Nate's Weekly Rant

2008-11-24T14:21:00.002-05:00

Sorry it has been so long since I posted. Planting a church is a lot of work and very time consuming. I also don;t have the internet at home yet (we just moved, and believe it or not, it is not available yet. It thought it was 2008, but apparently in parts of Massachusetts it is not). So here is my next chapter to my book. Hope you like it.

Chapter 4

Television:

TV has been a mainstay of American culture for 70 plus years now. Almost every home in the US owns one, and many have more. It is such a part of us, that even at live shows there are cameras that project the stars on giant TV’s. We go to sports games and watch all the action on the Jumbotron. Advertising is even giving up traditional billboards in favor of giant TV’s running their visions. In this chapter we are going to look at 5 values of the Après Post that are present in Television. They are sexuality and sensuality, violence and honor, sports, polytheism, and materialism. Some of these thoughts will be revisited in the Cult of Personality, Movies, and Superheroes, but I will try my best not to be too redundant.

We must remember that TV serves two purposes today. First it mirrors culture. People want to see themselves and their values in what they watch. If something doesn’t resonate with us, we don’t continue to watch it. The shows that do best are the ones that “speak” to us. They are the ones that reinforce our own thoughts, values, and desires. But TV also does something else, it drives culture as well. The most culturally powerful people work in entertainment, and as such, they get to choose the agenda. They change the landscape slowly though, so as to still appeal to the masses.

We can see how this has worked by studying briefly the history of acceptable television. There was a time when nudity was nowhere to be found on televison. More than this, everyone was married, there were no one night stands. Casual sex was not even joked about. It was thought inappropriate to show a couple in the same bed, even when that couple had been married for decades. We look back and laugh at old sitcoms with their two twin beds, but forget that even showing the bedroom was risqué. The culture of the 40’s would not have it, and so TV didn’t show it. But slowly the media began to push the boundaries. TV first showed a bedroom, and then this became common. Soon a genie bared her stomach[i] (for shame). After that a man had female roommates[ii]. The youth grew up seeing men and women share a house, and with a little bit of skin. This was the new norm. Slowly, sexual encounters began to be shown. By the 80’s soap operas and their night time equivalents are filming all manner of depravity. Things that couldn’t even be insinuated are now present in all their “glory”. And then cable arrives, and HBO. Nudity and sex were now available. Because it wasn't broadcast, it was accepted (this will be revisited in greater detail on the chapter in movies).

Today HBO originals are aired on a variety of different networks. By pushing the boundaries slowly, TV executives were able to slide their agenda along. They reflected the culture with one hand, and enlarged it with another. People watched because it resonated, and then they assimilated the new values into their world view. Après Post culture began to seep into the contemporary script. And largely we were not aware. I think the Simpsons said it best when in the future, Marge says, “Fox turned into a porno channel so slowly, I didn’t even notice.”[iii] This is what has happened today. The values that were portrayed 50 years ago changed so slowly nobody noticed. The new prophets and priests convinced the world to bow to their gods.

Now that we have explored how this has happened, it begs the question, “What are the new values we are being sold?” As I already said, I believe there are five of them, so let’s look at each one. Sexuality and sensuality are the easiest to see, so we shall start there.

I want to first assert that there is not much difference between the two, which is why I list them together. One always follows the other. Sensuality, in its barest form, is just lust for all the senses. Its power is in sexualizing everything. Strawberries are sensual because we associate them with sex. The sexuality sold to us today is sensual. It strives to enflame the senses. Sex is sold as something elegant and sexy. Not as messy and clumsy (although beautiful and worshipful within marriage). This is part of the lie. If TV were to show sex as it really is, I doubt we would watch. But it is sold as something different. It is poetry and champagne. The two, sexuality and sensuality are the same. I will be using them interchangeably for the remainder of the book.

As we already saw with my previous example, sexuality creeped into television. It was once taboo to even say the word, and now it is almost impossible to not see the act. More than this, the type of sexual relationship changed as well. Once we saw happily married couples. Now we see one night stands. Promiscuity is the rule. Sure, there are still families in the traditional sense, but these are being fazed out. Most shows that are not sitcoms have divorcees, casual hook ups, and live together boyfriends and girlfriends. We see shows like Sex and the City where the women are sexual huntresses, have, multiple partners, and are proud of this, and shows like Swingtown, where key parties are celebrated.

It is near impossible to find shows where partial nudity is not found. We have elevated sex to levels only held in pagan societies. Music videos are glorified orgies, and reality TV is soft-core porn. All women of any worth are perfect. It is hard to find normal looking people anywhere in a staring role. They are all beautiful. Men shave their bodies and have rippling abs, women shave their bodies and have gigantic breasts. Après Post is selling us gods. These beautiful people have sex with very little consequences. It is just what they do. We are told that it is what we should do too. Woman should be 100 pounds, wrinkle free, and leggy, men 200 pounds, pure muscle, and also wrinkle free. Sensuality is held in the highest. If we smell good, look good, have white teeth, appeal to the senses, then we can have lots of sex. Look at commercials for Axe body spray. Perfect Greek gods spray themselves with a can of good smelling liquid, and then have casual sex with other Greek gods.

It is pagan culture that elevates sex and sensuality to such lofty expectations and ideals. Jesus, remember, was an average looking man. It was the Parthenon that had the ideal human forms. I don’t believe anyone would argue with me that TV is sexy. But we have mainly attributed this to Post Modern culture. We see it as an overthrow of the Modern morality. I don’t believe this has been true since the 70’s. In the 60’s there was free sex that I would say was Post Modern, or at least more Post Modern than today (I am unsure if any sexual culture can be anything but pagan). Women were celebrated the way they were. Men could have beards or not. There was a return to the natural. There was no ideal body. In true Post Modern form, you could look like you wanted.

This is not Après Post though. Après Post has absolutes. There are ideals that need to be worshipped. There are expectations we need to live up to. We have a moral duty to be sensual. There are shows like Queer Eye For the Straight Guy, What Not to Wear, etc, that correct the way people look. They stop the individuals from their un-sensuality. They are reinforcing the idea that we all have an obligation to look as sexually appealing as we can. We must be sensual. The Hollywood icons that are paraded before us are our models and gods, and we should try to be as like them as possible. The greatest thing a woman can be is sexy. She knows she is doing good when she has lots of sex. This is the hidden theme in many TV shows today. It is no different for the man.

Après Post is consistent in its morality. Men and women alike are to be sexually promiscuous and good looking. Metro-sexuality, the idea that men should primp and preen as long as women, go to stylist instead of barbers, get pedicures, etc, is all around. Shows on networks like E! and VH1 constantly remind us who the sexiest people are, and who they are sleeping with. There are constant fashion tips on the TV guide network, and even broadcast television got in the game, with shows like Extreme Makeover, and The Swan, a show where ugly people (un-sensual) were given plastic surgery to “fix” them. Sensuality is everywhere on television.

And it is everywhere in our culture because of it. Girls have eating disorders, guys go to gyms and take steroids. Clothes are made that hide little, and what they do hide have words on them to draw our attention to it. The highest ideal is being desired. This is not love. Desire is lust. It is never satisfied. It is selfish. It is pagan. Love looks beyond the skin, desire only wants it. TV has been able for a generation to sell its pagan ideals, and culture has adapted. We will look more in depth at this when we talk about pornography, so I want to stop the discussion here for now.

What is important is that TV both reinforces and drives the culture. If sex and sexuality are major themes in TV shows, then they must also be major ideals in society. I don’t think any would disagree. Keep in mind though, this new sexuality is not a revolution against “repressive” Modernity. It is something more. It is far more insidious. It is not a lack of moral values that is driving American cinematic sexuality anymore, but an embrace of pagan values. This means it can be far longer lasting, and far wider reaching. Its impact will be far greater than that of Post Modern sexuality, which has already been caste aside. Tell teenagers to stop shaving and wearing deodorant because they are “of the man”, and watch the reaction you will get. They won’t do it. They know that they have to try to be like the ideals set before them. They have fully embraced a pagan sexuality that idolizes and idealizes sex. Their sexual orientation may be a choice, but their sexuality isn’t. Their gods look perfect and so must they.

Violence is probably the second most prevalent truth in television today. I will throughout associate violence with honor culture, a pagan virtue that has no place in Christendom. We can all agree that there is violence in almost every non-sitcom TV right now, but that in and off itself doesn’t prove anything, except that there is a lot of violence on TV. So instead of looking at all violence on TV, I want to look at two specific cases that I feel are the most Après Post. These are Reality TV and Ultimate Fighting.

First let us examine Reality TV. We have all seen some of the craziness that Reality TV has produced. As for me, I weekly watch The Soup and Best Week Ever to keep up with pop culture and not have to sit through any of it. These shows give highlights of almost all things relevant to the week. These aren’t my only sources, but they are too good not to use. And what I have learned from watching them and briefly watching a reality show here or there, is that they are all about honor, and honor breeds violence.

Before we look at specific examples of Reality TV violence, it will behoove us to see why honor begets violence. And it is a rather simple explanation. Honor is a selfish virtue. It is about maintaining your good name, your appearance to others. When honor is threatened, we are threatened, and the usual reaction to threat is fight or flight. But if we take flight in an honor culture, we have disgraced ourselves even more. So there is really only once choice when threatened and that is fight. If we don’t then we are giving up our standing forever. People seem to know this instinctually on some level, and this instinct can be honed and refined if the culture is right for it. Honor is the natural cause of selfishness. Again, this has its roots in Post Modernity, but it has grown beyond them. Post Modernity in casting off all truth, also cast off the idea that others should be cared for. When it decided it would not accept some Judeo-Christian morality, like bans on premarital sex, it couldn’t accept any of them, like love as the greatest virtue. What was left was a vacuum, a theme that has, and will continue to emerge throughout or cultural survey. The only thing left was the self. All other truth was caste aside. These are conditions ripe for honor culture.

When people began to look for truths again, as Post Modernity is left in the past, a new value system has to emerge. Having abandoned Judeo-Christian morality, Après Post is left with really only one choice, pagan morality. And pagan morality will place honor at the top of its list of virtues. The others are bravery, strength, and self reliance. The moralities of pagan society elevates things that Christianity sees as vices.

And so we have an honor culture. And the only way to protect one’s honor is to fight if needed, how else can you get an apology? One person wrongs another, and they want the wrong to be righted, but to apologize would show weakness and violate the second man’s honor. Violence is the only solution. And this is exactly the interaction I se on reality TV all the time. Roommates fight because so and so did thus and thus, and won’t apologize. And she won’t apologize because she was wronged first, etc. And so they must fight, or someone must be dishonored. The trashier the show, the more prevalent this is. The “higher class” reality shows on primetime usually have people who can be civilized to some extent, even if their honor is being threatened. However, watch VH1 and it is a completely different story. There are fights all the time; people even get spit on, one of the most dishonoring things one can do to another! And this should be expected if we think about it. The people watching VH1 at 11 pm are much younger than those watching ABC at 8. If this honor culture is beginning with the generation after me, then we should expect to see it in shows that speak to youth culture more.

But it is not only on VH1. It truly is everywhere. There may not be actual fists involved, but I have yet to see a fight on reality TV that didn’t involve honor. It is always about lying to someone, or backstabbing, or making fun of, and these pierce honor’s heart. Being made a fool of is dishonoring, being mocked is dishonoring. And so there must be a defense. Think about dueleing for a moment. Why did people duel? It was because their honor had been violated. Then, as now, the only way to right this was through violence. This has always been the solution for dishonoring somebody. It was the reason the Greeks fought the Trojan War. Violence is always the way to restore ones honor. It says to the community around that you are not a coward and won’t take what is being done lying down. It lets the people watching know that they should not dishonor you or they may be hurt as well. It is the only safeguard against not being dishonored.

Ultimate Fighting display all these traits as well. It appears that some of the fighters are friends before and after the match, and at first this would appear inconsistent with my thesis. How can I be friends with someone who dishonors me? But we will see it actually can fit into this world view. First, I would bet that for as many friends, I can find some life long enemies. Exceptions do not disprove rules. Second, I would also bet that they are not friends in the weeks leading up to the fight, even of they were years earlier.

The entire sport of fighting is predicated upon an honor culture. There is no reason to lift this character trait up as a virtue unless we all needed it and wished we were better at it. And if we ever wanted to be better fighters, it was not to compete, but so we could put people in their place. It is so we could defend our honor. I would bet that that is the reason most of these guys learned how to fight, and then they found out they had a knack for it, and so continued to train. Before big matches we are pumped up for the fight by hearing the opponents talk smack about each other. They are violating each others honor. And we have conversations about what they said. Can you believe he said that? Do you think he will get away with it? These are the conversation I hear about televised fight shows. We understand that honor is on the line. It is part of the culture now. There will be a lot more on this when we look at internet violence and rising gang numbers, both of which point to honor as supreme.

Just like sexuality, this virtue of honor is mirroring culture and driving it. We can see this in the rising popularity of the sport, which means it speaks to something in people, as well as the growing acceptance of it on TV. At first it could only be found on pay-per-view, much like sex. But now it is on at least three cable channels, and one broadcast. It found some acceptance at first, and then was able to push the boundary a little farther, and inch by inch it has seeped into Après Post culture as normal and accepted and valued. It is no coincidence that these men are called modern gladiators. We like Rome are pagan.

The reason the athletes of fight shows can be friends after a fight is because their honor was upheld. Both men fought. Honor doesn’t need to win, necessarily, it needs to show up. By stepping into the ring, and getting and giving punches, both men uphold the Après Post code. We frown upon not accepting fights, not loosing them. The people we loose the most respect for (an honor culture value) are those who run, not those who “take their beating”. Honor values bravery, even if it is stupid. It is cowardice that is the greatest vice. So after a fight, both men having their honored restored, can congratulate each other and regain a friendship.

This honor culture can be seen best in the marriage of Reality TV and sports fighting. There is a television show on Spike TV that is just that. It is a reality show design to find the next Ultimate Fighter. The contestants constantly talk about honor. Their honor, their families honor, their names honor. That is why they fight. The arguments that occur are all about one man disrespecting another. And they are usually solved in the ring. It is where they can restore the honor that their competitor tried to take from them.

Violence is therefore held up as a good. We glorify it in our television because it points to the deeper values that are taking over society. Violence for violence sake though, is still not smiled upon. Violence in Après Post is a means, not an end. That said, we must always be ready to use violence to defend honor if necessary. Our honor is everything. If we loose it, we loose our standing in society. But honor can not be Christian. In Christianity we must loose ourselves. It is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. Our honor matters not. We are to walk the second mile. This is repulsive to pagan society. You fight before you carry a Roman’s armor. Rome forced their conquered people to carry their things as a way to remind them they were conquered. It was a shot at honor. Rome knew that honor was to be most prized in its society. So it is with us. Après Post is becoming increasingly violent, and this is due to the honor-centric values it holds. Society has always tried to curb violence, and I don’t think we will see a reversal of laws making dueling illegal, but we will begin to see more and more violence on TV and a greater popularity of fighting sports. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more violence in society, even as it is outlawed. The new generation will fight to preserve it honor, and we will see this clearly soon.

Ultimate Fighting is not the only sport that Après Post idolizes though. All sports point to a rise in paganism. I put sports in the chapter on TV since most of us watch them here. TV has allowed us to follow every game, every player, every thing about any given sport. And sports in general are becoming more violent. Almost every season we see entire teams fighting, and get to watch it live. These fights point to the growing groupness of culture. We are either Red Sox or Yankees fans, Lakers or Celtics, Patriots or everyone else.

This is one of the areas that pagan group think has already taken over. Christianity is the absence of group. Rich or poor, slave or free, male of female, we loose part of ourselves in Jesus. We are all Christians. The old patterns of the world are dead to us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. We crucify our old selves, and with it our old alliances, allegiances, and groups. Paganism reinforces groups. Boundaries are of primary importance. “Who do you worship?” is one of the main questions a pagan has. Today we don’t use the arcane language of worship when we talk about sports, but we worship nonetheless.

If you are a true Red Sox fan you are expected to watch the games, go to them, and buy the apparel. You wear your favorite players jersey, have many hats, maybe even a license plate. You give your time and money to the team, and set its best up as gods. And you by no means ever say anything good about other teams. You hate them vehemently. This is how groups work. It is the only way they can work. We choose our side and pay homage only to it. The association of the layman to his team is so great often they claim credit for victories. He feels like he is really part of the team.

To properly worship we need to make sacrifices. So people buy larger TV sets, season tickets, travel to see away games. The average trip to a baseball game in Boston in over 200 dollars for a family, and this is just for tickets. You are not a good fan unless you also but stuff while you are there. How else do the gods know whom you are loyal to? Not to mention the sacrifice of time and energy. The average baseball game is 2-3 hours, and there is one almost daily. But we can’t watch just the game, we need to watch Sports Center and Baseball Tonight as well. We need to have our fantasy team, and check it continually. We give almost all we have to our group, to our gods, and what is left over goes to other things. We tithe off the top, and give the best to what we worship. Everything else must take a back burner.

The athletes function as gods. I will talk about this more when we look at superheroes, but I want to mention it here. Pagan gods have always operated in this reality and outside it. What I mean is that they are allowed to go against the moral code of society for their own good. They are by nature better than us, and can’t be expected to adhere to the same rules we have to. Cults of personality raise people to godlike stature, and this is as true of athletes as it is of Actors. How often do we hear of athletes breaking the law and getting more lenient sentences? Steroid use, abhorred in Congress, is not as hated by the new man. In his opinion the athlete can do what ever he needs to be the best. He must be allowed to, he is a god. Drunk driving and affairs are seen as norms, and almost necessary. We give the best shots of cortisone so that they can perform despite injury. This is foolishness for the mere mortal. Athletes are paid astronomical sums of money, and we find it to be justified. The gods must live in luxury. They need to be better than us in every way. And TV perpetuates this modern mythology.

Contemporary commercials for Gatorade and other sports drinks lift the athlete even higher. These are the new nectar of the gods, and give them super human ability. We have created whole sciences and economies around athletic performance of the super elite, training them to be even better than they could have dreamed of. We put up posters of them in our rooms so the idol can watch over us. We buy their brand of shoe, wear their name on our backs, and wait for hours in lines only to have them charge us to sign a card. We put balls they have thrown under glass, sell their autograph for thousands of dollars, and collect all the memorabilia we can. We worship them as gods. Again this is not true of just athletes, but we will talk about the other gods on Olympus later.

TV produces one more clearly pagan ideal- polytheism. We have just briefly seen how athletes, as promoted on TV, have become gods, but they are not alone. I will not talk here about celebrities, but rather shows that are out right pagan. Recently we have seen an upsurge in shows about ghosts, aliens, the occult, and heroes. All of these have at their root a pagan understanding of the world. From network televisions dramas about ghost whisperers and mediums, to cables love of haunted houses and alien abductions, we are inundated with a world view that is not Modern, Post Modern, or Christian. Modernity brushes off all paranormal things as false. Christianity castes them aside as evil. Neither one allows or its people to explore them. Post modernity does allow for it, but is skeptical and holds that there is no truth. Après Post culture is none of these things. It is assumed there is an afterlife, that there is truth, and that we can explore it. There is no longer the Christian fear of it, or the modern disbelief.

People are watching these shows because they believe them to be true. Almost weekly on A and E or the Travel Channel there are documentaries about ghosts, demons, and the occult. People go to haunted places and try to help others who are being haunted. We are told of good spirits and bad spirits, good ghosts and bad ghosts. They exorcise them for us, live on our Television. There is a truth in the spiritual world. It is assumed that we know this. The shows don’t try to prove anything, but rather already assume (and know) the people watching believe. And these shows are growing in number and popularity, which means people do believe. They are watching because they care. It touches their world view. It speaks to them. But none of these shows take the Christian view. None of them say that all these things are evil, or that we shouldn’t mess with it. They give ways to control the spirits, to live along side them. It is all very close to true Buddhism more than anything else. Spirits are all around us and we should work with them.

Occasionally there are bad spirits, demons, but these are dealt with by invoking the power of good spirits or gods. I am reminded of the Itinerant Jewish Exorcists in Acts much more than Jesus’ commands to devils. It is so prevalent that even drama now uses spirits as plot developers. A show about a Medium who uses the spirits to solve crimes would never have flown 50 years ago. But there it is, in prime time, and not just one show, but many. The current view of Spirituality is pagan at its core. Society admits now the spiritual, but it is both good and bad. We can interact with it, we can control it. It is not a giant step from here to actual spirit worship and deification of the dead.

And it is not just a rise in shows about the dead that is driving this Après Post world view forward. The are numerous shows about magic and witches. Many of these refer to ancient gods and powers by name. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which actually holds on to a semi-Christian world view, believe it or not) to Charmed, to Fear Itself, there is a rise in shows that are outwardly pagan. Again there are even documentaries on channels like Discovery and The History Channel of real life vampires, werewolves, and witches. Witches remember pray to gods and goddesses for power. There is the rising belief that there are many powers out there, and we can commune with them, use them, fight them.

And a common theme in all these shows is that the heroes are usually more than human. In Buffy there is a slayer who has mystical power, Charmed has the “power of three”. The humans are more that human, they are demi-gods. They function in both realties to fight the gods who would bring destruction. This is reminiscent of Hercules, Odysseus, Theseus. No true pagan mythology is complete with out these super humans. And now we even have shows about super humans. Heroes is all about people who are more than people. They have the gifts normally associated with the gods of pagan myth- they can fly, time travel, morph shape, read minds. This show was not created in a vacuum though. As a kid I remember most of my cartoons having such heroes. Gone were cats and mice, now there were He-Man, Transformers, X-Men. All of these shows portrayed a struggle between good and evil of almost equal strength. Sure the good guys won every episode, but evil was never fully defeated. It always came back. The heroes were also divine guardians. They were the ones who knew the truth, and could fight the villains. We mortals stood no chance.

X-Men especially drove this home. The villains were exactly like the heroes. They were all mutants, gods. They were all more than human. Like Heroes, they were given strengths previously given the gods of lore. Some of them even took gods names. I want to stop here. There is an entire chapter dedicated to superheroes and villains, and I don’t want to be to redundant. What is important now is that television is the new medium that is telling these myths. We no longer go to temples to hear their stories; the altar is in our house.

What we are watching is the pagan struggle and world view. We see powers greater than ourselves either tormenting us or fighting for our race. We see super humans and ghosts, psychics and heroes, all interacting on a plane that we are barred from, but exists.

Before I finish this chapter with a quick examination of materialism and television, I want to digress for just a moment. Two paragraphs previous I made the statement that television is our altar, and I want to discuss this. The West has not seen altars and temples in its houses for quite some time. This was not always the case though, nor is it the case in the East. We find altars to gods inside houses today in Buddhist and Hindu cultures. Very often religious ceremonies are performed in the house as a way to both protect from, and obtain blessings from the gods. Shrines to dead ancestors or the house god who looks after and protects the property are common place. Pagan gods demand worship. And they demand the best. The central aspect of the houses is typically the shrine to the family’s gods. This used to be the case of the West as well. Idols were commonly placed in the place of most prestige. Carvings and pictures of Apollo or Odin were kept with the family. We even see this in the ancient paganism that Israel encountered in the Promised Land and before in Egypt. Temples in the house are a mainstay of paganism. What one holds as primary importance is always center to ones world, and this manifests itself in the material by usually being the center of ones belongings. It takes an important position. It has prominence. People can see it when they walk in.

Now think about television. Where is a TV usually located in an average house? How is the furniture arranged? Chances are, if there is only one TV owned, people spend most of their time in that room. If they own more, there is definitely one in the bedroom. The furniture is set so all can look upon it. What used to be 5 inches, now takes up entire walls, making sure everyone sees it. All chairs point to it. The Entertainment center that holds the TV is a shrine to entertainment. The TV has become central to the American house. It has become the Altar. The gods we watch may be different, just as every individual house has its own idol, but idolatry is still the rule. The picture or carving in Hinduism may be different, but the worship is always the same. So too of our television.

All of these reasons, plus many more that I lack the space to discuss here, come together to elevate materialism to another of Après Posts most lofty virtues. It is relatively evident how materialism is now a new virtue, but let’s discuss it anyway. TV sells us an image. As we saw with sexuality, it tells us what our ideals should be. We are told that if we buy the right products, wear the right clothes, we will be desirable. Since desire is something we want, we do as we are told. Sports force us to pick teams and be loyal to them. That means we must buy their products, wear their gear, drink their drinks. And TV itself demands we keep buying it. TV’s break, get outdated. We need to have better cable to get the better channels; we need flatter more defined pictures so we see what the television is showing us more clearly. We need to buy our favorite TV shows on DVD, and then we need a rack to display them. We have to have cool entertainment centers to display our boxed god. And then the rest of our furniture doesn’t match, so we have to buy more of it as well. Style changes ever season, and to keep up, we too must buy new clothes every season. The people we see on TV have nice stuff, and since they are our ideal, we try to emulate them. We are consistently told what it means to be a person of value in our society, and that is someone who is matching, owns nice things, and is in vogue. So from a young age we are fed this materialism.

This materialism is a further rejection of Post Modernity. Modernism was extremely materialistic because it rejected the spiritual. It was grounded in science and proof, and since spiritual things could not be proven, as such, they were rejected. This leaves one real thing to live for, stuff. Post Modern man rejected this. By the sixties spirituality was on the rise, and materialism seemed to be dying. Hippie’s made their own cloths, lived on communes, and vowed never to be like their parents. But as everything Post Modern, they had nothing backing this philosophy. And soon it was the 80’s and everything changed. Après Post was slowly creeping into fashion, although we won’t really see it for another 15-20 years. The children of hippies vowed, too, not to be like their parents, and so embraced materialism. They were still more Post Modern than not though. They embraced it as the best thing in a world of unsure truth. It was something they could grasp and taste and see. In a society were the old class system was destroyed, having more stuff was a way to tell where you stood.

This was not the end though. Après Post will take this and make it a certain truth. The more money you have, the better. Class will again become defined by economic strata. This is not Christian. The worth of someone is never about class in Christianity, but rather inherent in them as God’s creation. Après Post is pagan though. If you are richer, the gods have surely blessed you. To maintain the blessing, you worship them. You sacrifice yourself to them. If the gods tell you to buy new clothes, you do it, and as such can maintain your stature. This will be the truth that the Après Post Man clings to. And television only reinforces this. There are tons of shows about how the wealthy live. MTV’s Cribs, VH1’s the Fabulous Life Of, almost every show on E!. All we see is how the rich and famous get along. How many car they own, how big their house is, how much money they spend on dinner. We are consistently told that we too, should want all this. And so TV culminates in, and sells us materialism.

This chapter has been meant to give a quick overview of culture as seen through, and perpetuated by television. It is in no way complete. I suppose an entire book could be written on this subject alone. What I have been trying to show is that this Post Modern idea that we have taken for granted is dying or dead, depending on where we are looking. The rise of The Après Post is not going to stop. Some of the bigger themes mentioned in this chapter, will be solidified as the full theology of Après Post comes to light. What is to be sure, is that these trends won’t be ending soon. We will see more nudity earlier in the day, more violence, more vengeance, more riots over sports games, more materialism, more altars in our homes.

I want to move on to the next big indicator of culture though, movies. In the next chapter I will look at a few examples and the general genre of Horror. I plan to draw a lot off the conclusion reached here, and won’t re-explain everything. Movies, we will see, are a little farther advanced than TV, because they don’t have to be censored for all ages, like primetime television, they can just be rated. This allowed them to have sex and violence first, and it will also allow them to proclaim their new truths with out as much resistance as TV has. Remember, the people in political power are sometimes behind the cultural curve, and so won’t allow the new thing to enter, like married couples sleeping in the same bed, or sexual depravity of the kinds we find in movies.

[i] I dream of Genie

[ii] 3’s company

[iii] Simpsons episode

Let My People Go

2008-10-03T12:53:00.001-05:00

Here is the sermon for this week. It walks through Exodus. Enjoy.

We are out of Genesis this week, and will be continuing our journey through the rest of the Bible. Now unfortunately, I will be referencing parts of Genesis today that we didn’t cover. It is unavoidable when we look at Exodus, I apologize for that. You are just going to have to go back and read the Bible on your own if you don’t believe what I am saying, or you get really into it and want to know more. Many of you are probably familiar with Exodus, at least a little. This is the book that Moses is introduced in, and there have been some pretty famous movies about it. I thought about just showing the movie, but it is wildly inaccurate, and I do get paid to preach, so I thought better of it. Instead there will a sermon today covering the first half of the book, and a sermon next week coving the last half, as well as Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and the first half of the book of Joshua, maybe. I haven’t written it yet, so it is hard to say.

Before we look at much text, we need to catch up to speed on Hebrew history up until this point. We left off last week knowing that Abraham had a son, Isaac. Well God comes to him many times and also promises him that he will make a covenant as well. And then Isaac has 2 sons, Esau and Jacob. They are twins, but Jacob is the younger, and so we would expect that Esau is going to continue the line for Abraham. But we read that God loved Jacob, and as God continually does, he make his covenant with the one he “is not supposed to”. Jacob is kind of a jerk, his name means deceiver, and like, Abraham, he too has many lessons to learn about trust, lying, marriage, and God. He eventually wrestles God, at which point God touches his leg, and for the rest of his life he has a hobble. Jacob has many sons, one of whom is named Joseph. He has a colorful coat, and a musical named after him. His brothers are all really jealous (of the coat, not the musical, in fact if they had known Andrew Lloyd Weber was going to eventually immortalize their brother in song and dance, I imagine they would have had pity on him, and all of Hebrew history would be different.) Joseph rubs it in their face that he is Jacob’s favorite. Eventually they have enough, and they sell him into slavery.

At this point Joseph is in Egypt, and he is a slave. But he also has a gift from God- he can interpret dreams. This gift eventually gets him to the highest levels of Egyptian courts, sitting at Pharaoh’s side. Also because of his gift he knows a famine is coming, so Egypt prepares itself. A famine does come, Egypt is saved, and so are many others who travel to Egypt to buy food, among these people are Joseph’s family. He saves them, they all reconcile, and the story ends very happily. Joseph says to his brothers, “What you intended for evil, the LORD has used for good.” They apologize, he apologizes, there is crying, it is all very sentimental.

And since Joseph is very wealthy and has a good job, they all settle in Egypt. Which works out well for them for a while. They have good standing with the Egyptians and subsequent kings for saving the kingdom, but then we read in the beginning of Exodus:

6 Now Joseph and all his brothers and all that generation died, 7 but the Israelites were fruitful and multiplied greatly and became exceedingly numerous, so that the land was filled with them.

8 Then a new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt. 9 "Look," he said to his people, "the Israelites have become much too numerous for us. 10 Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country."

11 So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor…

The Israelites become slaves. And things go from bad to worse. Even though they are slaves, they are still increasing in number. Pharaoh decides that this is a great way to have a civil war. To avoid this, he orders that the midwives kill any baby that is a male, so the Hebrews won’t have a fighting force. Now we are told that the midwives were God fearing woman, and they wouldn’t kill babies, so Pharaoh gets mad with them, and asks them why they haven’t been killing the boys as they were instructed. They tell him that the woman give birth before they get there, and so don’t have the ability to kill them as ordered. Pharaoh them tells the entire kingdom to kill any Hebrew babies they see by throwing them in to the Nile.

This is what Moses is born into. His mother hid him for as long as she could, we read 3 months, and then put him in a basket hoping someone would take him in. She doesn’t abandon him though. She waits by the basket. Pharaoh’s daughter sees the child, takes pity on him, and adopts him. But the thing about Egypt in those days is they didn’t have formula, so if you were to raise a child, you needed a wet nurse. Moses mother is right there, and she gets the job, being taken into Pharaoh’s home as well. This is where Moses is raised. He is considered Egyptian royalty, but his mother is there along side him while he is in his youth. She is teaching him about God and his people, and everything else.

And then the following happens. Turn with me to your programs. We read in Exodus 2

11 One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. 12 Glancing this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. 13 The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, "Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?"

14 The man said, "Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?" Then Moses was afraid and thought, "What I did must have become known."

15 When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well. 16 Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father's flock. 17 Some shepherds came along and drove them away, but Moses got up and came to their rescue and watered their flock.

18 When the girls returned to Reuel their father, he asked them, "Why have you returned so early today?"

19 They answered, "An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock."

20 "And where is he?" he asked his daughters. "Why did you leave him? Invite him to have something to eat."

21 Moses agreed to stay with the man, who gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. 22 Zipporah gave birth to a son, and Moses named him Gershom, saying, "I have become an alien in a foreign land."

23 During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. 24 God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. 25 So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.

This is Moses middle years, all in one short paragraph. Let’s look at it in a few chunks. First we have Moses killing an Egyptian. The entire scene is funny, if not for the murder. We read he looked this way and that. I imagine a cartoon guys looking around a corner, this way, and then that way, and then he kills him. Now I want to say that Moses reaction to what he saw was right, but his actions were not. Moses saw injustice and he wanted to do something about it. This is good. We should not be content to let injustice go on. Murder is not good though. There are limits on what we can do to fight injustice.

The next thing we see is Moses also trying to get involved in injustice between his people. Moses is considered by the Jewish religion to be the greatest of all the Prophets. Now prophets in the Bible have many functions. We today often think of Prophets as people who tell the future, and there certainly is some of that in the Old Testament Prophets, but it was not necessarily their only or primary role. One of their main functions was to call people back to God. They often did this by pointing out what was wrong. As we shall see in the sermon in the series on Prophets, very often they just pointed out injustice and sins. They are that friend that always tells the truth and so no one likes them or asks them for advise. I am very often that person. I find it hard to be sympathetic, especially when I see someone’s trouble brought on themselves. I am the guys telling them where they messed up, not taking them out to make the feel better. Be warned if you come to me, though I am better about it now than a few years ago. I am letting you know now. My wife is the compassion person. This is what Moses is doing here. He sees injustice and he has to act. He is a Prophet, but a Prophet in the raw. Later we will see him reacting differently to wrongdoing. He still calls a spade a spade, but he is a little more delicate about it, and he doesn’t kill anyone again in cold blood.

Now the ironic thing about this mans question is that soon God is going to appoint him Judge over all the Hebrews. Anyway, Moses flees, unlike the movie where he is banished, and he ends up running into some woman who are also being wronged. He helps them out, which pays off in the end, because he gets a wife out of it. Guys, the lesson here, help out the women; they may be your wife. While all this is going on in Midian, there is a parallel story still in Egypt. There is a new Pharaoh because the old one died, the murder and Moses has seemed to blow over, and the people are being worked harder than ever. God hears their groans though, listens to their prayers, and he remembers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. If we remember last week, as I read one of the covenants that God made with Abraham, he let him know all this was going to happen. He said that Abraham’s descendants would be in slavery for 400 years, and then God would free them. This has all been foretold.

We pick up the story in Exodus 3

1 Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. 3 So Moses thought, "I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up."

4 When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, "Moses! Moses!"
And Moses said, "Here I am."

5 "Do not come any closer," God said. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." 6 Then he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob." At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.

7 The LORD said, "I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. 8 So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. 9 And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. 10 So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt."

Moses has a nice little life for himself in Midian. He has a wife, a son, a great father in law. A quick aside on the father in law, Jethro. He is pinnacle to Moses story. He is a worshiper of God, and as Moses story continues, he is going to be Moses surrogate and spiritual father. Moses will come to Jethro for advice and aid many times as the story goes on. Moses most likely wouldn’t be the same man without him. As we read the beginning of Moses story we see his sister, mother, adopted mother, but a father figure is missing. There is no guy to show him how to really be a guy. That is until Jethro. We are going to see this be a reoccurring theme through the Bible. There are going to be great men who will stand on the shoulders of other great men who take them under their wings. We will see it with Joshua, the guy to takes over for Moses, with David who has Samuel to help him, with Elijah and Elisha, Paul and Luke, and Timothy. The theme is rampant.

It has also been true in my own life. I was raised by a single mother, and throughout my life God had raised up other Godly men to train me in the ways of being a godly dude. Part of who I am today I owe to Robert, the pastor of MERCYhouse, and he owes it to a guy named Tom who lives in Oklahoma. God has done thins in many people’s lives even here, bringing spiritual advisors and fathers into lives where they were lacking. And he does it for Moses too.

Moses is out taking care of his father’s sheep and he sees a strange sight. He sees a burning bush that won’t go out. So he decides the best thing he can do right now is to check it out. It is a good thing he was not in a horror movie, because he would have been toast. You know, the bush would have grown arms or something and jumped at him and he would burn, and then the camera would zoom to he sky and we would see smoke and hear screams, and then the title would come up and we would know that we are indeed watching a B movie made for the SciFi channel called Burning Man are The Unquenchable Flame. Anyway, he checks it out, and it is God.

And God calls to him, and he answers. This calling is familiar, is it not? We saw it with Abraham. God called, “Abraham, Abraham.” And he answered, “Here I am.” And we see it again, and we will continue to see it. This is the answer of almost everyone who is called by God. “Here I am.” It is short, but it says so much. It is the answer we must give God when he calls us too. It is all he is looking for. This is the answer that gets you on God’s team. Nothing else. There are no other pre-requisites. Just tell him you are there.

After Moses answers, God goes on to tell him His plan. He says I remembered my people. I hear their cries. It is time for my promises to be fulfilled. And he tells Moses he is going to be the agent by which all this is to be fulfilled. Because of time we can’t go very far in depth on these passages, though we will at house church, which, if you are not already in a small group, I would encourage you to be a part of. What I do want to do is tell you a few things about what happens next.

The next thing that happens is Moses asks how he is going to prove this to the Israelites. And God answers that they will come back to this mountain and worship, and that will be the sign. This isn’t a very convincing sign is it? I mean, put yourselves in the Jew’s position. A murderer who is on the run come back to you while you are a slave and tells you he talked with a burning bush which happened to be God on a mountain, and that you should follow him. Your question has to be, “Prove it.” And then the guys says, “Well the proof is that we will worship on the mountain that God talked to me on.” I would be skeptical to say the least. But this is the sign God says he is going to give.

Moses objects again and says who should I say sent me. Remember that in the ancient world if you knew the God’s name, you had power over them, or so they believed. And God answers Moses, I am that I am, or I will be what I will be. He is telling Moses both his name, but also letting him know he doesn’t go in for all that control things. The game is played on his terms.

And then Moses objects again. He says they won’t believe me. God gives him a staff that can turn into a snake and does many other things as well, and also gives him, and then cures him of leprosy. Moses still objects. He says that he can’t speak all that well, and God, getting noticeably more aggravated answers that he knows Moses. He reminds him that he created him, and has been with him since the day he was conceived, and he chose him nonetheless. Moses objects one more time, and God, very angry at this point, tells him to take Aaron, his brother along for the ride, and let him do all the talking. Moses finally agrees and leaves.

He goes and talks to Jethro, who gives him his blessing and Moses and his family head off toward Egypt. And when we see the movie, the next thing that happens is he is in Egypt saying “Get your hands off me you damn dirty ape.” I mean, “Let my people Go.” But in between this, there is a very convoluted and interesting story. We read it in Exodus 3

24 At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met {Moses} and was about to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son's foreskin and touched {Moses'} feet with it. "Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me," she said. 26 So the LORD let him alone. (At that time she said "bridegroom of blood," referring to circumcision.)

And the question should be asked, “Whaaaa?” What is going on here. Well, we need to go back to Abraham. Remember that at one of the conversations Abe had with God, God told him that all the men should be circumcised? Well he did. And remember too that Jethro was a follower of God, and would have known this command. Moses also met God on a mountain a few verses before. Yet Moses kid was not circumcised. I believe what is happening is what often happens to many of us. We, after our conversion, think we are all set. That we are favored and liked by God and so don’t need to follow all those pesky rules. This happened to me. My freshman year at Umass I was following God, joined a campus fellowship, started my own Bible study and got a Christian girlfriend. The fellowship decided that I should be in the leadership group because I had lead some people to Christ and was very righteous. As this was happening I decided that it would be okay for me to sleep with my girlfriend because I was needed by God and he would just have to let some things slide.

I think we all do this. Moses did it. God had just told him that he will be the one to lead the Jews to freedom for the Egyptians. I imagine that Moses was thinking pretty highly of himself. And that circumcision law was pesky and for a different age. He was enlightened and knew that it was written over 400 years ago when things were different. He didn’t need to follow it. And what happens. God is about to kill him. God is telling us that although we are called, we are not that special. If he was going to kill Moses, don’t think any of us can get away with deliberately disobeying him. As for me, God released his hand of Grace and my life was like a death for years. There are consequences for not obeying God once we have decided to follow him. We need to keep that in mind. Luckily Moses had a very upstanding righteous wife and she does the right thing. This has also helped me many times over the past few years as well.

And then Moss makes it to Egypt. Many conversations happen, the Pharaoh decides that he is going to work the Hebrews harder as punishment for asking to be free, more conversations happen, and then something called the plagues start. I suppose some of you are familiar with them. We will go through them very quickly and then speak about them. In chronological order they are:

1. River of Blood- Nile, Hapi, god of Nile

2. Frogs- Heket, god of frogs

3. Gnats- Geb- god of the earth

4. Flies- Khepri, god of insects

5. Death of the Livestock- Hathor, goddess of cows, milk and Apis (Menvis) god of bulls

6. Boils- Bast, goddess if health, Thoth god of medicine

7. Hail- Baal, god of weather, Nut, god of the sky, and Set

8. Locusts- Renenutet, goddess of harvest, Anbis, god of crops, Isis protector from locusts

9. Darkness- Re, (Ra, Amen-Ra) god of the sun

10. Death of the Firstborn- Pharaoh reincarnation of Horus

One thing we need to know as we read all these plagues. Every plague is in fact a god of Egypt beginning with the Nile, which was the God Hapi. Hecket the god of frogs, Hathor was god of livestock, the god of hail was Baal, god of harvest Renenutet, god of the Sun, Re, and Pharaoh was the reincarnated Horus, a god unto himself, and the most important god to the Egyptians. As we read the plagues what is going in behind the scenes is God is showing his supremacy over Egypt’s gods. As the people of Egypt prayed to their gods for protection, God was destroying them. He is showing, even in this, His supremacy over all. We are not going to look more in depth at all the plagues at this moment, but we do need to talk about the last one more. All of the other plagues happen in Exodus chapters 8-11. And then there is an entire chapter, 12, dedicated to the last and final plague.

1The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, 2 "This month shall be for you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you. 3Tell all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb according to their fathers’ houses, a lamb for a household. 4And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the lamb. 5Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, 6and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight. 7"Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. 8They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. 9Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts. 10And you shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. 11In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the LORD’s Passover. 12For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD. 13 The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.

21Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, "Go and select lambs for yourselves according to your clans, and kill the Passover lamb. 22Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning. 23 For the LORD will pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the LORD will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you. 24You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and for your sons forever. 25And when you come to the land that the LORD will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this service. 26And when your children say to you, 'What do you mean by this service?' 27you shall say, 'It is the sacrifice of the LORD’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses.'" And the people bowed their heads and worshiped.

the people of Israel went and did so; as the LORD had commanded Moses and Aaron, so they did. 29 At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. 30And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians. And there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead. 31Then he summoned Moses and Aaron by night and said, "Up, go out from among my people, both you and the people of Israel; and go, serve the LORD, as you have said. 32 Take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone, and bless me also!"

And the final plague comes. This is so important to both the Jewish and Christian faiths. Up to this point as I already said, God was taking out the Egyptian gods. There was judgment on the land. For many of the plagues, God did not distinguish between Jew and Egyptian. When it come to the livestock and harvest, God does distinguish, but frogs were everywhere. Everyone’s Nile was turned to blood. Everyone felt darkness and had hail. God also deals first with the minor gods and works his way up. We see him beginning at the bottom of the food chain, and only taking on one god at a time. By the end though, he is fighting multiple very powerful gods and rocking the Egyptians world view. The god of frogs was no where near as important as the Sun, since without sun everything would die, but without frogs some kids can’t catch frogs. By the time he gets to the death of the firstborn, he is taking on Pharaoh himself, the greatest god in the land.

Something else in new about this plague. If we were to read the text, which we had to skip because of time, we would see that God just did the other plagues. There was no action needed from the Jews. They just were. Here though, God tells them to do something. They are to sacrifice a Passover Lamb and spread its blood on the doorpost. Only this would save them. If they didn’t have the blood, or they left their house, they too were as good as dead. Also, there is nothing to say that any Egyptian who put blood on their house would not be spared. This plague was different than all the rest. This plague required the people to do something. This plague required a sacrifice. This plague required some obedience. This plague required faith.

And the Hebrews listened to Moses, the obeyed God and they were spared. And God went through Egypt and he killed every firstborn male. Every one. And Pharaoh’s house is hit. And Pharaoh’s kid is killed. And the final god is toppled.

Last week we took communion. Jesus instituted this at what we today call the last supper. It was a Passover meal. Every year, every year, Jews from around the world would, and still do, remember this night. Before 70 AD they would sacrifice a lamb at the temple, just as a lamb was sacrificed to this night. They tell the story of Exodus. How God freed them from slavery. How he beat all the other Gods. How he himself redeemed them. And they would look forward to the day the Messiah would come and free the world. In the Gospel of John we read that Jesus too was sacrificed at Passover, becoming our spotless lamb. It is through his blood that we are allowed to live. It is because he has set his protection about us through the shedding of His blood that we too can enter the Promised Land and be free forever, being slaves no more.

The Exodus story continues. What happens next is that Pharaoh decides to let the Hebrews go finally. And they plunder Egypt and begin the ling walk to the Promised Land. Pharaoh though, has a change of heart, and chases after the Hebrews. The Hebrews see Pharaoh coming, and panic. They cry out to Moses that it would have been better for them to live as slaves than to die in the wilderness. They are afraid of the guy who was just smacked down by God. Like Abraham, we see that after the call, there is an obedience, but an almost immediate lapse of faith. God ask why they are worried. Don’t you remember all those plagues I just did, and then tells Moses to part the Red Sea. He does, the Hebrews walk across, the Egyptians follow, at which point their chariots get caught in the mud, the water comes back in, and they all drown. The Hebrews rejoice, celebrate God, and we should assume that the next thing we see is them in the Promised Land.

First though, they need to make a quick pit stop. Remember the first sign that God told Moses to tell the people, that they would worship him on the mountain that he met Moses on. So that is their first destination. And if you know your Exodus story, you will know it doesn’t go as planned. Moses goes up the mountain, talks with God for quite some time, God giving him His laws ad statutes. While he is up there, the people panic and decide that they should make an Idol to worship, melting all their gold and jewelry to make a Golden Calf. God tells Moses this, sends him back down the mountain, Moses sees it, and gets so mad he destroys the tablets God gave him with the law on it. He then has to re-write all of these by his own hand.

This wasn't the first or last lapse of faith of the Hebrews either. Before this happened they complained that they would stave to death and so God gives them food from heaven. They complain that the have no water, so God tells Moses to hit a rock with his staff, and water comes out. Repeatedly the Hebrews say that it would be better for them to have never been freed and longing for the slavery of Egypt.

And so God makes them wander the desert for 40 years, until all the unbelieving people who worshipped the Calf were dead. He wasn't going to allow any of them to see the land he promised their ancestors and heirs. And so they walk in giant circles all over the wilderness. And even Moses isn’t allowed to enter the Promised Land, for he too doubts God and his plan during this time. They arrive at the doorstep of Canaan and Moses is allowed to see it, and then he dies. He passes off his legacy to his protégé Joshua, and the Jewish story of Redemption continues.

You may ask why I end my sermon here. It would have been very nice to end at the Passover, right. Talk about sacrifice and freedom. End on a high note. Instead we are at a place where all the people (except Joshua and Caleb) who were in the original Exodus are dead, Moses is punished and doesn’t get to live in the place he as brings his people to, and everyone has been screwing up royally. Now, remember I am dramatically oversimplifying the end of Moses life, and next week we will pick up with him alive and well, but I think this is where we need to end tonight. Moses story, Israel’s story ends incomplete, and so must we tonight.

Israel’s story really is ours. We have been freed from slavery, yet form some reason we continue to doubt. I know I do. Over and over God shows himself faithful, giving me water from rocks and bread from heaven, and over and over I cry out that it would have been better for me to stay in slavery. And I think it is all of us too.

How many of us have run back to our old lives when things get tough. When we see danger approaching, Pharaoh’s army on the horizon, how many of us long for our old life back. We remember how good it used to be, how satisfying it was to have food and be in slavery. How predictable it was. How many of us, after accepting the sacrifice of our Passover Lamb wish that we could go back to the way things were. I imagine it is not just me. I know that sometime late at night I think that I didn’t screw my life up that much drinking. That it was really fun. I forget the pain, the self mutilation, the wanting to die. I forget the slavery and remember only Egypt. And so I erect my own god, worship my own Golden Calf, and cry out that it would have been better for me never to have left.

And through it all God is still faithful. He gives bread from heaven, he gives water from rocks. He brings the Hebrews to the Promised Land. He doesn’t abandon them or forsake them. They are still his people. Sure there were consequences, and there are consequences sometimes for us today, but we are still his children. He still has a plan for us. He still was our spotless sacrifice.

If you are here today and you want to be freed from slavery and death, I tell you the sacrifice has been made. As he hung outside the city gates, Jesus became the only sacrifice we need. He died that we might live. He bled his blood so that the wrath of God might be turned away from us. Whether we are Hebrew or Egyptian, grew up in church or have never been before, we can find refuge under his lentil. He did not save only the Jews, but all those who put their faith in His Sacrifice. And the same is true today. Just being a church kid, just coming here doesn’t mean you are safe, you to need the blood. And if you have never heard this before, if you are worshipping other gods, all God asks of you is to believe and enter His house. There are no other pre-requisites. He is the Savior for all.

If you are here today and you have lost faith, you are longing for Egypt, know also, that he is calling you back to himself. His promises are still there for you. He wants you to continue to faith in him. This is not a one time thing. We must continually rely on God not just to free us from slavery, but to bring us to the Promised Land. He who has given you his only son, how will he not give you all things? Cry out to him. He is there. He is still giving you bread from heaven.

The message for tonight is trust in God. Whether it is the first time we are taking the blood and putting it over our doors, or we have been walking in a desert for 40 years, we need to trust in God. God only asks this of us. Last week we saw a man called righteous, Abraham, who slept around, prostituted his wife, and lied more times than we could talk about. Yet God called him, an eh went, and he was called righteous because of this. This week, we see yet another man God should not hang out with walking with him. Moses was a coward, a murderer, and had a terrible temper. He 5 times in the face of the LORD tells him to choose someone else. He 5 time tries to get out of his relationship with God. We see God saving people who don’t want to be saved, who complain about him all the time, who worship false gods right under His nose. And yet we still see God initiating with them. He still provides food and water, even as the wander for 40 years.

God initiated with all these, and he is still initiating today. He is here asking you to have a relationship with him. Asking you to follow him. All he demands, all that is required is that we say “Here I am.” He is calling you, maybe not form the top of a mountain, but he is calling. How will you answer. Remember, we need not be perfect to answer him, only willing.

Let us Pray.

Sermon fo September 28

2008-09-26T15:51:00.000-05:00

Here is the sermon for this week. Enjoy.

As many of you know by now, we are on a sermon series called “From Creation to Christ”, where we will be walking through the Bible in 12 weeks. For the last two weeks we have been covering Creation, and something called the Fall. What we need to be aware of is that the Bible is a play written in four acts, Created, Fallen, Redeemed, Restored. As we continue in the series all of this will be come more clear. So, in two weeks we covered Created and Fallen. What we will see for most of the remaining semester is that Redeemed is most of the rest of the Bible.

Before we begin this week, I want to say that we are skipping a lot. And we are going to have to skip even more as the semester goes on. It is not that the parts we skip aren’t important, just that we have limited time, and so sacrifices must be made somewhere. I say that this week because we are jumping right to Abraham, about the half way point in Exodus. If you are familiar with the Bible you will notice that we are skipping Cain and Able, Noah, the Flood, and many other things. Sorry. If you really need me to speak to them, then I will say in Genesis 4 the first murderer takes place, the world goes to hell in a hand basket, God finds a righteous man called Noah, and saves him while he wipes the rest of the world out. Many of you may have heard these stories in church as a kid during Sunday School, and you really shouldn’t have, because telling kids about the death of other kids seems very sadistic and wrong somehow. Here is a quick tidbit about the Noah’s Ark story: there are over 450 flood stories around the world, from people groups in China, the Mediterranean, and the New World. Anyway, today we are talking about Abraham, who for most of the sermon is called Abram. Know that these two names are the same guy.

As we read this, we should also try to get a feel for the entire book of Genesis, which I know is hard since we are skipping some. If you were to read the book on your own, what you will find is that it is pushing us toward this man, Abram. We read 1 chapter about all of Creation, 1 about human creation, 1 about the fall, and then 9 others summing up the rest of human history. In the same way that Genesis 1 pushed to the creation of humans, really neglecting the rest, so too does Genesis push to Abram. He is really the main character of the book. We are going to see this literary device used throughout Scripture. Often the Bible skips much of history to get to the next guy. We will see this with Moses, David, and finally Jesus, that being said, lets jump in. We read in Genesis

Genesis 11:27-32

27Now these are the generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran fathered Lot. 28Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred, in Ur of the Chaldeans. 29And Abram and Nahor took wives. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. 30Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.

31Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there. 32The days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran.

Now these verse are not the crux of the sermon today, so the question can be asked, why did I read them. Two reasons: 1. It is here that the book of Genesis makes a jump. It is clear from the details given and the grammatical structure that this is a history. Where some of the previous stories could be read as history, or myth, or poetry, the Bible is forcing us to read this as history. We are to know that Abram was a real guy, who really lived, had a house, a job, a family. 2. Sometimes we, as westerners and Christians, tend to skip the genealogies. We don’t see them as that important, the names are hard to say, we so no good in reading them, so we jump to the “good parts”. When we do this, we do a disservice to both ourselves, or faith, and the Bible. Genealogies are going to be very important for the rest of the Bible. Two of the Gospels, the book about Jesus life, start with them. Also, these guys are in the Bible. They did something to get in there, and we should honor that. Finally, we read in the Bible that all scripture is God breathed and profitable. This includes these genealogies. So when we encounter them, we should read them and study them, not dismiss them.

We also find out some about Abram. He is from Ur, for one. He is not Jewish, nor Hebrew. He is from Ur. We also know that he has no kids since we read that Sarai, his wife, was barren. I want to pause here just to say that this has been a very challenging sermon to write. Abram is the central character of Genesis, and the Jewish faith, and we are going to cover him in one night. The only way I found to do this is to tell a narrative. This means that some scripture which is in your program is just for you to look up, and I am going to paraphrase it. It also means you have to trust me until you can look it up, otherwise we would be here for a few more hours. The narrative begins:

Genesis 12:1-4a

1Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

4So Abram went, as the LORD had told him

This is the first interaction we see Abram have with God. And what we see is God calling him to a different country. In a Global society that doesn’t seem like such a big deal. We are all travelling all the time, right. But for the day, it was huge. When God calls him to a new place, he is essentially demanding he leave everything behind. His family, his life, his security. This all takes place about 2000 BC. If you know anything about the time period, you know they didn’t have email. They didn’t even have regular mail. The way you talked with someone was to go to their door. If you left the country, there was large possibility that you would never see your friends again. And your friends at this time weren’t just people to get lunch with at the DC. They were the only protection you had. There was no police, or Interpol, or FBI. If you left the safety of your clan, you were toast. There were also no planes, or cars or trains, so you had to walk everywhere. The roads were extremely unsafe, because as I already said, there were no police. Bandits and robbers and murderers waited to jump upon unsuspecting caravans. I am not exaggerating by the way. It was very unsafe to travel.

This is what God is calling Abram to. When Abram goes, he is taking his life in his own hands, so to speak. He is trusting God to protect him, guide him, provide food for him, since he can’t take his farm with him, and everything else. It would be like God asking you today to go to LA, but you have to walk, could only bring one back pack full of stuff, only as much money as is in your checking account right now, cut up your credit cards, ATM cards, etc, never call home again, and you aren’t allowed to hitchhike, call for help, or pay for hotels along the way, and when you get there, just trust God has the perfect mansion for you- only much scarier and less safe.

We have to also ask the question, “Why does God call Abram?” What I mean by that is what was it about Abram that made him stand out? Was he a perfect Christian? Did he go to church every week? Was he just such a good guy? What was it that made God call him? The only answer in the Bible is a little later in Genesis, and it is that Abram believed God. See, at the time he was called, Abram was a sinner. Lets pause here for a moment. Have any of you heard of the Ten Commandments? Most, good. We can read this as a list of things that make God mad and us sinners. This is not the only or most important function of these commandments, as we shall see next week, but it suffices for now. It is a list of do’s and don’ts. Now the first tow commandments are the real big ones. The first commandment is that we should have no gods before God, and the second that we shouldn’t make idols. They are pretty big deals. So we would surely think that Abram has kept some of these. Now they haven’t been given yet officially, but one would assume that God still digs them, he did just wiped out the entire world for breaking these commandments just a few chapters earlier. I think it is a safe assumption that the commandments are still in effect for Abram.

Do any of you know what Abram did for a living before God called him? He made idols! His job was to carve graven images for people and them sell them as gods for others to worship. He must have had idol upon idol in his home and garage. He is breaking the commandments, but more that this, he wasn’t even worshipping God. God calls him when he is a idol worshipping, lawless, filthy sinner. He is actively breaking God’s rules, even profiting by it, teaching others to do it, and God calls him. This is the first in a number of scandalous relationships God will have throughout the Bible.

Well, you may say, God called him when he was a sinner, but I bet he cleaned up his act, started listening to Christina music only, got a suit, and went to church for the rest of his life, and you’d be wrong. Now I am not saying those things are bad. And certainly Abram becomes a better person as his relationship with God progresses, but he was not perfect before his calling, and we will see, nor is he perfect after. Why am I making a big deal of this? Because God gives grace to the sinner. As we walk through the Bible we will see everyone, and I mean everyone God chooses to initiate with is broken in some way. Church isn’t a place you need to be clean first to enter. You don’t need to be perfect or flawless to enter into a relationship with God. All you need to do is believe and follow him. As we continue Abrams journey we will see him doing many things, changing his life in certain ways, worshipping God. And we will also see there is only one thing that the Bible credits his righteousness with. It is not correct worship style, or a fully holy life, it is that fact that he believed.

Abram is called, and he follows, and we expect the next chapter to be him in the land God promised him. But it is not. What happens next is in Genesis 12. Abram goes to the land, but then continues on, and ends up in Egypt. He went there because there was a famine. Here’s the thing though, God doesn’t tell him to go to Egypt. He tells him to go to the land he called him to. So the first thing Abram does is not trust God. Now we may object and say, well there was a famine, and didn’t you, Nate, tell us last week that the husband is to care for his wife. If she starved he wouldn’t have been a very loving guy. And that is fair, but we also must ask, could not God have given them food, or ended the famine? Maybe the famine was so that Abram could settle the land, since everyone would have been leaving? I say he was not wholly trusting God. The reason for this is what happens next. As they are entering Egypt, Abram tells Sarai to pretend she is his sister and not his wife because she was very beautiful. He was afraid he would be killed by the men of Egypt so they could marry Sarai. God just spoke to him and told him he would bless him, and now Abram is lying to save his own skin. This does not sound like the actions of one who is trusting God.

I also cant imaging the conversation he had with his wife. So, uh, can we, uh, pretend, you know, to not be married, you know, just for a little while? I mean I still love you, but… we could have a super secret marriage. It will make it even more special.

Any way, she apparently is very beautiful because the Pharaoh decides she will join his house and be one of his wives, which, again, I can’t imagine Sarai was happy about. Pharaoh finds out Abram was married to her and kicks them out of the country because marriage was sacred, even to the Egyptians, and they are worried that God is going to punish Egypt for the sin. I image the conversation on the walk back to Canaan, the land God promised Abram, was even worse than the conversation about pretending not to be married.

So Abram screws up. We all do, right. What is God’s reaction to this? If I were God, I would give Abram a talking too about trust and listening and marriage, but that is not what happens. The next thing God does is to speak to Abram again and re-emphasize the promises He made. The pattern so far is God initiates with people he really shouldn’t, they trust Him, but not always, try things their own way, screw things up, and again God initiates with them. This is a God of Grace. God should have kicked Abram out of the family right way, but he doesn’t. Instead He reminds him again of the covenant he will make with him and his descendents.

And then a whole bunch happens that we won’t talk about, some battles, some giving of goats, all very exciting, and then we get to Genesis 15

Genesis 15:7-21

7And he said to him, "I am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess." 8But he said, "O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?" 9He said to him, "Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon." 10And he brought him all these, cut them in half, and laid each half over against the other. But he did not cut the birds in half. 11And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

12As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram. And behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. 13Then the LORD said to Abram, "Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. 14But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amoritesis not yet complete."

17When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, "To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, 19the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, 20the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, 21the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites."

There is a lot going on here, and we are going to gloss over most of it. God again is making his covenant with Abram. We have heard it all before. It almost gets redundant as we read the text, trust me. Here is what we need to take away from this passage though. We may be wondering what is the deal with all the animals and the splitting in two, etc.? In the ancient Middle East, this is how one made a covenant. The two parties would bring animals and kill them and split them and walk through them together. It was to show that the promise was expensive and to say that the same may be done to them if they renege on their part. What Abram is doing in setting all this up is what any Middle Easterner would have done if they were going to enter a covenant. It is what he knew. It is akin to signing a binding contract.

And then he waits for God, like he was told. He is back to obeying, so that’s good, but God doesn’t come. He waits all day. He drives away scavengers. He waits. And finally he falls asleep. And then God shows up. We read a dreadful darkness. This is something to be feared. Something otherworldly. And God speaks to Abram and makes his covenant with him, again. And then something out of the ordinary happens. I mean more out of the ordinary that having God speak to you or splitting animals in two. We see God come and the covenant established, and from what I just told you, or from your in depth knowledge of Middle Eastern Covent practice, we should expect Abram and God to walk through the animals together. But that is not what happens. God walks though by himself!

This is extremely important. What God is doing is taking the entire covenant upon himself. He knows that Abram can not fulfill it, and so He bears even Abrams half. Again and again we are going to se this in the Bible. God will assume the burden of both his role and ours, this culminating in the Cross where He will die in our place, assume the sin we amassed, and be our spotless sacrifice so we can once again fellowship with God. And it all starts right here, in book 1 of the Bible. The third act in the Play, Redemption, begins as soon as Fallen ends.

Abram would have picked up the symbolism easier than we. So know surely Abram is good. He has to understand God now. There can be no more doubt in his mind. I mean, how many times does God have to visit someone for them to get it? One of the promises of God is that Abram will have a son and that his heir will bless the world. But we read in the beginning of the Abram story that Sarai was barren, so it seems like this is an impossibility. Abram by this point is almost a hundred, and Sarai ain’t getting nay younger, so how are they going to have a son?

Abram and Sarai had the same thoughts. They knew how the human body worked. Sarai even says am I to feel pleasure again at this age? She knows that she has been through menopause and that is that. So somehow they come to the brilliant conclusion that Abram should take another wife. As if the first marital conversation Abram had went over so great. Has he forgotten how mad God was with everyone when he told Sarai to pretend to not be his wife? Now he is taking a second wife. I wish I heard the logic. You know, babe, I love you, right? Well, here’s the thing, God says I am supposed to have a kid, and who am I to go against God. I am fine not having any kids. You know that right. But he says… its not me really. But anyway, I love you, you know that, but, well, if you can’t have the kid, I was thinking, well, there’s this girl Hagar. She’s one of your servants, and well… Now to be fair to Abram, it was Sarai’s idea, but I know guys, and I imagine he had dropped hints around. And even if he didn’t, he is the husband. How about, Sarai, I Love you. I trust God. I don’t need Hagar. You are all the woman I need. But that is not what happens. He sleeps with Sarai’s servant girl, and she has a kid.

Ladies, how do you think this turned out? Cause some of the guys might be thinking, two wives, awesome. Tell them later. It turned out terrible. Sarai was jealous. Abram was getting it from both ends. The kid he had wasn't the kid God was talking about, and He tells Abram that. It gets to the point that Sarai kicks Hagar and her son Ishmael out of the house. Remember, it is 2000 BC. There is no welfare, there are no woman in the workplace, there is no food stamps. Woman were property to many of the surrounding culture, and women with kids were seen as damaged goods. She couldn’t marry, go to the wells, get a job. It was a death sentence. This is how Abrams second marriage turned out. And, as we shall see, it screws his kids up royally, who also take many wives, have infighting and jealousies, and betrayals, and everything else one can imagine. This is all found in Genesis 16. I suggest you read it. Side note, God finds Hagar by the side of the road crying and comforts here. He also blesses her and Ishmael and tells her he will be a great nation too, but a warring one. Muslims believe they are descendents of Ishmael.

And after all this happens we read

Genesis 18:1-9

1And the LORD appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. 2He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth 3and said, "O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant. 4Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree, 5while I bring a morsel of bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on— since you have come to your servant." So they said, "Do as you have said." 6And Abraham went quickly into the tent to Sarah and said, "Quick! Three seahs of fine flour! Knead it, and make cakes." 7And Abraham ran to the herd and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to a young man, who prepared it quickly. 8Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them. And he stood by them under the tree while they ate.

9They said to him, "Where is Sarah your wife?" And he said, "She is in the tent." 10The LORD said, "I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son."

Again God is giving grace upon grace. And he reminds Abram, who is now called Abraham that his wife Sarai, who is now called Sarah, will have a son. This is the second time since the debacle with Hagar that God has shown up to tell him this. The first time he gave them new names, and now he is just dropping a reminder. Look, I am really going to do it, so stop screwing around. It is like a “Save the Date” card for a wedding, and then the real invitation. What I want to draw you attention to here is the fact that three men and the LORD are used interchangeably. There are other instances where this occurs, and we need to ask ourselves what this means. I think it is fairly certain that there is a trinity without even having to stretch the text.

And Abraham’s story continues. Now, by this point God has shown up at least 6 times, Abe has messed up his marriage at least two, and over and over God has made covenants with him, really the same covenant, and shown Abraham that He will bear the burden Himself. You would think that Abraham is strong in his faith. He has been called righteous for believing God by this point, and so we should see a man who is secure in himself, his marriage and his God. And I imaging you can tell by my set up that that is not what we are going to see next. We are in Genesis 20 by this point in the narrative. Abraham is in a foreign country. And the king Abimelech is very powerful and scares Abraham. So what do you think Abraham does? That’s right, he talks to Sarah again, asking that she would pretend to be his sister. And the king finds out, and God is mad and the king is mad, and I imagine Sarah is mad. Sound familiar. Abraham has still not learned his lesson. This too will have consequences and his sons will do it to their wives. The lesson, men, is that your sons are watching you. They are going to be men the way you are men. Same for the woman. If you are not careful your sins will be their sins.

This story also resonates with me, and I think all of us. I became a Christian at 17 while in Jail after heavy drinking for a few years. After I converted I stopped drinking for quite some time. And then I had some trauma in my life, and instead of working though it I went back to what I knew best. I picked up a beer, and that was that. 6 years later I was in a detox crying out to God that he would save me form myself again. This is Abraham here, is it not? He gets scared and runs back to old habits. And this is all of us at times, isn’t it?

Now by this point surely God has had enough. Abraham has continually invented new ways to hurt himself, God, and those around him, and even repeats his mistakes. Surely God will find someone else, cancel the son that has been promised, and tell Abraham that he has had enough. But that is not what God does. After this God gives Abraham his son, and he calls him Isaac.

And it seems like everything should be all set. God came through on his promise, Abraham is finally obedient to God. The story is over, right? Wrong. After some time God comes to Abraham and the following takes place:

Genesis 22:1-14

After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here am I." 2He said, "Take 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." 3So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. 4On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. 5Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you." 6And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. And he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. 7And Isaac said to his father Abraham, "My father!" And he said, "Here am I, my son." He said, "Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" 8Abraham said, "God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So they went both of them together.

9When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. 11But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here am I." 12He said, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me." 13And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14So Abraham called the name of that place, "The LORD will provide"; as it is said to this day, "On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided."

This is another whole sermon, so let’s just pull out a few things. One, Isaac is a proto-Christ. In the same way Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son, so did God sacrifice his. We also see this in the provision of the sacrifice. God himself provided our sacrifice as well. When we were dead in our transgressions, when a knife was literally going to fall, God spared us and provided the sacrifice himself. There is also a lot of theology in the fact that Isaac carried the wood, Christ his cross, etc. If you have been to church before you probably have heard all this. If not, we will be talking about it at house church, and you are welcome to come. We are starting one on Tuesdays at 6:30 this week and would love to have you, as well as to the Wednesday house church, which starts at 5:30.

What is often missed in Christian circles is the sacrifice Abraham actually had to make. This is a guy that has not really trusted God whole heartedly up until this point. He has lied many times, let his wife move into other guys houses so they wouldn’t hurt him, took a second wife to make sure he had a heir. He is not the standard of faith. And now God has told him to take his son, the one promised him, the one who was to fulfill God’s blessing, the one and only heir he is to have, his flesh and blood, to take him, and kill him and then set him on fire. That is what God is asking. Not let him die, or let him move out, or anything else, but literally take him and stab him through the heart and kill him, his son, and set him on fire. Talk about a test of faith! And Abraham does it. He has finally learned his lesson. He knows that God will provide. I imagine he is getting more and more nerous as they climb the mountain. He has said God will provide, and he believes it, but he is still on the look out for the lamb he is supposed to kill. As they climb, he is saying, ok, where is it. I know you God. I know you are good. Where is it. And he keeps going. He gets to the top of the mountain, looks around. No sheep. Ok God, where is it. I love you, I know you will provide. Where is the sacrifice. He ties his son up. A little more frantic. Where is it. He realizes that he has to kill his son. Where is it. He pauses, looks around. Where is the sacrifice. Looks in his sons eyes. Lifts the knife, and an angel of the LORD, says, What are you doing”! You crazy, crazy man. Look, there is a ram right over there. Killing your own son. Didn’t you know God was going to provide? I mean really! Quickly, when we see Angel of the LORD in the Old Testament we should always ask is this Jesus. I am not saying it always is or isn’t, but we should ask the question. Here, I believe it is.

The other quick lesson here is God is seldom early but never late, which sounds trite, and the type of advise one would give to a friend in pain to try to make them feel better, but not really. I mean you want to comfort them, but you know they messed up so you say, well the reason you didn’t get the house you wanted is that its not time. You know, God is seldom early, but never late. And then you walk away self righteous because you sure helped them to understand God a little better, and they shouldn’t be sad anyway. And it is trite, but I can say it is true as well. I have experienced it many times.

Just last month I got my paycheck, paid my bills, like a responsible adult, and then found out I had 14 dollars in my account for the rest of the month. I have 2 kids and a wife, and although I could eat only Ramen for the 30 days, they couldn’t, plus diapers can only be rung out and reused 4 or 5 times before they are gross, so we were in dire straights. And I was praying, ok God. You are going to provide. And nothing happened. And then again. And Again. And again. Nothing. And then, when it was time to food shop, I got two checks in the mail for a few hundred dollars. I was not expecting them, though I was. I know how Abraham felt, sort of. I didn’t have to almost kill my kid, unless starving them to death cause you have no money counts, but I don’t think it does.

Now what is this story all about? As I said before we will discuss it more in house church, but it has some application for tonight. See, we are all Abrahams. We were all unworthy of a holy calling, but God has initiated with us anyway. We all mess up all the time. Maybe we don’t let our wives marry other men, but there is always times when we don’t trust God, when we take back our lives in spite of what we know, in spite of the promises of God. And God continually takes us back. God continually gives us grace. God continually reminds us that he has taken this covenant upon himself. God continually reminds us of His promises. Abraham’s pattern is our pattern. We are all only righteous because we have believed. There is no action or law you need to follow, no worship style or Bible study you need to do to be good. You only need to believe God.

Here is the thing though, at some point during your faith, God will test you. There will be things in your life that he will ask you to sacrifice. He is going to ask you to trust him unconditionally. He is going to, at some point, as for your all. There will be a moment in your walk, a moment you don’t think you can do, when God is going to topple your world and demand you obey Him, and Him alone. God never wanted Abraham to kill Isaac, he had already promised Isaac a nation unto himself. What God wanted was Abraham to unconditionally follow him, to love him more than anything else. He wanted Abraham to know the depth and breadth of his faith. Abraham screwed up many times before, and if was anything like me, he focused on those defeats. He knew he couldn’t measure up. God was showing him he could. He had the faith. He did believe.

When we decide to walk with God, we need to know that his friendship isn’t cheap. He demands we leave all and follow him. We have to go to a foreign country, leave our old life behind. We may have to climb a mountain with our most precious thing, maybe our family, or job, or world view, or social standing, or anything else, and sacrifice it on an altar. We need to be prepared to give God our everything. He demands no less.

But know as we do this, that he too gave us everything. He died so that we wouldn’t have to. He sacrificed himself that we may live. He sent his son as the sacrifice, providing for all of us in a way we never could for ourselves.

There is one more story we need to look at before we end tonight. It is actually found near the beginning of Abram’s walk of faith. We read:

Genesis 14:17-20

17After his return from the defeat of Chedorlaomer and the kings who were with him, the king of Sodom went out to meet him at the Valley of Shaveh (that is, the King’s Valley). 18And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. (He was priest of God Most High.) 19And he blessed him and said,

"Blessed be Abram by God Most High,
Possessor of heaven and earth;
20and blessed be God Most High,
who has delivered your enemies into your hand!"

And Abram gave him a tenth of everything.

Abraham at this point has decided to follow God, and as he does, a man, Melchizedek, priest of the Most High God, a priest without beginning or end, shows up. And he reminds Abraham of the covenant God has made with him, and he gives him bread and wine. And we too have a priest without beginning or end who finds us on our walk of faith. He too brings bread and wine.

On the night he was betrayed Jesus took bread and be broke it and said, “This is my body, broken for you. Do this is remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup and said,” This cup is the new covenant of my blood. Do this every time you drink in remembrance of me.”

If you are a follower of Christ, I invite you to this table. Know that there is a Priest who has met you as well. Know there is one who sacrificed all that you might live. I invite you to search yourself and see what you are holding onto. What are the idols you have made? Is it religion, false righteousness, school, money, security. Sacrifice them on this altar. Know that God himself will meet you at the mountain and provide what you can not. I invite you to follow this Jesus once again, having your heart made clean. He knows that you can not do it perfectly. He has taken the entire covenant upon himself. He took it to the cross. Eat this bread, drink this juice, and know, that just like Abraham, it is your belief that has been credited you as righteousness. God has gone to Calvary alone. He has called you while you were still in Ur, and he walks with you today.

If you are here and you are not a Follower of Christ, I invite you to use this time to pray and meditate on what has been said. I tell you God is the same God who called Abraham form Ur. He is still calling. We don’t need to be good to be called his, we just need to follow him. Search Him out. Ask him to show himself. He is Faithful. He is a Good Father. He will provide your sacrifice as well.

Scott’s going to come up and we are going to sing some songs. I invite you, if you know this Jesus as your Priest, as your Sacrifice to come and eat. He has brought bread and wine. Let us remember him. Let us pray.

Book Chapter 3

2008-09-24T15:17:00.002-05:00

Here is the third chapter of the book. Check out the new MERCYhouse Nights website too. Podcast to come.

Chapter 3

Global Warming: Mother Earth in Menopause.

Before I begin this chapter I want to get something out of the way. I believe in Global Warming. I even believe that humans have something to do with it. This is not a popular view in some of the circles I travel in, I know, but that needs to be stated before I go on to talk about Environmentalism. This chapter is not an attack of the science. You will not find in these pages a critique of their findings, though I will comment on their techniques (if you don’t know this, many things are modeled on computers). I think that whether you agree or disagree with Environmentalists, what will be valuable here is the philosophy that has latched on to it. There are still scientists who just want to collect data and fit it to curves. It is always philosophers who use the science to promote their ideas, not scientists. With that out of the way, let us proceed.

The Earth has always been studied. Après Post is not unique in this. Scientist have studied everything they could about the Earth. From platetechtonics to sunsets, the reasons the way the Earth and its components function the way they do have always tried to be explained. Weather, the most finicky of systems has always been predominant in mans study. And this is not just true of the Modern man. From the earliest days of civilization weather was of primary importance. Even today the weather controls most of what we do. It even has its own TV channel. This dependence of weather is really how Environmental Science got started. How and when it rained mattered for survival. If there was a way to make it rain more after planting, and less at harvest, all of humanity would benefit. And so people began studying the environment.

Something happened when I was a kid. I remember when everything was thrown out. You put your trash in a waste basket, and it disappeared. And no one seemed to have a problem with this. And then there was a huge marketing campaign, Earth received her own day, and recycling was introduced into schools and communities and homes. I am not saying recycling is bad, or that we should revert back to the old way of doing things. Recycling is probably good. But along with this campaign that was modern in its origins, snuck the Après Post, and the majority of culture still doesn’t know it. Earth receiving its own holiday was the beginnings of paganism. The Earth is now something to be revered and cherished. The Christian notion that God gave man the Earth to tend has been thrown out as archaic and barbaric. Part of this is because of the abuse of that power, but there is hostility to it nonetheless. We are not the gardener anymore. Après Post sees humans at best as a steward, and at worst as a parasite. A steward only maintains what isn’t theirs, and a parasite outright steals. It kills to survive. The Christian idea of ownership is gone.

This reverence for Earth is a new religion. It is complete with priests and followers, some of whom are more devout than the average Christian. But what is truly scary is that we have all been indoctrinated to the religion and follow it without realizing what we are doing. Again, I think recycling is a good thing, but we need to keep it in perspective. We should recycle because the Earth is a wonderful gift from God and as such should be honored. We were given a Divine mandate to keep the garden and subdue the Earth. And just like any other commands from God, we should follow this with fear and trembling. But is that why we recycle? I would say the answer is no, that is not why. Let me give you an example from my own life.

As a pastor, I have very many Christian friends. My wife and I also host a house church at our home twice a week. We have been doing this for years. Part of the house church deal is that different people cook and clean each week. Part of this cleaning is taking out the trash that house church has created. Let me stop here, and make another confession. My house doesn’t recycle. Before you get too mad at me, let me tell you why. Our trash company only gave us one bin for trash (I won’t name them ever for fear they will be blown up). They pick up the bin once a week and empty it. They have never given us recycling containers. Now you may think I should go get them, but then I have to take them to the dump, buy a dump sticker, sort my trash- and I am lazy. We would probably recycle if the company made us, but they don’t, and so being fallen, I take the easy and cheap way out. Whoever cooks and cleans at our house church immediately notices this fact. They ask where the recycling is, and I tell them the same story I just told you, and they have in the past, always accepted it, and thrown out everything. That is until this last year.

This new generation is different. They are all environmentalists. They have grown up knowing nothing else. When I explained to them this past September (2007) about why I don’t recycle, they attacked me. In their eyes I was now unredeemable. I could see my credibility as a spiritual leader falling away from me. It was the greatest offence I could have done. And the reason was that I was killing Mother Earth. Many of these people were new Christians, and I don’t know if they had all their theology down. They were not arguing that recycling was a Biblical mandate. Scripture was not brought into the conversation. They just knew that recycling was a supreme good. They didn’t question this assumption, or why it was so, it just was. What they didn’t see, is that without a Scriptural reason for recycling, they were in fact standing on old pagan truths. The Mother had to be revered and honored. Not to do so would bring her wrath upon us.

The idea that I would not protect the Earth was appalling to them. What they don’t see is that this fascination with, and strict adherence to recycling is a pagan value, or at least the current reasons to recycle are pagan in origin. What has been taught for 20 years now is that the Earth is to be valued above all else. If we don’t value her she will retaliate. The Earth has been anthropomorphized more than anything else in our current culture. She is a living organism. We call the rain forest her lungs. We speak about her wrath. We talk about robbing and raping her. And this is all from the “mainliners”. If we are to talk about environmental anarchists, the view is even bleaker.

The general idea is that if we continue to steal from our Mother, she will crush us. We need to give her homage. The Earth is not ours anymore. She is her own thing. We can’t just take what we want because it already belongs to someone. But Christianity says it was a gift to us. It is pagan culture that has worshiped the Mother goddess, and has always associated her with the Earth. It is no coincidence that Earth’s name is Gaia, or that we still call her mother. She is an ancient god. One full of power and wrath. And this is as true today as it ever has been.

We are told to recycle to reduce trash so that we don’t upset the ecosystem. We need to conserve because Earth has given us her bounty and we are squandering it. This makes her angry. She will stop blessing us unless we change our ways. Unless we reverse course and value her again, the goddess will unleash her vengeance. This is how environmentalists today talk, but I challenge us to listen to how Native Americans who practice their pagan religions also talk. It is hard to tell the two apart. In recycling we are offering our gifts back to the great mother. We are presenting our sacrifice. We have spent time washing our trash to make sure it is acceptable. We have sorted. We have separated. We have taken not just one trash can out, but many. Or we have driven it to the alter ourselves because our trash company didn’t give us multiple bins. We have changed our lifestyle to please the great mother, and hopefully know she will continue to sustain our existence. And this attitude doesn’t end with recycling.

(exapand)

How many people are now paying money to offset their environmental footprint? There are companies designed to do just that. We drive to work, but feel guilty, so we pay someone to plant a tree. Does this sound like a system of sacrifice to anyone else. There are priest who stand between us and the mother. They make offerings in our stead. We have infuriated the mother by driving and wasting her resources, so in return we will give her our money, via the priest’s planting of something, and hope the offering is good in her eyes. If we are real devout, be pay more than we need to. We give of our recourses so she will continue to give of hers. By offering sacrifice we hope to assuage our guilt and her wrath. This is pagan sacrifice.

(expand)

And what about Global Warming? As I already said, I believe the data. We are getting hotter, and it appears that man has something to do with it. But we also need to remember that there is an agenda being pushed. I am not saying we shouldn’t find better sources of energy than fossil fuels, we should. But we also need to remember that humans are not the enemy. If we are to believe some of the propaganda right now, we have doomed the Earth. It well would have been better had we never existed. We have elevated our mother to a higher position than ourselves. She has regained her position as goddess. And we are told that there will be consequences if we don’t change. The way these are phrased though, it seems more like a person’s revenge than a system trying to find equilibrium.

(expand)

Before we discuss any of this, we need to remember that a value system has already been cast when we speak of global warming. We are assuming it is a bad thing. It is immoral to let the Earth warm. We have to stop what we have done. We don’t know that this is true though, it may be better. No one knows, we have never had it happen before. Notice that, again, there are absolutes. Après Post brings its value and truths to the culture. Warming is bad. This is not Post Modern, this is a truth external to our thoughts. This is not to be debated, but rather accepted with blind faith. This is also I would argue, a pagan thought.

Pagan cultures have always operated on the idea of balance. If we push too hard one way, the gods will push back. We need to have yin and yang. Harmony is the highest good. We need earth, air, fire, and water[i]. Very often to day we are told that the Earth is on the brink, it is out of balance, we have moved too far in one direction. This is pagan ideology. There is not this stream of logic in Christianity. Sure, to every thing there is a season, but we don’t need balance per se. There is not a Chi inside us that will get out of whack; we don’t need to realign our chakras. What paganism tries to do is balance all things so that none revolt against us. We need to maintain the earth so it is not offended.

We assume when we talk about global warming that a direction is bad. Getting hotter means we have thrown off the balance. Directionalism is evil. It must be fixed, and if we don’t do it, nature will. To stop her vengeance, we must police ourselves. The pagan world is a see-saw. This is why sacrifice had to be made when things were wanted. The other side of the sales needed to be balanced. We can see this in the tales of magic in our own culture.[ii] There are consequences when people go to far. Scales are always fixed by the universe. Very often we see the tale of a witch hurting someone, only to be hurt herself. To get what she wanted, she had to sacrifice. She pushed, and the god pushed back. Balance was restored. Pagan balance.

And this is the Après Posts ideal today. The Earth must be balanced. For every tree we cut down, we need to plant another. As we take from mother earth, mother nature, Gaia, we must also give. And the idea is that we have taken too much. That is why we are unbalanced. We have not returned what we have used. We drill for oil and offer nothing in return. Nature will soon rebel against this. Our mother won’t be made a fool of for long. She will repay in kind what we have done. That is, unless we stop now. We need to restore the planet before it restores itself. If we maintain balance, maybe the goddess will be pleased and leave us be.

This is so akin to pagan earth cults it is scary. We have the experts prophetic visions, the environmentalist priestly offerings, and the adherents sacrifices and hopes. If we recycle enough, change our behavior to please her enough, drive less, plant more trees, then maybe we will be blessed. We have only stopped short of killing rams and spilling their blood, or having orgies to induce the gods to mate. Nature has become the most esteemed object of Après Post culture. We have given up trying to control it in the Modern sense- we no longer try to make it rain. But in quite another we are trying to control it all the time. The pagan sacrificial system was about control. It was about getting the gods to do what you wanted them to do. This is how we are now trying to control nature. We are giving her what we think she wants. We are apologizing for our previous sins. We are sacrificing our old culture at her alter to have her not wipe us out. Recycling and renewable energy are all about control and worship.

Balance and cycle are at the forefront of the pagan world view. They noticed seasons and lunar cycles, and saw truth in them. Eclipses and comets were bad omens for this reason. It meant things were out of order. Cycle and balance are also the new ideals of Après Post environmental science, and this is not just evident in attitudes about global warming. We see it in all area of this new study. Look at attitudes about forest fires. For ages man has seen forest fires as the enemy. The burned down civilizations and the resources needed for them. Fighting them was paramount in the Modern Mans mind. That is not the case today. Yes, we still fight them when they are close to houses, but our general outlook on them has changed. We see them as part of a forest’s life cycle. They are necessary. We let them burn to keep the forest healthy. We can’t cut down trees because that is bad, before can destroy whole wildernesses and it is good. It is the way our mother cleanses herself.

Fires are not a threat anymore, but a boon. They allow a forest to maintain itself. It is death and rebirth, the same thing that pagans saw in winter. It is not something to be stopped, but rather honored. As good children, we should look on with reverence and awe. Look how the Earth rejuvenates herself. She is so fantastic. Conquering this with human intervention is a vice. How dare we intervene. She knows better than us. And when houses burn, it is always our fault. We should have had more respect. We need to know our boundaries. It is we who have encroached on her, not visa versa. If we only didn’t live there, or were better about brining balance, mother nature would not have had to be so cruel with us. Fire is seen as her retribution for what we have done.

Environmentalists tell us there will be more fire until we have learned. It is the way nature restores balance. When we built houses in San Diego we upset her, and now we are reaping the consequences. The solution is to move out of her way, not fight the fires. The goddess needs her space. We no longer are the ones to bring order. We are pawns in natures game. It is the great goddess that will cleanse the world in fire and water. We did not bring order, but chaos. When we neglected her and did as we wanted, we invoked her wrath. Humans are the ones blamed for the rise in natural disasters, and the reason is that we unbalanced order. We need to begin revering nature, and when we do this properly, things will be as they should.

This reverence of Nature has infected all areas of Après Post culture. In his sermons, Mark Driscoll is constantly talking about Seattle’s love for dogs. In his town he says there are more dogs than children, and even movements to allow dogs to dine with humans at restaurants as co-equals. [iii] And he recognizes this as pagan. But I don’t think he goes far enough. In all areas of higher culture, there is a renewed and eerie love of animals. It is not just Seattle. There are whole industries devoted to clothing pets, massaging pets, grooming pets. People are worshipping nature. This is pagan. Animals have always been revered in pagan societies. Egyptian gods were half animal, as are most of the Native American deities. Cats, birds, wolves and crocodiles have always seen associated with pagan gods, if not gods themselves.

This all changed in Modernity. Animals during and after the Renaissance were dissected alive.[iv] They were seen as lower creatures. I am not condoning this, although we have benefited from it. Medicine and anatomy had it start in these gruesome experiments. At the same time, not even the dead bodies of humans could be experimented on. Throughout the modern age we performed all our tests on animals, sending monkeys into space well before humans. Cosmetics, vaccines, and medicine were all animal experiments first. And no one complained. Humans were better than their animal counterparts.

(expand)

But Post Modernity questioned this assumption. Man was reduced to only an animal with the capacity to make tools. Why should other creatures suffer? The Judeo-Christian truths were cast aside, and along with them the belief that humans were special. Animal rights advocates (a contradiction in Modern term) fought to ban animal testing. We were lowered to the position of ape. But this didn’t go far enough. Like everything else, Après Post picks up where Post Modernism left us. Post Modernity shattered the truth that we are higher than animals, and Après Post filled the vacuum of hierarchy. Something has to reign supreme, and Après Post fills this void in the top tier with the very things that were below us. Animals now reign supreme. And this must be the case where nature is worshipped.

We feed animals human food. We give them human medicine. There are even animal psychiatrics and animal anti-depressants. We need to keep our gods happy. Even science must bow down and worship the creature. The other night I was watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe was on[v]. They were in the Arctic studying a Greenland Shark. The object was to get one alive, tag it, and release it, but in the struggle to bring it to the surface, it suffered injuries that were fatal. The animal had to be killed. They had to apologize for this brutal “murder” at least 4 times throughout the show. They explained that they didn’t want to kill it. The entirely of the episode they justified the massacre. But it is only a shark. It is not even endangered. There are plenty. But this was seen, even by the scientists, as a sin. This is not a Modern Perspective. Only when nature and animals have been elevated over humans do we need to apologize for killing them. It is not our right to hunt and study anymore, but privilege, and we need ot recognize it as such. This is akin to our ancestors offering back part of the animal or another offering after a hunt. The spirit of the animal needs to be appeased.

Pets used to be a tool for us. They hunted the mice, or kept the wolves away from our flock. They didn’t live in our house. If they got sick, we shot them. They were below us. Not so anymore. There are now day cares for dogs so they are not lonely, gourmet food, trendy outfits. We buy things with our money and offer them to our pets. This is animalism, a form of pagan worship. Look at India for some perspective. Rats, snakes and cows are revered. They are adorned with beads. They can not be killed. In the temple of the rat, humans who can barely feed themselves, offer the best food in their house to these rodents. And this is far closer to our Après Post culture than we openly admit. Cows are sacred and can not be harmed in India. We laugh since they are food for us, but I dare you to kill a dog and cook it. The very thought huts our Après Post sensibilities, but in most of the world, dogs are food. We would be arrested and labeled a monster if we were to hurt a dog today. This is paganism.

(expand)

I am not saying torture of animals is ok. But if you buy a dog and want to eat it, I say go ahead. It is your right as a human to eat any animal you want. Vegetarianism and Veganism are the height of this pagan animalism. The belief that it is wrong to kill animals is foreign to almost all cultures. If Modern Man were vegetarian, he would have died. Animals have always been food. Veganism is even more extreme. Not using any product made by animals is absurd. It appeals to the animals rights. Only in pagan cultures do animals have rights. Modern Man gave rights only to humans. They were the pinnacle of creation. They were the height. Paganism sees all nature a valuable and worthy of protection.

The outcry against animal testing, an Après Post value, can also be seen through this animalistic paganism. It is almost worse to animal test that to not recycle. All products tell us they are not tested on animals. Movies make sure we know no animals were harmed in the making of the film. But shouldn’t a rat get cancer rather than a human? The answer is only yes if we hold man as God’s special creation. If all nature is sacred and we disturb it, then we are evil. The value of nature has almost taken over in present day America. Après Post’s usurpation of the Judeo- Christian philosophy of creation is almost complete.

(expand)

Even the rise of new, “humane” or no kill traps for pests is a pagan nature worship. Mice and rats are pests. They are not to be ought and set free in a field. They bring death and disease. But today we think they have just as much right to live as you or I. People think that is we who invaded their territory, and so we should show compassion. God gave Man the Earth though, not vermin. Again, I point to Hindu Temples where rats are free to eat of the human priest’s food. Things thought dirty and pests by Modernity have been elevated to the position of rightful owners and co-inheritors of the world. Humans are now seen as the intruders, and intruders are always bad. It is we who invade and disrupt. It is we who hurt the planet. It is we who are the menace.

And science has been pointed to for justification of this philosophy. Biology has shown man to be no different from other animals. It has taken man of his pedestal and placed him firmly at the base of the animal kingdom. Environmentalist show how all creatures are needed for the survival of ecosystems, and then set about to prove how Man’s fishing and hunting has violated the balance. We are not allowed to kill mountain lions, even when they are a threat to us, because our mother needs them. They are more valuable than we. It is the animals who are the order and also maintain it. We are seen as intruders. The previous environment is more important than the people who want to change it. And in a pagan society this is true. It is only by appeasing nature that we can guard against it. We don’t violate the sacred because it will come back and kill us. The cycle and balance must be maintained. The mother goddess is something to be worshiped. Nature something to be revered, not subdued. The Judeo-Christian ethic of filling the Earth and creating society is sacrosanct to paganism. The gods are the ones who create, and we need to obey them.

I want to give one more example of Après Post pagan value of the environment, but at first it is not going to seem it. The current demonizing of cigarette smoking has its origins in paganism. I know it doesn’t seem to fit anything I have said so far, but bear with me. Again, I feel I need to buffer this section by stating I am not pro-smoking. I realize that it is bad for you. I used to smoke, and know its addictive properties. I think there are valid Christian reasons to not smoke, we are God’s Temple, we shouldn’t be controlled by anything but God and his Holy Spirit, we need to not gratify the desires of the flesh, but these are not societies reasons for not smoking.

At the same time, Christianity has always placed a value on the individual. Modern Society, based in Judeo-Christian values, also held the individual over the group. This value was so high the Declaration of Independence, one of the pinnacles of Modern Political Thought, gave the individual the right to throw off society and government if they infringed upon his basic rights. Paganism values the group though, above the individual. And this is the root of non-smoking campaigns. They are not aimed at helping people cope with addiction, or give them a better life. Thy are aimed at giving the groups environment a cleaner feel. Smoking is seen as pollution.

If this were not the case we would not have so many bans on smoking in public. The idea that cigarettes can impact an entire parks air is absurd. However, in an age where environment is worshipped in all other aspects of culture, can we really be surprised by this? I am sure second hand smoke hurts, but outside? Is there not already all the chemicals from cigarettes in the air from a myriad of sources. But smoking is a visual sign of pollution. The smoker is putting his or her pleasure above the environment of the group. This is akin to the disgust at my not recycling. I have put my private desires to be lazy over and above that of mother earth and the group. And remember, if we don’t honor the great goddess, she will punish us. Her punishment will not be just on me though. My pollution effects the entirety of humanity. When she lets loose her vengeance, it will be all of us who suffer. The group must come first. I have to be coerced into recycling or not smoking so that everyone isn’t hurt.

Smoking does fit into the earth cult’s logic. We need to cleanse and purify all so that we all are saved. People must lay down and do as the group sees best to make sure the mother is not aroused to enact her vengeance. When laws are enacted to stop smoking, it is not for the individual. It is for the group and the environment. This trumps all, since it is our god.

Pagan cultures have always been divided into too schools, earth cult and sky cult. These two were typically at war. Some pagans worshipped animals, and some the stars. Both thought the other wrong, or praying to an inferior power. It is interesting to note that Après Post fuses both of them together. Earth cult may seem to have more power at the present, but it is firmly rooted in sky cult creation. They need each other to stand. Cosmology alone can not spread pagan ideals, and environmentalism alone has no cosmic beginning. Together though, they define a new (old) way of seeing this world. Après Post world view combines all paganism together, from astrology, to mother earth cult, to animalism, to form a coherent world view the likes of which will change our country forever. Firmly grounded in science, it touts it new truth around as unquestionable. It holds a new morality that the west has not seen for thousands of years. Nature is held in the highest honor, and humanity cast down as the greatest threat. Balance and cycle are now the norm. From Universes that birth other Universes eternally, to the death and rebirth of forests, circles and cycles now define our culture. The sharp line of Judeo-Christian creation, validated by Modern Science has been replaced. Time is not linear anymore. Progress not desired. Change is bad. The highest ideal is balance. And this is just the beginning.

Over the next few chapters we will leave science behind. It has played it part in this new world view, but it only the base. It is the justification, but the morality is found elsewhere. We will be examining pop culture and politics to find out not only what Après Posts holds as its ideals, but also how it is effectively communicating them to the masses. Film is the new medium for this culture. We will be looking mostly at it in its various forms. Written word had become a thing of the past for effective communication of culture. TV, movies, and the internet are where the current Après Post philosophers reside. And so we will continue to study Après Post culture through what it transmits itself best through. As we look at film we will see clear picture arising of the pagan values that Après Post holds so dear. We will now look at Television in all its glowing glory.

[i] Paglia

[ii] Buffy, the Craft

[iii] Mark Driscoll’s sermons

[iv] Find source

[v] Dirty jobs episode number

[vi] I dream of Genie

[vii] 3’s company

[viii] Simpsons episode

Second Sermon in the Creation to Christ Series

2008-09-18T23:03:00.002-05:00

Here is this weeks sermon. I also blog on MERCYhouse Nights website now, here is the link:
MERCYhouse Nights Website.
It has postings about the new church plant, my podcast, and pictures soon.

Anyway, here is the sermon

Glad to have so many of you back (I hope). For those of you who are new, my name is Nate, I am the pastor of MERCYhouse Nights. We are still at the start of the sermon series for this semester, “From Creation to Christ”, where we will be walking through the entire Bible in 12 weeks, hitting the major points and big themes.

This week we are in Genesis 2 and 3. Let me say before we begin that I am going to be talking about a lot of hard things this week. If you can make it through this sermon, you will make it through anything. This is the section of the Bible known to theologians as the Fall, so we will be talking about some hard things this week. Bear with me. We will be looking at these two chapters in 2 sections, first, there is the special creation of Man, which we won’t spend as much time on, but if you join a housechurch you will have opportunity to discuss it deeper, and then we will get to the bulk of the sermon, which is the Fall. Let’s jump in. The other thing to keep in mind as we read these sections of Scripture is that I had to leave many things out for the sake of time. I also will touch upon some dicey topics, some of which are kind of controversial. If you have questions, feel free to ask me or Scott or any of the Campus Ministers we have her tonight. I would encourage you to do it in fact. I also want to say that people have the freedom to disagree with me. You may be wrong, but you have that freedom.

In Genesis 2 we read

Genesis 2:7-9

then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. 8And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

This section is very dense, and as such, I am going to give a lot of information in a very little period of time. The first thing one would notice as one reads this in the Hebrew is the way the Bible is talking about God. In Genesis 1 we learned that the word for God was Elohim. This is true. It means God, but it is sort of generic. Here we see something new. In most of your translations it reads the LORD God, with Lord all capitols. When we see this in English, what we need to be aware of is that it is a proper name in Hebrew. This is the actual name of God, in a similar way as Nate is my name. The Hebrew word is YHWH. Notice there are no vowels. This is because the name was so holy the Hebrews wouldn’t say or write it. Consequently, we don’t really know how to pronounce it, Yahweh being what scholars have settled on.

Why am I making a big deal of this? Well, this is a different side of creation than we saw last week. What we see from the first moment is a much more personal God, one who has a name that he calls himself. That is not to say we didn’t see a personal God last week, in fact that was the point of my sermon, but there is marked difference. Some people see these as 2 different creation stories, and the name change is one of the reasons they point to. What I believe we are seeing in the transition from Genesis 1 to Genesis 2 is not 2 different stories, but two perspectives on the same story. Genesis 1 is giving the big picture. It is an overview of all creation. And then, from the Cosmic, the Bible zooms in to explain human creation further. This is in part, because as I said last week, we are God’s pinnacle of creation, we are his crown Jewel, and as such special attention is given us, even in the telling of our creation. So we read a name a creator, instead of a generic God.

Along these same lines, what we see when we look at the creation of man are two things: 1. God formed him with his own hands, 2. He breathed into him life. I am not going to talk here about the first, though, like last week, there are many analogies to artists and creators today to draw, as well as laboring for ones love, etc. But we covered those aspects last week. What concerns us here is the statement, breath of life. In Hebrew this is the word neshema, so God breathed in to Adam, the neshema. So what, we may think. The neshema is important. Earlier in Genesis we read that all creatures have the breath of life.

Genesis 1:30

And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life,

But here the word is different. In Genesis 1, as well as when life of animals is talked about in the Law (which we will get to) and other places, the word is nefesh. This roughly translates into life force. It is like a soul, but not one. It is what people see when they look into the eyes of their pets and swear they have emotions. The fact is, according to the Bible, they do. But they are not the same. Humans have the neshema. This is a soul. The image we need to have of this is God stopping down into the Earth, molding Adam with his hands, and then breathing some of his own essence, the neshema into him. It is an intensely personal and intimate image. It is CPR to the nth degree.

The next thing God does is present Adam with a gift. He puts him in a garden that is lush and vibrant and full of life. Once more we see a God with a plan, the garden was created first, and a God of Grace, who gives good gifts before they are deserved. We see God initiating with Adam after he is created. And there is a tree in the Garden, a tree with a very long name, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There are going to be consequences to this later, as we shall see. Let’s move on. We read:

Genesis 2:15-25

15The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

18Then the LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him." 19 Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. 20The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23Then the man said,

"This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man."

24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 25And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

There is a ton happening here. First, God gives man a job. Today we think of work as evil, and as we shall see, it can be today, but it was in the initial plan of creation. Adam was made to be a gardener- it was his calling. Work is not bad, but a God given gift. That may sound strange today. We have all worked jobs we have hated. So when I say work is a gift, we shirk. But, have you ever done something you love? I have a friend Tony and he loves wood working. He does it in his free time. He had built bowls and boats, and many other things. Wood working is hard work. There is a lot of labor involved, but he loves to do it in his free time. I image we all have something like this, maybe not woodworking, but writing, or painting, or knitting. Those are all work. That is the gift that God gives Adam. Adam was created for this work, and I imagine loved it.

And God also charged Adam to not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And the question always is, “Why did God put it there?” And the simple answer is so that Adam had free will. God wanted to love and be loved by creation, but love that is not a choice is not love. Have any of you seen the Stepford Wives. The plot is that the men of the neighborhood turn their wives into robots. They look like their wives, cook like them, etc., but they can never disagree with the husbands. We shudder when we see it and are offended. This is because these robots didn’t love their husbands. Love has to be a choice, so God, loving his creation and wanting it to be free, allows for there to be a choice not to love him back. We can get more into this in housechurch.

One quick aside. For the first time in creation we see that something isn’t good. Did you catch it? It is not good for man to be alone. We will revisit this later.

Then we see God try to create a partner for Adam, and it seems like God is bubbling about. He is making giraffes and manatees and presenting them before Adam and asking him if this is good enough. And they aren’t, so God makes more things. Or is that what is really going on? Remember, God is a God of plan and order. I highly doubt he expected Adam to fall in love with an aardvark. So what is really going on? The tip is that Adam gets to name all these creatures as they pass. To get the full impact of this, we again have to remember last week’s sermon, or know our ancient cultures. I told us that to the Hebrews words had power. More than this, to all other cultures around, if you could know the name of a god, you had power over it. As Adam is naming these creatures, the ancient reader would have heard two things: 1. He has power over them, and 2. That he was allowed to participate in creation. God didn’t make him guess the names he had already come up with. God allowed Adam to partner with him in Creation. He as allowed to name them. God has given some of his authority over to this brand new creation. He is giving Adam a stake. He is also, by contrast, going to show Adam how good the real partner is.

I imaging God telling Adam he will have someone soon, and then God shows him all these animals. Adam is excited, but disappointed that none of them are suitable. Sure they are beautiful and exotic, but they are not right for him. And then God says, ok. I have one more thing to do. He causes Adam to fall asleep, and creates woman out of him. And he uses Adam’s rib to do so. Now, I know it is urban myth that men have one less rib that woman, this is not true, but there is significance to being created from the rib. God, in a symbolic way is saying that woman and men are equal. He didn’t take from the head so she was above Adam, nor from the foot so she could be trodden on, He took for the middle.

And so God creates woman and then brings her to Adam. This is the first wedding in history. We have God the Father walking the Bride to the waiting and expecting husband, Adam. Remember, it is not good for man to be alone. If you don’t believe me, ask any married man how much better his life is now. He has a comb, clean clothes, real food. It is not good for men to be alone. All we would do is play video games and eat junk. Anyway, what does Adam do when he sees his bride? He sings a song! Guys, take notes on this. This is how you woo a woman. I don’t care if you can sing or not, woman can’t resist it. That is why rock stars are so popular. It all stared here. Blame Adam if you thin it is unfair. I also imagine he did a stupid dance as he sang. It probably looked like this:

This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man."

(Imagine me actually doing a stupid dance)

But we have to cut him some slack, it was his first attempt at song writing, and there were not other woman around to teach him how to dance, so he can be a little of rhythm.

Another thing we see in this text. Does Adam say, “Well, she’s nice, but what else do you have?” NO. He doesn’t shop around. She is his, and he hers. He is not pointing out ways other women look, or things he sees as imperfections. Adam is a one woman kind of man so we need to be too. Same for Eve. She is brought to Adam, and then marries him. She is not asking God for another guy. They don’t hook up to see if they are compatible. They don’t do friends with benefits to make sure the magic won’t wear off. They don’t move in together. They aren’t looking for the next best thing. They see each other and get married. I am not saying that you should all marry the first person you see, but we do need to know that shopping around, testing the product, sleeping with people, is also not in God’s plan. He doesn’t create multiple people and let them chose the best, or go for test runs. He brought one woman to one man, and it was enough. And it was good.

There is another lesson here for all of us today. Men, you are the ones who are supposed to court. Eve doesn’t sing a song. She stands there trying to not laugh at the guy, but thinking he is really sweet. He is pursuing her. As I said, men and woman are equal, but there are still gender roles. I know that isn’t popular today, and I actually bet the men are more upset by this that the ladies, but please bear with me as we flush out what this means.

Ladies, don’t you want the guy who is going to buy you dinner, hold the door, sing you songs, write you poetry, make you feel loved. Of course you do. So hold out for it. Wait for the guy who is doing it all for you. Don’t pursue them. Guys, that means you have to step it up. Don’t wait for her to ask you out. You do the work. You sing the songs. We need to think of this as a dance. It only works if one leads and the other follows. But the follower is following voluntarily. The guys asks the girl to dance, and if she accepts he escorts her to the dance floor, guides her in the dance, and protects her from other dancers. This happened naturally and we don’t even realize it. This is the kind of roles we see in the Bible. Remember though, the lady can opt out of the dance or wait for the guy she really wants to dance with. It is not a dictatorial thing. We are going to revisit this in a moment.

Let me also say here, Adam is not the leader to be submitted to unquestionably by Eve. God is the leader. Adam has an authority over him. This needs to be true today also. Guys, you are not the head, Christ is. If you are not being a good guy, God will kick you r butt, because these women here are His children and he loves them and wants them protected. Ladies, this is why finding a guy of good character is important. You don’t want to be submitting to men who are not submitting to God themselves. It is a terrible idea.

Eve marries Adam, and things are great. They are both naked and unashamed. And then the story continues. We read in Genesis 3:

1Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made.

He said to the woman, "Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden'?" 2And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'" 4 But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die. 5For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." 6So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

The serpent enters with his eye set on making Man fall, and he does. How does he do it? The same way he continues to do it- by lying with the truth. He asks Eve, “Did God really say you must not eat of any tree?” He knows God didn’t say that. He is trying to twist the truth; there is a prohibition of eating from one tree, and at the same time start putting seeds of doubt into Adam and Eve’s hearts. The question is really a question about God’s goodness, is in not? He is telling them that God isn’t really providing for them, is He? An Eve answers him, “No, that’s not what God said, but he did say we can’t touch the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Did God say this? NO.

At this point, I imagine the serpent is touching the fruit of the tree all over and he is not dying. He knows that they were told just not to eat of it. They could touch it all they wanted. It is probably a good thing they weren’t touching it, however Eve needs to know that is their rule not God’s. Here is why it is good. Playing with temptation is a fine line. By playing with forbidden fruit, the temptation to taste it is a lot greater. What Eve had done by having the rule not to touch it was keeping a fence between her and sin. I do this is my life. I have anti-pornography software on my computer. Not because I had a huge problem with it, but because it lessens the temptation. I know every time I go to a website, it is logged and emailed to a trusted friend. Another way I do this is to not be alone with women in my house. I have set up a fence. Now is it a sin to be alone with women, no, it is my rule to keep my life above reproach. It is noble what Eve is doing, but she forgot it was not God’s words. That gave Satan a foothold.

The moral here is: know what Scripture says. If we only have half truths, or partial knowledge, or we make up our own things and add them to the Bible, like God helps those who help themselves- Benjamin Franklin, not the Bible- we walk a very narrow wire. All it takes is for someone to show us what we believed extra Biblically was wrong for us to stumble into sin. Know your Bible. It is the greatest defense. What does the Bible actually say about sin and sins? If we don’t know, how will we know what we can eat, and what we can’t? Take slavery, for example. People say the Bible justifies slavery, but in fact, it does just the opposite. They say this because in some letters Paul tells slaves how they should behave, and one of these ways is to submit to their owners. People read this, take it out of context, and say that the Bible justifies slavery. Now people abuse Scripture to justify their sins, but the Bible itself says that slavery is an abomination, and in 1Timothy lists enslaving with the characteristics of sinners, along with murder and stealing. If you hadn’t read 1Timothy though, how would you know that? Also, if you didn’t have the context of the letter Paul wrote about slaves, knowing that the slavery or Rome was different than American Slavery, and that they were to submit to win people to Christ, that the letter was written when slavery was ok, and was part of culture, and so it needed to be addressed, you wouldn’t know this. Or if you had not read Philemon, you would not know that Paul tells a man to free his slave. And the same is true for most hot button topics. But I digress.

And as the serpent is sitting on the tree of good and evil, touching the fruit, he is again planting seeds of doubt in Eve’s mind. He is questioning God’s goodness. Why would God tell you not o touch this? I am touching it and not dying. He is keeping something from you. And so Eve eats.

Ladies, Eve gets a bad wrap. We all blame her for sinning, and it is seen as Adam being an innocent bystander, right. Now, Eve did sin first, make no mistake, but where is Adam when all this is going down? Right next to her! In the Hebrew text the “yous” the serpent speaks are plural. Adam is right there, not saying a thing. Guys, this is our sin. I see it all the time- passive, weak men who won’t shepherd or protect their woman. Why hasn’t he stepped in and set the serpent straight. Why is he not telling Eve we can touch it, just not eat it, why doesn’t he stop her from eating. Guys, as I talk about gender roles, this is why women get upset. Often we don’t take the lead, and so the woman is forced to. We are passive, letting the woman plan the dates, pick the restaurant, cook the meal. We want to hang out, watch the game, veg, and so we let woman pick up our slack. The reason woman rebel against this is valid. Stop doing it. Be men. Lead, protect, guide. Now I am not saying be a jerk or force woman to follow you. Go back to the dancing. We need to be the ones who ask the lady to dance, make sure her feet aren’t getting stepped on, make sure she feels safe. Not the other way around.

And Eve eats the fruit, and gives some to Adam, and he eats the fruit, cause she told him to, like a weakling with no spine, and the entire world changes. Here too is something I think most of us are guilty off- we sin, and then bring others down with us. I know I do it. I used to be in a Fraternity and loved getting the new members to drink as alcoholically as me. We could share the brokenness and then I wouldn’t be as alone. I don’t think me and Eve are unique in this either. Most of us want others to sin with us, or bring them into our sin, don’t we? If we are not alone, we don’t fell it as bad. We have comradery in our shame. It all started with the first sin too. The story goes on.

8And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, "Where are you?" 10And he said, "I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself." 11He said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" 12The man said, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate." 13Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

God comes back, and he knows something is up. Where are you, he asks, like the Creator of the Universe is fooled by two people hiding in a bush. And Adam says he was afraid because he was naked. Remember, not a few verses earlier he was naked and not ashamed. He saw Eve naked, she him, and all of it in front of God. God made them. He has seen all their junk before. There is no reason to feel shame, but the universe has changed. And God asks who told him he was naked, knows he ate for the tree, and is giving Adam the opportunity to fess up. What a great time for Adam to be a man. He can say I ate it, I didn’t shepherd my wife and she ate it, we are sorry, etc. But instead, what does he say?

“The woman you gave me! She made me eat! This is not my fault. It is hers, or yours, I mean you brought her to me. What a courageous and stupid thing to say to God!

And then God asks Eve what she has done. What a time for her to be a woman. God, I ate from it, I am sorry. But what does she do? She passes the buck too. It is the serpents fault.

Notice one more thing before we move on. Who sinned first? Eve. Who was blamed? Adam. Again, there are gender roles. Guys, we are the leaders of the house. When things fall, it is our fault. When we die and give an account, and we will, it is not just for ourselves, but for our wife and kids. Hear this. This is a huge responsibility. If you think, “I will just do my thing and let my wife do hers”, or she is working here butt off and you are watching TV, or anything else, know you will be called to task on it. If your wife doesn’t feel loved, guess whose fault it is- yours. If your wife eats of the tree of good and evil, guess whose fault it is- yours. Let’s move on before we run out of time.

Then God tells the guilty parties what is going to come of their sin. I don’t think God is cursing them in the way we think. When I think of a curse I think of a witch who makes evil come upon someone regardless of what they have done. That is not God’s curse. God is more telling like it is. He is not imposing this upon them so much as telling them the consequences Adam and Eve incurred upon themselves. He is telling them how the universe had just changed. We are going to skip over some of this. We read

14The LORD God said to the serpent,

"Because you have done this,
cursed are you above all livestock
and above all beasts of the field;
on your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
15I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;

he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel."

I don’t want to talk too much about the serpent’s curse here, though we will come back to it in a few months. What is important is verse 15. It is called the proto-evangelium by theologians. It is recognized as the first prophecy of Christ in the Bible. The idea that a man will try to be killed by a serpent, but instead Satan will have his head crushed will become on of the things the Messiah is supposed to do though out the Old Testament, and what Jesus did. God goes on.

16To the woman he said,

"I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.

Your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you."

Here God is telling Eve a few things. First, one of the consequences to sin is that our relationship with ourselves has changed. We are not who we were supposed to be. There wasn’t supposed to be pain, now there is. This is a huge change. I deal with this all the time. I don’t know how many students I meet with, who, because of sin have hurt themselves. In a college town, this mainly has to do with booze and sex. People drink alcoholically and their lives are ruined. They don’t even know who they are anymore. But even more common is the sex. I see people having sex outside of marriage and thinking it is no big deal. And then they are crying in my house. The other person wasn't in to them, or it was just for fun, or had an STD. Today we see things like random hookups or friends with benefits and we believe the lie that it is ok, that there need not be emotional involvement, that it can be just for fun. Here is the truth. It can’t be. I have seen so many people devastated by it, or devastating someone else. My own story has this as well. I came to college, was in a Christian relationship, and we started sleeping together. The relationship lasted longer than it should have, because physicality bonds people together, whether they want to be or not. (A chemical called oxytocin, which is as addictive to the brain as heroine in released when we have sex, and then the body craves more of it. This is a good thing in marriage, because it also bonds people together, stimulating the emotional response center of the brain, but outside can be very damaging, binding people who otherwise shouldn’t be, and creating a need to get more of the chemical the way they did last time.) When we did break up, there was all the added stress of sin and unhealthy bonding. We ended up just sleeping together to get our fix, and both ended up becoming very hurt by the entire thing. I was changed by it. She was changed by it. I still live with the pain and sorrow of the whole thing. Our relationship to ourselves are effect by sin.

So are relationships to others. We read that Eves desire, or woman’s desire, will be for, or against her husband, and he shall rule over her. This is the other aspect of broken femaleness and maleness. On the one hand we had the weak guy who was not protecting his wife, right. The passive, TV watching, let the wife plan everything guy. We look at him, and woman say, there is no way he can lead me, and so they do it. One the other hand is this guy. The one who will rule over his wife. He is abusive, mentally, and physically, controlling. We look at him and woman say, there is no way I am going to submit to that either. And let me say if there is abuse in the relationship, get out. You don’t need to submit, it is not sin to not submit to abuse. Get out. If you are a guy and I find out you are abusive, I will show you why the elders of a church are called to be soldiers, warriors and tough. That is not a threat, it is a promise. A shepherd is supposed to protect his sheep, and I will do it. Shepherds used to have to kill wolves. Remember that.

So we have brokenness on both sides of men. And woman shouldn’t or don’t want to follow the lead of either. Very often what I see is men being passive at first, and then the woman takes over everything, and then they get mad at her for trying to be the guy. Guys, you need to not be either passive or controlling. As men of Christ, we are called to love as Christ loved the church- and he died for it. This means very often, the woman’s needs come before yours. That you are sacrificing to see her thrive. Again, ladies this is why it is important to find a good Christian man who is submitting to God. And guys, you need to submit to God, these ladies are crown jewels of Gods creation. If you are passive or abusive, He will not be happy, and although He is abounding in live and slow to wrath, he also pours wrath out sometimes.

Ladies, this is your curse however, and you are equally as broken as the guys. I see men who want to lead in a Godly way all the time, and independent, self actualized, modern woman won’t let them. I am not saying you can’t have your own life or anything like that. But what I see is woman frustrated men won’t lead them, so they put them down, complain, and then take the lead themselves. Or on the flip side, to find a strong leader, they search out abuse, which seems odd, but happens, or guys who are no good. Hear me ladies. Wait for him to sing you a song, and then respond to it. If he isn’t taking the lead, encourage him to, and don’t do it yourself. This may seem scary. Talk to my wife about how scary it actually is. She handed me the checking account when we got married so that she didn’t have to be involved with money, which was hard because she likes control, and I didn’t pay all our bills for a few months and her credit took a hit. But instead of taking the control back, she let me lead, even when I was terrible at it, and encouraged me when I was good. Today I am the leader I am partially because of actions like these.

I want to give another example of how sin changes our relationships to each other. As I said, I had been sexually active before marrying Sarah. Now after we were married, it brought a lot of pain into our first year. She was always comparing herself to my other girlfriends, wondering if she was good enough physically, if I still wanted the others, if she was beautiful enough. And I don’t think Sarah s unique in this. We may think sex is harmless, or see it harms ourselves, but it harms others more. Guys, do you really want to cause harm to your wife, the love of your life, by making her feel inadequate. Same for the ladies. Do you want them wondering of they would prefer another more, if they just settled, etc.

And finally we get to Adam.

17And to Adam he said,

"Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree

of which I commanded you,
'You shall not eat of it,'

cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
19By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;

for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return."

And God tells Adam that not only has humans relations to themselves changes, and their relations to each other, our relationship to creation has changed. It is no longer easy. Jobs are no longer fun. What used to be in submission to us, is now in rebellion, in the same way that we used to be in submission to God and are now in rebellion.

And then God does something interesting. He kills and animal and clothes Adam and Eve. We read:

20The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. 21And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.

This whole interaction is interesting for number of reasons. First, remember what the penalty or eating from the tree was- death. Not death sometime, not spiritual death, although these are definitely true, but real, instant death. Right away we see God giving grace. We also see a sacrifice being made. As we walk through the Bible, what we are going to see is there is always a sacrifice for sin. This peaks at the Cross, where God sacrifices himself for all our sins.

And finally, God gives his kids clothes. Remember, they were wearing fig leaves. I brought some leaves to show you how crappy they are as clothes. I imagine even in His anger and grief, this scene was still funny. So like a good Father, he continues to provide for his creation, even after it revolted against him. This is a God of love and mercy, not judgment and wrath. Finally we get to the end, and we see the trinity talking to each other once again.

22Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—" 23therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. 24He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

And even here there is grace. God blocking the tree of life was grace. Now we may not see it, but imagine living eternally in this world. Places where torture never ended, where we have to bare our sin for eternity, where rapes and traumas must be in our mind for all time. Imaging living in the ghetto, or starving for hundreds of years. Imagine having to toil forever. No, this was grace.

And this is also not the end of the story. It is just the beginning. What happened when Adam sinned, happens when we sin, is four fold. We hurt our relationship with ourselves, others, creation and God. We live today in a broken world where people are abusive, there is murder and sexual molestation. Work is no longer fun, but toil. We try to rule over others, or we are passive aggressive. We have holocausts and genocides and atrocities. We look at the world though, and see something more. We know that we were created for something better. We wonder why this place so jacked up. Here is the answer. Sin has entered the world. But it is not the end.

Yes there is sin, but there is also a loving God who is providing for us through it, who is giving us grace all the time. There is sin, but there is also hope. Although the serpent seemed to win the battle, his head has been crushed. We read in the New Testament that although all sinned through one man Adam, so too can all be made righteous through one Man, Jesus Christ. When Jesus hung on the cross he put himself in the same place that many of us have been in. He was convicted unjustly, beaten, maimed, mocked spit on. He was betrayed by one of his closest friends and abandoned by the others. The men, who just hours before said they would be with him until the end, didn’t even go to his grave. And as he hung on a cross, a word which has been so sterilized we forget that for thousands of years it was the prime way to torture some one, a machine that slowly suffocated the victim and allowed them to be eaten by vultures and other birds and rats and everything else while alive, a device that hung people up by their hands and feet, naked for all to see, he said, “Father forgive them.” In fact, the language is such that it is implied he kept saying it. A man who couldn’t breath kept uttering the words, “Father forgive them.” “Father forgive them.” “Father forgive them.”

The God who created these miserable little wretch called humans, the same creatures who cause so much heart ache and pain to each other, and to him, hung on a cross, dying in our place, so we could be reconciled to Him. This God who formed Adam out of the dust of the earth, who initiated a relationship with his creation, is the same God who initiated in the last way he could, and sent his Son to die that we might live. And through this act, we can be reconciled. We can be reconciled to each other, to ourselves, to creation, and to God.

I invite you now, if you want this reconciliation, to ask for it. God is stooping down from creation; He entered into it, He shared in your pain, and wants to bare the burden for you. All you need do is ask. He is there in the same way he was there for Adam. He made the sacrifice, now let him clothe you with it. He has done all the work. Our fig leaves won’t work any more. Ask for his clothing, for his provision. Ask that you might have a relationship with him again. If you’re here and are a Christina, or are not, I say, ask. We have all sinned. We have all fallen, and God wants all of us to have life once more. He is here with his arms spread wide, waiting for you to accept his embrace. Feel his forgiveness, cry in his arms, love him again.

Let us pray.

Retreat Talk

2008-09-10T22:39:00.000-05:00

Here is my talk for the Fall conference this weekend. I get to open the thing. Pretty exciting.

Welcome everyone to the Retreat. I was asked to give the first talk this weekend, which is really a lot of pressure. As many of you have seen and heard, the theme is the Ancient Path. This weekend is about bringing Christians together and trying to change this Valley and our campuses for Christ. Before I begin, let’s pray.

(prayer)

Okay, let’s begin. As I already said the retreat is called the Ancient Path. Here is where I am going to blow your minds. You may be thinking, as you have looked at the program of events, that we were going to be studying methods and means to become more spiritual. And in some way we will be, but as we go through the weekend, there is going to be an overarching mega theme, and that is, all of these things are about a person, for a person, directed at a person. We need to keep this in mind as we stay here until Sunday. As we sit in on talks about mission and church, worship and prayer, we need to remember that these are not the primary things we should take away. They are ways to become closer to a person, increase our love for a person, to be drawn us closer to a person. And who is this person I speak of. Well you may have guessed- it is Jesus.

What I want to do tonight is set the ground work for the rest of the talks. To do this, I think we need to look at some things Jesus has said about himself, so it isn’t just some dude standing on a stage talking. If you have a Bible, please turn with me in it to John Chapter 14. If you don’t have a Bible, don’t worry, all the text will be up on the screen to my left, you can follow along there. If you don’t own a Bible, come see me after the talk, and I will get you one, don’t be shy about it, we have many extras to give out.

The text we are going to be reading is in the Gospel of John which is in the New Testament, which is the second half of your Bible. Jesus is speaking to his disciples before he gets arrested. What he is going to do in this chapter of the book, and the ones following it, is give last minute advice and instructions. It is kind of like when your parents dropped you off at college for the first time. They kept giving you all sorts of words of wisdom. They may have seemed rushed. They were just trying to get everything out so you would hear it. This is what Jesus is doing here. He is throwing many things at his disciples since he knows he is going to be leaving them soon. And so he is giving them the last few things they really need to remember.

In John 14 he says

1 "Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. 2In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. 4And you know the way to where I am going." 5 Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" 6Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him."

And here is the foundational text for tonight, and I hope the entire weekend. Most of us here are Christians, I would imagine, and so we hear these words and are not startled by them. We already know Jesus is the Way. But this text is more revolutionary than we may believe. Jesus is saying that he is the only path. As we think about way to interact with God, we may have many ideas. Many religions have many ways of finding God, of getting closer to Him. In fact, this weekend we are going to be talking about a lot of ways to interact with him. But Jesus says there is one primary way, himself. With out this, all else is for naught. The way to God is not through correct prayer methods, or worship songs, or meditation- not so say these things aren’t good. The way to God is through Jesus, and only through Jesus. Jesus says no one comes to the Father except through him. This is revolutionary. This is slightly offensive too, is it not? Maybe not to us, but to many other people around the world. C.S. Lewis touches on this in his essay, “What are we to make of Jesus Christ?” which I will be quoting from later.

As we go though the weekend and attend all these different seminars, again, we must remember what Jesus said about himself. His last words to his closest followers were not about how they should act, or correct methods to spread the Gospel, or how to do small groups. His last words were a reminder that he was the way to do it all. We can study all we want, and pray all we want, and evangelize all we want, and sing all we want, but if Jesus isn’t t the heart of it, nothing will come of it. Or rather nothing good will come of it in the end. What we need to remember tonight, this weekend, this semester, this year, is that Jesus is the Way. He is the Ancient Path. Everything else we talk about are road signs and signposts and directions. They are helpful to get us to our destination, but they are not the end. We need to use them and pay attention to what they say, but we are not on the trip to see them. We are on this trip to get to Jesus.

How many of us have ever taken a road trip? A few, good. I used to drive to Florida with my friends every spring break when we were in college. The first year we stopped at many places to take pictures. We stopped at boarder signs, you know, the “Welcome to (this state)” billboards, we stopped at South of the Border. We stopped at sign posts and for directions. Sometimes we took back roads to avoid traffic and really needed to stop for directions, getting lost in rural North Carolina- a few times. But none of these things, although cool, were the destination. They were places along our way. We didn’t stay at the truck stop we stopped at for directions, we found out where we were, and where we needed to be, and kept going toward our goal, Florida. This is how we need to view everything else we will be talking about this week. They are not bad; don’t hear me say that, they are quite beneficial if used properly. They make the trip more exciting and memorable. When me and my friends look back at our Spring Breaks, we have great memories of the trip. We have pictures of crazy things along the way, and it helps us to relive the adventure. We used them as they should have been used. It would have been foolish however to stop at the “Entering Georgia” sign and camp under it for a week and then drive back. That is not the purpose of the sign. The purpose is to help us get to our destination. So it is with all the devotions and talks this weekend. They are designed to get us to the destination. And that is Jesus. He is the way, the truth and the light.

Before I go on, I want to make a quick aside. I know some of what I just said can be controversial. I said that the only way to God is Jesus. If you are here and you have a problem with this, I encourage you to come speak with me or any of our speakers after this workshop. I am not as mean as people think I am, I promise, and the other guys I can vouch for too. I would encourage you to actually dig into the text and see if we do need to take Jesus and his words at face value- I think we do. We can talk after. Please don’t be shy. Now that I said that, I want to move on. An entire series of talks could be given on this text alone- and after all that set up and potential controversy, I am going to move on. Most of us are Christians, and buy what Jesus said here, and so I don’t want to harp too much on it. The actual talk for tonight is going to begin now, not 10 minutes ago as you all assumed when I started speaking. But I needed this mini sermon to set up my real talk.

See it is all well and good to get up here among Christians and say that Jesus is the way. But what does that really mean? What does it look like if we are to take this Ancient Path? How do we get on? That is what I actually want to talk about today.

If you still have your Bibles turn back to Luke chapter 18, verse 18-30. We read:

18 And a ruler asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" 19And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 20You know the commandments: 'Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother.'" 21And he said, "All these I have kept from my youth." 22When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." 23 But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich. 24Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, "How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! 25For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God." 26Those who heard it said, "Then who can be saved?" 27But he said, "What is impossible with men is possible with God." 28And Peter said, "See, we have left our homes and followed you." 29And he said to them, "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, 30who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life."

Here is where we are going to camp out the rest of the night. As we first read it, we may be tempted to read into the text something like the Poverty Gospel. The Poverty Gospel basically says that you can not be a Christian if you have lots of money. That is you are very rich, you should be giving all you own away to follow Jesus, and that unless you do this, you are not on the right Path. And that may be true of some people, maybe of even some in this room. There may be people who’s biggest stumbling block to Jesus is their wealth, and until they get rid of it, they will never understand the Gospel. But this is not the only valid interpretation of the text, as we shall see.

The other way we could read and misinterpret the text is to read something like a Prosperity Gospel into Jesus words. This basically asserts that if we give up our stuff, God will bless us with more. We can get this by reading what Jesus says to Peter as a promise that if we sacrifice for the Kingdom of God, we will receive much more, both now and in heaven. This too is not how this is supposed to be read though.

To truly understand what Jesus is saying here, what the Scripture is teaching us, we need to examine the text much closer. First, let us examine the rich young ruler. For one, we know he is Jewish. How do we know this, well there are a few give aways. First, he calls Jesus Rabbi. This tells us he knows something about the culture of the time. Jesus was a teacher, and in Jewish society, they are called rabbis. He recognizes Jesus position. This tells us he knows about the position to begin with. We also, a few lines later, see Jesus tell him that he knows the commandments. Only Jews would have been expected at this time to know the commandments. Jews would have dressed different than the Gentiles and Romans in Palestine at the time, and Jesus picks up on this, and assumes the man knows the commandments. The guy is Jewish. After Jesus tells him he knows the commandments, the ruler replies that he in fact does know them. More than this, he has followed all of them (although, as we shall see, this is doubtful). This confirms his Jewish heritage.

Why is this important? Well, for one, the Jews knew their Bible. They were the people to whom God entrusted his Word, and through whom all Scripture would be fulfilled. They were the people in “the know”. They were like Christians today. They knew about God, the Bible, etc. As we read this story, we need to keep in mind that this guy was probably like many of us. He went to church, did Bible studies, tried to live a good life. He was trying to follow God, kind of. We can even see this in his question. He is really seeking from a pastor who he seems to respect, what the next step of his faith must be. He has probably asked many other rabbis the same question in the past. How else would he have known to follow the commandments? Or about eternal life? My guess is that he was a very devout Jew.

That is not to say that his line of questioning was completely innocent. Upon reading the text we get the impression that he knows the answer to his question already. He is expecting the answer so many other rabbis have given to him in the past- follow the commandments. Then he can say that he has, and walk away feeling good about himself. He can rest assured that yet one more teacher has confirmed that he is a good person. It almost seems like he wants to acclimation. He hopes Jesus will look at him, see how good he is, I mean, he says so himself, and then tell everyone else they should be more like this ruler. He has followed all the commandments, right?

And so he asks Jesus what he needs to do to get to heaven. But he doesn’t just ask. First he pads his question with some false compliments. Good teacher he says. And here is the thing about this, we get the impression he has not really met Jesus before, so the compliment is empty. He is doing it to loosen Jesus up a little so Jesus will like him better. At least that is what I take from it. We have all done this haven’t we? We go into a job interview or something else, and compliment the guys tie, or store, anything. We tell pastors before we talk with them how good their last sermon was, or how we love what they are doing. I am not saying don’t compliment pastors, in facts, I will be in the back to take all the compliments you want to give me after this talk, I am just saying, sometimes we butter people up so they like us more. And this ruler is no different. This may even be how he got rich. I find very successful people are much better at making me like them with false compliments than unsuccessful.

I think we also sometimes do this to God. How often when we are praying or talking to people about God do we throw in how good He is, but we don’t really mean it at the time. I mean, we know he is good, but, at least I am sometimes insincere. I want to get to the part of the prayer where I ask for things, so I give some time to talking God up to himself. I say things like you are so awesome and powerful, Almighty, etc, and what I am really thinking is, okay, get he formalities out of the way so I can get to my stuff. But that is an aside.

See, Jesus sees right through this. He calls the man out and asks him why he said he was good. This is kind of funny on so many levels. First Jesus really is good, and so maybe he is giving the ruler a chance to call it as it is. He is letting him try to figure it out. Jesus is seeing if this man can see what others can’t. He wants the ruler to see that he is in fact god, and only God is good, so therefore… But the ruler misses this. He misses a lot of things, we shall see. Even more funny though, had to be the rulers reaction. Have any of you said something that you really didn’t know why you said, and then had someone call you out on it? I have. It is really embarrassing if you don’t have an answer. This happens to me a lot in sports conversations. I don’t really watch sports, but I am a guy, so I need to know about sports. Very often I just watch SportsCenter and quote what they said. Usually I get away with it, but sometimes people ask why I think that, and I am I quite. We will be talking about basketball and I will say something like, well the Celtics are the best team in the NBA this year. And they will say, really, why do you think that. And I don’t think that. I mean, I do, because SportsCenter told me, but I haven’t done my own research or anything, so I really don’t know why I think that. So I stare at them and mutter and walk away embarrassed. T

That is the scene here. Jesus asks why the ruler thinks he is good. There must be a reason, or he wouldn’t have said it, right? If the ruler had been following him for a while he may have had an answer. “Well, I saw you feed 5,000, or exercise that demon, or heal all those lepers. That is a really good thing to do, Jesus. I am all for healing lepers miraculously. That is why I call you good.” But the guys is stumped. He doesn’t reply. Instead, Jesus continues. There is no conversation from the ruler. Just, I imagine, a deer-in-headlights kind of stare, a wide mouth, and silence. At which point Jesus begins speaking again, because of someone didn’t it would have been even more awkward.

There is another thing Jesus does here. The ruler, as I’ve already said, thinks himself good. I make this statement, and know I am right, because no one says they have kept all the commandments, unless they think they are good. He is looking for confirmation that he has done the right thing. Why else would he tell Jesus so quickly that he has followed the commandments? What Jesus does, is tell him no one is good, though. He is subtly telling the ruler that he is not good, even though he thinks himself so. This guy was biting at the chomp to tell Jesus he followed all the commandments and get the acclimation he deserved. And before the guy can do that, Jesus has already taken the wind out of the guy’s sails. The ruler doesn’t realize it yet, but it has happened. See, the ruler misses a lot. I think he may have come into money, rather than earning it himself.

Jesus then answers the ruler’s question. He does it kind of sarcastically. It is almost like Jesus knows the man already has the answer. And Jesus answers him in just that way. He says, “You know the commandments.” Why are you asking? I know you just want to show off. I know you aren’t really one of my followers. The ruler misses the entire conversation that Jesus is trying to have with him under the talking, and having his mind on showing off, tells Jesus he has done it all. I imagine he is pretty proud at this point. Have any of you asked a question in a class, knowing the answer, so that you can then Talk with the professor and show off. I know some of you have. I used to. That is the interaction here. And with out flinching, Jesus continues his answer.

He says, well there is one thing left to do. I am not sure if the ruler had heard this before. “One more thing to do, what could it be”, he is wondering. Is it tithe to Jesus church, he could do that. Wear different clothes, listen to different music, all these are ok. At this point the ruler is a little disheartened, but I imagine ready to what Jesus says. He was not looking for one more box to check, but of that is what it is going to take, well he will heck that box. And Jesus, knowing people’s hearts, seeing this man has money, and more than this, that he is attached to it unhealthily, says the final thing the ruler must do to inherit eternal life is to sell all he has and follow him. And we read that the rich man became very sad because he was very wealthy. And he went away disheartened, and Jesus felt bad for him.

And then Jesus says, “How hard it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” And so we read it and thank God we are poor college kids or poor ex-college kids, and we go about our merry lives. Or we chastise those with money and feel bad for them, because it really is hard for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Or we react like Peter.

How does Peter react? Let’s look. Before we do though, I really need to set up Peter’s character in the Gospels. He is not the best guy. He is portrayed many times as bumbling, misreading the situation, and terribly ambitious. So let’s now see what Peter says to Jesus. Remember also that Jesus just essentially crushed this rulers hopes of eternal life. Now I don’t think the guy was totally hopeless, he actually heard Jesus words, and finally understands, but he goes away sad. He knows there is a tough decision ahead of him. And what does Peter say after this? He says, “We have left everything to follow you.” This is terrible timing, to say the least. It is in bad taste, rude, and many other things, not the least of which is just plain stupid. It is like when we were kids and we see another kid getting in trouble and we say, “Iti is a good thing I didn’t do such and such.” It is a way to beat the other guy down and at the same time lift ourselves up. It is a manipulation, and selfish. And it is very often how we react.

What Peter was doing was reminding Jesus that he was better tan that man because he understood more. He was holier because he did what Jesus told him to. And he was proud of his position, and wanted Jesus to raise him up in the same way the ruler wanted to be lifted up. We are no different. We are proud in the fact that we have given up stuff for Jesus and remind him occasionally that we have left everything to follow him, as if he didn’t know. Seriously, what is Peter thinking. He is looking for the same thing the rich ruler is.

“Hey Jesus, I have the right answer, pick me. I am not proud or foolish like that other guy, see, I left everything”. And what was Jesus supposed to say, “Oh, Peter, I didn’t realize you left everything! Wow, we have been together all this time, and man, wow, I am sorry. You…you really are holy. Wow. What has it been, 2 years, and this whole time, I had no Idea you left things. I though every night when we went to sleep on hills and in other peoples homes you secretly snuck back to your bed, or to an RV or hotel or something. Man… you really left everything… I am sorry I didn’t recognize this before. You really are making sacrifices. That other guy, he didn’t get it but, wow, you left everything? Really? Wow. Peter, you’re awesome. Know what, you should teach next week. Everything? Wow. How did I miss it? Wow. That’s all I have to say…Wow”

Really, what was Peter thinking? So, we too react like Peter or the ruler. We are proud that we have left things and want to make sure God knows, or we are disheartened because we don’t think we can. But this story isn’t about leaving all your material possessions, or your family. It is not about selling all you have and walking around in 1^st century Palestine. It is about riches and the cost of Christianity. Jesus is only telling the ruler to leave everything because that is his stumbling block. As Jesus does this, he is showing hi that he has not kept all the commandments, because he has elevated his money, or the security it buys, or the cool things, to the position of God. He is showing him that he has made an idol. And he is doing one more thing as well. He is teaching those around him a lesson- there is a cost to following Jesus. It is not a casual thing. There are consequences to it. Jesus has taught his before.

Turn in your Bibles to the last Text for tonight. It is earlier in Luke. Chapter 9, verse 57-62. We read:

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, "I will follow you wherever you go." 58And Jesus said to him, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." 59To another he said, "Follow me." But he said, "Lord, let me first go and bury my father." 60And Jesus said to him, "Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go andproclaim the kingdom of God." 61Yet another said, "I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home." 62Jesus said to him, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God."

Now this text, like the last is not as dramatic as it first seems, yet is at the same time more dramatic then we believe. Jesus is not saying don’t go to work or don’t go to funerals. He is not saying we need to be homeless. Just like he is not telling us we need to sell all our things to follow him properly. What he is saying is that there is a cost to following him. There is a price to be paid to call ourselves Christians. There are things we used to do we can’t do anymore, and new things we have never done that we have to start doing. There is a walking away from things.

Too often, we like the rich young ruler, especially those of us in the church, think we have all the answers. We think since we read our Bibles, follow the commandments, are good people, we are all set. We think, like Peter, “well we left our old ways behind, so it is clear sailing form here on out.” And we remind God of these things. We pay Him lip service, but we really don’t know him. When he asks us why we think he is good, we stare at him with our mouths wide open, and then jump into our question, ignoring his entirely. We see him on the road and we say, “We will follow you.” But have we counted the cost? Have we sold all we have?

Jesus is telling us that there is a lot more to following Him, to walking this Path, than often we want. He is telling us that the Path he has for us is not safe and secure in the traditional worldly sense. The Son of Man has no where to lay his head. That isn’t very comforting. There is some uncertainty there. Jesus is not safe that way. We say we will follow him, but we have to go finish our old work. We need to say bye to our old life. And Jesus says if we do that, we are not fit. If we try to be safe, to always have our P’s and Q’s minded, to have a safety net incase this Christian thing doesn’t work out, we are not truly following Christ. We can’t take the comfort of the world with us.

One of the things Jesus is telling us in all these stories is that there is no middle ground. We are either with him, or not. There is a new life ahead of us, and we can never go back to it again. When we become Christians, we are leaving things behind. He says this when he calls himself the Way, he is saying this in this last passage, and he is saying it to the ruler when he tells him to sell his things and follow him. The old work we were a part of is not of us anymore, our old lifestyle is not for us anymore, our old safety is not for us anymore.

I said I would quote C.S. Lewis tonight, and now I will fulfill ,y promise to you. In his essay, “What are we to make of Jesus Christ?” he finishes the essay as follows:

“’What are we to make of Jesus Christ?’ There is no question what e can make of Him, it is entirely a question of what he will make of us. You must accept of reject the story.

The things He says are very different from what any other teacher has said. Others say, “This is the truth about the universe. This is how it ought to go,” but He says, “I am the Truth, the Way and the Life.” He says, “No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me. Try to retain you own life and you will be inevitably ruined. Give yourself away and you will be saved.” He says, “If you are ashamed of Me, if, when you hear this call, you turn the other way, I also will look the other way when I come again as God without disguise. If anything whatever is keeping you from God and from Me, what ever it is, throw it away. If it is your eye, pull it out. If it is your hand, cut it off. If you put yourself first you will be last. Come to me everyone who is carrying a heavy load, I will set that right. Your sins, all of them, are wiped out. I can do that. I am Rebirth, I am Life. Eat Me, drink Me, I am our Food. And finally, do not be afraid, I have overcome the whole universe.” That is the issue.

My question then for us tonight then is, “Have we counted the cost?” When we decide to walk this Ancient Path, have we taken a good look at what it is going to take? Foxes and birds have places to go, but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head. We can join the foxes and birds. We can follow the ways of the world and be secure. We can look to homes and cars and material things for our security, or we can decide to find all of that in the Way, the Truth, and the Life. It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to enter through the eye of a needle.

Tonight, as we finish, I want us to ask ourselves if we have really followed all the commandments as we think we have. Are we as good as we wish? The rich young ruler though he had followed all the commandments, but what about the one where we were told not to covet, not to have idols? Can he really say that he followed that? Why was he so distraught when he was told to give it up? It is because that is where his security was. He worshipped his money, and he didn’t even realize it. He coveted others things, and wasn’t even aware. He was rich in the conventional sense of the word, and the money was keeping him from following the Path that would lead him to eternal life.

Where are we rich? What is it that we are looking to as our path to eternal life? What is it that we truly worship? These are the things I want us to think of tonight. Maybe we are monetarily rich, maybe we are rich with friendships, maybe it is relationships. Are we rich in our studies, putting our hope and pride in our grades and intelligence. Or possibly it is clothes that make us rich, always being in style, or our car, or we are rich in how good a person we are, making sure never to break a commandment. Maybe we are rich because we have followed Jesus, and we need him to know it. Maybe we are rich in our poverty, taking pride in how well we give all we have away. Is it athletics, artistic talent, political superiority? I tell you it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. What are we holding onto? What are we coveting? What are our Idols?

There is a price to be paid to call ourselves Christians. We must sell everything and follow Jesus. We must leave the dead to bury themselves, we must leave our old life, completely. We can not have one foot on the Ancient Path, and another on our own way. There is only one way to eternal life, the Way, and we must take it whole heartedly. Tonight, as we prepare for the rest of the weekend, I would beg us to take a look at ourselves and see where we have not followed Jesus. What are we holding onto? What would make us sad to give up if Jesus told us we needed to, to follow him. Where are we rich? What would make us disheartened? Jesus does not want part of us, or for us to be good- what Jesus wants is all of us, and all of us wholeheartedly devoted to him.

So I ask again, where are we rich? What do we love sometimes more than Jesus. What has gotten in our Way? Tonight as we end, I don’t want to just beat us over the head. The story doesn’t end there. There is hope. We still have the ability to sell all we have and follow him. He has not left nor forsaken us. HE is still right here, begging us to sell our things. He is still saddened when we don’t. He is still the Way, the Truth and the Life. He is still offering us eternal life, if we would just ask for it.

As we prepare for the rest of this weekend, I want to invite us to give up our riches. I invite us to ask for this eternal life. If you r here tonight, and you want to follow this Path, if you want to walk in the Way, I invite you to come up here to the front of the stage. If you are here and there are things in your way, things blocking our path, I invite you to come up here and give them up. If you are out there and want to commit to this person , or recommit, I invite you to come to the front of the stage. I invite all those who are weary and sick and weak and rich. Come follow this man. Come give up your wealth. Give up all the things that are in your way. I invite you to com up here and recommit to Jesus, to begin anew walking the Path. I invite you to come up and pray with me, as I pray for you. Don’t be shy. If you know there are things that are blocking your relationship with Jesus, riches you have that you can’t seem to get the courage to give up, come and lay them at Jesus feet tonight. He has overcome the world, he is offering new life, He is offering freedom. Come and follow the Path that leads to life and life abundant.

Let us Pray.

Creation to Christ Part 1

2008-09-09T12:36:00.001-05:00

This week for MERCYhouse Nights we are beginning the semester sermon series titled From Creation to Christ. We will be walking through the entire Bible. Here is the first sermon, on Genesis 1. Hope you like it.

This week we begin our new sermon series, “From Creation to Christ”. We will be walking through the entire Bible, (high points anyway) in the remaining 12 weeks of the semester. This week we are going to be dealing with Genesis 1, the account of creation. Before we jump into the ancient Hebrew text, I want to first give a taste of the creation stories around the Mediterranean about this time.

The Babylonian creation myth goes as follows:

There are two ancient gods, Tiamat and Apsu. Apsu is a male, and is fresh water, Tiamat female and salt water. Many other gods are created and they live in Tiamat’s body, one of these is Ea. Like any children, these new gods make a lot of noise, and it is upsetting Apsu, who sets about to kill them all. Ea finds out about this plan and uses magic to make Apsu go into a comma, at which point he kills him. Ea becomes the new head god, takes a woman, Damkina, and they have a son, Marduk. Marduk is more of a punk than his family, and is even keeping Tiamat up at night as he plays with wind inside her body, where everyone still lives.

The other gods have had enough with Marduk, and convince Tiamat to take revenge for Apsu’s death. She recruits gods to her side, creates 11 monsters to help her, and remarries, declaring her new hubby, Kingu as having supreme dominion. The other gods chose Marduk as their champion, and his power grows. He then super inflates Tiamat with the wind he got as a child, and eventually she can’t move because she was too bloated. He then shoots an arrow into her heart, killing her, and takes the gods and monsters on her side captive. He smashed Tiamat’s head with a club, and then rips her body in twain. He uses half of her body for the earth, and the other half for the sky. He then sets about o create the natural order of things, using Tiamats spit for rain, and setting us seasons. Her nose formed rivers and her breasts mountains. And the story goes on.

This story isn’t unique either. The god’s of the ancient Mediterranean were second generation gods, being created first and then usurping and killing the others. We see this with Greek myth too. Zeus kills Chronos to become chief god. Zeus lived on Create well before “creation” happened, that is where he grew up and planned to overthrow Chronos. With the help of his mother, Zeus was able to rescue his brothers and sisters, whom Chronos, had eaten by inducing him to vomit them up, and then they wage war against him. The children won the battle and banished Chronos and his allies forever.

Egypt and other places are not much different. There are a pantheon of gods and goddesses, chaos is the ruler, infighting between the gods the law. And amidst it all, there is a little backwater hole in the wale called Palestine that had something very different. What we are going to see as we explore this text is a creation story that is different from any other. There is a God of order who has a plan. In many of the stories I just read, and others around the world, humans are an afterthought. In some stories, the gods seed accidentally falls on the ground, and we sprout up, in others it is their blood. What we are going to see today though, is a God who creates everything with a purpose. There is no accident. Order is the rule, rather than disorder. So without further ado, lets jump into the text.

We read in Genesis 1:

1In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

3And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Before we get to the big themes of Genesis 1, and we will, I want to stop and discuss some minor, yet very important details. This text is probably the most well known, and little studied by those of us here today. We all know the creation story, and so we never read it. When we read it, we only read it, think it very nice, and go no deeper. The problem with this though, is that this story is so dense I could give an entire sermon series on it alone. We are going to try to hit a few of the major points as we go. Let’s dive in, shall we.

The first word in Hebrew of the Bible is the word Bereishit (pronounced berrasheet). The first three words are “Bereishit bara Elohim”. Many of the Bibles we have seen in our life, including the translation I just read translate this, “In the Beginning…” We all know this, right. The first sentence of the Bible is sort of iconic, isn’t it? In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. However, this is a mistranslation. Some modern translations do have the correct interpretation of the words, the Anchor Bible, being one of them. What this sentence should read is “When God began to create the Heavens and the Earth.” This might not seem like a big deal, it may seem this is only semantics, but I think it is a huge deal.

Entire theologies have been built around semantics, as well as scientific proof that the Bible is false. And some of the strongest objections to the Bible’s validity are found right here because of a mistranslation. If we read the text “In the Beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.” we have stated that the Earth was there from day one. We have a much more literal depiction of creation. This leads to the doctrine of a 6000 year old Earth, and Creationism. Let me pause here and say that this isn’t necessarily a wrong view. The text is certainly open to that interpretation. It is not, however the only interpretation of the text. Very often when I talk to people, they have made up their mind, and try to force me to take their perspective. This s true of everyone by the way, including myself. So Creationists on one side tell me that I have to interpret the text their way and build and entire theology around it, and scientist tells me that because Creationist interpret the text that way, they have disproved the Bible. What I am telling us today, is that the text may not be as open and shut as we have been lead to believe.

If we take the translation, “When God began to create…”, a whole new world is open to us. We don’t have to take the text literally, but possibly we can interpret it symbolically. We can see it not as setting up a Creationist Theology, but as standing in stark contrast to the other creation myths of the world. The text implies a plan from the very first sentence. When God began to create. Humans are not an afterthought. Creation is not just some dead gods corpse. There was a creative action that occurred. I am no saying that the story isn’t literal as well, I am just saying there is more here than others would have us believe.

I could spend all day in these verses alone, but I need to move on. The next thing we see is that the Spirit of God was upon the waters. This is the first reference to the Trinity in the Bible, and it happens on page one. We are going to see references to the Trinity throughout the Bible, including many in Genesis alone.

And finally we get to the act of creation itself. God says, “Let there be light.” And there is light. What we have, is again a God with a plan. Creation is not some accident. God speaks it into creation. In the ancient Mediterranean world, speech had much more power that it does today. Language was sacred, especially to the Hebrews. It was often believed if one could know the name of a god and speak it out loud, one could have power over them. If an oath was sworn, it was binding unto death. Language was held in the highest regard. It says something then, that God would create by speaking. Speech is a very rational and premeditated thing. It is the highest of human capabilities. Unlike creation coming from more primal behaviors- murder, or sex, or blood- in the Bible, it comes from the highest. It is the product of thought and direct action. Again, this is standing in contrast to all other myths.

The creation story goes on. To get a full appreciation of what is going on, I am going to read it once through. As I do this, listen. I mean really listen. Actually, before we read it, I should tell us all something else. There is a lot of controversy, not only in the first sentence of this story, but with the entire thing. Part of the reason for this controversy, is that we don’t really know how to read this story. There are parts of the Bible that are literal histories. When we get to Kings and Chronicles, we will see that they are written like history. We are told of real people doing real things. There is no poetry and little metaphor. As we read these texts, including the last half of Genesis, we get the impression that we are supposed to take them literally. There are also sections of the Bible that read much more like prose. If we look at the Psalms or Song of Solomon, no one would think we should read them literally. That are full of simile and metaphor. When Solomon says his lovers teeth are like goats, we don’t think that they are hairy, or her breast like rolling pastures, we don’t think of grass. We understand that this is poetry. Sometimes in the Gospels we are told where Jesus went, and we think, “this is a literal story”, and other times he tells us the kingdom of God is like a (fill in the blank) and we think, ”Jesus is creating an analogy.” This is something most of us do naturally all the time.

We are able to read poetry and know it is poetry and read first hand accounts and know they are to be taken literally. There is nothing controversial in this statement. Here is where the controversy is though. There is nothing like Genesis 1, not in the Bible, not anywhere else. As far as ancient literary techniques go, it is unique. So we don’t really know if it is supposed to be read as a history or as poetry. I think it is both, and I will explain why in a minute. First, most of us have heard this text before, but I want us to hear it as poetry.

6And God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." 7And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. 8And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

9And God said, "Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so. 10God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

11And God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth." And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

14And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, 15and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth." And it was so. 16And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

20And God said, "Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens." 21So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." 23And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

24And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds." And it was so. 25And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

26Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
27So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

28And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth." 29And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30Andto every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

If we read this as an ancient Hebrew poem, something very interesting happens. Here is how creation looks.

Day 1 God creates light, the Day and Night. Day 4 God creates the sun and moon, things that were to govern Day and Night and found there home in them.

Day 2 God creates the oceans and the sky. Day 5 God creates all the creatures of the sea and birds and flying things. He creates first the home for his creation, an then the things that will be there.

Day 3 God creates dry land and then plants to live on it. Day 6 God creates things that live on land, creeping things, beasts and livestock. He again, created the home for the creation, and then the things to live there. And after all of this he creates Man.

Notice too that everything God created was good. This is an aside now, but will be more important next week.

The way the text is set up, we clearly see a God of Order. He has forethought and plan. He is systematic in his creation, everything building upon the previous creation. We also get the idea that the text is rushing us toward the creation of Man. There is almost as much text about the creation of this one thing, as about every other day. There is a push. It is almost rushed, isn’t it. It seems to me like the author doesn’t really care about the other stuff too much, but cares about the way they were created and the reason. It is like a kid trying to tell you what happened to him, but first he needs to tell some set up that isn’t important. So God created the Heaven and Earth, and the sun, and the land, and all that stuff, then plants and birds, oh yeah, and fish, and see the order of things, and then he created animals, and then he paused for a second, and this is what happened. And the Author takes a breath.

What we see is an entire scene painted for this moment. The Human creation is special. It is different. Something happens that didn’t happen in all the other creative acts God just completed. God begins to speak differently than he did in the rest of the tale. He says “Let us make man in our image.” Now this statement, again, is an entire sermon. What we have is a singular God talking to himself, it would seem. There is nothing else created. This is the second reference to the Trinity.

But more than this, it says that humans are special. We are not just another animal created for the land. God stopped. It is as if he has finished the background to his painting, and now is time for the portrait. He steps back and looks. “Everything is good, lets move on to what we really wanted to do.” And he makes man in His image. There are many things I could talk about with this. Here are some of them. God is three persons in one, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and we kind of are too. We are Mind, Body, and Soul. God is a God who creates, and we too create. God is a rational God of order, and humans also possess these qualities. One of the reasons language was held so high in Hebrew culture is because we were created in God’s image, and he created with Language. It was believed that we too, create with language.

There are a few other things that we will get to next week as well. What is important for us here, is that we are special. We were set apart. There is a divine spark in us that the rest of creation doesn’t have. And more than this, the text goes on. Not only does God talk about this last creation, and then make it in His image, he then speaks to it. He tells man to fill the earth and subdue it. That he has dominion over it. These verses have also been misread by many people. They have been read to prove that we can destroy forests and pollute as much as we want, and more recently they have been used to support an environmental agenda. Neither of these are true. The truth is something much better, much more special.

It is true that we have been given power of the Earth. God presented man with a home, and a gift. This doesn’t give us free reign to pollute though. We are not being appreciative of the gift if we squander it. On the other hand, environmentalism is a pagan value. Mother Earth as a living thing that we need to hold up and respect is not what we see in this text. We have the right to subdue it and have dominion over it. Humans are the pinnacle of creation, not Nature, and as such are given divine rights over it. That is not to say we shouldn’t recycle or reduce our waste or not pollute. But we need to have proper motivations for it. We are dong it as grateful children who want to keep their gift in as good a condition as possible, not as people who need to bow down to a mother goddess.

And after God speaks to man and gives him this divine mandate, the text takes an interesting turn. One of the poetic tools that was being used throughout Genesis 1 is the ending of a creation with it is good. On Day six, we see that it is good before God ends creating for the day. We see him reflect at only the creation of land animals, read it is good, and then we have the special account of the creation of people. And then God speaks to them, and gives them a gift, and then he steps back for a final time in the text. We read that God saw all that he had created and saw that it was very good. We the reader, the first time reading this as a poem, should expect that it was good. That has been the literary device used thus far. But we are unexpectedly told it was very good.

This may mnot be shocking to us today because we have heard this story so many times, but literarily it is. It changes the entire mood of the text. We see a dramatic turn. What we see is a completion of work, and a God to is not only pleased with what he has done, but ecstatic. And then he rests. This reminds me of my art. God is an artist. Many of you have seen my art work up at MERCYhouse. I am always proud of what I create. I look back and think it is good. I have a plan in my mind before I set about to draw, start at a point and work out. There is order and rationality involved. If you have ever painted, you know that the easiest thing to do is to start the background first. You paint it in, wait for it to dry, and then move to the next closer object. This is akin to the creation we read here. But the analogy isn’t done. Some of my painting series are even more telling. The paintings up on the walls right now took about a week to do. I painted many at a time, working on background of one, while I did foregrounds of others. I also had all of them sketched out before I began. I was asked to have art done for Easter Sunday a few years ago, and these are what I came up with. They are abstract stations of the cross. As I finished each painting, I would frame it, take a picture, and send the picture to my wife. I would step back and see that they were good. I was proud of each piece. And then I finished all of them, and hung them on the walls. And I thought it was very good. I saw, not only each individual creation, but the series as a whole. And I was proud. This is the picture that we are to have of God as well. Each thing was good, but he finishes his piece de résistance, Man, sees the whole thing finished, and is super pleased. It was very good.

And then he rests. After I finished these 10 paintings, I took a deep breath, stepped back, saw what I had done, and stopped. I stopped creating, stopped thinking, rejuvenated. I sat down and looked upon my work. And I do this with every piece. After I show them to people, take pictures, etc. I very often like to sit and look at them. There is a picture I created of a man in my living room, many of you have seen it. It is hanging over my TV. I did it over half a year ago, and still I enjoy coming home and staring at it. Resting. Knowing that it is very good. What we see in these last few verses of Genesis 1 is a God who is proud of what he has done. Again, this is in stark contrast to other creation mythologies who have gods arguing about what to do with pesky humans, trying to kill them, and finding them extremely annoying. This is not the God of the Bible. He is the proud parent, creator, artist.

Now I said that this was both poetry and history. I want to wrap up here. Many people will have you believe that you need to take this story literally. That God only took 6 days to create. That the order laid out in the Bible is a science. I am not saying you can’t believe this. I know people who do. I am friends with them. It is a valid interpretation. Scientists will tell you that they can prove the earth was not created in 6 days, and so all the Bible is therefore false.

On the other side, there are people who will tell you that most of Genesis is closer to myth. C.S. Lewis, who I agree with on most things, calls these stories true myth. They will say you shouldn’t take any of these stories literally, but pull the principles out of it.

One camp wants to read only poetry, the other only history. I disagree with both. They are both right and wrong. The truth is something so much richer, so much fuller, so much more true. The truth is that these stories should be read as both poetry and history. The creation story tells us in a poetic way how God created everything. It shows us a plan, forethought, and a means. He speaks everything into creation. If we only read this as poetry, we loose something. We loose the fact that we are special. That God created everything with his thoughts and words. That he gave us the Earth as a gift. That we are special, created in his image. If we read it only as history we loose just as much. We miss the subtly to the creation. We miss that the days correspond to each other. We miss some of the mystery and nuance, some of the subtly and mystique.

As we leave here tonight, what is important isn’t whether the Earth is 6000 or 4 billion years old, whether God used evolution to create or not, whether the Earth was there on day 1 or day 4. What is important is that creation was planned, logical, and ordered. And what is more important than this, is that we are its pinnacle. We are special. We are created in God’s image. We are not some byproduct of probabilities and mutations, we are the reason for everything else. Creation was given as gift to us. God stopped both before and after we were created, and said that is was very good.

If you are here today and you feel unimportant, miniscule, insecure, I want to tell you that that those thought are all lies. We are very important. We are not just another animal. We are created in God’s image. Often when I think about the size of the universe or the smallness of atoms, I wonder how God could take notice of me. I think we may all feel that way at times. With over 6 billion people, a world so large, and a solar system so gigantic, I wonder how could God care. I wonder why he would care about my problems, about my sorrows, about my joy. With a galaxy so large, a universe so large I wonder why God created us. I count up the numbers of cells in my body, on this planet, the number of atoms in creation, and I wonder how God even thinks twice about humans.

But the truth of this text is that he not only cares, but all the other things are for us. It is not that he is busy dealing with the rest of creation, and we are a happy afterthought- the rest of creation was for us. We are the pinnacle of creation, and the reason for it all. He set about on day one to create something marvelous and beautiful and wonderful for us. We are not unimportant or small, we are loved and cared for. We are the part of creation that God though about, conversed with, gave gifts too. We are not just another naked ape, we are God’s beloved, made in his image, valued by him. This is the truth we need to take away today. We are infinitely valuable to God. We are his Magnus Opus. We are important to him.

If you’re here today and you don’t feel this way, I encourage you to cry out to him. He will listen. He is not a distant creator. He is intimate and personal. He didn’t create at first from far away, and he is not far away now. His Spirit is still hovering. He is still doting over his creation, looking at it, and smiling. Ask him to come closer to him, and move closer to him. He is faithful. He will listen.

Let us Pray.

This weeks sermon

2008-09-05T12:01:00.001-05:00

Here is this weeks sermon- Preview Sunday. hurray.

Last weeks sermon was called “Making of a Movement Part 1: Know and be Known”, this week we continue this idea, with “Making of a Movement Part 2: Pray, Give, Go”. I want to first give a few disclaimers before we jump into the sermon this week. I have agonized over this sermon for a few weeks, mainly because I will be talking about money. The first thing I need to say is that if you are here and you are not a Christian, forget the money talk. The parts that deal with giving to the church and missionaries aren’t for you. Church is free. So please don’t here just another pastor talking about money. I hope the sermon isn’t conducive to that thought anyway, but I just wanted to be clear. When I am talking about money in this sermon, it is for people who call themselves Christians and are part of this church, not anyone else.

With that out of the way, I think we can proceed. As you just heard, this week we will be talking about money, but not just money. We are again going to be talking more about starting a movement. There was so much text I could have chosen for today, I have to admit I was a little daunted when I began. I eventually settled on Acts 2:41-47. This is for a couple of reason. Before we get into the reasons for choosing this text, let’s read it. Turn with me to your programs. We read:

41So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. 42And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. 44And all who believed were together and had all things in common. 45And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

Before we go on, we should put this text in context. We are in the book of Acts, which was written by Luke, the same guy who gave us the Gospel of Luke. He was a doctor who converted to Christianity, travelled around with Paul, the writer of many New Testament books, and planter of church all around the Mediterranean. He is writing the book to give an historical account of Jesus life and the early church gathered from talking with first hand witnesses, and his own experiences, to give to his friend Theophilus. The book of Acts specifically describes the early church and church planting movement. It begins with the resurrected Jesus still on Earth. He gives final instructions to the new church, which has about 120 people at that time. He leaves to heaven, and the church is on its own.

The early church was told to wait in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit came upon them, and so they retreated into houses and worshiped and prayed together. During one of these prayer sections, the Holy Spirit did com, and some very interesting things happened. I must digress for a moment. The early Christians were in Jerusalem, as I said, but what we often don’t know is that there were many people in Jerusalem at this time. In fact, there was a festival called Shavuot going on which meant Jews from around the world would have tried to make it to the city. There were peoples from all nations and tongues. Jerusalem was crazy. I imagine it is akin to move in day at Umass. It is all quite during the summer, you can drive on the roads, everyone is more or less culturally homogeneous. The same people are at Rao’s everyday, same people at Bueno. It is beautiful. And then, one day, around the same time every year, the town is invaded. Parents and freshman roll in, don’t know where they are going, back up traffic, speak with weird accents, wear clothes that are distinctly not Amherst, don’t drink their coffee at Rao’s, like some sort of cultural heretic. It is crazy. There are a multitude of cultures and even languages with foreign exchange students not knowing the provincial slang and speaking in high English. It is awesome. If you have been here for a summer, you know what I am talking about. This is roughly equivalent to what is happening in Jerusalem at the time. People have come from all over for this harvest festival, and with them, different cultures and languages. And in the middle of all this mayhem and craziness, there are 120 disciples of Jesus just hanging out and praying, waiting for the Holy Spirit.

Remember, they didn’t even know what they were really waiting for. Nothing like this had ever happened before. So they waited and prayed, and something cosmic happened. Something like tongues of fire came from out of the sky and descended upon these 120. And they all began speaking different languages. They in fact began speaking the languages of all the visitors. Each man could hear the disciples’ message in his own tongue. After this Peter stands up to explain to all the people what has just happened, and ends up giving the first sermon of all time. And this is where we pick up the text. We read that many heard his sermon and were baptized. And in one day the church went from 120 to 3120 men, give or take. It is important to note that these conversions may have only counted the men. Women were not that important in the ancient world, and as such, much of the Mediterranean wouldn’t have counted them. I am not saying it is absolutely the case, but it is possible that, if only men were counted ( which may be probable because usually the women are specially mentioned in Scripture) the actual number of converts was closer to 6-10,000. Children also were a marginalized group and may not have been included. What I can say for certain, is even 3000 in one day is a good day for a pastor. Also we know that this moment right here is the birth of the church, and that is the main reason that we are looking at it today, instead of the many other passages of scripture we could have chosen.

As we try to start a movement, there is no more fitting place for us to start than where the first church movement did. Let’s begin by seeing what the Apostles and early church did as a light into what we must do. The first thing Luke tells us after he talks about the conversion of the people is that they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching, to fellowship, to breading of bread, and to prayer. I am not going to really talk about all of these devotions, as we at MERCYhouse call them, but if you go to a housechurch you will learn all about them. Like how I snuck a pitch for housechurch in the middle of a sermon, clever, huh? Anyway, one of the things we see the new believers dedicating themselves to is prayer. This is also the thing we see the disciples dedicating themselves to before this event called Pentecost. We read in Acts 1:12-14

12Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away. 13And when they had entered, they went up to the upper room, where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James. 14All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.

Prayer is something that was held in high regard by the church since the beginning. I think we should stop here and discus prayer since it is in the title of my sermon. Before we do, I need to confess that I am not the best pray-er. When I really think about it logically it doesn’t really make sense to my hyper-rational western mind. How can God, the Ruler of the niverse, really want input from me? How can I change his mind? Etc., etc., etc. That is not to say I don’t pray, but I often think that prayer is only for me and doesn’t effect other things. The problem with this outlook on prayer is that it is not Biblical. Throughout the Bible devout men pray and God listens. We see it at Sodom and Gomorrah where Abraham pleads with God and God changes his mind. We see it with Moses who constantly intercedes for the Israelites. We see it with David and Solomon, who pray constantly and have their prayer answered. We see it with Jeremiah who begs God to remember his promise when the Israelites are in Exile by the Babylonians. He prays that God would restore Israel, and we see God listen and raise up Ezra and Nehemiah to restore the Temple at Jerusalem. We see it with Isaiah and all the prophets. We see it with Jesus too. Jesus is always in prayer, even teaching his followers how to do it, and in his model, he asks for his daily bread. The last night with his disciples he tells them to pray for anything they need. Paul tells us throughout his letters to pray in season and out of season, and asks for prayer in specific things.

My sometimes rational ideas of prayer are destroyed when I hold them up to Scripture. Many men smarter than myself have grappled with this problem of prayer. Do we actually change God’s mind? Is it just that the more we pray the closer we get to God and so know better what to ask for, so when it happens we see it as answered prayer, but it was actually in God’s plan all along? And there are many other solutions as well. I am not going to tell you I have an answer. I am going to quote C.S. Lewis though. In his essay on Prayer he says the following:

May seem like coincidence, but I know that when I pray the coincidences are much more frequent. (Paraphrased. The real quote will be in sermon)

We are told to pray constantly. And if you are a western academic like myself, you may struggle with the same metaphysical questions about prayer that I have just laid out, or others. I could give a very technical theological argument to try to convince us all that we should pray, but I think some examples of prayer in action are a little better. My first example is this passage in Acts. All the people did at first was pray, and when the time was ready for action, Peter knew what to do. If he had just gone back to his old life and not prayed could he have been as ready to step up and lead the church as he was?

In more modern times we have movements like the Haystack Revival. For those of you who don’t know what the Haystack Revival was, I will explain it. It began at Williams College in Williamstown Massachusetts in 1806. Five students at the college decided to begin a prayer meeting at the school and a storm blew in as they were praying. This caused them to find refuge under a haystack. As they talked and prayed they got the crazy idea to go to foreign countries as missionaries and spread the Gospel. The next year the first modern missions trip set sail for India. These five men are responsible for founding the first missions board to send people abroad, and are credited with the birth of modern missions. And it all started with prayer.

Similarly we can look at people like Phoebe Palmer, a woman who lived in the mid 1800’s. She began a small prayer group with 2 other women, that 6 years later would get here world wide recognition, sprouting prayer meetings around the country, and according to records, responsible for over 25,000 conversions.

I don’t here have time to speak about the first or second Great Awakening, men like Henry Ward Beecher who stands at Amherst College, Jonathan Edwards who preached in Northampton, or Martin Luther who said he prayed one hour a day, unless he was busy, in which case he prayed two. There were prayer meetings in New York City that began as a few dedicated men and turned into 50,000 across the city, most of who were not Christians when the entered, but were when they left. This was called the Fulton Street Revival. It was begun by a business man on September 23 at noon as a way to change his city for Jesus. He held it in the business district and advertised it all over the city. At the first meeting, 6 people showed up, 30 minutes late. Then there were 14, 23, and 40 over the next few weeks, respectively. It exploded all over the city. Within a few months there were thousands praying. This movement swept through the entire US, and estimates credit about 1 million conversions in the US out of a population of 35 million to this prayer meeting, with 10,000 conversions a week coming from New York City alone for a few months.

So as we look back at history with our modern enlightened view of prayer, we need to remember that every movement, every one, began with a few followers praying in a room. I don’t know how it works, but like C.S. Lewis, I know it works. If we are to truly start a movement, we need to begin on our knees. How can we think we need not pray for this movement, when that is where the Apostles started. How can we look at the history of the church and be so smug. We can’t. We need to pray, and pray daily for this movement. We need to pray for this church, for MERCYhouse, for Amherst, for our campuses, for our friends, for our family, for our Valley. If our foundations aren’t here, then everything else is for naught. I don’t know how it works, but I know it works. When I start arguing with myself about the efficacy of prayer, I have to come back to this. I have seen it work in my life. I have prayed for people and things, and they have come. I prayed to get sober, and I did, I prayed for friends and they were baptized in this church, I have prayed for things as miniscule as a parking spot, and they been granted it.

Don’t mishear me. I am not saying prayer is a magic button. That if you do it right, you will get what you want. There have been many things I have prayed for and been denied. When I prayed for parking, it was just a little confirmation that I needed that day that God was there. When I prayed for my friends, it was much more cosmic. What I am saying is that God wants us to start in prayer. That somehow, when we pray, things can happen. This area, the Pioneer Valley, is full of people who prayed and changed the world. 3 of our colleges were founded by Christians who prayed that they could make a difference. The second Great Awakening began right here. The Haystack Revival. We, today, are asking for nothing less that these people did. We are asking that our Valley, over 600,000 people would be changed through the Gospel. We need to begin such a task in prayer, both begging that God would change this Valley, seeking His will in how to do it, and confession of our fallenness and weakness.

And we need to pray together. These movements were not started by a single guy praying in a closet silently to himself. They were started by a group that prayed together. And so must we. That is not to say don’t pray by yourself, but don’t pray only by yourself. Very often when I tell people this I hear things like, :”It is awkward”, “I don’t like praying out loud”, or “My mind wanders to much.” I have this to say- get over yourself. The ancient Israelites always prayed 2 ways. Do you know what they were? Out loud standing up, and out loud laying prostrate on the ground. That is all. The Apostles who were in that upper room surely prayed out loud with each other. We know about Jesus last prayers before his execution because he was speaking with others. We need to pray with each other if this movement is going to go anywhere. I don’t want to beat us over the head here. I want to call us to something bigger. We are not getting over ourselves simply to pray out loud. We are doing it to start a movement. 6 men praying together so set on fire New York City through just prayer meetings alone, thousands converted every week! Thousands! 120 guys praying together in Jerusalem 2000 years ago converted 3000 in one day, and began something that would sweep through the world. Doesn’t that seem better than praying to ourselves in our beds with the lights out quietly? Doesn’t that beat us being embarrassed about what we should say. I want to here call us to something higher, better, holier. We are to pray and pray fervently and trust God will use it. He has so many times in the past, and he will again. Wouldn’t it be better to be part of that movement? To look back 50 years from now and see hundreds of thousands of people worshipping Sunday afternoon and know that God used the prayers that we prayer here and now!

And what came of all this prayer and worship that the new converts participated in? We read in Acts 2:43 that awe came upon every soul. I don’t know about the rest of us, but I certainly want to be a part of that. I have had awe come upon me a few times in my life, and it is what has kept me going when things get hard, it is what has made me want to plant a church, it is what has kept my faith alive. But notice, the movement doesn’t stop there. I think this is one of the problems with the Christian church today. We stop at awe. We pray, and worship, and go to Bible studies, and we have our conversion experience, and then we stop. That is not how we start a movement. That is not where the disciples stopped. We read in Acts 2:44-45

44And all who believed were together and had all things in common. 45And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.

Here is where I talk about giving, the second word in my sermon title. Now these are somewhat tricky verses, right. They say that the disciples were selling all they had and giving to all who had need. Does this mean that we should do the same? I don’t think we need to apply these verses literally to our lives. In fact, if you hear a preacher telling you to sell all you have and give it to him to distribute, I would say you are most likely in a cult and should get out as soon as possible. These verses aren’t teaching us to give away everything, necessarily, but they are illuminating. What they do say is that there is a proper response to this awe that we get to experience. There is a next step after prayer.

What these verses are painting is the makings of a movement. There is sacrifice involved. In American Christianity today, I speak in generalities, and there are always exceptions, we forget this. We have been to content to stop at awe, and not respond in kind. We, and I include myself in this, often are selfish and self seeking. We look at what God can do for us, and often forget our role in the equation. We often forget that God answers prayers with people. I want to give an example from my own life. When I joined staff, Sarah and I brought with us lots of debt. We both had well paying jobs before, and so we charged a lot of things on credit, because there was always another paycheck. And then Sarah got pregnant and she decided she wanted to stay at home with the kid, so we lost one paycheck. And then I was called to staff, and so quit my well paying job with a guaranteed check every two weeks for the uncertainty of ministry. Last summer due to various circumstances, we were barely able to live. It seemed like we would never get out of debt, and we were destined to be poor. Sarah and I ask our housechurch and a few others to start praying that God would pay off our debt so we could minister more effectively. Soon after someone we know came into money, heard about our problems, and gave us 8,000 dollars to pay off all our creditors. We didn’t ask this person to do it, and we were even shy about taking the money. But they had prayed and wanted to do it.

I am not saying all of you should give me 8,000 dollars, but this is the kind of community we have to have, that the early church had, if we are to start a movement. They gave as any had need. The church saw some starving, and selflessly gave to help them eat. They saw brothers without clothes, and took the burden of buying them pants. They were the church to each other. That story I just told you, isn’t unique to me either. I know of many collections at MERCYhouse given to people who were struggling anonymously. I can’t tell you all of them here, but many of you were privy to them. And it has effected the people around them drastically, as it effected those around the early church.

As I thought about how to preach about money and giving there were many roads I could have taken. I could talk about tithing (giving 10 percent) as a discipline that we just need to do. I could talk about many of the times Jesus spoke about money; I could go to places like Ezra or Micah where money is directly talked about in the Bible. But none of these seemed to satisfy. I could beat all of us over the head and talk about how it is the Christian duty to give, or I could not mention it at all, and hope that people know what to do. I could be heavy handed or limp wristed. Neither of these satisfies. So instead, this is what I am going to say. If you are a Christian, you need to give money somewhere, to a church, to missionaries, to Christian Charities. If you don’t know where to start, the Old Testament puts a rule at ten percent. So if we were in ancient Israel, we would give ten percent of our income away to God. Paul is Corinthians says that this may not be the rule for Christians, and says that we should give as we are able. But we need to remember why we are giving.

We are not giving just to give, or because God will be mad at us if we don’t. We are not giving money so that God will bless us either. If we are to believe many preachers on TV, if we sow our faith seed, God will multiply it, and we will be financially blessed. The truth is, this may happen to you, I don’t know, but it also may not. We don’t give to get. That is manipulation, and not what we see in the book of Acts. The truth is that giving is often going to cost us. There is a sacrifice involved. To be able to give to MERCYhouse, and now this church, we had to get rid of the internet and cable at my house. There was sacrifice involved. Maybe we have to eat out less often, or in my case, drink regular coffee instead of delicious Carmel Macchiatos from Starbucks. The people in Acts were selling their things for others to have something. There is sacrifice involved.

We are not giving out of fear, or out of some divine manipulation to get more. The reason we need to give and be generous is something so much more beautiful. There are three reasons we need to give, and I will go through them quickly. The first reason is because God first gave to us. He gave us the free gift of grace through his son Jesus. He gave to the point of dying. When we give to those in need, and to the church, we get to be the agents by which God is still giving grace. When my debt was paid off, it was grace. I didn’t deserve it. What I deserved was to suffer for my irresponsible spending. When I ask the person why they gave it, their response was that they liked giving grace. They were able to do for me what God did for them. That is the first reason why we need to give. Why wouldn’t we, when we look at it like this. We get to be Jesus to people. We get to impact their lives. We get to show them the Gospel, not in some hypothetical way, but really show them. We get to have the rubber meet the road.

As we do this, we will very often encounter the second reason to give, it is worship. We get to worship God through our giving. When we give to the church or other organizations, we are making sacrifices for God. We get to meet him in that place. This is an aspect of giving that we very often forget in our modern Christianity, but it is something the ancients of all religions knew. In the book of Ezra, king Darius, the ruler of Babylon gives Ezra not only permission to rebuild the Temple, but a gift to be offered as worship to God. In Hinduism and Buddhism today, the very way you worship is to bring actual gifts to the altars of the gods. In the African Church the offering is very often at the front of the church and people dance and sing as they put their money in. What they knew and know that we have forgotten is giving is a way of worship. It is a visible way to tell God, and the world, that he is valuable to us. That he matters. He is not an after thought. He does not get the scraps, but the first fruits.

The months where I didn’t know how I was going to give money, but did anyway, have been the months that I have been the closest to God. I have had to rely on him to make the rest of my life work out- and to this date it always has. Those months where I looked at my bills and at my paycheck and said it would never work, but gave money away anyway are the months that at the end I had an excess somehow. Those are the months I have clung to God more, cried our more, worshiped more. We give not out of fear or manipulation, but out of love and affection. We give to increase our relationship with God. We give, because He first gave.

There is one more reason to give, I think. The disciples gave because they saw the movement coming. They did not give just to give. They gave because they saw if the didn’t the church would die. They gave because they owned the vision and felt it incumbent upon them to do all they could in their power to see the vision realized. And that is why, the Christians here, should give too. We are talking about changing a Valley of 600,000 people, 43 cities and towns, and 1200 square miles. This is going to take pastors and evangelists and gas and buildings and heat and electricity and programs and Bibles and computers and food and clothes and homeless shelters and halfway houses and detoxes and battered women shelters and helping people with rent and sending people to seminary and conferences and many other things we don’t even know about yet. And all of this takes money. If we are committed to this vision we need to give. We need to give of our time, talent, and treasure. Now most of you are already giving, so I don’t want to beat it too much, but it is this attitude of giving that is going to help change people’s hearts.

A group of Christians, who quite literally put their money where their mouth is, is what this Valley needs. To often we pay lip service to charity, and are stingy, and the world knows it. To often we want the church to take care of social problems, but won’t help out with our own resources. The movements we have been talking about, they began with prayer, but most of those men and women gave as well. They paid pastors to go to the next town and start yet another church, they paid missionaries to go to India so they could not have debt sailing over, they rented space, and helped the poor, all with money given to the church. We need to give to see this movement start.

Don’t only hear we need to give though. I want you to hear more what we can do. In 182 in London England one man named William Booth began preaching to the poor and don trodden in London Streets. By 1867 he was employing 10 people. By 1874 there were 1000 volunteers and 42 staff. Between 1881 and 1885, 250,000 people were converted because of this movement. Today the organization he started, the Salvation Army, is all over the world. Because people gave they were able to each the poor, giving them a better life and eternal life. I am calling us all to give today because it really can change the world. It has happened. The possibilities of outreach and ministry are endless. But it is going to take more than me and my family. It is going to take an entire army of people, giving their time to help others, their talents to serve God, their treasure to pay for it all. This call to give is not so I can get rich or the church can have some new fence. It is a call to join a movement. I am only able to do what I do because people form all over the country give to me. My salary is 100% donated by people outside the church. We need to give so the next person can be funded too. So the next church planter can get to work. So the next church, and the one after that, and the one after that can start.

This call to give is a call so much higher than just being obedient or afraid. It is an invitation to align ourselves to God, to worship him, to be part of his army. There will be sacrifices we have to make, yes, but there will be treasures abounding we could never have anticipated. We may be stretched and stressed, but we will know an intimacy and love with God that we couldn’t have imagined before. The call to give is a call to join something that is so much bigger than we. It is call to be Christ to those who most need him. It is a call to set this Valley on Fire once again.

Before we end tonight, there is one more thing we need to do to partner with God in this making of a movement. Turn back one last time with me to your programs. We read at the end of Acts 2:

46And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

The final ingredient is Going. See, after they prayed, and fellowshipped, and broke bread together, after they gave as each had need and helped each other from with in, they didn’t stay there. They didn’t send Peter only to go preach again to the masses and see how many people he could bring back to their little church building. They went to the Temple. We may object because the temple was the place of worship. We may think that this just describes them going to a worship service together, but we would be missing many things. The Temple wasn't only the place of worship for someone living in Jerusalem. It was also the town square, flea market, and coffee shop. The Temple is where all business was conducted. It was surrounded by shops and restaurants. What this is describing are people who are on the move. They are going.

In Acts 1:8 the final instructions Jesus gives to his fledgling church is that once the Spirit comes upon they that they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the Ends of the World. The Spirit came upon them, and now they are fulfilling this mission that Christ commanded they fulfill. They are being witnesses in Jerusalem here. They are not holed up gloating about how holy they are, or talking theology all day, or discussing the direction the church should take. They are out on the field, interacting with people, going to where they are, meeting them on their terms, and telling them about this Jesus who was crucified.

This must be us as well. Now that is not all they did. They came back at night and broke bread together, which here refers to communion and something that only members of the Church were allowed to take at this time. There is a balance. They are coming back to be with believers, but spending their days with those who are not Christians. I am not saying here that we should only hang out with non-Christians, we clearly need fellowship too. But when fellowships is not balanced with mission, we are not with Jesus anymore. These early Christians understood this, and so they went out and preached the good news.

I am also not saying we need to go to Rao’s with out Bible and start street preaching. Peter definitely did that earlier in Acts, but it was called for then. What we read here is simply that they are going to the Temple. I imagine they have friends there, and family. They are buying things and bartering and talking, and amidst all of this, they have to talk about their conversion and what has been happening. How could they avoid it. Some where poor and now have money, so they surely would be praising God and explaining to people where the money came from. Some were rich and were selling their things. Surely people would ask questions, and surely they would explain why the sudden change and why they are now selling all the things they used to hold so dear. They had a change and the people noticed, and the only thing this early church did was go out and be available and unashamed.

We too must go to the Temple unashamed. Very often we think evangelism a dirty word. It is something that must be awkward that we do to strangers. Much more effective is just to live and be available. Go about our daily business, but with intent. We don’t go to the market simply to buy things, but to buy things, and be salt and light. If we Go, God will bless it, just as he had so many times in the past.

John Wesley, a Pastor in the 1700’s in England, and the founder of the Methodists is renowned for this. He would ride his horse through the country and speak to anyone and everyone he could. This is during the rise of the Industrial Revolution in England, and there were many dirty and dangerous places. John was known for going to them. During one trip he went to one of the local coal towns. These places were known for violence. They were very hostile to outsiders and people begged him not to go. He entered the shanty town, worse than any ghetto in America today, and began preaching. As he was finishing up he recounts how these men, whose faces were blacked to the core from years of work underground in coal mines, began to have streams of white running down their faces. These men, who were known for running into the civilized parts of town looting them and retuning to their shanties, who were so fearsome even the police wouldn’t enter, who’s violent society was feared around the world, were crying at the Gospel. Their tears were wiping the years of dust and dirt off their faces. John understood that we need to go, even if it seems dangerous, even if it seems hopeless.

As we finish today, I again want to not beat us over the head and say we have to go. I want to call us to a vision of what it could be like if we went. The men in Acts who went to the Temple did not go in vain. We read that they received favor with the people and the Lord added to their number daily. It as not an exercise in futility. People’s lives were changed. When John Wesley entered the coal town, the men’s hearts that were so hard were softened to tears. When all the people I have talked about today went, people came to know Jesus. The Haystack Revival started churches all over the world where there never was one before, when the Fulton Street Revival went to the neighborhoods of New York City and the world, they left a wake of conversions behind. When the Salvation Army left England and came to America, it created a movement throughout the world.

And when we go out, we too can impact this Valley in the same way. It may seem daunting. It is. The task is too big for just us. That is why we are trying to start a movement, not just of us, but of many, many more. I am telling us to Go, not just so we feel good about ourselves and can say we spent X amount of hours being a good evangelist, I am saying Go, because God uses the faithful. The early churches numbers were added to daily. What these new converts say were devout men and woman who prayed constantly, gathered together, gave generously, and lived like they talked. They encountered the redeemed life, the Church in action, the Living God.

This week, I tell us to Pray, Give and Go, not because God will be mad if we don’t, but because he will rejoice if we do. We have the opportunity to be used by the Almighty to change lives. If we truly believe that God has redeemed us, given us all things, brought us to the kingdom of light, given us an inheritance and a new life, how, I ask, can we not offer it to everybody we see. How can we be ashamed or embarrassed to share this Gospel, how can we be stingy with out gifts and money, how can we not want to talk with Him daily. How can we not pray for this Valley, this Town, these Campuses. The call today is not to do these things out of fear or discipline, but to do them with Joy. Remember the calling we have, remember the God we have, remember the New Life we have.

Tonight is a call to join a movement that can change so many lives in the same way ours was changed. Tonight is an opportunity to be part of something so much bigger than ourselves. Tonight is the beginning of something that will change the world.

Let us pray

Book Chapter 2

2008-09-01T17:24:00.000-05:00

Here is Chapter 2. Hope you like it.

Chapter 2

Cosmology is the Key: A New Creation Myth That Isn’t New At All

With any philosophy that hopes to become a world view, there better be real world data and application. What I mean is that the theory needs to describe the world how it is. If I tried to convince you that murder was good and the sky was green you would think I was rather insane. That is because we can look at the sky and see it is in fact blue, and we can look out over history and see that murder has been almost universally condemned. We see that man has decided it not good. We adopt a world view because it fits, at least partially, with the world we live in. This was the classic goal of philosophy, to define the world as it is. Modernism gets a great boost because of Galileo and Kepler, culminating in Newton and his formulation of certain “laws” nature obeys. This gave weight to the idea of external truth that can be found by observation and study, a main stay of Modern thought. Post Modern Philosophy latches on to Darwinian evolution and more importantly Quantum Mechanics as “proof” that nature is unpredictable. They point to the way the world “really” is scientifically, and then show that this means any truth is therefore inherently wrong. Après Post, being birthed out of these two movements, is not any different. It too has its scientific roots.

We need to note something before we go further. Philosophies are very often there before the science that backs them up. It was the belief that Nature was observable and rational that lead Galileo to observe it and find order. Newton was a hundred years later. The “proof” for Modernism didn’t exist until Modern Thought had taken over the landscape. Evolution was also a late comer to the game. Social Scientists, like Herbert Spencer[i] had coined the term “survival of the fittest” 10-20 years before Darwin would ever get on the Beagle and discover a plethora of finches. His scientific observations were just what society had been looking for. The philosophy of evolution was around well before the science. And Post Modernity was around before physicists discovered Quantum Mechanics. They were looking for evidence of their new philosophy, and thought hey found it in this new branch of science. And so they interpreted the data to fit their ideas, and not visa versa. Looking back then, it is “obvious” that Quantum Mechanics proved the Post Modern’s point, since that is how they taught the next generation to see things.

These men weren’t malicious in their thinking. They really believed that the science proved what hey had been thinking all along. They did not set out to twist data to fit their world view. In their minds, this was the proof they had been looking for. They did not think they were changing any interpretation of the data. We need to remember that. But, like all of us, they were human. They were confined to history and couldn’t change the circumstances of their life. They are like the child in Plato’s cave who can only think in two dimensions because it is all he has ever seen.[ii] It is impossible for him to transcend his own prejudices. These men too could not see anything but what they had been conditioned to see. And so, when science gives the world its raw data, the philosophers of the time mold it to fit the current world view. This in turn gives weight and authority to that view, and it can now trickle down to the Common Man. They point to the real world is order to validate themselves and their philosophy, and since they are describing things the way they are, the world view takes root.

This is the reason Modernity lasted for as long as it did. It described what was actually happening. You could do an experiment and see for yourself that the way the philosophers described things was the way they in fact were. It is also one of the reasons Post Modernity isn’t lasting. It contradicts itself, and so isn’t cohesive. It doesn’t describe the world. It tells its followers to disregard and suspect the expert, but relies on the expert to do the experiment. It is very hard for you or I to find quantum phenomena on our own. Quantum Mechanics describes the world, but not our world. It also fails when describing morality. It doesn’t define what people are feeling. It disregards this reality as false. Modernity, along with every other world view, had some answers as to why the world sucks. Post Modernity’s answer is that sucking is relative and that your feelings are wrong. This can’t sustain itself. It can only be a transitional phase from one set of truths to another.

Après Post fixes this foible in Post Modern thought. Scientific experts are restored to their former glory. The suspicion of the expert has all but vanished. We are now accepting what they say carte blanche. They have actually been raised to a level higher than Modernity would place them. They function much more like ancient shaman and priests in our culture than scientists. Today we see experts on all manner of Television shows, from news to entertainment, telling us all sorts of things. They control our food consumption and production, our economy, our politics. There are agencies for everything, and people assume that these people know more that they. This may be true, but it also may not be. Après Post has managed to restore a hierarchy and order that was threatened by Post Modernism. The experts almost drove themselves off the cliff. But they didn’t quite make it. Because they held onto scientific roots for justification, the expert could never be fully marginalized. And in a new culture, one that is throwing off Post Modernity, the expert must have a leading role.

In an age where old superstitions are dying as “unscientific”, but paganism is resurfacing, the typical priest will not do. The witch doctors and prophets must take a different form in a culture that refuses to believe in witch doctors and prophets. The role of them is still needed though. The gods must be communicated with somehow. There must be a conduit between us and the spiritual. Someone need to tell the people when and how to worship. Someone needs to write the creation story, and explain why there is pain and injustice. This is fast becoming the realm of the scientist, the expert.

There is a new science to go along with this new philosophy. The realm of the really small no longer holds people’s attention. Quantum Mechanics was fun, but the ride is over. It is not of particular use to people. Only those of us trained in science care about it or know it anymore. There is a science on the rise though, that affects all of us daily. We see it, we wonder about it. It calls out to our more basic selves and brings with it the great questions of humanity. This science is Cosmology.

Cosmology is the new astronomy, but sexier. Astronomy is the study of space, but it is the boring study of space (I apologize to any astronomers reading the book, but you know I am right). It is classification and observation. It is astronomers that find comets and label stars. This is why there can be amateurs making discoveries. It is Modern Science in its purest form. Cosmology is so much more. It looks deep into space and the past to find out how the universe began. It is cosmology that gave us wormholes ( a mainstay of science fiction writing today) and the big bang. Cosmology takes massive equipment, super powerful computers, and tons of money. It is securely in the realm of the expert.

Because it has now focused on discovering the origins of the Universe, it is also a science that can answer some of our more basic questions like, “Why am I here?” And it is attempting to do just that. The common man has no idea what is about to burst on the stage. Right now we are all comfortable with the Big Bang theory. There have been Christians touting it as proof of Genesis since it first burst into being (no pun intended). But scientists have always been slightly uncomfortable with it, and our universe. The universe is too perfect. Why should it be this way? Also, how can the Big Bang even happen? How can something come from nothing? They here assume no God, but as we shall see, that doesn’t mean there are no gods.

(expand)

Since Big Bang theory, science has set its mind to figuring out how it occurred and why the Universe turned out the way it did. For years there were only a handful of real theories. There were the weak anthropic theory, the strong anthropic theory, the infinite universe theory, and the Creator God theory. The weak anthropic theory said the universe is the way it is and only because of this can we observe it. It follows Darwinian logic. If the Universe wasn't ripe for life, life wouldn’t exist and we wouldn’t know other wise. There is life though, so lucky us, the Universe is ripe for life. The strong anthropic principle is more deist. It says all the conditions for life are too great to have happened by chance. Everything is fine tuned. There must therefore be a tuner. The Multiple Universe Theory comes directly from the Weak Anthropic Principle and says that there have been, and are, an infinite number of Universes. Some can support life, some can’t. We live in one that can. And then there is a loving Creator who sets his creation down in a garden to enjoy what has been done for him. These theories of creation and existence are either Christian, or closer to Post Modernism than science is really comfortable being. The idea that we are lucky and happen to live in a Universe where life can exist is not a satisfying answer as to why there is life. It is science giving up on itself. And humans are not content with this either. It does not let one sleep at night. And so, all of these theories are being shrugged off or recast.

Cosmology is trying to figure out creation. There must be a reason for the Universe coming into existence, and science will find it out for us. Cosmology has a few answers already. I am writing this in July of 2008, and Scientific America has for the past few moths been writing articles about what I am going to describe. They are claiming knowledge of creation. A knowledge that Post Modern Science could not explain. And this new scientific evidence is a tool in Après Post pagan agenda. Remember for a moment pagan creation. There is chaos first. Order is the aberration. The chaos is tamed by order. The Apollonian asserts itself over the Dionysian. This is going to be a key in understanding the new mythology being created in labs today.

And what is this new creation mythos? There are a few at this moment, but they all seem to follow the same principles. There is chaos outside our universe. It is a seething ocean of exotic energies and dimensions. Our Universe erupts out of this.

As I continue, remember, I hold a physics and math degree, but have been out of academia for 4 years. All of my science comes from more layman sources. This is almost better for a study of culture though, since the science is already packaged for us as the culture is dictating. Let us talk about Manifolds. Manifolds, as I understand them, are sheets of energy that exist outside our universe in multiple dimensions. The Universe was created when these sheets collided. Other Universes are being created all the time. Logically, it is a progression of String Theory, which has failed to live up to its promises, but allowed the idea of more that 3 spacial and one time dimension to be taken seriously. These manifolds are chaotic. There is no order to them. Dimension wrap and curl and unwrap all the time. Whenever shown visually, it looks like a boiling liquid. Chaos is supreme. There are rules though, that govern this ocean. Science is still a god.

(expand)

More recently the proposition that an old Universe birthed our current one has been becoming the vogue. The realization that our Universe will not collapse on itself, meaning it had only 1 beginning, has lead to a reorganization of Big Bang theory. It used to be thought that maybe the universe continually expanded and contracted like a spring. This has been shown to not be the case. There was a very special creation. (The moments after creation looked a lot like Manifold Theories soup, by the way.) There is energy and matter turning into each other freely, particles come into existence as they please, and leave in much the same manner. There is no order to things. Chaos is the rule. Multiple dimensions existed, since they had yet to compact to nothing, leaving us our orderly 4. Soon order takes form though, and quarks are trapped in particles, particles in atoms, atoms in molecules. Gravity pulls things together. Most energy turns into visible, orderly matter. But where did all this come from? First lets look at the naturalistic end of our universe as now accepted by science.

There will be what is called the Big Freeze. The Universe will continue to expand forever. The Temperature of everything will become absolute zero. Stars will become to far away to be seen, and then be extinguished all together. Soon, even gravity will fail, and the very atoms comprising stars will begin to spread out. The universe becomes a cold, black nothing. Atoms will eventually fall apart, and only elementary particles will fly around, rarely ever finding another. But this is not order. In the vacuum of space, something is happening. Random energy fluctuations produce particles. The seemingly flatness and emptiness of space is actually a lot like manifolds. It is teeming under the surface with chaotic “quantum fuzziness”. And from these quantum abnormalities, another universe is brought into creation. In fact, infinite universe are birthed. Big Bangs are happening everywhere. This is how our universe will end, and it is now thought, how we came into being. We are the byproduct of another Universe, who comes from another, ad nauseum. This is pagan in nature. Chaos is the winner. It is the first. Order comes from this, but it will be returned to chaos again. How close to Hinduism is this idea? From death there is new birth. Extremely pagan. There is no special creation by a loving Creator God. There is only scientific truths that permeate all universe everywhere, and it is indifferent. There is order, but it is not loving. This is not Post Modern’s lack of absolutes, or Christianities loving God. It is pagan creation retold in the guise of science.

The gods existed in another Universe. Before them were the Titans. Always is there a new creation. Always is the old birthing it. The god’s blood and death birth creation. There is, in this new science of cosmology purpose, there was a reason for the new creation, but it is also by chance. This is not God stooping down into creation and breathing the breath of life into His creation; this is the god’s seed spilling accidentally into their universe and haphazardly creating ours. This is pagan creation.

This is also seen in the new appreciation of time as it own thing. After Einstein’s General Relativity, it slowly became assumed that there was no difference between time and space. They were two sides of the same coin, and could be turned into each other. This is a Post Modern loss of truth and identity. There is not really space or time; it depends on how you look at it. Recently though, articles have been written refuting this claim. As scientist attempt to model the creation of the Universe on computers, they have found that time matters for their models. If they have 4 dimensions of space-time, things don’t work out as they “should”. If though, they have 3 dimensions of space and one of time, they can create what looks like our Universe.[iii] The assumption is that time must matter. Space must matter. There must be greater truth in these dimensions than Post Modernity gave them credit for. In actuality, there may be a lot more wrong with their computer models, and this “artificial” fix to solve the problem just coincidentally gives us what we think we should see, but that is not their conclusion. Guided by this new Après Post mentality, they are ready to declare truth and purpose in the Universe, and not error in their model.

The very fact that we model things on a computer is interesting. We have become the gods, and the real Universe is the Titan’s realm. We will create from the Universe but something completely other to it. Modeling also assumes truths. We have to program in the rules of the game. The most basic of these can’t change or the program doesn’t run. We have adopted a new mindset that is distinctly un-Post Modern. Some Universes we create are better than others. We are trying to make the “right one”. This is an embrace of truth that Post Modernity can’t make. In fact, Post Modern Universe modeling assumed all Universes were equally valid. It enjoyed the study of what other realms could be. It explored them. It studied them. Today, that is waning. We want to model reality. This assumes there is a reality external to us, and that it matters. This is what we program in computers now. This is how cosmology operates.

(expand)

One final note about cosmology. It has its roots in paganism. Astrology becomes astrology which has become cosmology. The study of the stars has always been pagan. The idea that the heavens held secrets or knowledge that we could study and control is pagan worship. The God of Scripture can not be controlled. He forbids this practice for this reason. When He prophesies, it is to talk about His plan, not to help us with ours. He alone is to know the future. Pagan gods are different. They can be bought. They will allow us to know things. The stars will give up their secrets if we ask the right questions. Nature is who we ask for answers, because she and her chaotic forces are what are really in control. When she sends a comet, it means something. When there are eclipses, she is sending a message. Pagans have looked to the stars to give them knowledge and power here on Earth. Jews and Christians have looked to the stars with wonder and amazement and praise that the God who created all that could love us too.

(expand)

Pagan science must always end with the stars. That is where the gods live. That is where the secrets of existence lay. That is where power resides. Modern Man began at the stars, but he linked them to Earth through Newton, and once this link was created, science began its study of the world. Sure, astronomy was part of this, but the real science was in biology, chemistry, and physics. Those were the truths that had consequences. The stars held nothing practical. Modern Man wanted to know how to make better steel and dynamite. This culminated in Quantum Mechanics, the opposite of astronomy, if sciences can be said to have opposites. With Post Modern Man origin tales did not matter. The study of the seemingly chaotic hit full stride. But Après Post must throw this off, both the Modern and Post Modern mindsets. The greatest truths, our very existence, is now credited to the study of space. Cosmology reigns supreme as the science for this new age. Paganism needs truths and creation lore. Cosmology is what will provide it, indeed, it is the only science that can provide it. It exists in the realm of speculation and models. We can never go to the edge of pace, only talk about it. We can never visit these other Universes, only theorize about them. We are locked into faithing in the expert that this is how creation really happened. They point to truths found in universes they create, proving simultaneously that truth exists in our Universe, and that it is their pagan truth. If we can create universes, then surely other Universes can also. The universes are birthed from disorder, and will always fall back into it. There is truth, but no plan. They have their proof in science, and the new Après Posts will soon start selling it to us.

But like all science before, Cosmology doesn’t actually prove or disprove a world view. Science is, it is man that proves. Science is the collection of facts, it is man who interprets. I say this to remind us that cosmology is not bad in and of itself. The first cosmologists did not have an Après Post agenda. If anything they had a Modern, or more likely Post Modern agenda. But seeing an opportunity to validate itself within the new structure afforded it, paganism will use science to plead its case. Après Post will use the cult of the expert, necessary in a science that we can not perform ourselves, to tell us what all the data means. Increased specialization means decreased ability to enter a field. We are more reliant on those who study their material to analyze it for us as well. Cosmology will be in the forefront of popular science and imagination. It is going to be the justification for the paganism that we are beginning to see today.

It is not the only science that is being twisted by philosophers to drive their thought. People are beginning to question the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and chaos theory points to an order and truth even amidst disharmony. The sciences that were the foundations of Post Modern Man are slowly being reinterpreted to fit with Après Post culture, just as Post Modern man redefined the older sciences in his terms. We predict weather with amazing accuracy given its nature, finding order and meaning in the chaos. We predict tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and earth quakes, admittedly with varying accuracy. But even this prediction is something not dreamed about 50 years ago. We have studied them and found truths to guide us. We find a deeper reality in nature that is knowable, though unplanned. We even study the Earth as a whole, and make predictions about what we are seeing.

Environmental Science is the next science we will look at. Not does cosmology have pagan roots, but here too we will find a pagan stream that is undeniable. The fact that it has become the forefront realm of the expert is further proof Après Post culture is pagan. This science has truths and dogmas (a step closer to religion than cosmology at present is comfortable going) that are not to be questioned. It has its zealots and rituals and alters. Mother Earth is an extremely old pagan cult, and we are seeing its rise again. Earth has its own name, Gaia, and even a day to celebrate her. She is alive. Even science here uses the language of life, breathing, lungs, self repair. Analogies are made to crying, anger, recourse, consequences. Earth is seen as an organism. All this will be unpacked in the next chapter, Global Warming: Mother Earth in Menopause.

[i] Spencer’s Book

[ii] Plato’s Republic

[iii] Scientific America, June