessings.

From Deuteronomy 28:  “Now it shall come to pass, if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments which I command you today, that the Lord your God will set you high above all nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, because you obey the voice of the Lord your God:
“Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the country.
“Blessed shall be the fruit of your body, the produce of your ground and the increase of your herds, the increase of your cattle and the offspring of your flocks.
“Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.
“Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out.
“The Lord will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before your face; they shall come out against you one way and flee before you seven ways.
“The Lord will command the blessing on you in your storehouses and in all to which you set your hand, and He will bless you in the land which the Lord your God is giving you.
“The Lord will establish you as a holy people to Himself, just as He has sworn to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in His ways. Then all peoples of the earth shall see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of you. And the Lord will grant you plenty of goods, in the fruit of your body, in the increase of your livestock, and in the produce of your ground, in the land of which the Lord swore to your fathers to give you. The Lord will open to you His good treasure, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in its season, and to bless all the work of your hand. You shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow. And the Lord will make you the head and not the tail; you shall be above only, and not be beneath, if you heed the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today, and are careful to observe them."

Paul was absolutely immersed in the Old Testament and he could not fail to realize that saying something is lawful is saying that the person who does it calls down all of these blessings on himself.  Paul knew full well that in Christ all the promises of God are absolutely brought to us.   "All things are lawful for me" is another way of saying that "Everything that I do, whether they seem good or bad to us, wise or foolish, right or wrong, whatever in fact they are in themselves, the best things that I do and the worst, are all drowned in the merits of Christ."  Can we really believe for even a second that Paul is trying to get us to compare our supposedly good actions, the ones that we think edify our brother and build the kingdom, and are described by Isaiah as "filthy rags" with our worst actions, say sexual immorality, and prefer the one to the other?  How can any of our actions be helpful when the one who did not spare His Son but gave Him for us all freely gives us all things?  What help do we imagine we can add to "freely gives us all things"?  No, Paul's intention must be very different from that.I am no Greek scholar but look carefully at the English version.  We read it as if it says, "Not all things are helpful" meaning "Some things are helpful and some things are not." but what it says is "All things are not helpful", "all things are UNhelpful", in fact all of our attempts to contribute only take away from.

I would like to suggest that the key to understanding this passage is found in Paul's reference to food, or as many older translations appropriately put it, "meat".  Basically from the moment Paul began preaching to the gentiles, maybe even earlier, the church was embroiled in a controversy over food, basically over the kosher diet and whether or not you could be a Christian without being a jew.  And the very mention of meat here should bring this aspect of the context to mind.  If this is to do with the Judaistic controversy then when he says "I will not be brought under the power of any" then what he is thinking of is pseudo-legal so called "Third use" restrictions being placed on the freedom that Christ has bought for us.  So whether these restrictions come as straight-up judaism or under the pretenses that modern Evangelicalism prefers the moralism they are beating us down with are exactly what Paul is teaching against, as he indicates by reminding us that both food and the stomach, that the entire order of creation to which such restrictions refer, no matter how spiritual their disguise, is temporary and insignificant compared to the freedom of the Gospel.

Now the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power.
Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For “the two,” He says, “shall become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.

It is a fact that there was considerable sexual misconduct in the church at Corinth, as there is in any group of human beings, sadly we know all too well that however "sanctified" someone is or seems to be that where sex is concerned they are often no better than the most unrefined sinner.  And sure, Paul was trying to clean that up, I grant that.  But it must be granted to me, that Paul's mind was never far from the Hebrew prophets.  And when they mention adultery, yes they are reproving the sexual habits of the Israelites, but they are aiming much deeper and I can't believe that Paul isn't as well.

From Hosea :
2 Bring charges against your mother, bring charges; For she is not My wife, nor am I her Husband! Let her put away her harlotries from her sight, And her adulteries from between her breasts; 3 Lest I strip her naked And expose her, as in the day she was born, And make her like a wilderness, And set her like a dry land, And slay her with thirst. 4 "I will not have mercy on her children, For they are the children of harlotry. 5 For their mother has played the harlot; She who conceived them has behaved shamefully. For she said, 'I will go after my lovers, Who give me my bread and my water, My wool and my linen, My oil and my drink.' 6 "Therefore, behold, I will hedge up your way with thorns, And wall her in, So that she cannot find her paths. 7 She will chase her lovers, But not overtake them; Yes, she will seek them, but not find them. Then she will say, 'I will go and return to my first husband, For then it was better for me than now.' 8 For she did not know That I gave her grain, new wine, and oil, And multiplied her silver and gold-- Which they prepared for Baal. 9 "Therefore I will return and take away My grain in its time And My new wine in its season, And will take back My wool and My linen, Given to cover her nakedness. 10 Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, And no one shall deliver her from My hand. 11 I will also cause all her mirth to cease, Her feast days, Her New Moons, Her Sabbaths-- All her appointed feasts. 12 "And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees, Of which she has said, 'These are my wages that my lovers have given me.' So I will make them a forest, And the beasts of the field shall eat them. 13 I will punish her For the days of the Baals to which she burned incense. She decked herself with her earrings and jewelry, And went after her lovers; But Me she forgot," says the Lord. 14 "Therefore, behold, I will allure her, Will bring her into the wilderness, And speak comfort to her. 15 I will give her her vineyards from there, And the Valley of Achor as a door of hope; She shall sing there, As in the days of her youth, As in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt. 16 "And it shall be, in that day," Says the Lord, "That you will call Me 'My Husband,' And no longer call Me 'My Master,' 17 For I will take from her mouth the names of the Baals, And they shall be remembered by their name no more. 18 In that day I will make a covenant for them With the beasts of the field, With the birds of the air, And with the creeping things of the ground. Bow and sword of battle I will shatter from the earth, To make them lie down safely. 19 "I will betroth you to Me forever; Yes, I will betroth you to Me In righteousness and justice, In lovingkindness and mercy; 20 I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness, And you shall know the Lord.
Hosea 3  Then the Lord said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by a lover and is committing adultery, just like the love of the Lord for the children of Israel, who look to other gods and love the raisin cakes of the pagans.

To Hosea, to all the Prophets, Adultery is used to bring home Idolatry to us.  The comparison of marriage to covenant faithfulness with God is constant in the Old Testament but yet more frequent in Paul.  So how does this relate to Paul's controversy with the Judaizers?  I think that the key is to remember that in Israelitish idolatry it was almost never an issue of replacing Yahweh with Baal.  It was always an issue of supplementing Yahweh with Baal of completing Yahweh with Baal.  And Paul does nothing more than transpose the same theme into another key.  The major issue in the Apostolic church, and every church, is of supplementing Christ's righteousness with our own, of completing justification with what we call sanctification, of wearing fig leaves on top of the robe of Christ's righteousness, finishing grace with law.

And that brings us back to the problem that I have always had reading Paul and with modern Evangelicalism.  It isn't that there is no grace but that grace has been buried under the law.  Our minds are so bent towards law that the tiniest amount swamps the superabundant grace.  Our sin nature sucks up law like a sponge and is repelled by grace.  There is no question of having them in the right proportion because the only way to get any grace at all is to get grace alone.  And it is true that the moralizers can explain Paul better than I can.  They can write commentaries where every passage fits together in a harmonious and logical whole, and I can only grab one passage and stubbornly say that it is about evangelical freedom whether it fits or not.  But it is about evangelical freedom whether it seems to be or not.

Baby Christians

We can all see that this church is pretty much a failure, and it isn't hard to figure out why.  We are all basically baby Christians, none of us doing the things that it takes to make the church grow and be influential in our community.  Sure we make some small contribution, but in my case, and probably yall's too, it isn't because we care.  I get up here and talk because I like to take shots at the people who piss me off and I am hoping to offer some comfort to my fellow losers.  In pretty much every church that I have been in there are two groups more or less.  There are those who contribute to the church, time, talents, money what have you.  The group of spiritually rich, mature Christians makes the institution of the church work, always busy with the work of the Lord's kingdom, they set a good example and know how blessed they are to not be like the tax collector types around them.  And then there are the bums, the baby Christians, mooching off of God and our elder brothers, not contributing anything but just sitting staring at Jesus with an idiotic grin on our faces.

When you are reading the Bible, it is always important to know the context in which what you are reading was written.  Now this is often overdone with respect to the New Testament.   Often the so-called "higher criticism" resolves the whole New Testament into a battle between Jewish Christianity and Gentile Christianity, between Paul and his friends on one side and Peter and James on the other.  The writings of John are usually considered to be written against the Gnostic heresy, and like I said this can be pushed way too far, but I think in understanding the first two chapters of 1 John, which is what I would like to talk about today, it is important to know what was happening to the people that John was writing to.

1 John starting at chapter 1 verse 4:

These things we write to you that your joy may be full.  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. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.
My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.
Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him. He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked.
Brethren, I write no new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which you heard from the beginning. Again, a new commandment I write to you, which thing is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining.
He who says he is in the light, and hates his brother, is in darkness until now. He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him. But he who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.

The situation that this letter was sent into was one pretty familiar to most of us.  As we learn from later in chapter 2, the Christians who were toting all of the weight had gotten tired of the freeloaders and had left to start their own church.  The more spiritual people wanted to go deeper and not be held back by the materialistic half-Christians.  John's message, and mine, is for the Prodigals, the Tax Collectors, the Marys, John's little children, the Baby Christians.

Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us.
But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all of this already. I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and that no lie is of the truth.

Those who "went out" from John's "little children"-his babies, were those who Christian historians call the Gnostics, they separated themselves from the Baby Christians because they wanted to do more for God and go deeper with Jesus.  They did so much for God that they decided He was dumb and evil to have created the world and went so deep with Jesus that they decided He couldn't really have been a man but only appeared to be.  If I sound like the Prodigal taking shots at his older brother then you have pretty much got the idea.  And I think that as we read the first part of John's letter the Prodigal and his brother are the two characters that we need to keep in mind.  John's great contrast, the big antithesis that we need to see is between the Screwup Little Brother and the Jerk Big Brother.

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. If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.   ---The Jerk Brother, the Gnostics said that they were top shelf Christians, but they looked down on and despised the Prodigals, the Baby Christians.

He who says he is in the light, and hates his brother, is in darkness until now. He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him. But he who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.  ---In other words, the ones who seemed to have all of the spiritual riches and maturity, those who appeared to be and claimed to be "in the light", didn't even know God at all.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.  ---They probably didn't come right out and say that they had never sinned or that they weren't still sinners, but they thought that they were better than their brothers.  They were Pharisees thanking God that they weren't tax collectors.  And John's little babies felt like garbage and could only cry "God have mercy on me a sinner.", knowing that they hadn't done any of the things that Christians are supposed to do.  They stood, we stand, before God with nothing but a cry for mercy not having done anything right but believing that Our Father loves us anyway.

Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him. He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked.--- So, John isn't saying here that we have to do the right things to be what God has called us to be, He isn't placing Martha's works above Mary's staring at Christ like a baby at her daddy.  The Older Brothers, the Jerks have been claiming to have this great knowledge about Christ, they were claiming to be advanced and spiritual, but John is pointing out here that if they were spiritual they would act like Christ, who instead of looking down on the babies declared that they were the kingdom of Heaven.  And the New Commandment that they were not fulfilling was given in John 13 by our Lord, that of loving the brethren.

So what is the point of all of this?  It is that we are all vastly overestimating our own maturity and spirituality.  We think that we have gotten somewhere and made some kind of progress in the Christian life, but we haven't.  The wisest, most mature, most spiritual Christian is in truth just a baby a few months old, and if He is looking down on the only minusculey less mature newborn Christian and thinking that He is contributing something to God's kingdom then he is being very infantile, which is only natural I guess.  The only thing that any of us is contributing is to put a smile on our Father's face and I promise that daddy smiles at the newborn just as much as he does at the baby a few months old.

But John began by saying that he was writing so that "our joy may be full" what does any of this have to do with that?  You all know how prone I am to depression and a grim view of the world, so I am probably the last person who should stand up here and talk about Christian joy, but you are just going to have to deal with it and be grateful that I am about to be done and not complain about how I close so long as I close briefly.  I have never heard a good definition of joy.  It is clear that it is something different than happiness, that it is possible to be joyful even in the midst of sadness, but no one seems to be able to explain why or what that means.  I am about to take a shot at it.  Recently Lily has taken to crying in her carseat a lot.  And we have looked for what is bothering her, searching for any discomfort.  I worried she was hot so I made this elaborate vent to get cool air around her carseat, Cheyenne had me adjust her carseat, we have made a point of making sure that she had toys in the car, we have stopped to feed her and stopped to burp her and finally are left with only one conclusion.  Only one thing stops her crying.  It is when mommy or daddy comes and sits beside her while she is riding.  The whole thing seems pretty irritating, but as I thought about it more I realised that there is a kind of purity, a simplicity about it.  Nothing in the world makes her happy except to have mama or daddy with her.  And hence this definition of joy.  It is simply knowing that when you cry your daddy will come and be with you.  We've all grown too old, older than we really are, and we will only find heaven, in this life or the next by being babies again.  So, John's message to all of the Baby Christians, is that you don't have to do anything to be close to God, He has already come close to you.  That we all have to become like Christ is the Law and we have all been beat to death with it.  The Gospel however is that Christ has become like us.  You are God's baby.  Helpless in His arms, as close as two people can be.  You may not know it, you may not feel it.  But you are just a baby what do you know about it anyway?

The Binding of Isaac

Our text today is the 22nd chapter of Genesis, the Binding of Isaac, when Abraham's faith was tested.  

Now it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!”  And he said, “Here I am.”

The Lord is most emphatic about this being a test.

From Hebrews 11 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, 18 of whom it was said, “In Isaac your seed shall be called,” 19 concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense.

So, why?  What is the purpose of God testing Abraham?  Testing is always designed to reveal something about the person or thing being tested.  I think that we can take it for granted that this is a test designed to reveal Abraham's faith, but reveal it to who?  It didn't reveal anything to God, who didn't merely know Abraham's faith with omniscience, but knew that faith as it's constant maker and sustainer.  Was it to reveal it to Abraham?  For what purpose?  That instead of depending on God's mere grace Abraham might bring his faith forward as if it gave him some claim upon God?  I can't think of any good that it ever does a man to know that he has faith.  We are not meant to dwell in God's salvation in sedentary confidence but in the fear and trembling of always knowing that it is only a goodness that we have no claim on, a grace which God is in no way bound to give us.  We are made to trust in Him, not to trust in our faith, and so I say that the purpose of this test was not to reveal Abraham's faith to Abraham.  Well if it wasn't for God and it wasn't for Abraham that he was tested who was it for?

From Romans 4 speaking of Abraham's faith  Now it was not written for his sake alone that it was imputed to him, 24 but also for us. It shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, 25 who was delivered up because of our offenses, and was raised because of our justification.

What does Abraham's faith have to do with you and me?  Abraham is the father of us all.(from Romans 4 again)  Your faith follows the pattern of Abraham's faith, there is nothing in your faith which is not contained in Abraham's faith.  And that is why it has to be revealed to us in such dramatic fashion.  And what is the faith that is revealed by this test?  It is often held up as some kind of perfect model of faith but I don't think that that is the case at all.  The Father of the Faithful's faith does have all of the good and beautiful things that any of his children's faith has, but it seems to me that it also has all of the defects.  And this is the point I want to look at today.  Not to drag Abraham through the mud but to say to you as plainly and emphatically as I can, what I believe is the message of God's test of Abraham, that no defects in your faith, no flaws of any kind, exclude you from the community of the faithful, and that who you are cannot separate you from the love of God in Christ.

2 Then He said, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”3 So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and he split the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. 4 Then on the third day Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place afar off. 5 And Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the lad and I will go yonder and worship, and we will come back to you.”6 So Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife, and the two of them went together. 7 But Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, “My father!”And he said, “Here I am, my son.”Then he said, “Look, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”8 And Abraham said, “My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.” So the two of them went together.9 Then they came to the place of which God had told him. And Abraham built an altar there and placed the wood in order; and he bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. 10 And Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.

The links between this passage and our Lord's crucifixion are numerous and strong.  I am not going to try and trace all of the similarities right now, but rather to use this comparison as a lens to look at Abraham and his faith.  The first thing that strikes me in our passage, is Abraham's silence.  He didn't tell Isaac what was going on.  It seems clear that the two men who came with them didn't know the purpose of their journey.  And although it isn't directly mentioned, I feel certain that Isaac's mother didn't know that her husband was planning to stab and burn her son.  Why?  Abraham was silent because he was trying to be faithful.  He felt certain that if he told Sarah his plan that she would prevent him.  He had nothing to show to anyone that would distinguish him from a madman.  What could he say, what could he do that would convince even the most trusting that the destruction of his son was an act of love and divine obedience?  So, Abraham remained silent, in order to avoid difficulties which he imagined would arise to stop him from completing his mission.  Did this silence come from faith?  I say no.  It was the typical scheming of fallen man.  For a contrast, look at our Lord's repeated predictions of His death, a course which set all men against him causing most of His disciples to abandon Him and straining terribly relations with those who remained.  He was not silent about the scandal to come.  He embraced the possibility of offense and of being isolated from all men.  But Abraham didn't.  Abraham was silent.  If Abraham is not like Christ in this respect then who is he like?  Abraham's silence is analogous to Peter's denial and to the disciples hiding wherever they were when their Lord was killed.  Abraham's feet may have been walking up the mountain but he was trying to stay as far from it as possible.



Abraham led Isaac up the mountain deceitfully.  He wasn't merely silent, when Isaac asked where the sacrifice was He cunningly concealed from his son the truth, under a mask of piety.  I am not saying that the piety was fake, I am not saying that Abraham didn't believe that God would provide a sacrifice, but Abraham betrayed his son, he plotted his murder.  Abraham must have known that Isaac, tired from carrying a bundle of wood up a mountain, weighed down by that same wood which his father had tied to him, and caught in shock and surprise when attacked by his beloved father would have no chance to resist him.  We always tell the story with Isaac as a willing victim, and perhaps that makes the parallels with Christ the strongest, but we really don't know that.  Isaac very probably had no chance to resist, whether or not he tried to we will never know.  His father betrayed him, maybe quite literally with a Judas kiss.

The Gospel is death to who we are, death to our selves.  The way that God chose to reveal faith, through Abraham binding Isaac, shows us a faith that includes cowards and weak men like Peter and the other disciples.  It includes men who are silent when they should speak, who are hidden in the bushes when they should be a light to all men.  The Gospel is hard to take.  It is hard to swallow when its light shines on Peter's denial and the disciples cowardice and shows that they are me.  But it is worse when it shows Abraham betraying his son for his own gain, I can't say why Abraham was sacrificing Isaac, but he deceived him and rendered him helpless to make this hated task easier on himself, and to guarantee that his design succeeded.  I don't pretend to know Judas' fate, but Abraham's faith includes men like Judas.  This is the faith that God's test reveals to us, a faith that is contaminated with selfishness and treason.

From Romans 4 What then shall we say that Abraham our father has found according to the flesh? 2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. 3 For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.”

The faith which God counts as righteousness is not some perfect, celestial faith.  It is a faith which is cowardly, deceitful, and treacherous.  It is a faith which denies Christ like Peter and betrays Him like Judas.  It is a faith which holds the knife above an innocent victim, condemning him just like Pilate did.  Perhaps the greatest thing about the Crucifixion as recorded in Scripture is that there are no good guys.  We must place ourselves somewhere in the story, and since we aren't Christ at best we are the weak and cowardly disciples.  But more and more I see myself in Judas and Pilate.  The faith which God counts as righteousness in Abraham, deserves exactly what Judas and Pilate deserve.  But it doesn't get what it deserves.

Romans 4:4 Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt.5 But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness,

Faith is not meritorious.  It doesn't deserve anything good.  If what I have is faith, then faith is contemptible and deserving of damnation.



11 But the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!”

So he said, “Here I am.”

12 And He said, “Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”

13 Then Abraham lifted his eyes and looked, and there behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up for a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 And Abraham called the name of the place, The-Lord-Will-Provide; as it is said to this day, “In the Mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”

15 Then the Angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time out of heaven, 16 and said: “By Myself I have sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son— 17 blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore; and your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies. 18 In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” 19 So Abraham returned to his young men, and they rose and went together to Beersheba; and Abraham dwelt at Beersheba.

Faith is not meritorious, but God treats it as if it is.  And the only reason for it is because of His love for us, love which he pours out on the most unworthy.

5 Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; 4 and perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

Acts 2

2 When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. 2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
5 And there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men, from every nation under heaven. 6 And when this sound occurred, the multitude came together, and were confused, because everyone heard them speak in his own language. 7 Then they were all amazed and marveled, saying to one another, “Look, are not all these who speak Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each in our own language in which we were born? 9 Parthians and Medes and Elamites, those dwelling in Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya adjoining Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—we hear them speaking in our own tongues the wonderful works of God.” 12 So they were all amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “Whatever could this mean?”

Whatever could this mean?  That is the question that Peter set himself to answer and that is the question that I want to try to answer this morning.  So what was it that was actually happening? We have all heard about, and some of us have heard people "speaking in tongues", allegedly speaking in some secret language, whether it is claimed to be the language of angels or a "private prayer language", whatever that means, it sounds like nonsense to the uninitiated, a mechanical, meaningless babble.  That is most emphatically not what was happening here.  What was happening is almost the reverse of modern speaking in tongues.  Everybody understood what was being said.  These men's message was mysterious, it was incomprehensible, but it was unmistakable.  Their hope was repellant, and their faith offensive, everybody understood what they were saying.  The choice was to be offended and reject the message, or to step outside the bounds of humanity and accept it.  But the first question for us is how could they understand it, and what did it all mean.  To answer that I want to back up just a little to a question that we often forget to ask in this context.  Not why could everybody understand these men, but why is it that most of the time we can't understand one another?  Why can't I speak Chinese?  Why can't foreigners understand me when I yell at them?  Why is the customer service guy on the phone from wherever so stupid?

From Genesis 11 Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. 3 Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. 4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. 6 And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. 7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. 9 Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

The story begins with human anxiety.  The fear of being separated from one another, "let us make a name for ourselves, so that we won't be scattered", the fear of the future, basically just saying, "I don't know what God has planned for us but, I don't trust Him."  That fear is the result of us deciding for ourselves what is good and what is not.  Distrustfully taking from God the determination of what is good for us and taking to ourselves the knowledge of good and evil always bears the fruit of fear and of death.  We were going in a bad direction, and God brought us this confusion as a way of putting the brakes on us.

13 Others mocking said, “They are full of new wine.”
14 But Peter, standing up with the eleven, raised his voice and said to them, “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and heed my words. 15 For these are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. 16 But this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel:
17 ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God,
That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your young men shall see visions,
Your old men shall dream dreams.
18 And on My menservants and on My maidservants
I will pour out My Spirit in those days;
And they shall prophesy.
19 I will show wonders in heaven above
And signs in the earth beneath:
Blood and fire and vapor of smoke.
20 The sun shall be turned into darkness,
And the moon into blood,
Before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord.
21 And it shall come to pass
That whoever calls on the name of the Lord
Shall be saved.’
22 “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a Man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through Him in your midst, as you yourselves also know— 23 Him, being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death; 24 whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it. 25 For David says concerning Him:
‘I foresaw the Lord always before my face,
For He is at my right hand, that I may not be shaken.
26 Therefore my heart rejoiced, and my tongue was glad;
Moreover my flesh also will rest in hope.
27 For You will not leave my soul in Hades,
Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption.
28 You have made known to me the ways of life;
You will make me full of joy in Your presence.’
29 “Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. 30 Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, 31 he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption. 32 This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses. 33 Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He poured out this which you now see and hear.

So, the confusion went away because the sin that made it necessary was taken away.  Confusion of tongues is a roadblock that God put in the way of our sinful course, there is no reason for there to be such a roadblock in the way of the spread of the Gospel.  And both in this passage and historically we see that the obstacle of confused languages provides little obstacle to the Gospel which has gone forth into the whole earth to tribes and tongues unknown to the rest of the world.  In Christ sin is forgiven and taken away, the fact of sin, the guilt of sin, the effects of sin, the consequences of sin both temporal and eternal, everything about sin is like it never was.  In fact, in its place we receive the fact of His righteousness, His merit, the results of His righteous acts both in this life and the next.  The heart of the curse of sin is death, and Peter's message is that Christ has overcome death, as is proven by His resurrection, and with the defeat of death, all of the lesser effects of sin, the confusion of tongues, the division of people, goes away.  Obviously for now this is only partial.  What Christ has obtained for us, God has only made a downpayment on.  Sometimes the curse vanishes from our lives, like it did on the day of Pentecost, as a sign that it is ending, that the curse is broken.

34 “For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he says himself:
‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at My right hand,
35 Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”’
36 “Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
37 Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?”
38 Then Peter said to them, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.”

And how is this sin and its effects removed?  By being identified with Christ and with His death.
 That is what the baptism that Peter called them to is.  It is to identify yourself with Christ in His death.  We have been judging for ourselves what is right and what is wrong for all of our lives.  And there is nothing that we will ever see that seems more wrong than the death of Christ.  It is an affront to the deepest part of our hearts and minds.  The good Father betrays His righteous Son when He needs Him the most, for don't forget that while Peter says that we murdered Him with lawless hands that it was all done by the determinant plan of God.  How can we trust a Father that would do that to His own son?  Why place our hope in someone who does the opposite of what we would hope for?  Christian hope cannot help but look and often feel like despair.  What more horrible place is there to be than in the hands of an omnipotent child abuser?  Christian faith cannot help but look like absolute cynicism and atheism.  What kind of trust can I have in the one who brought a sword to divide brother against brother, who makes our families our enemies and says that we are not worthy of Him if we do not abandon them?  All that we are is in rebellion against such a God.  We have judged good and evil and have judged ourselves to be good and Him to be evil, our way to be right and His way to be wrong.  But Christ didn't.  He put Himself into the hands of His Father when He seemed least good and least trustworthy with absolute faith and unshakable hope.  He endured the uttermost depths of His Father's wrath, certain that it was dispensed by a good and loving Father.  All baptism is, is agreeing with Jesus Christ.  It is believing that all appearances to the contrary, God is good and He loves us.  It is refusing to take the forbidden fruit, in the unreasonable faith that it is forbidden for good reason.  It is accepting having no name for yourself and no lasting place on the Earth, to choose the life of an exile, a despised pilgrim, outside the camp of human brotherhood, walking the Via Dolorosa for the joy that is set before you.  And in so doing, we gain a voice that can touch all men, that penetrates all confusion.