Sermon: God’s Surprising Response to Agony and Evil
Filed under: By Tim Brassell, Christian Living, Gospel, Perichoresis, Trinity |
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In short, this message proclaims the Good News that God the Father, Son and Spirit is not interested in destroying His creation in its mess. He is interested in untangling the mess from the inside out and at its root. Because of Jesus Christ we now question evil, agony and suffering ONLY in the light of Who He is, where evil has been fully and finally dealt with. Because of Jesus you can face the reality of evil, pain and suffering while also claiming victory over it through His Incarnate Life!
Noticing Glory
Filed under: By Jonathan Stepp, Christian Living, Church, Ministry, Perichoresis, Prayer, Trinity, Worship |
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[This is a repeat of a post I wrote three years ago at NeoReformation.]
Would you notice glory if it shone into your life on a regular workday morning? Experiments suggest the answer is “no”.
A couple of years ago the Washington Post did an experiment where they asked the master violinist Joshua Bell to play his Stradivarius in a subway station in Washington D.C. during the rush of the morning commute. Over 1,000 people walked past him and almost no one took any notice of him. Even though Bell routinely plays concerts where people pay $100+ to hear him, only a handful of people stopped to listen that morning – never enough to even form a crowd – and his open violin case collected only $32 in donations.
One statement in the Post’s article struck me as interesting. According to the writer, the philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested that in order “to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.” And, of course, rushing through a crowded subway station on the way to work is not an optimal condition for appreciating beauty.
This got me to thinking about church activities like Sunday worship, small group gatherings, and outreach. Attending to these – and other spiritual disciplines – does not in any way make our Father in heaven love us more or make us more included in his life through Jesus by the Holy Spirit. Because of Jesus we are always and forever included in the glorious life of the Trinity, apart from our work or action. The Glory of the Triune Life is always around us. But we do not always see it.
The Eucharist, sermons, prayer, and other spiritual disciplines are all gifts of Jesus to humanity. They are the gifts by which he creates an optimal condition in which we might pause, see, and appreciate the glory of humanity’s adoption into the Trinity through his life.
And that’s why they matter. That’s why it is important that some of us gather together as the Church and begin to practice the life in which we are all inlcuded. Without an optimal condition in time and space called “the Church” the whole human race would keep rushing right by the faithfulness of the Father and never notice the glory of what the Spirit is telling us about our life in Jesus.
~ Jonathan Stepp
Guest Sermon: Cultivating a Receiving Heart
Cultivating a Receiving Heart by Cathy Deddo
Cathy Deddo was a recent guest at New Life Fellowship in Baltimore, Maryland, where she spoke on how Jesus helps us to live with receiving hearts.
Jesus, Facebook, and Me
Filed under: By Nan Kuhlman, Christian Living, Scripture Paraphrases | Tags: Facebook, Jesus Benyosef, Peace, personal hell
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The Monday after Easter Sunday this year, Jesus posted this on my Facebook timeline:
Nan, you know your personal hell? It has left the building. Just you and me now. Peace, dear woman.
I’m sure you’re wondering if I made this up, but it’s true. Jesus Benyosef has a Facebook account. For those skeptics, all I can tell you is that there is a Jesus Benyosef, a John TheBaptist Benzachar, Andrew Barjonas, Mary and Martha Bethan, John MacZebedee, and a whole host of others who appear to be “walking through the gospel” in real time, or at least, Facebook time. They talk about biblical events as if they are happening present-day and do so in present-day language, allowing us “friends” to participate in the gospel events with them.
I was surprised by Jesus Benyosef’s message to me, and even more surprised by my immediate response to it. I was in my office at school when I checked my Facebook account (instructors have to take breaks, too), and immediately, my eyes began to fill with tears. Had I been at home, I probably would have had a good cry.
This puzzled me, because I have a very good and happy life, and while I have had a few seasons of “personal hells,” right now I’m in the clear. So why did I start to cry at the suggestion of Jesus that my personal hell has left the building?
After some reflection, I think the reason that Jesus Benyosef’s kind words affected me was because they reminded me of words I had heard before, yet they were communicated in today’s language:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. (John 14:27, NIV).
Despite the different wording, I know that these words are true both now and in the future, whenever I need them. And given that I live in a frail and fallen world, I’m sure that there will come a time when I will hold on to these words again tightly, knowing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are meeting me where I am, in all my brokenness, and encouraging me in language that I can relate to. Jesus isn’t stuck in King James land, unable to talk to a 21st-century me. He is here; he is now; he is relevant.
I like having Jesus as a friend, on Facebook and in life, because he knows how it feels to be human, yet he knows how to deliver comfort from the Father through the Holy Spirit in just the right way at just the right time. His words of comfort aren’t limited to just the Bible but can come through a song, a written note, or even a Facebook timeline post from a friend.
Jesus Benyosef’s words on my timeline are true for you, too:
(insert your name here), you know your personal hell? It has left the building. Just you and me now. Peace, dear friend.
~by Nan Kuhlman
Agony, Evil, and the Ministry of the Church
Filed under: By Jonathan Stepp, Christian Living, Church, Evangelism, Gospel, Perichoresis, Trinity |
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I’m thinking about Tim’s post from last week and what the Church would look like if we embraced the ideas he expressed there. Three thoughts stand out:
1. God is not interested in destroying His creation in its mess. We all know people who are caught up in messes and we are all caught up in some degree of mess ourselves. The gospel message to the lives of messy people is “your Father in heaven is going to untangle your messiness from the inside out.” How? By sending his Son into the middle of your mess.
This means that we in the Church cannot run away from messiness and expect to find Jesus close behind us, running away with us. If we want to see Jesus in the world the Church must run towards the messiness of individuals and society as a whole.
2. God draws near to His creation and creatures in their agony, evil, and suffering in order to vanquish it. This is the message of the Easter Season we are celebrating. Our evil and its consequent suffering does not send the Father running away from us – instead, like any good Father, he comes running towards us when he sees us entangled in evil. Through his Son he immerses himself in our sin and liberates us from it through the Son’s resurrection.
This means that we in the Church cannot simply stand by and point our fingers at sin and expect to find the Father standing next to us, pointing and condemning alongside us. If we want to see the Father in the world we must sit down at the table of life and dine with sinners.
3. Maybe the stories of the Bible are not so much about the transformation of the characters in the stories as they are about the untangling of the evil one. Tim asked us to think about the book of Job. It is often presented as a morality lesson about patience or faith but the book begins with God seeking to prove to Satan the nature of his relationship with humanity. In a sense everything that happens in the story is about demonstrating the faithful love of God to Satan.
This means that we in the Church cannot simply use the Bible as an “instruction manual” to tell people how we think they ought to be living. If we want to see the Holy Spirit in the world we must hear what the Spirit is telling everyone through the pages of the Scripture. He is telling us of the undying, passionate love that he, the Father, and the Son have always had – and will always have – for humanity and the creation.
In short, the Church must allow itself to be sent as the Father sent the Son : to live and die among sinners, bearing their pain and alienation as our own even as Christ has born our pain and alienation as his own (John 20:21). In this way, as we share in his sufferings, we will also share in the glory of his resurrection (Phil. 3:10-11).
~ Jonathan Stepp
Sermon: Everyone Was Born Again in Jesus’ Resurrection
Filed under: By Tim Brassell, Gospel, Perichoresis, Sermons, Trinity |
Comments (9) Everyone Was Born Again In Jesus’ Resurrection by Tim Brassell
This message proclaims with the Apostle Peter and St. Athanasius of Alexandria God’s Good News that “all people were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection. For the solidarity of humanity is such that, by virtue of the Word’s indwelling in a single human body, the corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all.”
God’s Surprising Response to Agony and Evil
Filed under: By Tim Brassell, Christian Living, Evangelism, Gospel, Perichoresis |
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There is probably no greater challenge to the Good News of Jesus Christ and the Gospel than the problem of ongoing evil, agony and suffering. Traditional arguments such as those made by even prominent Christians in our day not only seem conflicting and confusing but many times appear to add insult to injury.
You know the questions: If God is Omnipotent and has all power, how come he doesn’t use it to destroy evil and prevent suffering? and How can we believe in, let alone trust and love a God who seemingly does nothing when one of his ‘children’ gets kidnapped, raped or is going hungry?
And you know some of the answers: God sent trouble and unless you, too, repent, you will likewise perish or God didn’t send those tornadoes it’s just that people foolishly build and live in homes they place directly in the path of destruction!
Not very helpful in my book, and especially when these answers include no indication of Jesus, the Revelation of the Relational God, and Who He is for us as the Gospel, Good News and heart of His Father!
In stark contrast to these comments I hear in the Christian realm regarding the recent tornadoes and destruction in the mid-West, these words I read by Thomas F. Torrance have been better responses to me in thinking out of the Gospel about such horrors (from Ray Anderson’s article “Torrance as a Practical Theologian” in the book The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, pp.172-175). I have broken up the quotes for easier reading:
This movement of God’s holy love into the heart of the world’s evil and agony is not to be understood as a direct act of sheer almighty power, for it is not God’s purpose to shatter and annihilate the agents and embodiments of evil in the world, but rather to pierce into the innermost center of evil power where it is entrenched…
…[God comes] to pierce into the innermost center of evil power where it is entrenched in the piled-up and self-compounding guilt of humanity in order to vanquish it from within and below, by depriving it of the lying structures of half-truth on which it thrives and of the twisted forms of legality behind which it embattles itself and from which it fraudulently gains its power.
… Here we have an entirely different kind of and quality of power, for which we have no analogies in our experience to help us understand it, since it transcends every kind of moral and material power we know.
…only through the cross of Jesus Christ can we see and understand how God deals with evil in this world. The reality of God’s love as enfleshed in the humanity of Jesus is the hermeneutic [interpretation] of God’s power. All questioning from the side of human pain is now “Questioning in Jesus Christ,” the title of a chapter in one of Torrance’s early books.
God is not interested in destroying His creation in its mess. He is interested in untangling the mess from the inside out and at its root. He has accomplished this by entering His creation as a real man in Jesus Christ. In the shared faith of Christ we should now only question evil, agony and suffering in the light of Who Jesus is, where it has been fully and finally dealt with. This power of attacking and getting rid of evil in suffering love, and without annihilating it, blows the minds of us weak and puny humans, and we have nothing to compare it with, which is why we often stumble when addressing the issue.
As Ray Anderson says, because of present evil, agony and suffering in the face of the Good News of God Revealed in Christ, “the challenge to a practical theologian in the face of such agonizing questions is to expand the reality of God’s love and the reality of human suffering without breaking the two apart.”
That is what I am seeking to do in this blog post: face the plain and real suffering we still experience AND the Good News of Jesus at the same time, and hoping to help you and I communicate (NOT prove! Only God can do that!) the tension a little better. Again, quoting the late Thomas F. Torrance from Ray Anderson’s article:
God has taken the sorrow, pain, and agony of the universe into himself in order to resolve it all through his own eternal righteousness, tranquillity, and peace. The center and heart of that incredible movement of God’s love is located in the Cross of Christ, for there we learn that God has refused to hold himself aloof from the violence and suffering of his creatures, but has absorbed and vanquished them in himself, while the resurrection tells us that the outcome of that is so completely successful in victory over decay, decomposition, and death, that all creation with which God allied himself…in the incarnation has been set on the entirely new basis of his saving grace…
…The Cross of Christ tells us unmistakably that all physical evil, not only pain, suffering, disease, corruption, death, and of course cruelty and venom in animal as well as human behavior, but also ‘natural’ calamities, devastations, and monstrosities, are an outrage against the love of God and a contradiction of good order in his creation.
…the cross of Christ makes clear the fact that evil is not only a violation of humanity, but it is also a contradiction to God’s moral order. The incarnation places God’s sovereignty and moral order on the side of humanity in opposition to evil. No longer is there a basis for interpreting the tragic events which threaten human good as somehow linked directly or indirectly to God’s providence as though evil contributes eventually to some divinely ordained good.
WOWSA! The One and Only God the Father, Son and Spirit, through the Son Jesus, within creation, transforms rebellion in His Right Relationship, terror in His Tranquility, and perversion in His Peace. There is no God Who stands apart from, or is neutral and distant to, the pain of His creatures. There is only the God Who draws near to His creation and creatures in their agony, evil and suffering to vanquish it. The Resurrection of Jesus is our assurance that this has happened completely in God’s free and saving grace! All physical evil, all pain, suffering, disease, corruption, death, and cruelty and venom in animal as well as human behavior, ‘natural’ calamities, devastations, and monstrosities, are an outrage against the love of God the Trinity and a contradiction of good order in his creation. He is NOT for any of these in any way! God is on our side and against evil, agony and suffering in Christ and we no longer have to try to wonder if there is any “good purpose” of God behind it for us – there isn’t! Really – there isn’t!!! Wow!
This has got me rethinking everything I thought I knew! 🙂 Of course, I immediately think of the stories of Joseph and of Job and other potential objections at how God might have used evil for good. MAYBE those stories are not so much about their transformation as it is the untangling of the evil one…..hmmmmmmm…. God was assured of Job’s response (Job 1:1, 8, 22, 2:10, 13:15) and seems to have set up the trap the evil one ran right into…hmmmmmmm….
Your thoughts??? Does this kind of response give you a better handle on the Gospel? If so, how? If not why not?
~ Timothy J. Brassell
Sermon: Don’t be Afraid of the Lord’s Coming
Filed under: By Jonathan Stepp, Gospel, Love, Perichoresis, Sermons, Trinity |
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A Palm Sunday meditation on John 12:15, “Do not be afraid, O Daughter of Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.”
Sermon: Jesus and the Spirit of His Father, Part B
Filed under: By Tim Brassell, Christian Living, Gospel, Perichoresis, Sermons, Trinity |
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This message is Part B of a celebration of God’s Good News as seen in Luke 15. In this story Jesus relates in intimate fellowship with rebellious and notorious sinners while also confronting the self-righteous religious of His day. Specifically, the Spirit helps us experience and be transformed in the heart of God the Trinity as Jesus reveals the extravagant, gracious, persistent, shameless, passionate love of His Father for all.
Our Pursuit of Beauty
Filed under: By Nan Kuhlman, The Dance and Dream of the Trinity, The Plan of Adoption, Trinity | Tags: Beauty, C.S. Lewis, Sharon Randall, the pursuit of beauty, Weight of Glory
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The pursuit of beauty is a common theme in our world. From the beauty that is advertised on the pages of almost every magazine to our very own homes and gardens, human beings desire to create or view beauty, whether it is in the mirror or in our surroundings.
I recently read a syndicated column in our local newspaper by Sharon Randall called “Where Will Beauty Find You?” (http://www.sharonrandall.com/). In the article, Randall recounts spending her spring breaks with her grandmother, who taught her how to see beauty in everything. In their hikes through the woods, collecting the best of the wild spring flowers, they would end up with briar pokes, chiggers, or the worst, ticks. Her grandmother wisely advised her, “Beauty often comes with a price. But you have to keep looking for it.” As a result, Randall shares in the article how she has learned to look for beauty and to find it (or be found by it) in every season and situation of life.
Randall isn’t the first writer to think about the search for beauty. C.S. Lewis also considers beauty in The Weight of Glory:
We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it (42).
Lewis goes on to explain that our desire for beauty is because the Triune God is the source of that beauty, and so our yearning for beauty in our lives is really a yearning for God. Conversely, the Father, Son, and Spirit bestow lavish beauty upon the world and the human beings around us, so that we may recognize their handiwork and loving presence, even in situations that might not seem beautiful at first.
According to columnist Sharon Randall, “Every place we look for it, beauty is blooming.” As we look for the Father, Son, and Spirit in our lives, we will find evidences of beauty. There may be briar pokes or chiggers or ticks as you embrace the beauty in your particular situation, but “you have to keep looking for it.” The beauty we’re looking for is ready and waiting to be found.
~by Nan Kuhlman