Sunday, April 7, 2019

What Does Gospel Actually Mean? Maybe Not What You Think


Have you ever had a conversation that sticks with you?  Somebody said something.  It really impacted you, hopefully positively, but maybe negatively too.   And those words you just can’t forget.  

A conversation like that happened to me over thirty years ago, and it still sticks with me.  It happened in a cab in New York City.   My friends and I were heading to the hot club of the moment, Club Mars.  And as the cab went downtown, I chatted with the driver, who was Sikh, about religion.  Curious, he asked me.  What do Christians believe?    I rattled off something, nothing that profound.  Still one of my friends turned to me with the strangest look.  We got out of the cab.  And my friend said to me.   “I went to a Christian school for years. I never heard what you just told that guy.  If that’s what Christianity is, it’s pretty good.”

Now, why did that conversation stick with me?  It’s because, over the years, I’ve heard so many like it.  You can think you know Christianity until one day you realize. You don’t know it at all.   What is this Good News that Christianity proclaims?  In these words, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.


What is this good news that Christianity proclaims?  God tells you in only two words right in the first sentence you just heard.   It’s the same two words I just said.   It’s the words Good News.   In those words, God, believe it or not, tells you pretty much everything you need to know. 

And, to be honest, at least as Paul wrote it in Greek, the two words are actually just one word, Euangelion.  The Eu part is the good as in Euphoria or Eulogy.  And the news or message part is angelion as in angel.   Now, how can that one word, Euangelion, tell you so much?   It tells you because of how the Greeks used the word.   They didn’t use it for any good news.   Hey, we’re having a baby.  Wow, that’s Euangelion!   No, it’s not. They didn’t use the word for that. 

For the most part, they used it for just one thing.  They used it for the news of a great victory in battle.  

Imagine.  Your army has gone out to defend the city from an enemy seeking to enslave it.   Everyone is waiting to hear what has happened.   Will they stay free or become slaves to a conquering power.   A lookout from the walls see the messenger coming.    He is wearing the signs of victory.  The crowds begin to cheer.   Victory is won.   The messenger is bringing Euangelion, news of a great victory, a complete one.  

If the messenger had said.  “Hey, the army did a pretty good job. Only the last part of the enemy is coming now. So, you can just finish them off.”   That wouldn’t have been good news.   No, the messenger brings a message that goes like this.  “We have won a great victory on your behalf, a complete victory.   And because of that victory, you are free.”

Paul uses that particular word because Paul knows. That word tells you all you need to know about what God means by good news.  Do you understand how that is different than anything else?
Look, if you go to a church, and hear a message on how to live a moral and upright life, is that the good news?   It might be helpful news to you.    But it’s not the good news.  It’s not Euangelion.  It’s not gospel.

If you hear euangelion, good news, it leads you to feel liberated, overjoyed.    After all the news is telling you.   A battle has been fought for you, a great victory won for you.  As a result, you are now free, free like never before.     If you don’t feel like the Gospel of Jesus is the most wondrous and thrilling news you have ever heard in your life, then you have never really heard the good news.  Ok, so how does this wondrous News free you?  It frees you to become yourself. 

Too often, people think of freedom as being freed from something.  And sure, that is kind of true.   But it frames freedom only as a negative.    You get freedom from insecurities or debt or a bad relationship.  The list could go on.  But is that it?  Once you’re free from that, where do you go from there.

Freedom, true freedom frees you to something, not simply from something. It brings you somewhere. 

And the good news of Jesus frees you to become yourself.   What do I mean by that?
Take God.  God is perfectly free.  But can God lie? No.  Can God tempt people? No.  Can God break a promise?  No.  So, is God free?   Sure, God’s free to be God.  Look, people think freedom means you’re free to be whatever.  But the Bible says freedom means being free to become what you were always destined to be.  That’s freedom, freedom to become yourself.    

God has no insecurities, no bitterness, no fears, no shame. Why? God is free.  God is perfectly free to simply be God, nothing less, and nothing else.   And that is perfect freedom.

Think of it this way. Think of a fish.  If a fish were like a human being, that fish might think.   All this water is constraining my freedom.   I want the freedom to hang out in that tree, to spend some time in the grass.   But what if the fish does that?  That fish dies.  It loses the freedom to do anything at all.  Why?  That fish is denying its fishness.  But fish don’t do that. Why?  They’re perfectly free, just enjoying being fish.   That resting in their fishness is the ultimate freedom, nothing less and nothing else.

So, what is your humanness, what makes you, you?   Essentially the Bible says that God created you in God’s image, God’s likeness.  And at the heart of God lies love, a love that surrounds and fills everything in the universe.  And the more you live into the love, the more yourself become, the more free you are.  Why do you feel anxious or insecure or simply alienated from your life?  It’s because you have not yet become free to become you, to become who God created you to be.

Look a coffee pot is built to make coffee not concrete.   If you put concrete in there instead of coffee, that coffee pot will experience alienation, anxiety, insecurity and shame, well at least as much as coffee pots can.   And why?   It’s violating its coffeepot-ness, what it was created to be.   

Don’t you get it.  Freedom isn’t ultimately freedom from anything.  It’s freedom to, freedom to love, freedom to become yourself.   And when you have that freedom, only then, do you become truly free.  And in that freedom, insecurities fall away.  Fears and anxieties fade.   You experience peace, peace with yourself, peace with others, peace with the world.  You still live your life, deal with your problems, but you do so from a place of freedom. 

How does this freedom happen?  How did God liberate you to become yourself?  It has to do with Jesus, but not so much what Jesus said.  Jesus said great stuff, but that’s not what liberates you.  What liberate you is what Jesus did.   It’s why Paul spends most of this passage telling you that in detail, names of witnesses, the whole deal.     What is the good news you need to believe to become free?   

You need to believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection, God has won the battle for you.  God has gotten the victory.  That news, that is the good tidings.  In Jesus, a battle has been fought for you, a victory won.  And that victory has freed you forever.   That is the ultimate euangelion.  And that truth has such power, it shows up everywhere, even in a cartoon.

Have you even seen the movie, Frozen?   I have, approximately 26 times, because that’s about how many times my son has seen it.    He can’t get enough.   I want to tell him.  Let it go, let it go, but he doesn’t.  He loves that movie!

In case you haven’t seen it, the movie centers around these two sisters, Elsa and Anna.  Elsa has a tremendous power to make ice and snow, to freeze things.   But she is terrified of it.  She doesn’t feel free to be herself.    All that fear leads to disastrous things, Elsa’s flight and isolation, a perpetual winter she brings to her homeland, and finally a deadly wound she gives to her beloved sister, Anna. 
Anna then learns that the only thing that will heal her wound is an act of true love. Otherwise, she will become frozen forever.  Now, she thinks this act of true love will be a kiss from the man who truly loves her.   But that’s not how the movie works out.   Instead as the love of her life tries to reach her, Anna turns.  She sees that the villain of the movie has drawn a sword and is about to kill her sister, Elsa.   So, Anna with her last bit of strength leaps in front of the sword, and it strikes her.  Immediately the sword shatters, and Elsa is saved.  But Anna turns to ice.   Yet as everyone grieves her loss, that ice begins to melt away.   Anna returns to life.   Her sacrifice for her sister, Elsa, that was the act of true love that healed the wound.   And when that act of love happens, it frees Elsa from her fear.  She restores the kingdom to its rightful state. She finds the freedom to be herself and use her power wisely and well.

Now as I watched that final scene, I realized.  Holy moly, Anna is Jesus.  She sacrifices her life for her sister.  And in her act of true love she wins the battle. She frees her sister from her fears, and her kingdom from winter.   And the more you look everywhere, you will see the same story. The hero or the heroine out of love sacrifices.  And that sacrifice brings victory and freedom.   Why does that story appear everywhere?  It’s echoing the story, this story. 

But this story, this Good News here, no one made that up.  It happened.  All those witnesses Paul gives you tells you that.   And in that sacrifice of love, Jesus won the victory for you.  Why? In then end, the ultimate lie that infect human beings is that God does not love them, that God doesn’t intend the best.   That lie leads to distrust, to fear, to suspicion, to blame, to so much that is not God created you to be.  But Jesus act of love destroys the lie.  As you realize God loves you like that, enough to give up everything to bring you home, it liberates you from the lie.  And as you trust in the reality of God’s love for you, you find that love growing within you, restoring you to who you have always been destined to be, giving you the freedom to become yourself.  And as that happens, you will get it, how wondrous, how thrilling, this euangelion, this good news is.   For in its power, you will have become free, free to become the very person you yearned to be all along.     

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