Jacob Sahms

Sunday’s Sermon Today: “Friend” Me (John 5:1-15)

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Have you ever been physically incapacitated? Unable to move on your own? It’s often a condition of life that assign to the very young and the very old, but I had a brush with it a decade ago. I broke my tibia in half playing soccer while in seminary, and they casted my leg from toes to the middle of my upper leg. The cast kept my toes angled down, so I couldn’t even put my foot flat on the ground. Even with crutches, it was initially impossible to walk unassisted.

The worst part was that I couldn’t get up from a seated position on my own for the first week. Needed to go to the bathroom? Had to call for help. Wanted something to drink? Had to call for help. Wanted to find the remote, read a book, stop lying in the bed staring at the ceiling? Had to call for help.

That lasted for about a week to a week and a half. I thought I was going to lose my mind! When they finally let me walk on my foot, I remember trudging between the stacks in the archives section of the seminary library: I was going to do anything to get better, to get back to walking, and driving, and standing up!

But my incapacitation was temporary- I had hope that it would change.

What happens when there’s no hope?

In our Scripture today, Jesus arrives at a pool called Bethesda. The pool is known for all of the people who are suffering, the blind, the lame, the paralyzed, who are brought here to the waters. They come here because they want to get in the water, because an angel of the Lord stirs the water, and the those who enter while the water is moving are healed.

Here’s their chance, their hope, their opportunity!

Jesus meets a man who has been unable to care for himself for thirty-eight years. He tells Jesus that whenever the water moves, he tries to reach it, but there’s no one to help him. Whoever brought him to the pool, in an action of compassion or pity, has forgotten about him; he is thisclose to but he’ll never make it.

The hope has been offered to him, but it dangles just outside of reach.

And in one moment, his life changes forever. Jesus tells this unnamed man to “get up, take his mat, and walk.” In the blink of an eye, this man goes from being helpless to well. He is leaving the pool and taking his mat with him because he’s not coming back! This is not a temporary cure or a quick fix, this is a permanent restoration by Jesus that makes him whole.

This is a miracle.

The thing about miracles is that there are always miracle squashers. Now, this man had to have been a known commodity: he’s been unable to move for thirty-eight years! We figure he has to have been known to the people of Bethseda for awhile. But Jesus healed him on a Saturday, so he’s carrying his mat on a Saturday… which is “work.”

So, the religious-political leaders stop him and fuss at him. They want to see his papers. They want to know why he’s carrying his mat. They want to know why he’s not following the law.

Seriously? This guy was lifeless, hopeless, broken, and isolated, and a stranger befriended him, he can walk, and you want to know why he’s carrying his mat?

[Sidebar: Do we ever miss the point in church? That is all.]

So he tells these guys, who he is supposed to be mortally afraid of: “Look, this guy healed me, and he told me to take my mat, so I’m taking my mat!”

Well, he didn’t get Jesus’ name, because, well, he was just too excited to be walking! So the Pharisees have no idea who to pin this on (yet) and the man goes to the Temple, probably to sacrifice, to thank God for this miracle.

Where Jesus shows up and tells him to make sure he doesn’t sin. So that nothing worse will happen to him!

Imagine that: immobilized for thirty-eight years, I’m sure you get to the point where you think, “seriously, what’s the worst that could happen?” And Jesus shows up and says, “that may have been bad, but sinning, breaking God’s law by not loving, that can be worse!”

Again, Jesus shows up and heals the body and urges the man to keep his soul well, too.

Jesus gave this man hope and dignity and the ability to walk. Jesus gave him what he knew he needed first: the man knew he couldn’t walk, but sinning was probably the last thing on his mind. So he took care of the “felt needs” first, and then worried about the preaching later.

My former missions professor in seminary, Darryl Whiteman, talked about being a missionary, and arriving in a town in Papa New Guinea and boldly proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ to the natives. Of course, the natives… looked at him like he was crazy and went about their lives.

When Whiteman figured out, what I’m sure many missionaries figured out, that there was a shortage of water and medicine, and he helped them build a well and get some medical supplies, suddenly, the natives paid incredible amounts of attention to Whiteman and his family.

The missionary breakthrough was in taking care of what they needed, in gaining their trust, and then they were ready to hear the message. They knew that he cared, they knew they could trust him, and then they knew that his message was important, too.

Jesus heals this guy physically and then he heals him spiritually. He didn’t stop and look down and go, “wow, stinks to be you, and by the way, God wants you to love and obey him!” No, he took care of the man’s immediate problem and then he launched into the eternal, everlasting, spiritual part of it.

I wonder what it would look like if we, individually and as a church, took care of people’s immediate problems. I don’t mean to enable them, to keep funneling money and time into things that won’t last, but to show them that they mattered, that there was hope, that they weren’t alone.

I know that my Facebook “friend” list is full of people I’m not even sure I know. That’s the ironic thing about “friending” someone these days. But the truth is that real friendship, real compassion, happens when someone is known and knows that they matter.

What acts of kindness, service, and compassion can you perform in the next few weeks so that when you invite someone to church on Easter, that they will know you really care? How can you shows that this love thing isn’t just skin deep, isn’t just about “doing the right thing,” but is actually a way of life for you where you care about them as a person?

My friends, there are people waiting by “pools” everywhere, hoping that someone will stop and share a kindness with them, to help them get in, to acknowledge they exist, to remind them that they are loved and not alone.

Facebook would have you believe that friendship is merely a click away. But real friendship rises through shared storms, jointly carried burdens, problems overcome, late night conversations, and a willingness to put the other person above ourselves. Sometimes, it’s as simple as stopping to take a moment to assess a situation that someone else can’t solve for themselves.

In Pay It Forward we see that real friendship looked a lot like solving a problem for someone that they couldn’t solve for themselves. It looked like helping a person get unstuck from the thing that they couldn’t fix on their own. It looked a lot like recognizing that a man who couldn’t walk needed healing but couldn’t get in a pool.

Would you stop and help if you had the power? Do you recognize the power in you to make a difference? Would you be willing to give of yourself to make someone else whole?

Jesus said, “No greater love has a man than this, that he lay his life down for his friends.” Admittedly, Jesus was going to die on the cross for his friends (and everyone else). But are we significantly doing anything to better anyone else’s life? Are we willing to make sacrifices so that our friends, families, and even neighbors might meet God? Are we able to put the emphasis on them because we see them the way God does?

Jesus changed a complete stranger’s life absolutely. He stopped, noticed him, and did what he could. Isn’t that what we want from our friends? Can we do that for each other?

Will you be that kind of friend today?

I’d like us to practice it. Here are a few suggestions. Ask someone near you what’s the opportunity they had this week to see God move. Share a concern about your upcoming week with them. Then, take a few moments to pray. (Take time to do those).

Friends put themselves aside to pick up the other. Jesus was good at making friends, in deeper ways than clicking ‘like’.

In John 15:13, Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Do you think people understood that when he said it, or was is just as strange to them then? Do you think after he died, and they reflected on what he said about heaven and a relationship with God, that it made more sense? Do you think they considered what they did in this life and how it might matter in the next?

Jesus, passing by, stops and singles out this thirty-eight-year paralytic. One of a “great number” of people waiting to get in. But the act of kindness, the stopping to speak, the acknowledgment of the man’s existence, and the willingness to do something about it, that changed everything.

Jesus befriended the man. Jesus ‘be a friend’ to him. He healed him! But that was nothing compared to the opportunity Jesus would later give him, to be right with God forever, when Jesus died on the cross.

Will you be that kind of friend today? Will you recognize the calling of Jesus to practice the shema, “to love the Lord your God with your heart, mind, and strength,” and “to love your neighbor as yourself?” And recognize that in those moments, when we serve each other, when we recognize those lying on the fringes, waiting to be loved, that we have done just a foreshadowing, a faint glimmer, of the most excellent way that Jesus showed?

Be a friend. Put yourself aside for a moment. Meet Jesus in the process.

That’s worth clicking “like.”

Posted in Current Events, Pop Culture, Sermons | Tagged Bethesda, Bethseda, Facebook, healing pool, miracles, paralytic, Pay It Forward | Leave a comment

Mr. Peabody & Sherman: Our Adoptive Relationship (Movie Review)

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Mr. Peabody & Sherman is Twentieth Century Fox/Dreamwork’s latest animated adventure, written by Craig Wright (a seminary grad, and writer for Dirty Sexy Money, Lost, and Six Feet Under), about a talking dog and his human son, Sherman (Max Charles). This particular dog, Mr. Peabody (Modern Family’s Ty Burrell), is a Nobel prize winner, inventor, millionaire, and time traveler… which is where the real fun begins.

After failing to be adopted as a puppy, Peabody pulls off an upset on life by rising to be the smartest being on the planet, and adopts Sherman as a baby after finding him abandoned in an alley. But when Sherman sets off a series of madcap events by biting another seven-year-old, Penny (Ariel Patterson), who calls him a dog, the three of them find themselves time-traveling to interact with Leonardo da Vinci (Stanley Tucci), Robespierre (Guillaume Aretos), and Odysseus (Tom McGrath), among a list of ‘historical’ characters, both fictional and real. (Think Meet the Robinsons mashed up with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and you have the comic side of the film).

From an animation perspective, this is dynamite, and I only saw it in 2D. Fox delivers a nuanced take on the characters thanks to their voicing and visual depiction, but certainly creates space here where we accept the universe of Peabody as real. (Another aside: the preview of How to Train a Dragon 2 and Home, which aired with the clip “Almost Home” as a short before Peabody, also look pretty amazing… and fun.) There’s a certain feel to these cartoons that puts them on par with Pixar for their humanity, even as we watch a world that is clearly not flesh and bone.

Speaking of flesh, that’s where the real heart of the film lives. We know that dogs can’t adopt children in our real world, but it’s a parable about the way that we find our purpose in meaning in life, often in families that aren’t blood. Peabody remembers the hurt of not being chosen because he was a different sort of puppy; he adopts Sherman because he doesn’t want Sherman to experience that lack of home that he knew. And this adoptive relationship is what makes the film extraordinary.

When Sherman adopts Mr. Peabody in reverse, we see that anytime we make an outsider into an insider, there’s an incarnational aspect, a fleshing out of our spiritual connection. From a Christian perspective, we understand this and respond because God loved us that way first. (It’s interesting that one of the historical moments that Wright has written into the timetravelling journey is that of Moses being discovered in a basket as a baby… adoption, again.) Galatians 4:4-7 speaks to this God-adoption: “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba Father.’ So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.” There is a right to existence, happiness, purpose, and family that occurs in this God-adoption. And we see it with Mr. Peabody & Sherman.

I wonder if the film won’t make families more keen on what they have organically, and force some to consider whether adoption is for them. Seriously, if adoption is on your mind, then Mr. Peabody & Sherman will hit you with much more power than the average Rocky & Bullwinkle short. It’s a reminder that we belong, that we have purpose, and that our family, regardless of the criticism from outside, is strongest when we stick together.

Posted in Current Events, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture, Theology | Tagged adoption, adoptive relationship, ariel patterson, bill & ted's excellent adventure, craig wright, dirty sexy money, dreamworks animation, galatians 4:4-7, Home, how to train a dragon, leonardo da vinci, lost, max charles, meet the robinsonsb, modern family, mr peabody & sherman, odysseus, robespierre, rocky & bullwinkle, stanley tucci, twentieth century fox, ty burrell | Leave a comment

Get Church Right: Are We “Post-Church”? (A Mustard Seed Musing)

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Several of the conversations happening around the United Methodist Church seem to imply that the denomination itself won’t last into the second half of the twenty-first century. While non-denominational churches shoot up and mushroom out in pockets of suburbia, the established church (not just the UMC) watches as members leave (or die), coffers empty, and overall lethargy settles in. It’s not the way of every UMC certainly, but there’s a trend here that is unsettling.

And then one has to ask, is that such a bad thing? (Bear with me for a moment: I’m not arguing for giving up on the denomination, or church in general.)

What if we live in a post-church era? Some have said we live in a post-Christian America, where the world has passed us by and Christianity no longer has a valid hold. I beg to differ. But I think it’s possible that the church as an organization, as an institutional bully pulpit that politicks and lobbies, may need to be discarded.

Too often, I hear parishioners (usually older ones) discuss how the Christian America they knew and loved has died and been replaced by a reprehensible America that doesn’t value God or country anymore. (Without getting sidetracked, was Thomas Jefferson’s excerpted Theist Bible really Christian? Were the morals of Woodstock really ‘good’ and today’s teenage/college exploration really ‘bad?’) I think that ultimately the world has changed (even for the better) and that the church has failed to keep up.

I think instead of praying for a “holy hedge of protection” (thank you, Tim Hawkins) around the church, we need to be disassembling the way we’ve been doing it for the last century and take those stones to help rebuild the public square. I think instead of worrying about what’s been lost, we need to recognize that there’s still a hope we have in the future that God has promised. Some call this time “pre-Christian,” but I call it “pre-kingdom.”

If we really believe that in Lent, we look to refine and refresh who we are as Christians, then I believe we need to set aside our differences on doctrine and polity and focus in on the purpose of the church: to be the body of Christ. Jesus preached abundantly about the kingdom of God and what it would be like and how it was coming. It is a “present and future reality” that is not yet come to fruition and we live in that not yet.

Are we trying to batten down the hatches to save this or that denomination or are we building an ark (more on that later) where we want to provide refuge, respite, and healing for those who seek something good, something better? This kingdom of God has been promised and it’s coming, whether we’re ready or not.

Psalm 118:22 says that “the stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.” What if our dead and dying stones of the church, rejected for a time, could become the building blocks in the new kingdom?

Even the rocks cry out with hope.

Posted in Current Events, Pop Culture, Theology | Tagged dying denominations, kingdom of God, post-church, pre-Christian, pre-kingdom, Psalm 118:22, second coming, Tim Hawkins, united methodist church | Leave a comment

Lenten Movie Reflection: To End All Wars (Movie Review)

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Everyone has a film or two that they love… and no one else has seen. For me, The Power of One and To End All Wars are those films. The first stars a very young Stephen Dorff and Morgan Freeman, and the second stars Kiefer Sutherland, a pre-Stargate Robert Carlyle, and a before-anyone-knew-who-he-was Mark Strong. I know how to pick ‘em, don’t I?

Considering Lent, To End All Wars makes sense, as the film is based on the memoirs of the one-time chaplain of Princeton University, Ernest Gordon (Ciarin McMenamin). Gordon watches the way that Christ is followed even as POWs are forced to help build the Japanese’s Bridge over the River Kwai. Subjected to intense abuse, torture, and sometimes, execution, the prisoners have the opportunity to choose hate or to choose love. It’s a subject that we see reoccurring in the stories of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, who are usually minorities; here, the minorities are those who are normally considered ‘privileged,’ that is, the white, Europeans and Americans.

It’s ironic that both of my “what movie?” options reflect that sense of what it means to forgive, or to merely choose non-violence. In a world that seems intent on building up our machismo and reinforcing our sense of ‘fight or flight,’ Brian Godawa’s adaptation of Gordon’s memoirs screams for another way (and I don’t mean ‘freeze’). Obviously, given such recent films as The Butler and its complicated exploration of the various paths to true freedom, we’re still inclined to be sucked into a battle where we use the same methods of attack as those we can’t stand. MLK said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” To End All Wars is a film about living that out under the most extreme situations.

I’ll admit it: watching the film isn’t for the faint of heart. I find myself experiencing heartache and anger every time I watch! But it also draws me closer to the heart of Christ, and in this time of Lent, I have to ask, “how do I repent of my anger? How do I practice love and forgiveness on a daily basis?” I certainly don’t think it’s easy, but To End All Wars doesn’t claim that it is! We’re not into easy though, are we? When Jesus tells us to take up our cross and follow him (Matthew 16:24-26), don’t we have to expect that he means it?

If you’ve never seen the film, you need to give it a shot. It’ll trouble you, but sometimes being troubled is a precursor to change. That’s what Lent is all about– and to truly follow Christ, we’ve got to be willing to change.

This reflection was published as part of our ongoing Lenten film series at HollywoodJesus.com. You can check there for other films, like Amazing Grace, Babel, and others, coming soon.

Posted in Movie Reviews, Theology | Tagged Bridge over River Kwai, bruce courtenay, Ernest Gordon, forgiveness, Kiefer Sutherland, mark strong, morgan freeman, peace vs hate, Princeton University, Robert Carlyle, stephen dorff, the power of one | Leave a comment

Sunday’s Sermon Today: Why Fair Doesn’t Matter & Other Kingdom Anomalies (Matthew 20:1-16)

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Today’s scripture is one of those mysterious, this-isn’t-how-the-world-works kinds of things that always seems to grab my attention and make me wrestle with who I am as a person.

See, I believe in “fair.” I say I got a double-dose of it genetically, from my mother and my father. My dad was my swimming coach from the time I was twelve until I graduated from high school; my mom was the one who stayed up with me, watching the NCAA tournament and rooting on the underdogs (favorite NCAA moment ever? Harold Archineaux and Weber State defeating UNC!) Fair is what I’ve coached my soccer, swimming, and baseball teams; it’s what I’m teaching my children.

But like so many things about the kingdom of God, our expectations and Jesus’ reality meet in the middle and there’s an explosion. Today, we’ll look at the Parable of the Vineyard, and look at some of the other questions raised in the “Stump the Pastor” contest about how the kingdom of God works.

This parable is a good place to start, as it speaks to a few of the things that have become national news, like Obamacare and welfare. We know that Jesus spoke to the issue of money and spending more than he talked about many other things, like sex, occupation, and heaven itself- all of those would’ve made our lives easier, wouldn’t they?

Here, Jesus tells the story of a man who owned a vineyard and paid a group of workers a denarius, which they all agree to. But because the work is so plentiful, the owner goes out at 9 a.m., and noon, and 3 p.m., and 5 p.m., and contracts with four more groups of workers for the same amount of money.

Seriously, who isn’t getting a little hot under the collar here? He’s going to pay everyone the same, whether they worked for an hour or all day?

That isn’t fair! (See, you knew it was coming.)

I find myself saying that when I see a call go against my team when I’m watching a sporting event. Or when I see someone else go by me on the highway doing thirty over, and I’m the one who gets a ticket. Or when someone does something wrong, and I retaliate, and I’m the one who gets in trouble.

That isn’t fair!

But this parable says that the money doesn’t matter because the wage isn’t important.

It’s about the work that needs done. It’s about the people who need a purpose. It’s about the relationship of belonging between the owner of the vineyard, God, and the people who buy into the work, that is, the believers.

Consider today, how we know what it is that God cares about. Was it fair that Jesus would die on the cross for our sins? Was it just that an innocent man would be executed, beaten, and abused? Was it justice? No, it was mercy and it was grace.

God’s mercy and grace are the big answers to many of life’s questions. They fill in the blanks, they soothe our anxieties, they cover over our flaws. But we have so many questions, so many unknown answers, and here are more of my answers to the questions raised earlier this spring.

When God said, “let there be light,” who was he talking to?

John 1 comes to mind when someone asks this question: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” Christians commonly understand that God is three persons in two natures (seminary lesson coming!) where there are three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) who are eternal, without beginning or end. When God said, “let there be light,” it’s a figure of speech by which the world was created through the power of the Son. Jesus (and the Holy Spirit) were present with God the Father outside of time and space before the world was created. Internal dialogue or person-to-person conversation, either one allows us to see that God was creating within community.

As someone who doesn’t read the book of Genesis as entirely word-for-word historical account, I see God’s creation of the world as happening organically out of the abundance of God’s love. God is love and community, and wanted to share that, and poured out that love by way of making the Earth and everything in it. How exactly he did that is beyond us (for now).

Do you think that the nature of God changes overt time in response to his creation? I don’t believe that God’s nature changes, but I believe that God interacts with his creation intentionally, and that creation interacts with God in growing degrees of understanding. Again, I’m hesitant to explain Noah as a historical figure who had three sons, a wife, built an ark, let out a dove, etc. but I believe that there were people who God shielded or protected from the flood (considering that the flood narrative is a rather broad and basic element of many cultures’ origin stories). My reading there says the focus is on the grace of God to save some (even if they didn’t deserve it) in the ark story, and that grows to the point where some (even if they don’t deserve it) recognize the saving power of Jesus. All along the way, similar to the story of the man during the hurricane who doesn’t recognize the speedboat, the raft, or the helicopter as God’s answers to his prayers, I think God was working for good, for compassion, for salvation, all along, but humanity failed to full grasp it until Jesus.

Of course, there were some questions about the afterlife: Why do you go to hell if you can’t forgive or forget? What happens to your spirit/soul between the time you die and judgment?

First off, we don’t know exactly who goes to hell. Thank God! What we do know is that those who believe in Jesus Christ and put their full trust in his death and resurrection will spend eternity with God. That is the only thing I am willing to stand on top of and jump up and down, and call non-negotiable!

So, second, the rest is conjecture, and theory, and unpacking. What can we know? What can we understand? Check these out…

In Matthew 19, Jesus tells Peter that when the Son of Man sits on his throne, all things will be renewed. In Colossians 1:16-20, it again says that Jesus was the means by which God created all things, and that God will reconcile all things in earth and heaven through the death on the cross. In Hebrews 11, we’re told that the “saints” who’ve gone before us are watching us and cheering us on, so we understand that they are without pain and safe, but also aware enough of us to be ‘rooting’ for us.

We see hell in figurative terms. A few weeks ago, we saw that the ungenerous, the rich man, went to hell because he had it all on Earth and didn’t behave like a member of the kingdom. Jesus says in Matthew 7 that the road to destruction is broad and the road to life narrow, that not everyone who calls Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom. Jesus says if you call anyone a “fool” you will be in the danger of the fire of hell…. But again, in John 14:6, Jesus definitively states that, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Sure, John is the most poetic of the Gospel-writers, but he might as well have said, “all other roads to anywhere aren’t God’s.” If you don’t have God, if you don’t have Jesus, then the alternative to heaven certainly seems to be hell.

There’s some discussion about what the Greek words mean around the “everlasting” portion of hell. Is it actually forever and ever? It is temporal (not existing prior to God creating the world) but if there’s free will, people have to at least be able to experience ‘not God,’ right? Is it really used as a means to provide change and growth? I don’t know for sure (I’m not sure anyone does). But I do know that it says that the wages of sin is death and the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.

Paul seemed to think that the deciding who’s in and who’s out game wasn’t for us, anyway. In Romans, it says that Christ died and returned to life so that he would be Lord of the dead and the living. “You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. It is written: “‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord, ‘every knee will bow before me; every tongue will acknowledge God.'” So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God. Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another.”

Rob Bell wrote, “Often the people most concerned about others going to hell when they die seem less concerned with the hells on earth right now, while people most concerned with the hells on earth right now seem the least concerned about hell after death. Lazarus is an affirmation that there are all kinds of hells, because there are all kinds of ways to resist and reject all that is good and true and beautiful and human now, in this life, and so we can only assume we can do the same in the next” (Love Wins).

But again, back to Paul, we know that this has so much good held out for us. Romans 8:19-23 says, “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” So it’s not just us! It’s all of creation! The dogs, cats, plants, mountains, ozone, stars, sky—all are waiting for the renewal in this new heaven and a new earth.

What Jesus bought with a price (I Corinthians 6:20), what he actually died for (I Corinthians 15) is that we can be made right with God, that we be made right with each other. Our eternal life starts at the moment of our salvation, but sometimes we don’t live like that. Sometimes we are so tempted by the hope of our eternal, imperishable bodies (I Corinthians 15:40-45) that we fail to see that our current spiritual body is just as important to God. And if God breathed his spirit into Adam, and that’s what made him human, then we need to recognize the breath of God in each other, EVEN THOSE WHO DO NOT YET BELIEVE.

And that’s where the last question I’ll try and answer today comes in: “how can we be positive in a negative world?”

I think it starts with heaven. If heaven isn’t just a payoff for living a crappy life, for surviving, maintaining, not losing oneself but is actually a continuation without pain and suffering of the kingdom of God, then how could we not look for glimmers of it in the here and now?

Ask yourselves, “Are we living with the hope of eternal life? Has heaven ‘bled’ backward into the way that we treat each other? Do we pray for our enemies that their lives will be renewed and made better RIGHT NOW with the belief that they will be infinitely better in the future?”

I think that when we reflect on heaven, we get it wrong and think it’s boring and lifeless, sanitized hospital beds and white walls. To me, heaven looks a lot like the colors of the rainbow with gifts and graces showering down on all of us, like a Garden of Eden before the Fall.

John Eldredge writes that “Nearly every Christian I have spoken with has some ideat that eternity is an un-ending church service. We have settled on an image of the never-ending sing-a-long in the sky, one great hymn after another, forever and ever, amen. And our heart sinks. Forever and ever? That’s it? That’s the good news? And then we sigh and feel guilty that we are not more ‘spiritual.’ We lose heart and turn once more to the present to find what life we can” (Desire).

What if our definition of worshipping God in heaven is too small? Back in Genesis 2, he put man in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. Pre-fall, pre-sin, there’s an understanding that man was working in paradise! No one is retired there! We all take joy in the meaningful purposes of paradise. And how do we seem to lose sight of God’s desire for relationship over and over again? There’s this idea that somehow, at death, we get mindwiped of all our relationships, memories, ideas, etc. We tell little kids that their puppy or grandparent is looking down from heaven, but we fear that when we get there, we’re going to be mindless Jesus zombies.

God constantly uses broken people to help build the kingdom on Earth so why would he rub out all of our differences, our creativity, or made-in-the-image-of-a-beautiful-and-creative-God-ness when we die?

C.S. Lewis wrote in Problem of Pain that “He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you…Our soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions… But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for the hand.”

There has to be some degree of community, identity, and relationship in heaven, otherwise why would God be 3 in 1? If Jesus commanded his disciples in Matthew (referencing the Shemah of the OT) to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,'” then there’s something about heaven that has to be relational as well. We can’t love God if we’re not loving each other—right now AND later. We can’t really get heaven if we can’t appreciate the here and now, the work and the play, the highs and the lows, the hope of the future– RIGHT NOW.

We will be given new bodies: painfree, perfect, beautiful, and recognizable bodies. Augustine wrote in The City of God that “all that is excessive will be removed without destroying the integrity of the substance. In the resurrection of the flesh, the body shall be that size which it either had attained or should have attained in the flower of its youth, and shall enjoy the beauty that arises from symmetry and proportion in all its members.”

C.S. Lewis captured this beautifully in The Last Battle. (Can you tell I love C.S. Lewis?) The heroes have battled at last and are surveying the place that Aslan, the Christ figure, has brought them to. They don’t recognize it at first but slowly they begin to understand that what they are seeing reminds them of what they have left behind, only somehow… BETTER.

“And yet they’re not like,” said Lucy. “They’re different. They have more colours on them and they look further away than I remembered and they’re more . . . more . . . oh, I don’t know . .”

“More like the real thing,” said the Lord Digory softly. “When Aslan said you could never go back into Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. . . .”

It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right forehoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.”

Instead of a Lifeboat theology (Paul Marshall) that assumes the world is the Titanic and we’re all headed for an iceberg, why not adopt a more Scripturally sound Ark theology, where we recognize that we’re not selling fire insurance—we’re providing people with real life? We’re reminding them that in the midst of the floods, and the fire, and the wars, that God has a plan that he has been faithful to since the world began? There is plenty to be positive about there!

The United Methodist Church asserts:

“that the reign of God is both a present and future reality. The church is called to be that place where the first signs of the reign of God are identified and acknowledged in the world. Wherever persons are being made new creatures in Christ, wherever the insights and resources of the gospel are brought to bear on the life of the world, God’s reign is already effective in its healing and renewing power. We also look to the end time in which God’s work will be fulfilled. This prospect gives us hope in our present actions as individuals and as the Church. This expectation saves us from resignation and motivates our continuing witness and service.”

So what do we do about the kingdom, and our ideas about heaven and hell, fair and unfair? I say we give them all to God. Confess our sins and put our full faith in Jesus’ resurrection. Share your faith, knowing that if you believe this to be true, there is no greater love than this to share, whether it’s easy or hard, knowing that your faith is a journey. Relinquish our desire to determine who gets in where. God doesn’t need us to defend him. He doesn’t need us to worry about fair. He has already busted the lid off of justice and mercy, and let the contents spill all over us. If we don’t live like that, then it doesn’t matter what we think about heaven.

A few years ago, I wrote this: “if we believe that an absolutely loving God absolutely loved us enough to want to be with us forever, we need to absolutely love each other and everyone else so that absolute love will reign absolutely.” That’s the final piece there: if we believe this, even the smallest ounce of any of it, then we should be changed.

Our idea of “fair” has to change. And our ideas about justice, compassion, generosity, hope, grace, and, ultimately, love.

This kingdom of God thing is a beautiful mystery. It’s here now, and coming. It’s God’s best for us, and we get to actively be part of it.

What changes will you make this Lent to be a citizen of the kingdom? A resident Christ-follower?

There is much work to do, and many who need to hear about it. Why wait to start?

Amen.

Posted in Current Events, Pop Culture, Sermons | Tagged c.s. lewis, heaven and hell, love wins, obamacare, parable of the vineyard, problem of pain, Rob Bell, salvation, social principles, stump the pastor, the chronicles of narnia, the last battle | Leave a comment

Sunday’s Sermon Today: Greater Than, Less Than (Luke 18:9-14)

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Some of you have heard me talk about super heroes before, whether in movies, or comics, or old television shows. I love them all, because they rise above the fray to make decisions and take action when other people are standing around. Whenever danger lurks, they rise. Whenever evil strikes, they respond. That’s great. But the truth is, super heroes have some serious character flaws as well.

Take Batman: while being the world’s greatest detective not named Sherlock, he suffers from a serious desire for vengeance. Or Spiderman: who is the world’s bravest teenage mutant, but struggles with insecurity and indecision. Even Superman has problems—he’s always trying to save the world, making decisions that aren’t always his to make. The superheroes are sweet, but they sure are bipolar.

Speaking of bipolar, (and no, I’m not going to reveal a personal confession,) I want to share one of my favorite parables tonight. That’s the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector from Luke 18:9-13. It’s the story of the opposite ends of the spectrum of faith for two people who both admit that there’s a God, but who relate to God in opposite ways.

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

I’ve always been fascinated by the way Jesus sets this up—and the way that the author comments on what he’s about to tell us. Jesus is about to enter Jerusalem and head toward the cross, and his last parable is about righteousness. What does that say about what Jesus thinks is important? He doesn’t preach on marriage, or homosexuality, or how much you’re supposed to go to church—he preaches on righteousness.

So these two guys go up to the temple to pray—they’ve two things in common, they’re both men (because no one would’ve listened to a parable about two women) and they’re both headed to pray. There’s no comment on the way they’ll do it, just that this is where they’re headed and why.

But when we hear that one is a Pharisee, and one is a tax collector, we hear the difference in the way that society would’ve seen them. The Pharisees saw themselves as the end all and be all of righteous living, as well as their self-appointed status of gatekeepers of the faith. By gatekeeper, I mean, that they decided whether you were in or out of the religious community—they determined the kosher and the not kosher, the in and the out. But the narrator, the author of Luke has already let us in on where this is going—we’re going to hear something that knocks down the righteousness of the self-righteous.

The Pharisee it says, stands up. I’ve always taken that to mean he went to the front, and that he might as well have used a megaphone. It wasn’t really a prayer to God, it was a prayer about himself, out there, for everyone else to hear. What are prayers supposed to be about? The answer on that varies, but it should be TO God, and the focus here was definitely the content—this is for the individual, not between him and a powerful, spiritual being who has created and sustained him.

So the Pharisee compares himself to other men, to robbers, evildoers and adulterers. I’ve heard murderers in place of evildoers, if that helps you get a broader picture. So it’s like he’s saying, “I’ve never done the big three. I don’t steal, I don’t kill and I don’t sleep around.” But he takes it a step further, because he looks an aisle over and says, pointing, “Thank goodness I’m not like that guy over there.” That’s the same attitude that drove Jonah to Joppa, into the belly of a whale (or giant fish!) because he didn’t want to go to Nineveh like God told him to. Nineveh was too evil to be saved (in Jonah’s mind) so he didn’t want to waste his time. Jonah was an Old Testament Pharisee.

Speaking of Pharisees, robbers, murderers and the like, it reminds me of my favorite billboard. It was one a church ran on Cary Street: “Jesus hung out with tax collectors, prostitutes and murderers. There’s plenty of room for you here, too.” That billboard didn’t survive long before the Pharisees of the present day church had it taken down, but I think it was more in line with Jesus than the Pharisee’s prayer.

But he’s not done yet. Besides not doing wrong, our Pharisee is also quick to point out that he also meets the law by his actions, by what he’s doing. The fasting and tithing of ten percent would’ve been expected, required, part of his service to God. So, he’s all set as far as the law is concerned, both coming and going. The Pharisee has proven to himself that he’s a good person, that his actions exceed the expectations, so of course he’s right with God.

We see a completely different attitude from the tax collector. He’s humble because he sees his own sins and can’t look even in God’s direction—he merely prays, “God, have mercy on me a sinner.” He’s a guy in the back of the church who can hardly walk in the door, because he knows he’s screwed up, sinful, and desperately in need of some spiritual healing. He’s humble, and direct, not wordy or convoluted.

So I wonder what that would look like here at our church. Who are the Pharisees and the tax collectors? How are we guilty of being like the Pharisee? When we’re the ones who’s lives are together, right now, and we shake our heads at those who are struggling, we’re Pharisees. When we’re the majority of race, gender, religion or sexual preference, and we hold that against others intentionally OR unintentionally, we’re Pharisees. When we get hung up on who’s drinking, partying, sleeping around, smoking weed, spending money, etc., we’re being Pharisees. When we look at the faith of other people, and see our checklist as more filled than theirs, we’re Pharisees. And that scares me, because Jesus didn’t come to earth by way of the so-called ‘stable,’ for people who thought they had at all, like the Pharisees, he came for the least and the lost.

See, the Pharisees are masters of the checklist. And Jesus’ parable is specifically aimed at reminding us that the love of God isn’t about a checklist. You can’t make yourself good. You can’t earn a relationship with God. You can’t earn heaven. You will never be good enough. But that’s not the point. God’s grace is enough. It’s for the least and the lost, the people who can admit their need for God.

It says in Romans that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8.) While you were still stuck in the worst thing that you’ve ever done, completely oblivious of everything that Jesus wants for your life, Jesus died for you. Jesus knew every thing you’d ever do, before you accepted him and after, and he still died for you.

And Paul puts the emphasis on the “we,” not the video game setup that provides you with everything you need, without having to really throw a football or swing a golf club—no the “we” of community. C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity that “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than the others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.”

“How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit to themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people.”

C.S. Lewis isn’t taking any prisoners! When I’m proud, I’ve lost sight of God. When I judge someone, I’ve lost sight of God. To me, as someone who has accepted Jesus and his death and resurrection for myself when I was six, I must recognize that I am often the Pharisee, that pride and my desire to be better than others gets in my way. Anytime I accept the excellence and position of my life as right, and ignore the wrongness of the lives of those who are less fortunate, oppressed, abused and left behind, I become a Pharisee. When I let my education, my occupation, my salary, my comfort, get in the way of the people God wants me to love, I become a Pharisee. To avoid being a Pharisee, I must see through the eyes of God.

It makes no sense that God would spend his time dying on a cross for me, his creation, but he did. And because he did, I must look through his eyes at situations, places and people. Like Night Vision goggles, what was invisible and in the dark becomes visible. What was forgotten and neglected now takes center stage. God himself came into the world as someone invisible, unnoticed, absurdly. Why would he come like that? How else could he have come? He came absurdly to make the lowly royal and the royal lowly.

Yet the religious majority often make the lowly lower. God wants us to know the invisible, and to make the least great.

Speaking of the invisible, God has really turned my eyes to Africa as of late.

I am not much of a newspaper reader or news watcher. I am sure that you have more experience and more of a world-aware outlook than I have. My sister served as a short-term missionary to Guinea and Kuwait. But she really has turned my attention to Africa.

On a recent trip with her church, my sister Andrea found that her church group was the main attraction. People came from miles away to see the white people! They were celebrities. One night, the lead missionary who was showing their team around showed a movie about how Jesus had changed the life of a tribal witch doctor, and the people were packed in so numerously, that they couldn’t all get in the tent. The crowd came because of the visiting white people, but then they stayed and this movie sucked them in.

When the movie was over, nobody moved, which the missionary said was atypical. So, finally, he got up front and asked if anyone had seen anything that changed their minds about what they believed. He told them Jesus loved them, and twelve people ended up coming forward to pray a sinner’s prayer and accept Jesus into their hearts.

But the visiting group from my sister’s church couldn’t really take much credit. They didn’t do much, but they showed up. It’s one of those times where they could see so clearly that God loved them and that God used them, but it wasn’t about them.

Jesus told this parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector, and died only days later, still trying to prove to people that God loves them more than they could ever know. And that they didn’t need to compare themselves to others, they just needed to love God… back.

What happens when we start to live like that, knowing that God has loved you since before you were born and will love you forever? See, the Pharisee isn’t the only one “wrong” in the parable. The tax collector has a problem, too. He can’t see how much God loves him and wants to embrace him and lift him up. He, too, doesn’t seem to understand that Jesus is enough.

Is that you? Do you fail to see how much you’re loved because you’ve been told over and over again that you’re not lovable? Have you been told you’re not worth it? Have you been fed so much of the American dream, of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, of working hard to get ahead, that you feel like you’re doing something wrong if you’d just accept God’s grace? Do you accept that God alone has done the heavy lifting?

Both of these guys are flipsides of a personality, one the exhaustingly insecure and the other, the incredibly arrogant. Neither one meets Jesus where he is, and neither one fully embraces the gospel, the good news of liberation for the world.

As Easter approaches, think back to Christmas, the Nativity, as God himself enters the world as a baby. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be God the Father and send his Son innocently into the world. When I look at our kids, I see the way that we’re blessed to care for someone else, and I recognize how weak and fragile our human lives really are. But God loved us enough to expose his one and only son to that, without holding back!

When I look at my kids, I feel love that I didn’t understand before. God loved me so much he gave up the one thing that was his own—not a creation but the real thing. God didn’t see me as invisible, he saw me as priceless, more worthwhile than anything money or power could buy.

Because I’m priceless, because you’re priceless, God was willing to sacrifice his one and only son to die on the cross, so that you could have an eternal relationship with him. You have to want it, and you have to let it change your life. He isn’t going to force it on you, but when you let him, it’ll change your life. Someone said once that there is a resurrection at the end of every sentence, a new hope, and something beautiful that is about to begin. When your life is that sentence, that means even more.

Today, I pray for you, that God would open your eyes, and reveal the things that are invisible to you now. As we move through Lent, I pray that God would expose the things that you are proud of that keep you from seeing God’s grace, and that he would wipe away your insecurities and doubts that keep you from knowing that you matter. I pray that he will bless you with friends to keep your accountable, and a compassion for those hurting around you, especially those people on the fringe.

Maybe this parable is for you, the Pharisee, that God would show you what portions of your life are keeping you from seeing him clearly, and which people you need to reach out to. Maybe you have a family member, a co-worker, a neighbor that needs to simply know that Jesus loves you.

Or maybe this parable is for you, the tax collector, today. Maybe you need to pray that you can see the love of God, that he has forgiven the sins you can’t talk about AND the ones that everyone knows and make you ashamed. Pray that God would heal your heart and your life, because in God’s eyes, we’re all part tax collector, all part Pharisee.

But in the end, we’re all sinners who Christ has died for, and that makes us the blessed children of God.

Posted in Sermons, Theology | Tagged c.s. lewis, mere christianity, parable of the pharisee and the tax collector | Leave a comment

Ash Wednesday: Wrestling With Temptation (Mt. 3:13-17, 4:1-11)

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

This is my message for tonight at our Ash Wednesday service at 6 p.m. at Blandford UMC in Prince George, Va. If you’re looking for a place to worship, to begin your Lenten journey, I hope you’ll join us.

Think about the last time you went away. Was it on vacation? Was it for business? Some of you probably wrote a checklist, complete with the things you wanted to make sure you didn’t forget. Some of you waited until the last minute and then hurriedly threw it into the suitcase you probably left half-packed since the last time! Either way, your packing included some things you needed, and some things you wanted.

Imagine with me for a moment that you were leaving for forty days. Even the spontaneous would stop and think for a moment, right?

In our Scripture tonight from Matthew 3 and 4, Jesus leaves with the clothes on his back, without a kiss goodbye to anyone. But he does stop to get baptized first.

Jesus surprises his cousin John by showing up in the wilderness, at the Jordan River, where his cousin is preaching about “hamartia” or “sin.” He’s calling people to repent, to come back, from the way that they have strayed from the mark. This is the setup for Jesus’ first real mission.

John knows that people aren’t really living like they’re supposed to, that they’ve lost sight of what it means to be part of God’s kingdom. So he tells them to turn around, to stop acting like they know God’s heart when they don’t act like God wants them to. But that whole straying from the mark thing? That means there’s a mark to stray from, a way TO act, and that those who have strayed can find their way back. The Christian faith does have standards, right? It’s not just a free-for-all, but there’s also this thing called grace.

See, there is judgment in John’s baptism but there is also hope. John wants his hearers to turn from their self-involved lives of sin, of God-ignorance, of neighbor-avoidance. But he believes that a time is coming, this kingdom of God thing, where people are going to get it. He may be the “sky is falling” Henny Penny of the present but that’s because he’s the “happy ever after” Ken of the future. (It’s just that he’s dressed in some crazy, Grizzly Adams garb, not the Beverly Hills line of clothes.)

When Jesus shows up, John knows that the hope he’s alluded to has just become tangible. When the spirit like a dove descends and says, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased,” John knows that his work of preparation for the coming of the Messiah is about done. It’s not just a hope for a Messiah, but an actuality. A real, tangible, God thing.

As John is wrapping up, Jesus’ mission is just getting started. Three years of preaching, teaching, and healing, before three days of dying, and one new, eternal everlasting life. But the testing that Jesus will endure for forty days before his three years? There’s some treacherous stuff here.

Matthew 4 lays out Jesus’ three-part temptation this way.

First, the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness. Yes, the same Spirit that just claimed Jesus on God’s behalf, that descended on him and now resides with him, is also the causal agent in Jesus being driven from the relative comfort of his home, friends, and creature comforts (in 3 B.C….) into a month of loneliness, hunger, and struggle.

Stop and check that out for a minute: God’s Spirit, which bestows on Jesus the gift and blessing of God, is also the thing which leads him to experience a time of testing, of struggle, of frustration. Do we recognize that God is calling us to live a life of blessing but that in the times of frustration, those are the moments when we often recognize God… the most?

Next, the devil AKA tempter AKA ‘other options’ arrives.

The tempter provides three suggestions to Jesus to ‘make his life a little easier,’ to lighten the load of his mission.

1. The devil plays on Jesus’ hunger. Fully human and fully God, Jesus is hungry. I can’t not eat for forty hours; Jesus has fasted for forty days. I don’t like to be alone for a couple of days in a row; Jesus has embraced isolation for the sake of hearing God’s voice and his mission more clearly.

The tempter knows this, and so he goads Jesus: “if you really are God’s Son, then use your newfound power to make these stones bread.” The tempter knows that Jesus is God, that he could get himself out of it, and he knows that Jesus’ human nature is straining beneath the weight of the Spirit’s guidance. Jesus as God could get himself out of this; Jesus as human probably wants to. But Jesus is the person who was tempted by everything we are/will be and was without sin.

We hear that voice and those temptations, but sometimes they sound different.

It’s the voice that tells us when we’ve had a bad day, that we could just eat more than normal, just pull ourselves up on the couch and make ourselves comfortable, rather than facing real life.

It’s the voice that says that we have the means to make ourselves happy, so why not use it? That God has given us the money, the resources, the opportunity to do this thing or that thing for our own pleasure, so what could it really hurt?

It’s the voice that tells us we don’t really need to worry about anyone else because taking care of ourselves is hard enough.

It’s the voice that says, if God really loved us, he’d have taken care of this or that, so maybe God doesn’t actually love us that much.

But Jesus answers the devil with Scripture, and reminds him that the things the body needs aren’t what make a person. That it’s the soul of a person that makes them go.

2. Having been turned back, the devil turns to Jesus’ isolation, frustration, and internal desperation. Remember, he’s hungry, lonely, tired, and weakened. How many more days could he keep this regimen up? How long did God actually expect him to go without food?

The tempter tells Jesus to throw himself off of the temple roof, so that God would have to save him.

Did the devil think that God wouldn’t rescue Jesus? Did he think he could bluff Jesus into “showing his hand,” the degree of power which he possessed? Did he think that Jesus was ready to die, to shortcut his way back to heaven and circumvent ‘the plan?’

We may never know why. But any of these would’ve resulted in giving up, would’ve resulted in ringing the bell to end the training exercise early, rather than Jesus finishing his race.

Whatever you think of Jesus, know that he did not ever give up. And here, he answers again from his core, from what he had obviously learned before and focused in on while he was in the wilderness, that is, the Scripture: “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

If Jesus didn’t give up, and he was fully human, then why do we throw in the towel? Is it because we don’t know the Scripture well enough? Is it because we’re not in a relationship with the Holy Spirit? Is it because we haven’t prepared for this?

Jesus was prepared: he was ready for the spiritual onslaught.

3. Again turned away, the devil takes him to the top of the mountain. He has challenged Jesus’ physical needs, his emotional state of commitment, and now, his need to be justified and make a point of the forty days of suffering. He challenges the holy mission that the Spirit has driven Jesus to embrace.

The tempter offers him a deal: trade your soul, your worship, and your glory for the “stuff.” Trade worshipping evil, your enemy, for instant gratification.

Now, some commentaries say that the devil said if Jesus would just worship him for a moment, he’d give up all the souls that had succumbed to evil already. That the devil was offering Jesus a shortcut, to God’s endgame, around the cross. That Jesus knew pain was coming and the devil was playing on that here.

I think it was more of an immediate thing: the tempter thought maybe Jesus, God made flesh, would settle for what he could see. That maybe, just maybe, Jesus would opt for the immediate payoff rather than see the big picture. Because sometimes, we humans have an inclination toward grabbing what we can hold than holding on in faith…

But Jesus says, “Leave me alone! It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.'”

Jesus might as well have said, “Hey, this isn’t a great situation for me. I know some bad stuff is headed my way, but I believe God has a plan, and I’m holding onto that hope that God’s plan will pay off.” Maybe Jeremiah 29:11-14 was playing in his head: maybe he was too stubborn (wait, Jesus could be stubborn?) to let some pesky, tattered devil get in his head.

Then, having past the three tests, Jesus is waited on by angels. Then, having completed the exam, Jesus recognizes the peace and sustenance he can receive from God. Then, having survived the peirazo, the testing, Jesus sees that what he had believed in faith to be true in the Scriptures has been proven true in his life.

Rob Colwell called Lent the “Christian boot camp” for the early church. New Christians, who had professed a desire to follow Jesus, used those forty days to train, to examine their souls, and see if they still wanted to be baptized. And then they would be baptized on Easter Eve, to rise to new life with Christ on Easter Sunday morning. Not only were they tested by their public profession, but they were supposed to test themselves.

I wonder what it would look like if we approached Lent this year like it was a test. A test to see what we were made of, if we could put aside the lust for luxury, the desire to be comfortable, the thrill of attention and power, and embrace the simple.

I wonder what it would look like if we took offense at the things that tempted us, if we recognized that our temptations are all different, but no less real, and we set out to stare them down and reject them.

I wonder what would happen if we proactively, aggressively, with extreme prejudice, denied our temptations the juice they needed to bring us down, the way that you can starve a fire of oxygen to put it out?

So, what’s the thing that most keeps you from being who you’re supposed to be? When you think of temptation, what comes to mind?

Is it physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual?

Can you be real with yourself and name it?

What if you focused on ‘defeating’ that thing for the next 40 days?

If you made time to be like Jesus, to know your Scripture, to study it and live and breathe it, through Bible study, prayer, and worship, what might your life look like at the end of forty days?

What would it look like if you took a good, hard look at yourself, a spiritual inventory, and declared that one of those things that isn’t good for you would no longer have a hold over you. I want to invite you to come forward in a few minutes and nail that thing to the cross. I want you to give it to Jesus and take up something else.

Maybe you’re supposed to journal every day.

Maybe you’re supposed to make the church prayer list your hourly prayer to God.

Maybe you’re supposed to sign up for a Bible study or make an effort to come to Sunday School.

Whatever it is, recognize that the same Spirit that blows through to comfort, anoint, empower, bless, and feed us is there to challenge, disrupt, push, and open us up to testing.

May you look back over Lent and realize that your commitment to Jesus Christ has been tempted and challenged, that you have stared your fears, addictions, troubles, brokenness, and flaws in the face. And that you have overcome.

I imagine that the angels would attend then to you as well.

Posted in Sermons | Tagged 40 days in the wilderness, Ash Wednesday, baptism of Jesus, Lent, temptation of Jesus | Leave a comment

Sara Miles’ City of God: God Is Out There (Book Review)

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Sara Miles, author of Jesus Freak and Take This Bread, returns with her third non-fiction exploration of a life of faith lived out loud. In City of God: Faith in the Streets, Miles traces her path through Ash Wednesday, 2012, as she bears the ashes of Lent’s beginnings out of the church’s four walls and into the streets. Not knowing exactly what to expect, it’s a rediscovery of finding God where you are and recognizing that God’s movement is not confined to the life (inside) of the church.

Miles’ style reminds me of Anne Lamott’s (whose blurb graces the front cover). Having spent a few hours one Ash Wednesday (2008) with Lamott, chauffeuring her around Richmond, Va., I’m struck by the way that each moment is real, gritty, and yet, theological. No detail is too small, no moment misses the opportunity to both be an annoyance (a stop light when running late) and yet also an opportunity to see the grace-filled paths that God leads us across.

Early on, Miles wraps up Ash Wednesday’s complexity (the movement toward repentance and yet an acknowledgment that Lent ends with the joy of Easter): “Repentance means turning toward other human beings, our own flesh and blood, whenever they’re oppressed, hungry, or imprisoned; it means acting with compassion instead of indifference. It means turning away, ‘fasting,’ from any of the little and big things that can keep us from God–drugs, religion, busyness, video games, lies– and accepting the divine embrace with all our hearts” (21). Miles has come to understand church, but now living out this Ash Wednesday repentance on the streets, she finds God in the mundane, in the interaction, in the person-to-person humanity, and it makes her exploration of God grow.

As I explore my own understanding of “church” as a Protestant Christian and as a pastor, I find myself recognizing that the definition grows and changes and becomes more (and needs less) than I once thought. And worship is that act of the church that we are constantly seeking to do ‘better’ and to find meaning in, but which always seems flat when only done one way, or with one pattern. Miles writes that “worship outside of church buildings is the unexceptional historical and contemporary norm for Christianity,” and it reminds me of John Wesley’s (my denominational forefather) preaching outside in the fields to reach those who were not welcome inside of the institutional church (66). What would it look like if my church’s understanding of what worship looked like grew, until we saw God in places we never expected?

Miles implores us through her story to see God in the way other people worship, in the things other people are doing. It’s a provocative look, to find God worshipped in the streets, but she insists that it requires us to put down ourselves and our expectations. “In movements,” she writes, “we often want to be right in our assumptions more than we want to receive the truth from others… It’s so much easier to offer analysis of the correct path than to see where people already are going themselves” (79).

Miles’ Ash Wednesday looks much more exciting in her interactions and adventures by the end of the night than most of mine have ever been. But I wonder what it would look like if we took the “ashes” (not just the marks of the ashes) out of our churches into the streets, and shared the good news of God’s love? What would that look like? Right now, I’m not exactly sure, but Miles’ thoughts have stirred my soul to consider if God isn’t calling us to the streets of our cities, boroughs, and towns. God is already there working and caring for people, just waiting for us to join in.

Posted in Books, Current Events, Reviews, Theology | Tagged Anne Lamott, Ash Wednesday, faith in the streets, mission district, san francisco, st. gregory of nyssa episcopal church | Leave a comment

Get Church Right: Is Church Irrelevant? (A Mustard Seed Musing)

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

I’ve had one of those conversations, the kind that makes you stop and think. A young adult (seriously, is that twenties? thirties?) asked me some questions that you wish everyone would be willing to wrestle with. He obviously thinks God exists, that Jesus is pretty cool, and even expresses some desire to be more like Jesus in his everyday life. But church, “it sucks,” he says, as he gets dragged there by his mother or his grandmother. There’s just not a lot there on the surface that appeals to him. As a pastor, I’ve wrestled with some questions on my own, but lately, these keep coming back at me. Namely, in the person of a young adult with lots of questions.

The young man first approached me after worship. He’d obviously been digesting things we were studying as we learned more about Jesus’ ministry and the movement from Christmas to Easter. He asked if we could meet, and I agreed to meet up at a local coffee shop, outside of the confines of my 1960s paneled office. (Hey, you go with what you’ve got.) After some niceties, like who won the game last night and what March Madness would look like this year, he dove into a consistent line of questions I’ve heard, over the course of a series of meetings.

“Can’t you do church on your own? (That’s the least worrisome question to me, but it’s one I hear quite frequently.) “Can’t I just read the Bible and pray? Why do I need to go anywhere?” Well, I reasoned, for me, church isn’t a building, or a place, or even a way of doing something. It’s a fellowship, a community, of believers who want to be more like Jesus, and for whom Jesus is the head of their corporate body. I’m pretty much a Matthew 18:20 guy: Jesus says he’s there where there are people meeting together!

But at least by asking if he could do church on his own, he’s telling me that there’s something about church that is important, and that gives me a playing field to work with. Honestly, from a social perspective, we’re not the center of town anymore, people; most folks don’t have Sunday morning and Wednesday nights blocked off from their work schedules and social lives. We’re foolish if we’re not asking questions from the perspective of someone who hasn’t been raised with church in the forefront.

“Why is the church so judgmental? Why would I want to go to church when the people they were so mean to [my family member]? Why would I want to go to church when that guy on TV said over and over that God doesn’t love [fill in the blank]?” Hurt people hurt people. The church at its best is a hospital for the sick, an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting for alcoholics. We are all sick, all addicted to something (probably ourselves), and all desiring to be the main thing, when we’re not. If we could recognize our own struggle, the plank in our eye, we might actually respond to other hurting people, in church and otherwise, differently. Because as long as there are people, people will be saying and doing stupid things to each other. Followers of Jesus just learn to ask for forgiveness faster.

Sure, there are standards: Jesus didn’t tell us we could do whatever we wanted. But Jesus made it really clear that God’s grace was greater than the rules and regulations.

[The corollary to recognizing that “hurt people hurt people” is that church folks need to recognize that their bad day at church, when shared out of context or to folks who don’t recognize the above truths, serves as some of the worst PR that the church can get. Pastors are not exempt.]

“What’s in it for me? Why would I go to church when they don’t sing music or say prayers that make any sense to me? Why do you ask me to do stuff to help, when I can’t see anything I’m really getting out of it?” The truth is, the church isn’t “ours.” That’s a truth that old and young people need to learn. It’s not as much of an issue for an unchurched person as it is for a de-churched (formerly going) one or one like this young man, who isn’t sure why he’s there to begin with. The church is the body of Christ, and yet, even those who claim that the church is where they want to be, find ways to pick it apart and criticize it. “I’m not fed” or “I don’t like the music” are just ways of formulating that the church didn’t make us feel good, when it was supposed to be first about us worshipping God. Sure, no one wants to attend a church that isn’t emotionally, mentally, and spiritually stimulating, but what have you done lately to make that church rock? What have you done to make sure someone else feels fed, comfortable, or loved in church?

Why won’t the church leaders do anything new? This goes hand-in-hand with the church’s fear of change from the “traditional” (whatever we’ve done more than once) and its need to cling to the “way it’s always been done.” Honestly, I think the church is like this because it has some misguided sense sometimes that God needs our ‘protection’ from liberals, conservatives, women, gays, pentecostals, the Smurfs, etc. (You name it, we’ll ride on a Crusade…) There are certainly traditions that matter to the life of the church like baptism and communion but too often we get the baby and the bath water (pun intended) confused. When we get our traditions (i.e. comfort levels) mixed up with our standards of faith, we become just like the Pharisees. And consider how Jesus felt about them. Sure, we can make new things all the time (some of these non-denominational churches that pop up) and watch them fail to grab ground and grow deep, or sometimes, recognize that a new way of doing things actually allows us to grow (when a church plant or church initiative makes a difference and brings people to Christ).

“Why doesn’t the church serve others? Why would I want to go to church when the church doesn’t do anything for young people? Why can’t I just help the Ruritans or the honor society volunteer, and keep my Sunday clear? Why does the church care more about membership than taking care of people?” Christians shouldn’t do good deeds just to feel better. We sometimes lose sight of what it means to actually be disciples of Jesus, a costly discipleship where we place everyone else ahead of us in importance. We can’t go to the homeless shelter or tutor a kid once a month and figure we can wash our hands of it. We can’t just “throw money at the problem” and figure that we’ve actually made a difference. We need to live a lifestyle of service. And we can’t lose sight of being like Jesus for the sake of maintaining dying buildings and congregations that won’t change… It’s not actually about the money (even if some churches will have funds for something specific still in existence, and unspent, when Jesus comes back). We shouldn’t ever put the numbers before the people, whether they’re dollars or behinds-in-seats or membership rolls.

The truth about this young man’s questions is that none of these questions find that the church is relevant at all. That’s on the church, not on him. And while the church matters to me, because it’s a place where my faith has been nourished, and comforted, challenged and pruned, I worry that one day, one of my children could be asking these questions as they leave the sanctuary for good. It’s a scary day for me to consider that someone, anyone, could find Jesus’ church irrelevant. This young man is one of the people walking out the door and not looking back for twenty years, or ever.

Paul wrote in I Corinthians 12: “Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.” Paul understood that the church was made up of different kinds of people, even the ones who ask all of the questions, even the ones who feel disenfranchised by church but who stick around. Paul knew that when church started to look like a homogenized pattern, that church was losing its “stickiness,” it’s effectivity, it’s relevance.

So here’s the argument I made for church.

We need church because we can’t do it all on our own. The church is the place where you experience and recognize that Jesus died on the cross for you. The church is the place where you see that God wants big things for your life so that you can be a blessing to others. The church is the place where you can learn from Jesus, about yourself and those around you. The church is the place where your burdens should be lightened because other people help you carry them. The church is the place where people hold us accountable to being better than we’d be on our own. The church is the place where Jesus is the central point and the rest of life rotates around him! The church should be all of these things but unfortunately, it is not (always) who the church is.

So, now what?

Pray, pray, and pray some more. If you’ve made it this far, thank you. If you’ve made it this far, you’re someone who wants to get Jesus, to be involved in reforming and reframing the beautiful mess that is the church, the cruel mistress of many a pastor. It doesn’t have to be like this, but we can’t change our attitudes and those of our churches until we make God the decision-maker in our lives. I urged this young man to pray for guidance about what God would have him to do, whether it was in my church or another. But I told him he needed to be going to church.

Get involved. Seriously, whether it’s Vacation Bible School for a week or teaching a kids’ Sunday School class, there’s no better way to learn what you don’t know than to teach someone else. And there’s no better way to see that you matter to the church than to take some responsibility for what happens in church. If you believe in God, if you know Jesus died for you, then it shouldn’t be all about what you can get out of it but what you can give. Honestly, I am encouraged as we move into Lent because if Jesus would die for me and you, and you, and you,… then Jesus would die for the church. The church is worth it. This young man may not get it but he’s part of Jesus’ body, Jesus’ church, God’s plan for our community.

I told this young man a story. A preaching professor, Mike Pasquerello, told me over a decade ago that the church was broken, and that many people would leave it for something else, but that some people would choose to stay to be part of fixing it, to bring it back to what it was supposed to be. Isn’t that what Jesus did for faith, for the Jewish belief system? Didn’t he come and stay to fix it? Wasn’t he bent by it… but never broken?

I pray today for the church, and for you, dear reader. May God challenge the parts of your soul that are too comfortable and comfort the parts that scream with pain. And may we be healed by the love of Jesus Christ, together.

Leave your stories of the best and worst that church can be below. Consider how you can make your church better! For more reading, check out Dan Kimball’s They Like Jesus But Not The Church or Graham Standish’s Becoming A Blessed Church. Get involved in a small group or at least start the conversation!

Posted in Books, Current Events, Pop Culture, Theology | Tagged becoming a blessed church, body of Christ, dan kimball, Easter, graham standish, judgmental church, Lent, they like jesus but not the church, unfriendly church, unwelcoming church | 6 Comments

Runner: What Moves You? (Book Review)

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Patrick Lee’s Runner has already been optioned for film with Justin Lin (Fast & Furious) set to direct. His writing seems destined for the screen, with its quick descriptions and fast-paced action, centering around a retired Special Forces operative named Sam Dryden and a young girl named Rachel who seems to have special intuitive powers. Fans of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher or David Baldacci’s John Puller will want to see more of Dryden, and the deeper philosophical impact of Rachel’s “gifts” will draw in fans of Justin Cronin and Stephen King. Well-written and entraining, Runner was hard to put down and tense until the very end.

In a late night/early morning collision on a quiet seaside boardwalk, Dryden’s hermit-like existence is interrupted when he runs into Rachel. Pursued by her former captors, Rachel needs Dryden’s help, and it’s his drop-everything-and-fight attitude that saves her life. Mixing in the point of view of those who pursue them, Lee doles out bite-sized pieces of the mystery. What is Rachel’s power? Why was she held captive? Who can the two fugitives trust? Can Dryden keep them safe long enough for the memory-erasing drugs to wear off of Rachel?

Having read all of the Reacher novels, I found myself initially comparing Lee most strongly there, but the gradual unraveling of the mysterious studies involving Rachel led me to… Firestarter. This isn’t a mystical book, or any kind of supernatural story, but there’s a level of otherworldliness that ties into what happens. We’re sure Dryden has no dog in this fight, but who can Rachel trust outside of that? Who are the good guys? And how can you harness a power that seems ridiculously overpowering (and scientifically more developed than anything we know about now?)

This was my first venture into the worlds of Patrick Lee (he’s written another trilogy prior) but the way he kept the action moving, and the mystery sustained, has me hooked. I always wonder how I’d react if someone in desperate need wound up in my care; would I have the presence of mind and heart to play “Good Samaritan” and risk it all, whether socially, economically, or physically? Dryden is that kind of hero and Runner is an explosive tale that challenges what we think we know.

Posted in Books, Reviews, Theology | Tagged david baldacci, Fast & Furious, justin cronin, Justin Lin, Lee Child, patrick lee, stephen king | Leave a comment