At Play in the City of God

Zechariah 8:1,3-8
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost 2010
Family Dedication

Nine years ago, when I was being introduced to people in the process of my transition from the role of professor and administrator in the university to the role of servant and leader in the church, I was asked a myriad of questions, one of which caught me completely off guard. “What do you do for play?” someone asked me. “What do you do for play?” “Play?” I thought to myself. "Who has time to play? I have a fulltime job, three children, a house, a yard, and a garage that looks like the Beverly Hillbillies unloaded their truck into it. Who has time to play?” That’s what I thought to myself. But instead of going off on a rant in response to an entirely innocent question, I simply said, “My play time right now is spent with my children.” It was true then, and it’s still true now. Real men play rugby; I play peek-a-boo. But the common denominator in the question I was asked, in my answer, and in rugby and peek-a-boo is “play.”

It turns out that play is very serious business. Believe it or not, play has been studied seriously by psychologists and educators since the 1800s. In 2006, the American Association of Pediatrics released a clinical report titled, “The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds” (http://www.aap.org/pressroom/playFINAL.pdf). It occurs to me that this morning as we dedicate children and families to God and the church and celebrate and honor and remember the positive contributions to our lives that fathers and figure-figures have made, it makes sense to take time to consider “the importance of play in promoting healthy child development and maintaining strong parent-child bonds.”

“Play,” the report begins,

is essential to development because it contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children and youth. Play also offers an ideal opportunity for parents to engage fully with their children.” In describing the benefits of play, the report says this: “Play is important to healthy brain development. It is through play that children at a very early age engage and interact in the world around them. Play allows children to create and explore a world they can master, conquering their fears while practicing adult roles, sometimes in conjunction with other children or adult caregivers. As they master their world, play helps children develop new competencies that lead to enhanced confidence and the resiliency they will need to face future challenges. Undirected play allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts, and to learn self-advocacy skills. When play is allowed to be child driven, children practice decision-making skills, move at their own pace, discover their own areas of interest, and ultimately engage fully in the passions they wish to pursue.

More recently, Dr. Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College, wrote this about play: play “is a means by which children develop their physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and moral capacities. It is a means of creating and preserving friendships. It also provides a state of mind that, in adults as well as children, is uniquely suited for high-level reasoning, insightful problem solving, and all sorts of creative endeavors” (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200811/the-value-play-i-the-definition-play-provides-clues-its-purposes). What he could have added but didn’t is that some psychologists have also suggested that play is an essential component in children’s healthy spiritual development.

In the Old Testament book of Zechariah, the free play of children is featured in a description of God’s redemption of God’s people and the world from suffering and oppression and danger: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets” (Zechariah 8:4-5). If we had read the entire chapter, we would have seen this picture of the free play of children associated with “a sowing of peace” in v 12 and “seasons of joy and gladness” in v 19 and “the favor of the Lord” in vv 21 and 22 and the active presence of God in v 23. Scripture and psychologists agree that play is serious business!

The book of Ecclesiastes tells us that “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. . . . a time to break down, and a time to build up, a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together (3:1,4). If Ecclesiastes is correct, then being at play in the city of God is the time we spend stacking blocks and knocking them, turning sand into castles and castles into sand, laughing and dancing and skipping stones on the water. Being at play is “a sowing of peace” and “seasons of joy and gladness,” a sign of “the favor of the Lord.”

I remember my paternal grandfather’s example of a passion for his work as a research chemist and a department manager at the DuPont Company’s Chambers Works. But I remember also that he constructed a giant canvas teepee in his back yard for his grandsons one summer and we—grandsons and grandfather alike—played Indians (without any cowboys). Each morning we went out from that teepee to hunt moose on the hill behind his house. Just for the record, there were no moose within, say, 600 miles of his house, but he agreed to go moose hunting every day for a week that summer. I remember my maternal grandfather’s example of extraordinary devotion and pride in his work as a machinist at the DuPont Company’s Experimental Station. He had been retired to Florida for years before the black grit of machine oil and metal filings finally disappeared from the skin around his fingernails. But I also remember his laughter and joy as he told the story of how my grandmother in preparation for a Sunday School teachers’ meeting at their house followed so diligently—and naively—the punch recipe she found in a magazine without realizing that she was spiking it, with the end result that those otherwise tee-totaling teachers finished the meeting with a spirited game of leap-frog in the back yard. I remember that my father was almost never at home in the evenings when I was young and that family vacations were something he found intrusive and inconvenient when he agreed to take them at all. But I remember also the introduction he gave his sons to games and sports and jokes and theater and the arts that were his play. Whenever and wherever we engage in healthy play, we are “sowing peace” and “seasons of joy and gladness” and “a sign of the favor of the Lord.”

Some of you may remember the Children’s Sermon for Children’s Sabbath last October in which Bev delivered to us words from our children she had collected in Sunday School. Among the things the children said to tell us adults were “don’t be so serious all the time” and “play more.” It turns out that those are words of wisdom, the wisdom of psychologists and educators, as well as the wisdom of children, because play “is a means of creating and preserving friendships . . . [and providing] a state of mind that, in adults as well as children, is uniquely suited for high-level reasoning, insightful problem solving, and all sorts of creative endeavors.” If you more serious adults need a reason to play, then consider this: if you play more, you will work more efficiently and effectively and more happily and more well adjustedly, not to mention the fact that whenever and wherever we engage in healthy play, we are “sowing peace” and “seasons of joy and gladness” and “a sign of the favor of the Lord.”

Several years ago, when we introduced our new Sunday School curriculum for preschoolers and elementary-school-aged children, there were some folks who were understandably aghast at its name and the whole concept: “Godly Play,” it is called. In Godly Play, the children don’t just sit and listen passively to Bible stories and look passively at pictures of them; they handle the characters and the elements, they move them around and they act out the story. The children engage in play with the story and in the story; and in the process, as psychologists and educators have been telling us for more than 100 years now, they develop their physical, intellectual, emotional, social, moral and spiritual capacities. First Baptist Greenville has become one of the leading practitioners of this approach to Sunday School in the entire country. You might enjoy observing one of those classes some Sunday morning. Talk to Juli Morrow or Bev Rogers about arranging a visit, and be a fly on the wall. Chances are, the experience will open your eyes to something you have been missing, a kind of interaction with Scripture and God and yourself that is a sowing of peace and seasons of joy and gladness, and a sign of the favor of the Lord.

But before we leave Zechariah 8, I have to tell you that there is something fascinating to me about the idyllic picture it paints of old men and old women sitting securely in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age and the streets of the city full of boys and girls playing safely in its streets. There’s someone missing from the picture, isn’t there? Zechariah left someone out. It’s the generation in the middle, isn’t it? They are sometimes called the “sandwich generation” because they are sandwiched between caring for their children and caring for their parents. They’re the ones with the fulltime job and the three children and the house and the yard and the garage that looks like the Beverly Hillbillies unloaded their truck into it—and a parent with a house and a yard and a garage that looks like the Beverly Hillbillies unloaded their truck into it. While the older and younger generations are sitting and playing, the generation in the middle is working so that the others can sit and so that the others can play.

Not too long ago, one of the wisest mothers in this congregation told me the words of wisdom that her mother told her when she was a mother of young children and one day expressed her frustration that she didn’t have the time to devote to her gardening that she loved. Her mother said, “There will be time for gardening when the children are grown.” There will be time for gardening when the children are grown. And it was so. It is so. But even if it turns out that there is not—as there was not for my father who did not live to see all of his children fully grown, in part because he worked more and played less than he should have—we are still left with no excuse for being so serious all the time and not playing more, as our children have said, even if it’s peek-a-boo instead of rugby, even if it’s a tea party with children instead of a cocktail party with friends, even if it’s a children’s book read with a little one instead of the latest New York Times bestseller read alone or with a book club, even if it’s a back-yard game of catch or kick instead of an organized sporting event, a hike in the mountains, a walk on the beach, a morning at the zoo, an afternoon in the park, a teepee and a moose hunt in the back yard, a game of leap-frog.

Ask the children what they want to do and follow their lead at play. If you do, the children will teach you a thing or two about developing your physical, intellectual, emotional, social, moral and spiritual capacities; about creating and preserving friendships and a state of mind that is uniquely suited for high-level reasoning, insightful problem solving, and all sorts of creative endeavors. And not the least of it all, they will introduce you to “a sowing of peace” and “seasons of joy and gladness” and “a sign of the favor of the Lord.” May it be so. Let it be so. Amen.


This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Your Sins Are Forgiven

Luke 7:36-50
The Third Sunday after Pentecost 2010

Forgive us, Lord, for we have sinned and broken vows in two
When we have let our lesser loves come before our love for you.
Until our bond has been restored our hearts will never rest.
Remove our sin as far from us as the East is from the West.

Forgive us, Lord, for wounds we made by careless word and deed
And our small part in global sin when we take more than we need.
And we confess that we have failed to do the good we know.
So, most of all, forgive us for the love we failed to show.

Forgive us, Lord, as we forgive; our bravest prayer we pray.
For if our lives the standard be, we have no hope but grace,
And let us bear the joyful news that Christ stands in the breach
And that none of us can fall below the depths your love can reach.
– Kyle Matthews

The year after I graduated from seminary, I took a week off from preaching at the small Baptist Church I was pastoring to visit the Lutheran church where father had recently begun a pastorate. It had been ten years since I had worshiped in a Lutheran church. I hadn’t really noticed how Baptist I had become during that decade, until we came in the course of worship to the confession of sin and the declaration of grace. Facing the altar, my father led the congregation in the general confession of sin, and then he turned to face us and said, “If we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Your sins are forgiven, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

Even as he was making the sign of the cross over his flock, a voice inside my head was hollering, “Hey, you can’t do that! You don’t have the authority to forgive sin! Only God can forgive sin!” At lunch that afternoon, we laughed together about my reaction. Among other things, he said with a laugh, “Yep, attending a Baptist seminary turned you into a Pharisee, didn’t it?” He thought that was a lot funnier than I did. But the voice inside my head had hollered exactly what the Pharisees did in the gospel of Luke two chapters before this morning’s gospel lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary.

When a paralyzed man’s friends lowered him through the roof of a house where Jesus was teaching in the hope that Jesus would heal him of his paralysis, Jesus said to the man, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” And just like me, the scribes and the Pharisees in attendance went off on those words. “Who is this who is speaking blasphemies?” they asked. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” they cried (Luke 5:20-21). In this morning’s gospel lesson from Luke 7, when Jesus says to the woman, “Your sins are forgiven,” the people at the dinner table begin to say in amazement and scandal, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” They might as well have said, “Who does he think he is? Only God can forgive sins!” In the decades since the voice of the Pharisees hollered in my head, I have developed a doctrine of the forgiveness of sins that no Pharisee would ever endorse. I only have time this morning to share four points of my doctrine of forgiveness, so here they are.

Point #1. We don’t need a priest to mediate our forgiveness. We don’t need a priest to mediate our forgiveness. The Baptist doctrine of “soul competency” declares that every believer stands in an individual, direct, and immediate relationship with God so that there is no need for a priestly intermediary or go-between. We each stand individually, directly, and immediately in relationship with God with no one necessary in between. But at the same time, in the “priesthood of all believers,” as Baptists understand that originally Lutheran idea, we all stand together before God both needing no priest and being priests to one another. Do you hear those two parts? Part one: needing no priest, and part two: being all priests to one another. We don’t need a priest to mediate our forgiveness, and we are all priests to each other.

Point #2. Forgiveness is about who God is. Forgiveness is about who God is. 1 John 1:9 asserts in the words my father recited in his declaration of absolution, “If we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Forgiveness is at the core of God’s nature. God forgives because that’s just who God is. Exodus 34:6-7 tells us who God is in God’s own words, according to the book of Exodus. In Exodus 34:6-7, God defines God’s own self as “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.” What is God, like, you ask? God is like this, says God: “I am merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.” Now, verse 7 of Exodus 34 goes on to talk about the corrosive staying power of guilt and the insidious sustainability of sin, but that’s a topic for another sermon. What I want to be sure you hear this morning is that by God’s own self-definition, God is forgiving—“forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.” God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteous simply because that’s who God is.

Point #3. Confession changes us, not God. Confession changes us, not God. The way some people talk about it, you might think that confession makes an angry God soft-hearted or a vengeful God weak-kneed or a judging God spineless. But we’ve already seen that God is by nature forgiving, so the point of confession is not about changing God; it’s about changing us. Sin separates. In a friendship, in a marriage, in a business relationship, in international relations, in environmental interdependence, sin is a breach, a break that spews and spreads toxicity and pathology into every system of interactions that it touches. Sin is a darkness that destroys from the inside out. Sin is a secret that sabotages the soul as well as the body. But confession connects. Confession connects by acknowledging the our error of our ways to God and to ourselves and to those against whom we have erred. Confession acknowledges that we are accountable to God and to ourselves and to others. It is only in that acknowledgement and that accountability that we can be fully restored to right relationship. On the other side of the separation and breach, the darkness, destruction, and sabotage that is sin, confession restores, reconciles, rebuilds by changing us, not God.

If you were to read all the forgiveness passages in the gospels at one sitting, you might be surprised how seldom confession enters the picture. Remember those words on the cross that Jesus spoke in Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them, for they know do not know what they are doing”? The people for whom Jesus asks forgiveness don’t even know that they are sinning—much less have they confessed it—but the forgiving Christ, the forgiving God, the forgiving Spirit, goes there anyway. My prayers for you as your pastor have nothing to do with the sins that you have confessed. My prayers for you have to do with your sins that you don’t even recognize as sin, much less have confessed them. Jesus tells us from the cross that the forgiveness even of those sins is possible.

In this morning’s gospel lesson, there is no mention of the woman “confessing her sins.” Instead of “confessing” in this passage, she weeps and kisses and wipes Jesus’ unwashed feet with her hair. Instead of confessing, she acts with love and devotion and contrition, and Jesus says to her, “Your sins are forgiven. . . . Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” Jesus says it was her faith, not her confession, that saved her from her sin. In the story of the paralyzed man who was let down through the roof, we are told that Jesus was moved to forgive his sins not when the man confessed them but when Jesus “saw the faith of his friends.” Dare we say as the gospel of Luke does that the faith of a person’s friends can save a person from their sins? No Pharisee would say that, but the gospel of Luke clearly does. Never underestimate the power of your faith! You don’t often hear it preached, but hear it this morning: as the gospels tell it, forgiveness can happen whether there is confession or not because forgiveness is about who God is. The point of confession, on the other hand, is to change us, not to change God.

Point #4. Forgiveness is an act of community. Forgiveness is an act of community. Nowhere in the gospels does Jesus engage in a private act of absolution of a person’s sins. Dying the death of a common criminal in a public place of horror and execution, Jesus announced to all who could hear, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” In a crowded house where Jesus was teaching surrounded by “the public,” Jesus said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” At a dinner party where the best religious people in town mingled with each other and looked down their noses at a woman among them, Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven. . . . Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” Forgiveness is always about “us,” not just “me”; forgiveness is never just about “I”; it’s always also about “we.” Forgiveness is always an act of community.

In this season of Pentecost, I would remind you that in the twentieth chapter of the gospel of John, when Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit onto the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” the very next thing he says is, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven” (John 20:22-23). Imagine that. Jesus says that the community of Jesus’ followers has the authority to forgive sins. We are as priests to one another. The church is the public place where the cross still stands from which Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” The cross hangs in this place as a sign that you are forgiven. The church is the place where the teachings of Jesus are still promulgated in a crowd, where Jesus’ words, “Friend, your sins are forgiven,” are still repeated. The church is the place where good religious people still gather to mingle with each other and look down their noses at some of the persons among us and who are the ones who still hear the voice of Jesus say to the one who needs it most, Your sins are forgiven. . . . Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

This Lord’s Table in front of us is the dinner table that Pharisees like you and me set. This is the meal we host in Jesus’ presence. And every time we do, there is someone among us who needs more than anything else in the world to hear to the words of our Lord and Savior say, “Your sins are forgiven!” If you are that one today, then this is your community of forgiveness, this is the cross from which you were forgiven, this is the place of teaching where you heard those words, this is the meal at which it happens, and this is your song this day.

Forgiven, Lord, and free at last! How can we take it in?
We cast aside our broken chains to start our lives again.
Let all our days be filled with praise with love and gratitude
In celebration of the grace that we have found in you.
--Kyle Matthews



The text, "Forgive us, Lord," is used by permission of Kyle Matthews (http://www.kylematthews.com/index.html). This sermon material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Three in One: Peace, Hope, Love

Romans 5:1-5
Trinity Sunday 2010

Since the twelfth century in England and since the fourteenth century in Rome, the first Sunday after Pentecost has been designated “Trinity Sunday,” an annual celebration by the church of “The Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity,” as it is officially known. When I think of Trinity Sunday, the first thing that occurs to me is that even as I say the phrase, “the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity,” I can see people’s eyes begin to roll back into their heads. And I can pretty much finish that move off by explaining that the Trinity is the Christian doctrine that God is one in essence—homoousion in the famous Greek term, “of one essence”—but God is distinct in “persons” or individual realities—hypostases in Greek. Now, if you think eyes roll back at “the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity,” you should see the heads begin to snap back with them at homoousion and hypostasis. It only takes seconds for a preacher to lose an entire congregation, and on no Sunday in the Christian year does it happen any faster or more consistently than on Trinity Sunday.

And to tell you the truth, that’s probably a good thing, because there is no single doctrine in the entire history of the Christian church that has generated more claims and counterclaims of heresy than the doctrine of the Trinity. To this day, the great Eastern communions of the church such as the Greek Orthodox Church and Armenian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church are irreparably separated from the Western communions by competing doctrines of the Trinity generated by the Roman insertion of a single Latin word into the Nicene Creed in the sixth century: filioque, which means “and the Son.” The question is, “Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father?” as the Nicene Creed originally read, or “Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son?” as it was edited to read. That one word, filioque, has divided the church doctrinally for more than a thousand years.

Now, if I haven’t lost you completely, perhaps you can understand why some early Baptist preachers declared that the doctrine of the Trinity was essentially unbiblical speculation and an impediment to the proclamation of the gospel. Those early Baptists were more concerned with preaching the gospel pure and simple than they were with debating the philosophical subtleties of Christian theology. They had seen those eyes roll back, and they had seen those heads snap, and they swore off the Trinity. Don’t you wish about now that I was one of them? But as the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:1, Brothers and sisters, “I want you to be informed and knowledgeable” (The Message), so on Trinity Sunday you are going to hear from me the words homoousian, “one essence,” and hypostasis, “individual reality,” and filioque, “and the Son” because those are the great and historic terms of the Christian faith on Trinity Sunday.

But the apostle Paul also said, “Do not be conformed. . ., but be transformed” (Romans 12:2); and that’s what those early Baptist preachers were after. They were not so much concerned with conformation to doctrine as they were with transformation of lives. And it is that transformation of our living that is at the heart of this morning’s epistle lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary. If you look carefully, you will see lurking in Romans 5:1-5 the three individual realities of the one essence, Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit; God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; Lover, Beloved, and Love: the Three-in-One and One-in-Three, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. But the apostle Paul’s concern in Romans 5:1-5 is not speculation about the nature of God in God’s own self but the transformation of our selves by the active presence of God in our lives. And there just happen to be three transformations in this passage, just as there are three individual realities in the one God.

Transformation number one: “we have peace with God.” We have peace with God, Paul says. I want to contrast what Paul says in Romans 5:1 with what the great Italian poet Petrarch wrote about peace in a sonnet in the fourteenth-century on “the contrarious passions in a lover.” The sixteenth-century British poet Thomas Wyatt pretty much stole Petrarch’s sonnet and put it like this: “I find no peace.”

I find no peace, and all my war is done.
I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I season. . . .
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.
I love another, and thus I hate myself.
I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;
Likewise displeaseth me both life and death,
And my delight is causer of this strife.

That’s one miserable puppy. And that's all of us in a nutshell. The very things that give us joy cause us strife; life displeases us, but death terrifies us; no matter how much we have, we feel as though we don’t have enough; and even when we are not personally at war, we find no peace. That’s not only “the contrarious passions in a lover”; that’s the human condition as Petrarch and Wyatt posed it.

But the apostle Paul poses a transformative alternative to “I find no peace.” Paul says that peace has already found us. “We have peace with God,” he says. We don’t have to make peace with God; in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has already made peace with us. God has buried the hatchet. God has lit the peace pipe and passed it to us. God has signed the peace treaty, and in the blood of Jesus Christ, no less. The first transformation of your life by the active presence of “God in three persons, blessed Trinity” comes when you stop trying to find peace or make peace but simply accept and receive the peace that God gives you in Jesus Christ. There is nothing more you need to do; there is nothing more you can do; you are already good enough for God to be at peace with you, thanks to the goodness of God in Jesus Christ. So stop trying so hard to make peace because you are turning peace into strife by your effort.

Peace does not come by the strain of clenched fists; it only comes with open hands. Peace comes with the open arms of a loving God who runs to embrace a prodigal child. Peace comes with the open arms of a loving Christ on a cross. Paul’s image in verse 2 is that God has already ushered us into a room where we stand in grace (N. T.Wright, NIB, X.516). Look around you. The cross, the baptistery, the table, the Christ-light, the Pentecost banner. You are already in the room of God’s grace and peace. Live in it. Stop trying so hard to be at peace with God! God is already at peace with you. To be at peace with God, all you have to do is be. Transformation number 1: God is at peace with you; you have peace with God. Accept it and live in it.

Transformation number 2. I know it’s trite and it’s trendy, but I’m going to say it anyway: no pain, no gain. No pain, no gain. Because we are at peace with God, all that “contrarious” stuff that led Petrarch and Wyatt to despair leads us instead to hope. Before it ever became a mantra of the overachieving fitness crowd, the apostle Paul said it in Romans 5:3-4: no pain, no gain. That’s the irreducible minimum of Paul’s sequence, suffering-endurance-character-hope. Every person who exercises or who works in their yard or garden or who changes diapers understands that sometimes life hurts, sometimes life’s a pain, sometimes life stinks, but “hurt-pain-stink” is not the end but the beginning of growth and beauty and strength.

I have a friend who occasionally calls me a “spin-doctor.” It hurt the first couple times he said it, but that’s O.K., because one of the things I appreciate most about him is that he calls it like he sees it. But as I see it, my propensity for seeing or saying what’s good in a situation has less to do with “spin” than hope. I can’t help it; I’m wired that way. Some of you may have heard me say before that when I was young, my father used to say of me that I was the kind of kid to whom you could give a silo full of manure for his birthday, because he’d shovel through the whole thing to find the pony. The truth is, I’ve shoveled a lot of manure in my life, and not just in sermons. When I worked for Witherspoon Rose Culture when I was in college and seminary, I shoveled great mounds of cow manure, entire dump-trucks full of it every year. Nothing makes roses grow like cow manure. One year Bob Witherspoon made the mistake of trying chicken-stuff instead because it was cheaper. Word to the wise: Stay away from the chicken-excrement.

Every gardener knows that crap makes things grow. Whether it comes from a cow or from a compost pile, crap makes things grow. Some people might say I’m an optimist, but I say I’m a realist—as long as there is organic material, there is life and the potential for life. That’s a biological reality and a theological reality. The next time you stop and smell the roses, be thankful for the crap that helped produce them. Paul was more sophisticated than I am, so he said suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. I say, when life gives you a silo full of manure, know that even if you don’t find a pony, you can grow something good with it because crap grows stuff. All that “contrarious” stuff that led Petrarch and Wyatt to despair leads us instead to hope, because God has already ushered us into the room where we stand in grace. Look around you. The cross, the baptistery, the table, the Christ-light, the Pentecost banner. You are already in the room of God’s grace and hope. Accept it and live in it. That’s transformation #2: no pain, no gain; hope grows from crap.

Transformation #3: It’s already in you. It’s already in you. Paul says in verse 5, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Do you see the past-perfect tense: God’s love has been poured; the Holy Spirit has been given. It’s already in you. Some people get all excited about last week’s Pentecostal experience of the Holy Ghost in tongues of flame and tongues of languages, but Paul says in Romans 5:5 that Pentecost is all about God’s love that has been poured into your heart through the Holy Spirit that has been given to you. It’s already in you. You don’t have to earn God’s love for you; there is nothing more you can do; you are already good enough for God to love, thanks to the love of God in Jesus Christ. So stop trying so hard to be lovable to God because you are turning love into strife by your effort.

But there’s another “already in you” in this passage, and that’s your love for God. In verse 5, the expression “God’s love,” hē agapē tou theou in Greek is entirely ambiguous. If I hadn’t already dragged you through homoousion and hypostasis and filioque, I would give you a short treatise on the difference in Greek between the subjective genitive—as in God’s love for us—and the objective genitive—as in our love for God. Interpreters of Romans 5:5 have argued for centuries over that phrase: is it a subjective genitive or is it an objective genitive. In my interpretation of the phrase, I’m going to come down firmly . . . on both sides. I'm going to call it a great double entendre (although I grant it’s not as titillating a double entendre as we usually like to find). There is a double meaning in this expression. Paul did not distinguish clearly in this verse between God’s love for us and our love for God because those are two distinct realities of one and the same essence that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. It’s not the “contrarious passions in a lover” of which Petrarch and Wyatt complained. It’s the complementary power of God’s love for us and our love for God.

I have known God loves me at least since I learned to sing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong; they are weak but he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me, for the Bible tells me so.” Knowing that God loves me is not knowledge I attained on my own. It was a gift that was poured into my heart by my parents and Sunday School teachers and entire congregations of people who cared for me and nurtured me in God’s love. As far back as I can remember, it was already in me. And when the love of God—God’s love for you—is in you, you can’t help but love God back with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. Our children may grow up to hate us, but when they are young they can’t help but love us. They don’t know any better. The love that we pour into them overflows back to us, at least until they are old enough to decide for themselves who they are going to live in a loving relationship with and who they are not. God knows how that works; God has seen it billions of times! God’s love for you is already in you; all you have to do is accept it and live in its relationship. And your love for God is already in you; all you have to do is let it out!

Which brings us back to that whole idea of the Trinity. It was already in God; all God had to do was let it out. Genesis 1 tells us, “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” From the very beginning, God was present and active in Spirit. John 1 tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth.” From the very beginning, God was present and active in the Word that became flesh and lived among us. Three in One and One in Three: three realities in one essence, peace, hope, and love. That’s not speculation; that’s transformation. Accept it; live in it; let it out.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

A House with Many Rooms

John 14:1-3
The Sixth Sunday of Easter

“What is heaven like?” she asked. “I want to know,” she said. “Tell me about heaven.” It wasn’t an idle or abstract question on her part. She is essentially bedridden, in Hospice care, and confined to the bed in which she will die, if she has her way, at least. It’s one thing, you see, to engage in academic or intellectual or cosmological or theological speculation about heaven. But when the questioner is staring death straight in the eye at the same time she is staring you straight in the eye, the question is not a game of academic or intellectual or cosmological or theological speculation. In the face of death, “What is heaven like?” is a pressing question about an impending reality. It’s as much a question about impending reality as “What’s for lunch?” or “Where do babies come from?” or “Are we there yet?”

In John 13, the chapter immediately before this morning’s gospel lesson, death is an impending reality for Jesus. John 13 begins, “Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” That verse, John 13:1, serves as an introduction to chapters 13-17, the five chapters in John’s gospel that treat the night on which Jesus was betrayed. In that context, Jesus’ words in John 14:1-3 are not academic or intellectual or cosmological or theological speculation. They are words spoken by Jesus in the face of the impending reality of his own death.

It’s no wonder, then, that so many Christians turn to these words in times of impending death and in times of grief at funerals and memorial services and graveside services. In John’s gospel, Jesus spoke them when death was an impending reality, while he was staring death straight in the eye while he was staring the disciples straight in the eye. “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

The irony is not lost on me that on Mother’s Day we have in front of us a gospel text that speaks of “the Father’s house.” It just worked out that way. Don’t let the culture-war battles over gender references in Scripture get in the way of understanding these powerfully comforting and challenging words of Jesus. It is certainly the case that “Father”-language dominates the traditional Christian discourse about God. But that doesn’t mean that God in God’s essence is masculine or feminine either one. The Bible uses mothering imagery of God as well as fathering imagery of God. In Isaiah 66:13, we read these words of divine promise and provision: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.” In Hosea 11:4 uses nursing imagery to speak of God’s provision for God’s people, when it says, “I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.” And Jesus, in a lamentation over Jerusalem spoke of himself in mothering terms when he said, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34). According to the Bible, a mother’s comfort, a mother’s nursing, and a mother’s protection of her children are every bit as characteristic of the essential nature of God as any father-language is. God is at least as often revealed to us in the love and care and provision of mothers as of fathers, and we remember and celebrate that love and care and provision especially on Mother’s Day. God is not our “father” only; God is our “mother” also: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you,” says the Lord. And it is just so that Jesus speaks to the disciples with the impending reality of his death in view. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus says. “Believe in God; believe also in me.” These are words intended to take Jesus’ followers up in his arms, to hold them to his cheek, to gather them under his wings.

Now, if you happened to be reading the gospel of John very carefully in the Greek of the New Testament, you might have noticed that the verb translated “troubled,” tarassō, has already been used once in each of the three chapters before chapter 14. Each time it occurs, it refers to Jesus’ own “agitation and disturbance in the face of the power of death” (O’Day, NIB, IX.740). In John 11, when Mary the sister of Lazarus says to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” John’s gospel tells us that Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled (tarassō)” (John 11:33, RSV). Then, when Jesus speaks of his impending death in John 12, he says, “Now my soul is troubled (tarassō). And what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour” (v 27). And in the thirteenth chapter of John’s gospel, as Jesus sat with the disciples at the table on the night he was betrayed we read, “Jesus was troubled in spirit” (tarassō). In John’s gospel, tarassō is a “staring-death-in-the-eye” kind of verb. Bill Hull put it this way, as only Bill Hull would: tarassō is what happens when you feel more like you live in “a haunted house” than “a spiritual home” (Broadman). Jesus has been there, done that. Jesus experienced it. Jesus knew what it was like. And so he said to his disciples, instead of going there to the haunted house in your soul, “Believe in God; believe also in me.”

It is by faith in God and in Christ that we can continue to live in a spiritual home instead of a haunted house, even in the face of impending death—our own and others’. In Jesus day, the image of the “Father’s house” would have reminded his listeners of familiar Jewish apocalyptic terminology for “heavenly dwellings” in the life to come. The image of “many rooms” in the Revised Standard Version’s translation implies abundance and rest in that life to come. This is not a place of scarcity. There will be more than enough room in this inn, Jesus says. Theodore of Mopsuestia characterized the image this way in the late fourth or early fifth century when he suggested that Jesus has already made advance reservations for you! One of the curious quirks of my personality that serves me particularly well is what happens to me physically and emotionally and spiritually once I have set the dates for my vacation on my calendar. Once I have written that vacation on my calendar and the reservations are made, it is as if—in some small way, at least—the vacation has already begun. I’m already there. I know I can make it ’til then. There is a place prepared for you, a spiritual and eternal home, ready and waiting, in the presence of God and in the presence of the risen and living Lord. And because Jesus has already made the reservations for you, you have already begun to live in the physical and emotional and spiritual light of that reservation.

The most important thing to say about John 14:1-3 is that they are not in the end primarily—or at least exclusively—about life in heaven but about life on earth. However else we might read them, Jesus’ words in John 14:1-3 are not intended to describe heaven to those who are dying as much as they are intended to remind those who are living that it is already “on earth as it is in heaven.” We do not live in a haunted house but we have a spiritual home wherever by faith Christ is present with us. Listen to what Jesus says in v 23 of chapter 14: “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” Did you hear that? “We will come to them, and make our home with them” . . . on earth as it is in heaven! Two verses later, Jesus says, “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you.’” Heard that before? Of course you have. At the beginning of the chapter—as at the end. Jesus is always and everywhere present “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Now, let’s go back to those words from the beginning of chapter 13 that starts a new section in John’s gospel: “Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” Well, listen to what Jesus says of his followers at the end of that section, at the close of chapter 17 in a great unity prayer: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us. . . . so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me. . . . so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (v 21-22,26). All of life and all of death is all wrapped up in the love of God and the love of Jesus; it’s all wrapped up in the presence of God and the presence of Jesus. It’s already “on earth as it is in heaven.”

I said to her, “Heaven is like the very best you can possibly imagine it to be, except that it’s better than you can possibly imagine. You know how good it is to be loved and to love, don’t you?” I asked her. She nodded and smiled and looked at her son, her only child, who was sitting in a chair beside her bed. Well heaven is just like that, only better than you can even imagine. The love of God surrounds us, embraces us, and fills us in heaven in ways that we can’t possibly understand on earth except in the smallest part in knowing what it is like to love and be loved. I think that’s what heaven’s like,” I said. She smiled, laid her head back on her pillow, and said, “That’s what I thought.” And she went on living. Because she understood that it is on earth at it is in heaven.

Jesus says, “Those who love me will keep my word,” and the God who is like a father beyond all fathering and like a mother beyond all mothering “will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them . . . . I in them and you in me. . . . so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them.” “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” Those are words for living, now and forever, Amen.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.