The Danger of Getting Religion

Have you ever heard of the Pentecostal preacher,Jimmy Swaggart.  Let me tell you.  That guy is good.    Let me tell you how good. 

One Sunday morning, many years ago, I flipped on the TV before heading over for worship, and there Jimmy was, preaching away.   I thought.  I have a few minutes, I’ll take a look.  Maybe I’ll pick up some preaching tips.   I don’t remember exactly what he was talking about, but he was definitely talking about Jesus, and doing a bang up job of it.    He get me all fired up.   I was saying That’s right! Preach it brother.  I’m with you!”   Then somehow, somewhere, a detour occurred.  I can’t even tell you when.     I was rolling along “Yes, Jimmy, Jesus loves us, and that modern art, it’s of the devil.”  Woooahh!  What did he say?  Modern art, really?  How did he get there?  

Has that ever happened to you?  You’re talking with someone, and you are thinking.  We are both on the same page.   We agree on everything.  But then a detour comes, usually a shocking one.   “And you know that whole moon landing it was a hoax.”    Or “Those dadgum Israelis, they were the ones behind 9-11”    And you are like.  “Where did that come from?”  

But sometimes those detours don’t take us away from the truth.  They lead us closer to it.   One Christmas, when I was in seminary, we went for a family reunion in North Carolina.   I was talking to my sister after dinner one night, about my newly awakened feminist consciousness, and how troubled I was by our conservative uncle Charles, who didn’t even believe women could serve as church elders.   How sad. We seemed to be on the same page.  Then the twist came.  She said; “I hear what you’re saying.  But I noticed.  Tonight at dinner, there was only one man, who went in to help the women clean up.  It was Uncle Charles. You sat with all the other men and didn’t lift a finger.  What’s up with that?”    Her detour nailed me, and I’ve never forgotten it. 

Those sorts of detours wake us up, even save us from the worst of ourselves.   That’s the sort of detour Paul takes here.  A detour that shocked his hearers, but that woke them up to a reality they desperately need to see, that we need to see.  What is that reality?   That religion might be the worst thing you could possibly get.   How can that be so?   In these words, God shows us the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

Romans 2:1-6, 12-29

How can religion be the worst thing you could possibly get?  In these words from Romans, God shows us.   Religion can blind you to the reality of who you really are, so you see only the surface, and miss everything that lies beneath.    But if religion blinds you, how do you see the truth?  You look at where religion, especially the religion of the Bible points, to the One who was cut off for us. 

So how does religion blind us?   Paul shows us here how it does by delivering a brutal detour.  Just a few sentences before, he has been delivering this brutal condemnation of the worst of Gentile culture, the idols, the temples, the sex orgies.   Paul slams it hard.   Now at this point, as people were hearing this letter, because these letters were read publicly like a remote sermon, two groups of Christians were listening.   One group, the Gentile Christians, had to be feeling a little bad, as Paul pointed out all the ugliness.  But the other group, Jewish Christians, had to be loving it.  In fact, for this section, Paul was doing his version of one of the most popular synagogue sermons of the day, basically, you could call it, the “those nasty Gentiles” sermon.

But then Paul takes an unexpected detour.   Just as the Jewish Christians are going, “Yeah, preach it, Paul, those nasty Gentiles”   Paul then goes, but hey you Jewish Christians, you’re no better than they are.  The Jewish Christians must have been going, “What?!   We’re as bad as those orgy giving, idol worshipping Gentiles?  You have got to be kidding, right?”  But Paul is not kidding at all.   He is pointing to one of the most important realities that every human being has to face.   No one is okay.   In fact, everyone is pretty far from okay.

Now before we dig into why this is true, let’s take a moment to think about how unique that perspective is.   Some folks like to think, well, “I’m ok.  You’re ok.”   But when you look around at the world as it is, does that really hold any water?   Let’s face it, things in our world are not ok by a long shot.    And then you have folks, too often religious folks, who go.   “I’m ok, but the rest of you are so not ok.”   And that’s how you get everything from self-righteous jerks to Isis.   But Paul is saying simply this.  “I’m not ok, and neither are you.  Nobody is ok.  That’s the problem”  

A week or so ago, I was talking to someone who knows me pretty well, and she was saying.  “Ken, you are a really good person.”    And I said, “Oh that is so not true.   I am not a good person, not by a long shot.”   Now, I don’t have some sort of terrible self-concept.  I just get what is Paul is telling us.   “I’m not good because nobody is.”    And the danger of religion, at least as many understand it, can lead you to think you’re good when you really are not. 

But isn’t that a bit much?  How can you say that everybody is not good?  Because good is so much more than lots of folks think.    Paul gets that.  That’s what he is trying to tell us on all his talk about the law.  You see.  God didn’t give the law to deliver a bunch of dos and don’ts.   God gave the law to paint a beautiful picture of who God created every one of us to be.   And once you see that picture, really see it, you’ll know.  That ain’t you.

Folks can look at things like the Ten Commandments, and just see the surface.   But do you know the rule about icebergs? For whatever you see on the surface, there is 90% more underneath.   The commandments are like that, an iceberg.    If you look only on the surface, you’re missing almost everything. But religion, at least as lots of folks understand it, can lead you to look only there.  And because all of us are trying to make ourselves look good, that’s where we want to look anyway.   We want to see the law simply as a list of external actions.  That way, if we check them off, we can think.  I’m doing ok.  I’m good.  But the law goes so much deeper than that. 

That’s how Paul can say even to the most devoutly religious person listening in that room in Rome, you are doing the same things even the worst Gentiles do.   Just look at the list he gave of all the bad things Gentiles do in Chapter 1.  What are some of the things he put there?  Envy, deceit, craftiness, boastful, inventors of evil, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless; these are not so much things you do as attitudes you have.    And that’s the point.  Living out the law, being good, isn’t simply about not doing bad things, it’s about a life filled with such love, kindness, honesty, and every other good thing that bad things simply have no room at all to even be thought of, much less get done.    

  

Look at how Jesus talks about the law, about being good.   In the Sermon on the Mount, he said. “You know that commandment.  Thou shalt not murder.   I tell you if you say to anyone, Raca, then you’ve broken it.”  Now what does Raca mean?  Is it some sort of insult?  No, it actually means nobody.   Jesus is saying.  If you treat another human-being as if they don’t matter, you’ve broken this commandment.   If you see someone and think, well, they’re not important, you’ve broken this commandment.   In fact, if you don’t see every person who enters your life as of infinite value and importance, you’ve broken this commandment.   Now how can that be murder?  Because murder is simply the end result of an attitude that begins in the heart.   The murder is only what you see on the surface, but what you don’t see is the 90% of what lies underneath.  That’s the 90% of the picture that the law is pointing to.  It is pointing to the picture of what every human being is called to be, and that picture goes way beyond just not killing people. 

Now how many of you can say that you’ve treated every person you have ever encountered as infinitely valued and important?   Well, then according to Jesus, and he should know, you’ve broken this commandment.  And you don’t have to even have the Bible to know this.  Everyone knows this.

It’s why Paul can say, even the Gentiles have the law written on their hearts.   Why?  Because, as the Christian writer, Francis Schaeffer, once put it, every one of us has a sort of hidden recorder in our hearts.  Why?   So when we stand before God, and go, “Woah, God, I had no idea about these commandments things.   You can’t hold me to that standard.  I had no idea it even existed.”  And God will go.  “Oh you didn’t huh?”  Then God will pull out the secret recorder, and it will have on it every moment, when we thought or said, “He shouldn’t have treated me that way.”   “What she just did to me there was so totally wrong!”  And God will be like.  It sure looks like you held everyone else to that standard, so why can’t I hold you.”

So if this is the picture of who God calls us to be, this beautiful perfect portrait of a human life, how do we ever get there?  Strangely enough, God points us to the answer in, of all things, a religious ritual. That’s why Paul starts talking about circumcision.   That ritual points us to the answer we need. 

In the beginning, God made his first covenant with a man named Abraham.  What God meant by covenant is that God wanted a real, intimate relationship with Abraham and his wife, Sarah and their family.  And to symbolize this relationship, he asked for the ritual of circumcision.  Circumcision acted for Abraham much the same way that Baptism works for Christians.  But baptism can be a little easier to understand, the washing of sins, death and resurrection, all that stuff.  But what can circumcision mean? 

Well, in ancient times, to seal an agreement, you didn’t sign some paper.  Instead, you acted out the penalty.  So, for example, to seal one type of agreement, you walked between cut up animals.   In that ritual, you were saying, if I break this agreement, then I will be cut up like this.  Circumcision served the same purpose.   God said that as faithful as I am to you, you must be that faithful to me.  And if you break that commitment, you will be cut off.  You will be cut off from relationship with me, from the abundant life I yearn to bring you.   But here’s the problem.  If you know the story, Abraham is not faithful to God almost immediately, yet God still stays faithful to him.  In fact, everyone who follows after Abraham messes up.  So how can God keep the relationship?  Why hasn’t God cut them off, cut us off? 

In a few verses in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he gives us the answer.  There he says to Gentiles, that you have received a circumcision but not by human hands.  You have received the circumcision of Christ.   What does Paul mean?  He is saying.  Jesus was circumcised for you.  He was cut off so that you could be brought in.  He paid the penalty of the broken covenant.  He lost the relationship with God so that you might gain it.    But Paul goes further. He says, now you rest in this circumcision of Christ.   He has given you a new heart, a new intimacy with God.  What does this mean?  When the law paints this beautiful picture of who a human being is called to be, it is not just painting some generic picture.  It is giving us a picture of a person, Jesus.    And when you believe in what Jesus has done for you, this picture begins to live in you.  Jesus’ beauty becomes part of your life.   In fact, when God looks at you that is the picture he sees.   He sees you through Jesus.  And when you see what Jesus has done out of love for you that will cut you to the heart.  It will start to change that heart into something more than you could have imagined or dreamed.   

So yes, you are not okay.  I am not okay.  But in Jesus, you become that. You become who God created you to be.   And until that becoming is complete, you can rest in what Jesus has done for you.  You don’t need religion to justify yourself.   Jesus has already done it.  You simply trust that it is true, that he cut off so that you would never be.   And as you trust, Jesus gives you the freedom to fail.  And that freedom to fail, gives you what religion can never give. Paradoxically, that grace frees you to grow into the very good creation that God made you to be.     

The Danger of Desire

This past Monday, as I came into the room, I saw it there, resting on the table.    The staff had bought me a gift for the New Year.  I was so touched.  And I wondered.   What could it be?    I took off the ribbon.  I ripped off the wrapping paper.    Then I felt the warmth.   I caught the wonderful aroma.   Oh, they knew me so well.  They had given a gift close to my heart.  They had given me a box of Publix Fried Chicken. 

 

I know.  It’s not good for me.  That’s why I always eat a big salad with it.   I kinda hope that the salad will cancel out the fat and cholesterol.   I’ve tried to walk away many times.  But what can I say?  I love fried chicken.   I can stay away for a few weeks, but I always end up succumbing to that brown box full of caloric, crunchy chicken deliciousness.  

Now my desire for fried chicken, I don’t think will kill me, at least not right away.   But that doesn’t mean that our desires can’t be deadly.    In reality, our desires are the deadliest thing we face.   They capture us.   They blind us then bind us.   Nothing will destroy you more completely, more profoundly then your desires.   

And I’m not simply talking about “bad” desires.  I’m talking “good” desires, heck even “religious” desires.   All of them have the power to drive you over the edge.  And here’s the scary part, you’ll likely be over the edge before you realize it’s even happening.

Are you thinking to yourself, really?  How can desires be that deadly?   Does that make any sense?   And if it does, if desires can devastate you like that, how do you stop it?  How do you enjoy your desires, cultivate them even, but not allow them to take over, to hold you hostage?   In these words from Romans, God shows us the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Romans 1:18-25    

How can desires be so deadly?   How can they drive you over the edge?  In these words, God shows us.    Desires, unchecked, will first of all delude you, then they will dominate you, then they will finally diminish you, even dehumanize you.    But it doesn’t need to be this way.   When desires find their proper place, then you become free to grow into the very people you need to be, people who live out of the richly abundant life God created you to have.   That’s what Paul is trying to tell us in this densely packed thicket of words.   So let’s unpack what he’s saying.   

First, Paul starts out with a stunning assertion.   Everybody knows God.    Deep inside, they know that everything they have is a gift.    No one needs any special revelation to see it.  Why? The very world around them shows them the truth.   What is this truth?   The very unreligious writer, Kurt Vonnegut, put it stunningly well.   In one of his first novels, he had one of his characters give this dying speech. 

God made mud.  God got lonesome.  So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!’

‘See all I’ve made….the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars’

And I was some of the mud……That got to sit up and look around.

Lucky me, Lucky mud,

I, mud, sat up..And saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God!

Nobody but you could have done it, God!

I certainly couldn’t have.  I feel very unimportant compared to you.

The only way I can feel the least bit important…Is to think of all the mud….

That didn’t even get to sit up and look around.

I got so much.  And most mud got so little.

Thank you for the honor!   What memories of mud to have.

What interesting others kinds of sitting up mud I met!

I loved everything I saw!  Lucky me, Lucky mud!

This is the truth about God that people spend their lives avoiding, that they’re lucky mud.  Now they may not see that they’re avoiding this truth.  They may believe in God, but functionally they don’t live their lives by that truth.   They don’t live as if they’re lucky mud.  Here’s the problem.  We owe God everything, even the air we breathe, yet functionally, we give other things our functional allegiance, our ultimate trust.  And we don’t even see it. Why?  Our desires deceive us.   Instead of God driving our lives forward, our desires do the driving. Yet we can’t even see them in the driver’s seat. 

Human beings have to live for something.  We have to have purpose.   So if we don’t live desiring God, we’ll live our lives desiring something.   Paul gives examples here of two desires that he saw driving people’s lives in his world, pagan religious practices and sexual promiscuity.  But Paul isn’t saying, those are the only desires that qualify.   He’s simply giving examples to make his point.   In fact, in another letter, he talks about greed in this way. And in yet another letter, Galatians, he even gives the example of a desire to live by God’s law.  Now how can the desire to live by God’s law, to be a moral person, be bad?  

Here’s the crucial point.   It’s not desire in and of itself that’s bad.  God created our desires.  What creates the problem is how our desires get out of order.  How they become overwhelming desire, desires that end up dominating our lives.   To get across this point, Paul uses a very unique word in Greek, Epithumia, which means essentially super desire.     Now the translators use the word lust for the word here, which really misses the whole point.   Sure the desire can be sexual, but it’s not about the form of the desire.  It’s about the power of the desire.   That’s what the word means, an overwhelming, dominating desire, an epic desire. 

And if we are not desiring God like this, then guaranteed some other desire, often more than one desire is taking that place.  And that desire will begin to define us and diminish us, even dehumanize us.   We will become more and more our desires, and nothing else.  Now if you’re a Christian, then God has already broken the back of these desires.  But these desires still remain.  You’re hopefully just more aware of them so you can stand against their power.     But if you’re not a Christian, more likely than not, you’re missing these desires completely.  Why?  Your desires don’t seem all that dominating to you.  You don’t see their power.  But if something happens where you might lose them, then you’ll see.  You don’t just have your desires.  Your desires have you.  

Let’s take a few examples of how this works from a talk I recently heard.   Anxiety comes from super-desires mapped onto the future.   Anxiety becomes paralyzing to the degree that I have
some finite desire as the dominating desire for my life (what the Bible would call an idol.)  Let’s say my epi-desire, where I get my functional meaning in life centers around politics, either the Democratic or the Republican Party.   When my party suffers defeat, I’m not just glumly disappointed.   I’m shaken to the depths.  I want to leave the country.  And I’m too furious to speak to anyone who voted for the other side.    (from a sermon by Tim Keller - also in his book Counterfeit Gods)

Guilt comes from super-desire mapped onto the past.   Guilt becomes pathologically intensified to the degree that I have idolized or super-desired finite things.   Let’s say I have a dominating desire for a happy family, and therefore my performance as a parent is valuable above everything else.   Then if my child goes wrong or has big problems, I’m not just sorrowful and grieved.   I’m stricken with neurotic guilt.   I cannot forgive myself.   I hate myself.  I may even become suicidal. 

And lastly anger and bitterness is our super-desire mapped onto the present.  Anger becomes pathologically intensified when someone or something stands between me and what it is I ultimately value.  Suppose my career is the source of my worth, and someone at work is harming it.  I will not just be angry.   I will be so deeply bitter and capable of doing things to this person that I may blow up my career in ways more thoroughly than this person ever could.

Do you begin to get what Paul is showing us, how deadly an out of order, a super desire can be?  And oh how subtle it can be in holding us!   You can see a place that it grabs onto me in the bulletin today.   Under my schedule, I noted how I was going to work tomorrow even though literally no one else on staff would be.   Now why did I decide to do that?   Would the church collapse if I actually took MLK day, if some things got delayed in getting done as a result?   No, of course not.  My decision to work betrays all sorts of super desires, to be seen as the pastor always on the job, my anxiety about successfully doing my job.   Working tomorrow wasn’t about serving God.  It was about serving my own out of order desires.   So I’m going to honor Dr. King, and do something life-giving with my family tomorrow.      

Now what God does do when God sees these desires dominating our lives?  Does God send lightning bolts down?   No.  Paul gives us a far more chilling answer than that.   He says, God just gives us over to them.   This word gives over is one used to describe surrendering to an enemy. God surrenders us to our desires.    The worst thing God can do to you is give you what you want.  It’s why Oscar Wilde said.  When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

Almost 400 years ago, the Puritan preacher Richard Baxter acutely described what this looks like when it comes to wealth.   He described how if you set your heart on money, and actually get it, that it will actually spiritually devastate you.  First of all, you mistake wealth and money-making savvy for character.  Why?  Because you’re smart, and you’re savvy, and you want to believe that it’s because of your character.  So for the rest of your life, you’ll make terrible mistakes in relationships because you mistake wealth and savvy for character.  Because of course, that’s not true.  And you’ll become proud.   Baxter said.  Wealthy folks like that, believe they’re smart about every area, that they’re experts on everything.   And folks around them see the foolishness of the belief, but of course they don’t say anything, because of the person’s power.  Their wealth makes it impossible for people to tell them the truth.   But what’s true of what Baxter says about wealth is true of anything that we make our super desire.   If we get it, it won’t deliver us.  It will destroy us.

So how do we escape?  How do we find a way out?  First, when life hands you hard things, setbacks and disappointments, those things can be gifts.   How you react will show you where your idols are, the super-desires that are dominating your life.    They will give you truths each of us desperately need to see. 

But once we see the problem, how do we become free of it?   In the very last words here, Paul gives us a hint, when he concludes by saying the God who is blessed or praised forever.    In other words, the way you stop worshipping all the wrong things is to worship the right thing. And how do we get there?   Well, who is already blessing and praising God forever?  It’s the angels.  And in 1 Peter 1:10-12, we read this:

¹⁰ Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours made careful search and inquiry.......in regard to the things that have now been announced to you… —things into which angels long to look!    

Do you get this?  Angels long to look at the gospel, at God’s grace towards us, his sacrificial love. They can’t get enough of the beauty of it, the glory, the wonder.   And what is this word, long to look.  It’s the word Epithumia, the word super-desires, what is translated as lust.  The angels lust after the gospel? What does that mean?  The deepest passions of angels’ hearts are satisfied by looking at the love and beauty of Jesus, by reveling in it, rejoicing in it, and it wasn’t even for them.  When the deepest passion of your heart is satisfied by loving and adoring Jesus, that’s what happens.  All the other passions find their place.   You can look at all these things you yearn to have, and say.   I can live without you because I have what ultimately matters, the love of God.    And if I can’t live without you, I’ll never be able to safely live with you.   So don’t dominate my life. Don’t inflict anxiety or guilt or bitterness on me.  I can live free of your power, because I have experienced the beautiful power of the One who died for me.  

The Powerful News That Brings Change

I’ve given up.   I don’t even do it anymore.   It doesn’t really work for me.   Does it work for you?    How many of you made some sort of New Year’s resolution?   Do you know what percentage actually follow through on those things?  8%.  In other words, folks have a 92% failure rate.  Yet still about half of the population makes these resolutions.  Why?  

Folks want to change. They want to break through to a better place in their careers, their relationships, their health, their finances, the list could go on.   That’s great.   Who doesn’t have someplace that they’d like things to be better?   But what if those resolutions point to something deeper?  What if people in these resolutions are searching not simply for a change in habits, but a change in life, a breakthrough in actually who they are.  How does that happen?  

In these words, we’re about to hear, specifically in just two sentences of these words, God gives the answer to that question.  How do you break through to a better life, to the life God actually created you to live?   Here, God shows the way.   Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Romans 1:1-17

Let me tell you about two highly religious people, who tried to change, to become more.   One became a monk, even taught theology in a seminary.  The other became a Anglican priest, and even formed a group at his university called the Holy Club.   Yet in both cases, these two folks failed completely until, by their own accounts, they grasped what we just read.  And when they did, these words changed them forever.    That breakthrough changed their lives. It changed the lives of others.  It even changed history.  The monk was MartinLuther, who started the Reformation, and the priest was John Wesley, who started the Methodist Church.  What did Luther and Wesley see in these words that changed them so completely? 

It all came down to a few sentences, and at least initially one word.  What was the word?   You find it in verse 16.  Paul writes, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew and also to the Greek.  What was the word?  Gospel.  Have you heard that word before?   Do you know what the word means?  We translate it Good News.    But the word in Greek is evangel, which literally means good herald.   It’s where we get the word angel, but that’s not what Paul is talking about.   He is using the word the way everyone else did, the way today we use it, as in the Miami Herald. He is talking about news.  The ancient world had no newspapers. They had heralds, the angeloi   Leaders sent out these heralds, these angeloi, to share the news, usually of some great victory.   “Hear O hear, Caesar has defeated the enemy in Egypt”   People would hear this news, and go home happy. 

Now why would that word angeloi, news have such power?   Because Paul was telling people something profoundly different from every other philosophy or religion.  Other religions give you good advice.  If you want peace or change or an encounter with God, then do these things.     But what is good news.   It’s not advice.  It’s not about anything you do.   It’s about something that has already been done for you.   Do you see the difference?

If you asked someone on the street, what is the core teaching of Christianity?  They might say something like love your neighbor as yourself.   And that’s a great thing.   Jesus certainly thought so.  But is that news?   Is that something that has been done for you, outside of you, something so momentous that just knowing that news changes you?    No.  So it’s not gospel. It’s not news.               

If someone tells you that the message of Christianity is to love your neighbor as yourself, you get three reactions.   A person might go, yeah, whatever, I knew that.     Or they might think, sheesh, I can’t do that.  Or they might say, well, I’m doing that all the time already.   As the preacher Tim Keller puts it, it’s either shrugged or bugged or smug, but no breakthrough.

If your faith focuses more on what you need to do for God, then on what God has done for you, you’re not getting it.   You’re probably wondering.   Why did we just baptize this little baby, Alexandra.  She can’t do anything.   That’s the point.   We’re talking about something that God has already done for her, for you.  She doesn’t have to do anything.  It’s already been done.

So what has already been done?     That’s where the sentence in verse 17 comes in.  “For in it (that is the good news), in the good news, the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”

What does this mean?  It means that because of what has been done for you, God looks at you differently.  God only sees the beautiful, wonderful things about you.  All the ugliness is gone, at least as far as God is concerned.   Do you see the power of that?

So many folks think the gospel is all about forgiveness.   I do bad things, and God forgives me because of Jesus.   Yeah, that’s true.  But that doesn’t get to the heart.   That’s not the part that blew Luther and Wesley away.   That’s not what Paul is saying here.  

Decades ago, I worked with night clubs in New York City.  And I learned that you couldn’t just walk into those places.  You had to look the part, and if the doormen deemed you acceptable, you get the privilege of paying an outrageous entrance charge, and going in.   It hasn’t changed too much.  That’s still the deal at the clubs on SouthBeach.  Now as someone who worked for the public relations firm that handled the club, I could get on the list.  If you were on the list, you could simply go to the front, say to the doorman, I’m on the list, and voila, automatic entry without even a cover charge.   Doing that, I gotta admit, felt awesome. I felt very cool.

But to get on the list I had to justify myself.   I had to say that I was bringing some reporter in to do a story or some contact at a fashion magazine.   I couldn’t just go in.   

But imagine being automatically on the list, every night, every club.   It doesn’t matter how geekily you’re dressed or how much you weigh or how you look, the doormen waves you in every time.  Oh, Mr. McGowan, please go right in.   Now getting in some club might not rock your world, but do you get the point? 

That’s what Paul is telling you.   You’re on the list.  You don’t have to do anything to justify your place there.   Jesus has placed your name there, and it is never, ever coming off.   It doesn’t matter how righteous you’ve been or not been, you’re on the list.  Jesus made sure of that by paying an infinite price to put you there.    All you need to do now is simply trust that it’s true.    And we’re not talking about a dance club, we’re talking about becoming a son or daughter of God.   In other words, you go to God, and say, remember me, your son, and God goes, “Hey, son!  You look awesome!” 

You are on the list.   You are righteous period.   If someone asks you, are you a Christian? And you say, well, I’m trying to be.  You don’t get it.  It’s a standing you have.   You’re on the list.  That’s it. 

Now if you’re going, well, that’s good news for the Luthers and Wesleys of the world, those filled with religious guilt, but not for me.  Don’t kid yourself. People have all sorts of things they make their righteousness, how they get their standing in the world, how they assure themselves of their value or worth.  It could be money or success or popularity or relationships or family, whatever.  Everyone does it.  Everyone looks for this validation somewhere.  But I don’t care where your righteousness is, it will be blown away, if nothing else, then by death.   Only this righteousness lasts.

Do you feel the power of it?  That’s what Paul calls it, power.  Paul doesn’t say that it channels the power of God.  Paul says.  It is the power of God.  You get this, and the power of God flows into you.   

Paul gives us two ways that we feel the power.  First, this news bothers us.  It’s why Paul said he wasn’t ashamed of the gospel.  He knew.   People found this news, weird, even offensive.  They think.  This is way too easy.  You believe, and you’re on the list, like that?  Prostitutes, war criminals, you believe and you’re on the list?   Yep.  If you find that distasteful, then you are feeling the power.   Others feel it’s way too simplistic.   I believe that I’m on the list, and I’m on the list?  Really?   No course I have to take, no esoteric knowledge, no techniques.  Nope.  Believe you’re on the list, and you are.   And don’t think this is some intellectual affirmation, this is personal.  You believe this.  You feel it.  You feel the acceptance. You feel the love.   You break through.  And that brings us to the other way, you feel the power.

The power does more than offend you, it changes you.  At the beginning, Paul puts it this way.  He addresses the Roman Christians;.  To all, God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints.   When you feel the love of the list, that you are the beloved, what happens?   You feel an irresistible attraction to live like the One who put you there.   You can never get the righteousness of God put upon you, without feeling it growing in you.   You can’t feel the love without wanting to live the love.   You feel the call, the beckoning to live like Jesus and you can’t help but answer.   That’s the power that broke through Luther and Wesley; that has broken through the lives of billions.  Do you feel it?   If you don’t, you can feel it right now.  It’s that simple.  It’s that easy.  Believe it or not.  

Becoming a Person of Life-Giving Radiance - How Does That Happen?

I’ve been wondering lately.  What happened to sunny Florida?   We still get sun, but, it hasn’t been as sunny as normal.   Have you noticed it, the rain, the clouds, even the sticky humidity?   Isn’t summer over?    

But I still remember what it was like when I lived in the Northeast, and that was far worse.  I’m not talking about the cold and snow.  I could handle that.    No, what really got to me was the lack of sun.  Week after week I would wake up to a smothering blanket of clouds.   Sure it was light.  I knew the sun was there somewhere.  But I couldn’t see it.   No one could.   And not seeing it drained me.  It was awful.

In fact, not seeing the sun is so awful, so draining for many folks, that they get seriously depressed, even kill themselves.   It’s called Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD (which is kind of appropriate).  Doctors even prescribe sun lamps to keep these SAD folks healthy when they lack sun. 

Now here’s the stunning truth, Jesus expects those who follow him to be as life-giving as the sun, lights shining in the midst of a dark world.  He even called us that.  He said in Matthew 5.  “You are the light of the world.” And what is the light of the world?   It’s the sun.  

Christians should be so incredibly life-giving, that when you don’t see them around it depresses you.   Can you imagine if that were true?   If someone didn’t hang around Christians for a while, they’d get depressed.  Doctors would even diagnose it, SCAD (Scarcity of Christians Affective Disorder).   They’d ask you to get some Christian friends so you’d feel better. 

But how does that happen?  How do Christians become that life-giving, that vibrant and joyful?  It has happened before. It’s how the church spread from a few hundred followers to millions in the space of a few hundred years.   But how did it happen?  How can it happen again?    In these powerful prophetic words, God points the way.  Let’s hear what God has to say.

Isaiah 60:1-5,10-16

It’s stunning really.    Isaiah talks about a time when those who follow God will shine so radiantly that entire nations will be drawn to them.  The rulers of the world will come “to the brightness of your dawn.”   How do followers of Jesus become radiant like that?  Here in Isaiah, God tells us.    It happens when the ultimate radiance, when God, the source of all life, truth and beauty dwells within us.   And how does that indwelling happen?  It happens when we grasp the truth of who we are, and see the beauty of what God has done for us.  The more we do, the more God’s life grows within us.

After all any light we have comes from God.  And that’s where Isaiah begins.   He talks about God as the Sun, as God’s coming as the dawn.   And what an image that is.   Have you even been at the ocean at sunrise, seen how dark it is, and then that first glimmer of light on the horizon, how it stretches and grows.  Before you know it, that rising sun has literally lit up the world.  It is amazing, and it happens every day!  

Yet how we take the sun for granted.   Do you realize nothing living would exist without it?   But beyond simply the life it gives us, it gives us truth too.   We see things more clearly in the light.    In the end it is only light that enables us to see anything.  But beyond truth and life, the sun gives us beauty.   The sun opens us to the vibrant colors of the world.   Its very presence makes the world more beautiful.   What a great image to use to describe God.  Even so, it’s limited.

After all, God doesn’t simply give life to this planet.   God gives life to everything.  God undergirds all of reality.   Without God, reality would collapse.  Now, some folks wonder.  Well, if God is that huge, why don’t we have more evidence of God?   Well, if you are part of reality, it’s going to be pretty hard for you to discern what lies beneath it.    Heck, when it comes to reality itself, we know so little.  Do you know how much of the universe we can actually see, and I’m talking with telescopes and colliders, everything we have?   4%.  That’s it.  Why? Because the other 96% of the universe doesn’t interact with light.   Light passes through it like it’s not even there.   We have no clue, even now, about 96% of the universe.      

But God doesn’t simply undergird all reality, from God comes all truth and beauty.   Only in God do we see clearly.    And all that is beautiful comes from God.   God is the author of all beauty. 

But Isaiah doesn’t stop with God as the sun.   Isaiah tells us that this God will shine upon us, that through us, God’s radiance will shine into the world.   In that radiance, war will end.   Beauty will blossom as never before.   And all the world will see in us the life of God bursting forth.    Now Isaiah is giving a vision of the final day, of the end to which God is moving all history.   Still, that light should be showing a bit right now, that radiance should be starting to shine forth already.   But how does it shine forth?  How does that light grow within us?  

Well, let me first tell you how it doesn’t happen. If I had a brick here, and I piled up another brick and another brick and another.   You would say that the bricks are growing, yes?  But a few years ago, we also planted some trees down where we have the pumpkin patch, and when we planted them, they were maybe 15 feet tall.  But now I look at them, they must be almost thirty feet tall.   That’s some growth, yeah?   

God grows the life within us the same way that tree grows, but too often people think that God’s life grows in us like the bricks.    They think.   Ok, if I attend worship, serve the church, do the right things, obey the rules, if I pile up good deeds, then the life of God grows within me.  But God’s growth doesn’t work that way.   The life of God doesn’t grow mechanically in us like brick upon brick.   It grows organically like a tree.  

That’s why you can have people who can be part of a church for years, and still pretty much be the same people they were when they first came in.   Whatever good deeds, they’ve piled up on the outside hasn’t changed anything on the inside.   It’s all mechanical.   Do you realize that two of the most famous Christians ever, Martin Luther and John Wesley, were both ministers before either of them became Christians, before, by their own accounts, they experienced the life of God in them. They were both doing lots of good things.  But they were growing like a pile of bricks not like a tree.  They were not changing on the inside.

If you’ve been a Christian for a while, are you a happier person than you were two years ago?   Are you harder to discourage?  Are you humbler, able to take criticism better?  Are you wiser, more self-aware than you used to be?   Do you worry less?   If you don’t know, ask someone close to you.  Am I growing?   I wonder how many of you won’t ask simply because you are afraid of the answer.  But here’s the question.  If it’s not happening, are you children of the light then?   Has God’s glory really appeared over you?   Because if it has, then you grow, not simply in the things you do, but who you are.   The light of God changes you.  God’s life lives within you.  You grow in love and peace and joy and patience and humility and wisdom and self-control.   And if you grow like that, than you become incredibly attractive.  

In the early days of Christianity, so many believers were persecuted that the church had to worry about informers infiltrating their gatherings.  So non-believers, the non-baptized, could not come to worship gatherings.  The Deacons even served as bouncers to keep them out.   But the church still grew remarkably rapidly.  So how did it happen, if you couldn’t even invite your friends to hear the preacher?  It happened because simply the lives of Christians magnetically attracted others.  Their generosity, their kindness, their integrity; how they welcomed others into their homes, even strangers; how they handled suffering and how they cared for the poor; all of it stunned those around them. It made them irresistibly attractive.

So how does that sort of attractive, magnetic life happen?  Let’s go back to that Sun metaphor. The light and life of God grows within you when you see two things: when you see the truth of who you are, and the beauty of what God has done. 

After all, when the lights come on, what happens?  You see things. When God’s light dawns in you, you see things in yourself that you never saw before.

When I was in college, my friends and I went to a dance club, called the FOE club.   Now it wasn’t the fanciest club in the world, but I thought it was still pretty nice.  But I only saw it in the dark.    But then, I visited the club during the day.  What a shock!   The placed looked awful, worn, stained carpet, tables with water-marks and nicks, holes in the ceiling.   It was revolting.  After that, I never saw the place the same way again.  

So how do you know the light of God is dawning in your life?  You have a FOE club experience.  You see yourself like never before, and what you see isn’t pretty.  You see your flaws, your dirty places; stuff that you made excuses for before, or didn’t even see.   The more the light of God dawns in you, the more you see that stuff.  That’s what it means to become a Christian.  You look at your life, and you never see it the same way again.

Before the light of God dawns, you look at verses like we’re going to look at in Romans in the New Year.    “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  No one is righteous, no not one.”   And you think.   How pessimistic!  How exaggerated.  I know lots of good people.   I’m not perfect, but I do good things.   But when the light comes on, you realize.  If everything, even my very existence, comes from God, then everything I do should be for God.  But you realize.  You’ve probably never done anything for God ever.  Even your good deeds weren’t for God.  You did them to get praise, to feel good about yourself.   Even your religious deeds were all about you.   And you see that everything in your life is tainted by that, twisted by it into something not pretty at all.    And if you don’t see that yet, then the light hasn’t come on.  

But when that light does, when you see the truth of who you actually are, it leads you to the beauty, to the beauty of what God has done for you.  Verses ten to sixteen here shows you that.    God is speaking to a people that he has sent into exile because of their evil.   But now he says though I struck you down in anger, now I will have mercy on you.   Though you were forsaken and hated, now I will make you majestic forever, a joy from age to age.   Then God says, then you will know that I the Lord, am your Savior, your Redeemer, the mighty one of Jacob.  

If you had been an Israelite hearing that, that God would be your redeemer?   You’d think.  I can’t take that literally.  That’s crazy.   Why is it crazy?   Because not just anyone could become a redeemer.   In Israel, if you got so far in debt, that you could not hope to pay back your lenders, you had one hope.   You needed a redeemer.    But only a member of your family could become that.  And that member had to take on everything, the entire debt.   Only that would save you.  Now do you see how weird it is for God to say that?  An Israelite would think. God can’t be a member of my family, can’t become my blood, much less cover all my debt.

But now we know not only that God can, but God did.   Jesus in John 5 lays it right out.  He says.   I am the Light of the World.   I am the Glory of God dawning upon you.   I am God come to be your kinsman, your blood.   I am God come to redeem you.   How did Jesus redeem us?   How did he pay our debt?

Isaiah 60 shows us.   Jesus was struck down in anger, so that we might find favor.  Jesus was forsaken and hated so that we might become a joy from age to age.  On that cross, darkness literally fell upon Jesus.   The light of the world fell into darkness.   What does that mean?    If God is light, then the further you are from God, the darker things become.  It’s a darkness that takes you away from the source of all life and beauty and truth.  That’s the darkness that came over Jesus.   He became cut off from God, totally and completely, utterly forsaken.  Why?  So that we would never be forsaken.   He took on the darkness we deserve so that he might give us the light; that we might become the radiance of God.   And when you grasp the beauty of that,  the depth of that love for you.   It changes you.   It frees you.   You live in confident humility. Why?  You know how cherished you are.  You give of yourself freely.  Why?  You see how freely God gave himself for you.   That’s how it happens.  You see the truth of who you are.  You see the beauty of what he did.  And in that truth and beauty, the life comes.  And in that life, you become more than you ever dreamed that you could be.  You become the light of the world.  

Ringing in Hope, Ringing in the Light

I love trivia.   I don’t just love it because it makes me a wicked trivial pursuit player, though it does.  I love it because a little known fact can change the way I see the world.  One piece of trivia can cause me to see things I always took for granted in a whole new light. 

Take these handbells here.   Did you know in the middle ages, we baptizedthe bells?   Folks believed that once a bell got baptized, it could ward off evil spirits.  So when people died, they had a ringer come in and ring the bell at the bedside as the person passed.   Otherwise the evil spirits that hung around would seize the person’s soul as they died.  The bigger the bell you rang, the better; bigger bells kept the evil spirits further away. 

That’s why people started hangingbells in the doorways of their homes.   They thought that evil spirits were always hanging around outside just waiting to get in.   So if you rung the bell when you visited someone, you’d chase them away.  You’d both protect yourself and them too from the evil spirits lurking about.   That’s why even today we have doorbells in our houses.   After hearing that, will you ever take for granted your doorbell again?     

And I’m sure glad that we had a lot of bell-ringing today.  We need it.  Our world needs it. In the last months, we’ve seen how evil can hit us anywhere.  Death and mayhem can come in ways and to places we could never have imagined.  We live in a world that can be very dark.  

But in the face of such darkness, Christmas comes with a profound response.  That’s why we celebrate it at this time of year.  We don’t know when Jesus was born.   Our best guess doesn’t lead us to December, but maybe the fall or the spring, but definitely not the winter.   So why do we celebrate his birth now?   As Christianity spread, it connected to people who had other traditions, ones often rooted in the seasons.  So, folks would hold a celebration called Yule around the time of the winter solstice, the time when the nights were longest, and they days shortest.   They did so to remember that even in the dead of winter, soon would come the new life of spring.   What better time to celebrate Jesus’ coming than then, early Christian leaders thought, a time when darkness hangs so heavy.  What better time could there be to remember the coming of the light of God’s love to the world.    So around the year 300, Christians set Christmas in the darkest days of the year.

Still in the midst of these days of terrorism and uncertainty, it can be hard to see that light at times.  Fear can hold us instead of hope. How do you not let the fear take hold?  How do you live in the hope and confidence of the good news that proclaims no evil shall defeat Jesus’s love?  In these words, words written in the midst of darker days than these, God shows us the way.  Let’s hear what God has to say. 

Zephaniah 3:14-20

As Zephaniah shares this incredible song of joy, his nation has suffered under the two worst kings in their entire history, Amon and Mannaseh.    And Zephaniah knew just how bad they had been.  He saw it up close.  He was a member of the royal family.  If you read the rest of the book, you’ll see how angry their abuses made him.  Yet here he closes his writings with exuberant joy?  What’s up with that?

Zephaniah understood that these evil kings hadn’t written the end of the story.  God was writing that.   That’s why Zephaniah can write a song of joy even after the calamitous rule of two kings.  He knew that somehow, some way God will work it out.   The darkness would not win.   God’s light would shine through.  And as crazy as that sounded, he was right.  After the reign of those two horrible kings, God brought to the throne, a young boy, named Josiah.  Josiah became, after King David, Israel’s greatest king.

But Zephaniah wasn’t simply pointing to Josiah.  Zephaniah was looking further ahead than that.   Zephaniah was telling us that, even when it may not seem that way, evil is dying.   The light of love is spreading.   God is making what is broken whole.    Zephaniah was looking ahead to the One who would bring that light of love like no one else, to the coming of the one whose light would shine in the darkness as no other.   

And indeed here we are, 2000 years later, looking back at that good news that Zephaniah could only look towards.   And indeed in spite of this world’s brokenness and pain, that light still shines.   Indeed it has changed the world.  Too often in our world, we hear all the bad news.  But in reality this year has been the best yet in human history.   37% of the world used to be desperately poor.  Now less than 10% is.  Violent crime is at at its lowest level likely ever with 600,000 less violent crimes in this country alone than 20 years ago.  Today more kids are in school than ever.   Polio has been virtually eradicated, and measles outbreaks have been cut by 2/3s saving 17 million lives.  And these transformations happened because of the transforming value that followers of Jesus brought to the world.   Today, what began in an obscure Roman province in a small town among a poor family now captures the world.   If God could in that small event change the world so profoundly, do you really think some hate-filled extremists in the Middle East are stressing him out?  

So in those moments, when you sense the darkness rushing in, the fear rising up, the discouragement seeping into your soul, ring the bells.  Let the light shine in.  Christmas is coming.    And when you see the darkness that lies in your own heart, don’t let that deter you either.   As the great song-writer Leonard Cohen put it:

Ringthe bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

When you see the cracks in you, and in our world, remember that in those cracks the light of Jesus shines.    His perfect love will cast out your fear.   His faithful presence will make room in you for hope and joy.  His light will overwhelm your darkness.  And you will experience that hope that no circumstance can take away.   You will know that God’s love will win, because that love has won you. But Jesus didn’t simply come to let the light shine in.  Jesus came so that together we might shine the light out.  The more we let Jesus work, the brighter the light of his love will shine into the dark places around us, turning our world from violence toward peace, from vengeance towards compassion, from death towards life.   That is the call of Christmas, to let that light shine, to let it shine brighter and brighter until by God’s grace, there lives only the light of God’s love. 

Ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in

In the name of the God who first loved us, who gave his life for us, and who is doing more in us and in our world than we could ever ask or dream or imagine. Amen.

Don't get distracted. God is Working in the Small Far More than the Big.

I still remember the thrill.   I walked into that big room, with those video cameras rolling around on wheels, cables slung in every direction.   And there before me, stood the bleachers I had seen on TV, filled with lucky youngsters such as me.  Now it was my turn.  I was appearing on the Bob Brandy show.   If you grew up in Chattanooga, TN in the 70s or 60s for that matter, nothing was bigger than Bob Brandy, our own TV cowboy.  (His real name was Robert Brandenburg – I don’t think I need to tell you why he shortened it.)

Each weekday, and then on Saturdays, Bob would appear with his beautiful wife, Ingrid, and his horse, Rebel.   (There they are).  Each week, lucky kids from the TV audience would sit on Rebel, and try to throw a ball into a barrel.   That might not sound exciting now, but when I was seven, it sounded awesome!

I don’t remember much about my time on the Bob Brandy show except that it did kinda did feel awesome.   But today when I see what appears on TV, I don’t feel so awesome.   I see reports of mass shootings or politicians snapping at each other or the latest horror from ISIS.   The ads urge me to buy things I can’t afford.  The shows highlight people who gain fame by behaving rudely or acting stupidly.  It’s not all bad, but I gotta tell you.  I kinda miss Bob Brandy.  Do you know what I mean?  Do you ever get discouraged about what appears at the center of our culture; about what gets rewarded in the halls of power?    Does it trouble you how often the evil or simply the shallow seizes the world’s attention? And all of that attention carries power, power that can lead you to distraction, to lose focus on what ultimately matters.  How do you deal with a world that highlights so often the wrong things?  And how do you make sure you focus on the right?  In these ancient prophetic words, God shows us the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Isaiah 9:1-7,11:1-10

The world around us often centers its attention, even its praise on things that are hollow, even false.   How do you deal with that?   And how do you not get swayed by that attention?   How do you live a live that centers on what really matters rather than one that gets distracted by what doesn’t matter at all?  

Here God shows us the way.  God reminds us.  The truly great things rarely get noticed. The significant things rarely appear on TV.  Why?   Because God works in ways so obscure and small, you can hardly see them.  Yet in that obscurity, God is doing things so great, so utterly huge, they can hardly be believed.  

That’s what this first prophecy points out right at the beginning.   It tells us that God’s deliverance is coming from, of all places, Zebulun and Naphtali.   Zebulun and Naphtali were in the far north of Israel, right on the border.  And by Isaiah’s day, hardly any Israelites even lived there anymore.   That title Galilee of the Nations means literally Galilee of the Gentiles.  Do you get how weird this is?  Shouldn’t God’s deliverance happen in Jerusalem, the center of things, and not out in the boonies, where few Israelites even lived?   Yet Isaiah tells us.  No, God’s deliverance comes from here.  

And not only that, what will God’s deliverance be?   Isaiah says it will be a child.   But then Isaiah gives us the names of this child.  Wonderful counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.   Do you see what Isaiah is doing? He is giving this child divine names, not just divinish names, but names like Mighty God.   Isaiah is telling us.  God isn’t just sending you some great king or prophet.   God is sending himself.   The creator of the universe will become a human being.  

G.K. Chesterton’s Christmas poems capture the wonderof this so well.   

The Child that was ere worlds begun
    (…We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone…)
The Child that played with moon and sun
    Is playing with a little hay.

The child that played with moon and sun is playing with a little hay…In no other religion do you find this, a God who becomes an utterly vulnerable part of his creation like this.   And in case, we still didn’t get it.   In Chapter 11, Isaiah makes it clear again.   He tells us in verse 1 that a shoot shall come from the stump of Jesse.   That makes sense.   Jesse is the father of King David, the greatest King of Israel, and so this baby will come from his royal line.  But then in verse 11, he tells us this.   On that day, the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples.  Hold on.  You’re telling me this child is the root of Jesse.  How can he come before Jesse, who has been dead for a thousand years?  But that’s the stunning reality that Isaiah is telling us.   This child will be both shoot and root, will be both human and divine.  And what will this child do?    Will he conquer Israel’s enemies, make them a great kingdom again?   No, forget that.  This child will transform nature.  Wolves and lambs will lie down together. Lions will eat hay.  God’s presence will fill the world as waters fill the ocean. 

Do you see how incredibly big this is?    Yet how will it happen?  It will happen in the most out of the way place you can imagine.   It will occur in the smallest way possible with the birth of a child, something that happens countless times every day.    Yet that’s how God works.  No, let me correct that.  That’s how God did work. 

Let’s do a little thought experiment for a moment.  Imagine if I came to y’all one day, and said “Hey, I really want my son to be successful. I want your feedback on my plan of success.”  You might ask, “What do you mean by success?”   And let’s say I said, “Well, 2000 years from now, virtually everyone on earth will know his name.   25% of the world’s population will center their life around him, and his birthday will be the biggest holiday on the planet.   His teaching will be the most influential in human history, and be the foundation of two or three major civilizations.”    Now, you might reply, “Wow. That is ambitious.  What’s your plan?”   Well, he’ll need to be poor, and never travel any further than a few days by foot from his home.   He won’t go to any prestigious schools, certainly not college.   He’ll do manual labor for most of his life.    And he won’t associate with anyone who has any real power, political or religious.    And when he is coming close to his peak years of productivity, say early 30s, he’ll be arrested and executed in disgrace.”   Do you see how God works?   God came to earth as a child, and the child of an unwed mother at that.   But in that child and in his obscure life, God changes everything. 

Do you want to work where God is working?  Forget what gets the news and the fame.   Go to the places and people that few pay attention to.   There you’ll find God at work.

God reminded me of that again when I learned about John Barfield.   About 90 years ago, John Barfield was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.   But he almost didn’t live past his second birthday.  He caught a fever, and nothing was bringing it down.   Then two white women in long white dresses walked into his family’s house.  They handed Barfield’s father a note with an address and told him to find the house and to hurry.  Then they disappeared.   His father ran all the way to the white side of town.  He found the man, a doctor, who rushed to his son’s bedside and stayed there all night.   John recovered.  And what of those two women?   No-one had ever seen them before that night, and no-one saw them afterwards ever.  They came to the only conclusion they could.  God had intervened directly to spare that child’s life. 

What happened to John Barfield?  He never graduated from high school.  He got a job as a janitor at the University of Michigan.  But then he started his own cleaning company.   And from there, he started 11 companies and provided jobs for tens of thousands of African Americans looking for a way out of poverty.  His firm Bartech Group now has hundreds of millions in revenue.  PBS has done a documentary on his life.  And his memoir is raising funds to immunize children from polio in the poorest places on the planet.   Amazing huh?   But that’s how God works, in the places that no one notices, and in those places, doing things bigger than anyone could ever imagine.   

That’s why on Friday, we’re hosting a tour of our partner school, Hollywood Central.   At Hollywood Central, over half of the children, get free or reduced lunch or breakfast.  A good number live in hotels off Federal Highway.   Yet God is working in those kids. That’s not the question.  The question is are you going to make time to come and see that work, to even be part of it?    This Christmas, part of our offering will go to care for our HIV orphans in Haiti.   Those who have seen that work know the powerful things God is doing there.  That’s not the question.  The question is how many of your dollars will go to what the advertisers tell you is important and how many to what God does?  

Sisters and brothers, you can’t get distracted by the glittering and the glamorous.   That is never where God is doing his greatest work.   Just look at this meal.  It’s not much to look at really.   A small piece of bread.   A little touch of juice.   Yet here God will do more in you than in any other meal you will ever have. In this simple meal, Jesus will fill you with the beautiful, wondrous, powerful love of God.   And don’t worry about what you need to bring.  All you need is to bring yourself.  God will do the rest.  God will work even in the smallest, most obscure places in your heart, and in those places bring to birth things more wondrous and more beautiful than you could ever imagine.  Just as he did in that manger in Bethlehem so will he do there.