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piece of bullet proof plate glass and distribute bread and juice through a hand sized hole exclaiming proudly that everyone is welcome at my table you ve just got to stay on that side of it i get it i really do those are really scary things and there are really scary people in the world whose presence really does merit fear and fences i don t want to be exploited or taken advantage of i don t want to get to the pearly gates and find out that i misunderstood god s purposes and hurt god and god s children and i have literally made myself nauseous by deciding that someone else mishandled the lord s supper but it is in my fears that i really believe that i must join my voice with the father from mark who says i believe help my unbelief how often do we hear in scripture the commandment do not fear or do not fear only believe after all it certainly sounds like paul thinks that the gospel of jesus christ is infinitely more good than any bad news is bad and it is precisely because the gospel allows itself to be exploited and taken advantage of it is a free gift i don t know if the bad news is trespass or if it is sin having dominion or if it is that we are being dangled over a hell of eternal torment but i do know that whatever the bad news was it doesn t matter it s obsolete because the good news that jesus is the christ trumps the bad news paul even though he just got through eloquently proclaiming the freedom of the gospel also seems to share our fears because he knows that nothing that we can do will trump god s good work that it is so good and so freeing that it needs to be packaged with a warning label what then should we go on sinning that grace may abound because make no mistake grace will abound it s really that good and there is room in this gospel for even the worst sinners and heretics out there so let s go on sinning right of course not exclaims paul your life as a slave to that tyrant is over dead why would you keep living like you re a slave that is a ridiculous response but it s not ridiculous because the freedom of the gospel is only an illusion that freedom is real the bad news is no longer to be feared sin is no longer our lord the law is no longer our lord the fences have come down and everyone is invited in and has been given the free gift of grace and of new life and it is a life where we can and should live and make mistakes be creative in seeking to know and be known by god smash our idols replace them with new still incomplete ones ask questions that we don t have answers to dislike and challenge the answers that we have been given and finally get nailed to and hoisted up on a cross maybe even by the ironic hand of leaders of our churches the pastors and leaders who are verbally excommunicating rob bell aren t really concerned with getting rid of rob bell they are really concerned with trying with every ounce of strength and spittle they can muster to contain god but god will not be put in a box god is free and we have been given the free gift of getting to share in that very freedom of god and trust that it is god who has given us that gift and that it is god s love not our rightness or our morality that will finally usher us into eternity whatever that may end up looking like so what the hell are we so afraid of the body of jesus has already fallen into the wrong hands the blood of christ has already been shed on the shameful and foolish cross the veil has been torn the presence of god is on the loose and the free gift has finally trumped the trespass in an earlier letter paul quotes a hymn that the early church had been singing in worship and it goes like this let the same mind be in you that was in christ jesus who though he was in the form of god did not regard equality with god as something to be grasped but emptied himself taking the form of a slave being born in human likeness and being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on a cross let the same mind be in us that was in christ who gave himself over to be accused betrayed abused mocked and finally to be killed all so that we might walk with our creator in the newness of life this is the charge go preach a gospel that is so good it needs a warning label that is so freeing and selfless that it can and will be taken advantage of go preach a christ who is so good he needs a warning label who is so freeing and selfless that he can be and has been and will be taken advantage of to say that the bad news it bad enough to keep us in line is no gospel at all but the free gift is greater than the bad news thanks be to god amen posted in uncategorized death moving in reverse bremen 1st presbyterian church november 28 2010 1 comment i ve recently had the opportunity to preach a few sundays at a small church in bremen ga to a congregation of less than 30 people they are wonderfully welcoming and intelligent people who need a full time pastor but in the mean time are incredibly gracious and grateful to even have a 1st year seminary student this is a transcript loosely of my sermon from the first sunday in advent 1 the word that isaiah son of amoz saw concerning judah and jerusalem 2 in days to come the mountain of the lord s house will be established as the highest of the mountains and will be raised above the hills all the nations will stream to it 3 many peoples shall come and say come let us go up to the mountain of the lord to the house of the god of jacob that yhwh may teach us the ways of god and that we may walk in god s paths for out of zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the lord from jerusalem 4 yhwh shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks nation shall not lift up sword against nation neither shall they learn war any more 5 o house of jacob come let us walk in the light of the lord this is the word of the lord historical background so just a brief historical background for this text israel has divided into two kingdoms north and south and isaiah is a prophet in the southern kingdom of judah whose capital is jerusalem right around the time that isaiah would have begun his prophetic career israel is conquered by the nation of assyria now assyria in the 8 th century is the world s superpower and is creating the largest empire the world has ever seen so the small little nation of judah you can imagine is simply waiting for the massive army to march south and conquer them just as they have conquered israel its important to understand that to be conquered by a foreign nation is to lose all certainty you may be exiled to another land you may lose the freedom to worship your god or you may simply be killed no matter what it ends up looking like though its not going to be good now i want you to keep keep that history in mind as we listen to these word from elie weisel s night illustration of expectant waiting at four o clock in the afternoon of the same day as usual the bell summoned all the heads of the blocks to go and report they came back shattered they could only just open their lips enough to say the word evacuation the camp was to be emptied and we were to be sent farther back where to to somewhere right in the depths of germany to other camps there was no shortage of them when tomorrow evening perhaps the russians will arrive first perhaps we knew perfectly well that they would not the camp had become a hive people ran about shouting at one another in all the blocks preparations for the journey were going on i had forgotten about my bad foot a doctor came into the room and announced tomorrow immediately after nightfall the camp will set out block after block patients will stay in the infirmary they will not be evacuated this news made us think were the ss going to leave hundreds of prisoners to strut about in the hospital blocks waiting for their liberators were they going to let the jews hear the twelfth stroke sound obviously not all of the invalids will be summarily killed said the faceless one and sent to the crematory in a final batch the camp is certain to be mined said another the moment the evacuation s over it ll blow up as for me i was not thinking about death but i did not want to be separated from my father we had already suffered so much borne so much together this was not the time to be separated i ran outside to look for him the snow was thick and the windows of the blocks were veiled with frost one shoe in my hand because it would not go onto my right foot i ran on feeling neither pain nor cold what shall we do connect to text this is one of the milder scenes from the novel and yet it conjures up the depths of human fear and anxiety in a way that may help us feel the weight of what israel and judah were going through when isaiah comes on the scene a few comparisons in auschwitz there is the threat of evacuation in judah there is the threat of being conquered and exiled while in israel those things have already happened in auschwitz there is a faint hope that a waiting a life and death need for the russians to show up and liberate the captives in israel that same hope and waiting and need is put on yhwh for weisel above all else he is afraid of being separated from his father and at the heart of the fear of exile from jerusalem is the fear of being separated from the temple and from the promised land these things are the identity of the jewish people and to be separated from them is to be separated from yhwh from their father it can leave you numb only able to ask the question what shall we do what can we do connect text to present now in the christian church we believe that the hebrew bible the old testament is holy scripture and therefore we should be able to glean wisdom from these stories and yet it can be incredibly difficult to relate right we are not living in or even under the threat of conquest and exile i doubt if any of us in this room have endured the conditions that were endured by weisel and his father who was eventually beaten to death in auschwitz and i actually think that it would be wrong to assume that we can fully understand their perspective unless we ve actually been there ourselves i think that there is a common christian understanding that defines advent as the season in which we remember our understanding of this part of the story in other words advent is remembering israel or even the world as it waited on jesus and while that is true in some ways it would do us well to remember that the jews weren t waiting on jesus they were waiting on the day of the lord the day when all things would be made right and humanity would live in harmony with creation and creator and that s not how jesus showed up at least not yet it s difficult for me to believe that an understanding of advent that is only about what has already happened sometime in the past isn t also an understanding of the scriptures that doesn t give its stories any freedom to speak into our lives today maybe we think this way because we ve been told that jesus resurrection marked the end of the race and that our waiting is over or maybe we just don t like waiting and its easier to pretend we don t see the unfinished unacceptable state of the world in which we live but i believe that it is fair and true to say that we are still living in a world that exists in painful need of redemption in many parts of the world genocide is still a reality children are dying simply because they can t get a clean drink of water or enough food war continues to plague this planet and that one starts to touch home we re still in iraq and regardless of your political ideas about that war i doubt that anyone would argue against the claim that war is not a good way of life necessary or not war is a way of death let s bring it even closer to home according to the cdc the divorce rate for the us in 2009 was exactly 50 half of the relationships that come to life on account of love end up falling apart end up dying beyond that 1 out of 10 persons over the age of 18 in the us suffers from some form of depression that means this one touches someone in this room and i m sure you ve seen it in the news recently that in the month of september 2010 alone one month at least six gay youth all of whom endured a relentless stream of taunts and oppression by their classmates ended their own lives i could go on and on but there s no need the glaring obvious truth of our current situation is that sin is still very alive and extremely powerful throughout our entire world and we live in captivity to it we still live as exiles from the garden state the problem life as we know it is not as it ought to be it is incomplete and just like israel waited on the day of the lord and just like the jewish prisoners of wwii waited on their liberators so we still wait for much of the world even for privileged us life isn t even the right word in the second half of john 10 10 jesus is quoted as having said i have come that they might have life in greek the four english words they might have life are expressed in one word and it is in the subjunctive case meaning not yet not definitely in other words jesus recognizes that incarnation doesn t yet make real life a reality for humans and as the first church new and we just re stated neither does resurrection immediately fix things our reality is still waiting and in the narrative that we ve been given as christians what we are waiting for is heaven right for israel thought they may have used slightly different language their reality is our reality waiting on the day of the lord it is in the midst of this waiting that isaiah speaks these words of imaginative expectant hope of advent expecting the day of the lord imagining heaven but isaiah doesn t use the same kind of language we do to talk about heaven does he i don t know your experiences with conversations about heaven but in my own experience and observation we think about and talk about and even expect heaven in really intangible ways and that s not a bad thing because i think it represents the truth that heaven is beyond our comprehension but i want to read a couple of descriptions of heaven that i found online and you tell me if they inspire you from godandscience org the characteristics of the new creation tell us that it will be vastly different from what we are used to on earth probably the most noticeable difference will be the lack of gravity the new jerusalem is described as a 1 500 mile cube structures of this size would automatically become a sphere in this universe because of gravity therefore gravity will either be absent or significantly reduced in the new creation not very exciting not very imaginative who cares i personally don t find any value in this kind of description of heaven from cbn heaven is where god is he is the light of heaven the joy of heaven as you mature in your understanding of the bible you real...
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