The Biggest Question, and the Unknown God vs. Jesus Christ

Acts 17:16-31

Some weeks it’s tough to know what to say up here. I mean, I am pretty much saying the same thing week after week, and, as the author Bill Bryson once wrote about writing a weekly column, the thing about a weekly sermon is that it comes up weekly. Bryson writes, “Now this may seem a self-evident fact, but in two years there never came a week when it did not strike me as both profound and startling. Another column? Already? But I just did one.”

That’s pretty much how I feel about sermons. But, then I read about Paul, preaching the known God in a midst of a world in Athens that is worshiping the “unknown God” and I reminded of the necessity of sharing with the God we can know; the God who is specific, whose name Paul knows, whose name we know. Paul goes on to suggest that God created us this way—to search for him, to yearn for him, even, as Paul says, to grope for him, as if stumbling in the dark. There’s this God-shaped hole inside of us and we will spend our lives, one way or another, trying to fit various things inside of it, when only one fits. I don’t think we can talk enough about the one thing that fits.

            What matters to Paul is the specificity—it is this God, whom he knows in Jesus Christ, who is the one true God. Of all the questions I get as a pastor, one of the top few after “Can you get married?” (Yes, not Catholic), and “Why?” (Much more complicated) is “How do you know that your God is the one, true God?” I get this question on one level, because it comes from some kind of objective place where a person looks at the world and says, “I see thousands of gods worshipped by billions of people. How can any of them reconcile any of this business?” I get that. But where the people asking the question lose me is where they jump to the conclusion that, therefore, all these religions are bogus. Instead, I look at it like this: I can only preach the God I know. I can only share the faith that is in me. I can only tell you about the specific qualities of this God that I worship: That Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death and, through dying, he gives us eternal life. That’s all I can say, and I don’t say that having compared our God to a thousand other gods; I just share it because it is the faith that is in me.

            That also doesn’t mean I have to think other people are wrong—I don’t know their experience—and it doesn’t mean I have to spend my life doing the divine math on whether Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and whomever else is worshiping the same God or not. It’s not that I don’t care; I just don’t need to, because I can only testify to the God I know. Then, I can certainly listen to others talk about the God they know and ask myself in what ways they are filling in my blind spots and in what ways perhaps I disagree, but all of that is secondary. I can only testify to what I know.

            This last week was our final Big Q&A opportunity in Confirmation. This year I think the biggest question of all was raised—probably the most important, and, therefore, really, really difficult question to answer, and it was raised by an eighth-grader and I’m going to raise it myself now, because it ties in directly with Paul and the Athenians. This question was, simply: “What is faith?”

When you stop reading halfway through

Acts 16:16-34

About halfway through reading today’s scripture for the first time this week I stopped and opened up the lectionary document in the shared drive on the church’s computer and double-checked that I had the right scripture. Unfortunately, I did.

            Then I read the rest of the reading, and it wasn’t that bad. I had stopped after the part about the divining girl and the imprisonment; I hadn’t read far enough, and I didn’t remember what this story was about. I rejected the scripture on its premise without trying to understand where it was going.

            This got me thinking: This is a common challenge with how we read the Bible. Sometimes we start reading something in there, and it’s strange or shocking or we just don’t get what it has to do with anything, and so we are tempted to skip ahead and read something else, or else we read it quickly and say “I don’t know what that had to do with anything,” and then move on without a second thought. All the while we are missing our blind spots where scripture might be speaking to us; we pick and choose how we want to be affected and we don’t allow the Bible to challenge us. In this way, we domesticate this Bible that is naturally wild.

            After my reaction—and when I finally finished the reading—I was reminded of the men’s Bible study we did on the book of Romans last year for the few of us who gathered on Tuesday mornings. The book of Romans is a fantastic book—one of my favorites in the Bible, really. However, if you start reading in the beginning of Romans—which you should!—it’s easy to say, “Wow, Paul stop talking about the law. Give me some good news, man!” You see, in Romans, Paul sets the stage by talking about what it means to be justified according to your words and actions; he obsesses over righteousness; he tells us about the example of Abraham; the first half of the letter is mostly on sin and death and the law. If that’s not your cup of tea then in all likelihood you’re no longer reading when he gets to the point.

The first nine chapters of Romans leave us hanging on by a thread, wondering where Paul is going with all this. Then, there is this great turn where all that talk of sin and death and righteousness leads to a God who is the champion of grace, who embodies love, who saves us apart from all those things that Paul talked about so much in the lead-up. Starting with Romans 10, the next several headings in my Bible are: 1. Salvation is for All, 2. Israel’s Rejection is Not Final, 3. the Salvation of the Gentiles, 4. All Israel Will be Saved, and 5. the New Life in Christ. The book of Romans sets the stage for what life looks like under the law so that the rug can be pulled out from underneath us and show us why we so badly need the good news of Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, most people who started reading the book of Romans gave up before getting there.

Saul/Paul and the Scandal of the Particular

Acts 9:1-19

            I was going one way… and then one day I went another—it feels like the start to so many good stories. The villain turned hero—the nobody made extraordinary—it’s all so familiar, but would we accept it if it were part of our story? Would we accept Saul as Paul?

            Saul was breathing death against the early followers of Jesus. There’s this great choral piece by Z. Randall Stroope called The Conversion of Saul that begins with a minute-and-a-half of Latin cursing: Caedite, Vexate, Ligate Vinculis—Kill, Molest, Bind With Chains. When we talk about the story of Paul we have to begin with the story of Saul, and this story is a tougher one than we often give it credit, because would you accept Saul as Paul if he killed your son or daughter—if he was the one responsible for the death of somebody you love?

            This is one side of the “Scandal of the Particular” (a phrase of Walter Breuggemann). Most of us love the Saul-turned-Paul story in principle—in theory—but put yourself in the particular shoes and if it’s your loved one who met their demise at the hands of this man you might feel differently. Then, apply this to everything that happens in this life: If somebody you love is murdered it doesn’t matter that most people aren’t murdered; if somebody you love dies in war it doesn’t matter that most people don’t die in wars; or in a traffic accident; or in a natural disaster; or because of disease; or if you are born with a disability; or any of the multitude things that most people do not face.

            Statistics are not a comfort when bad things happen and neither are they an assurance that we are safe, and yet, on the other hand, the scandal of the particular is that we are met precisely in the midst of those moments where despair creeps in by a God who promises to be in the midst of suffering and death and loss and pain and grief because he went there first. The scandal of the particular elevates Saul to Paul in spite of our views of what is just, because the justice of God has a longer view of the universe than our own.

Holding one another fast

John 20:19-31

Hidden amidst the story of so-called “Doubting” Thomas is a verse that is of profound importance to what we do as the church. You might have missed it, focused as we are in Thomas in this story, but when Jesus first appears to the disciples (minus Thomas) he says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” This is what Martin Luther called “The Office of the Keys” and it is the special authority Jesus gives to his church—to forgive and, apparently, to refrain from forgiveness. And if forgiveness of sins is a significant part of our salvation then this is no small thing; in fact, it may be one of the most important things Jesus tells us to do.

            The first amazing thing here is that Jesus gives God’s people, the church, the power to forgive sins. For better or worse, Jesus allows forgiveness to come through sinners, such as us. This means that the capacity to forgive sins is not dependent on how holy you are or I am—and thank God for that!—because all of us need grace. So, already, Jesus, having died and been raised, has endeavored to pass on the faith to imperfect people such as us. This is both radical and, we might assume, potentially foolish.

If that isn’t enough, there comes a second part of the verse that is much trickier than the first. Jesus says, “If you retain the sins of any they are retained.” Now I don’t know about you, but to me this is cause for some concern. If sins can be retained—if forgiveness has to do with how proficient we are at offering it; then it feels like it will always be imperfect and limited. We need forgiveness that is perfect and can overcome all the dumb things we do. This second half of the verse scares the daylights out of me.

Easter Sunday: Resurrection and the Tree of Life

John 20:1-18

            This year I’ve focused on the three trees through the triduum—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess not all of you made it to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, so for a quick recap there is the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruit Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden. That tree invited sin into the world because we began to imagine that we are like God. So, we needed a second tree, the tree of the cross, which is the tree that stands tall on Good Friday—the tree on which Jesus died. It is the tree that bridges our pursuit of sin and death and sends Jesus through death on our behalf. The cross stands in-between this life and the next.

            Then there is today. No tree, you might think—not in the Easter story—except there is a garden and, in the end, this is taking us inexorably toward the third tree, which is the tree that has been there since the beginning. In the book of Revelation, the 22^nd chapter, it says, “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

            In the end, we have the tree of life. You don’t see the cross there because the cross has done its job. You don’t see the tree of knowledge there because knowledge is no longer necessary. In the presence of God we will know all we need. The tree of life is the end of the story because it encompasses all that is leading up to it. The trees are a progression and they offer a promise of returning to what was once created good and holy before sin entered this picture.