A Word of Thanks for "Bread for the Journey"

This note to the congregation of First Baptist Church, Greenville, S.C., appeared in the church News last week. The photos are by Juli Morrow and Bootie Cothran.

July 27, 2010

Friends,

The unveiling of Charlie Pate’s statue, “Bread for the Journey: Giving and Receiving,” on July 26 was a sweet culmination of years of stewardship visioning, planning, preaching, and teaching. I am grateful to everyone who had a hand in making it happen and especially to the Vacation Bible School children, teachers, and helpers who shared in the event.

Placed where children (and their parents) coming and going to Sunday School, choir, children’s activities and missions education, FBCK, and ITP can see it and touch it, Charlie’s portrayal in bronze of the little boy with five loaves and two fish in John 6 holding out his basket and looking up into the heavens is a wonderful children’s companion to the “Good Samaritan” statue in the Remembrance Garden. It is a visible reminder of the biblical witness that God “is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20) when we are willing to offer what we have and who we are to God.

I remain immeasurably grateful to the First Baptist congregation for your generosity, kindness, and prayers on the journey we have shared together; and I look forward to seeing the exciting “Great Things Still To Come” that God has in mind for you in the future.

Grace and peace,

Jeff

 

The Chemistry of Love: A Valentine's Sermon

The Orangeburg Series

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Mark 12:28-34
February 12, 2012

For nearly 25 years now, I have been telling college students and congregations and anyone else who would listen that the two great frontiers for theology in our time are astrophysics and neuroscience.

Astrophysics just might get closer to “reading the mind of God,” as the great physicist Stephen Hawking put it, than any other discipline. The farther out in space we look, the farther back we are seeing in time. And in theory, at least, if we can see far enough out, then we can to see far enough back to see the first light of the beginning of time when “God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light” (Genesis 1:3).

But in addition to “reading the mind of God,” theology must plumb the depths of the human psyche as well, so the other great frontier for theology in our time is neuroscience, the study of the structures that underlie the human mind. If, as Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your . . . mind” (Mark 12:30), and the apostle Paul says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5), then the structures of the brain that underlie the human mind are of utmost importance to theology.

Exploring the mind of God in astrophysics and delving the underlying structures of the human mind in neuroscience are the great frontiers for theology in our time.

But I know very well that you didn’t come here this morning for a lecture on astrophysics or neuroscience either one. What most of us feel that we need from church on Sunday is something we can carry away that will help us recover from the week that we just had and get through the week that lies ahead. So come with me for a few minutes to the grocery store. After all, that’s where we usually go to get the things we ran out of last week and need for next week, isn’t it?

Maybe you still need a Valentine’s Day card or a box of candy or a big helium balloon or a handful of cheerful flowers. Whether you’ve been dating for six months or married for 60 years or anyplace in between, you better come home with something on Tuesday.

I did a double take as I walked down the aisle. I was passing the magazines when a picture caught my eye. It was of a dark-haired couple in a romantic embrace, eyes closed, face to face, very nearly—but not quite—lips to lips. The photo was slightly grainy, sultry, steamy looking. In the bottom right corner, superimposed in red letters on a field of black was the word “Love.” Maybe Time would run this cover photo or The National Enquirer. But there was no mistaking the fact that this blissfully sensuous and romantic moment was framed by a bold yellow border that communicated as clearly and as incongruously as the white capital letters across the top: National Geographic. National Geographic? What kind of geography is this? Sign me up! I wanna be a geography major.

I did a double take and walked on by. After all, it wasn’t love I came to the grocery store for at 10:00 on a weeknight after having been up since 4 a.m. It was children’s Tylenol, a gallon of milk, and 0.7 mm lead for a middle-schooler’s mechanical pencil. Only to have my attention distracted by a grainy photograph in a yellow border. I walked away with the picture on the magazine still in my head, and I had to ask myself, “What is it I’m here for?” “Keep moving,” I said. “You’re not here for ‘Love’—or National Geographic either.” So I waited until the next time I was in the grocery store—about three days later. A gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and National Geographic, the February issue 2006, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Since a whole bunch of you are signed up for the Valentine’s Day Banquet tomorrow night, I decided to return this morning to the topic of that first “fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians 5:22-23: Love. “Love: The Chemical Reaction” was the cover story. Lauren Slater’s article was a blend of Cosmopolitan, Anthropology Today, and Scientific American. And Jodi Cobb’s photographs from Argentina, Cancun, Italy, Las Vegas, Pennsylvania, and Ohio were vintage Geographic with a Generation Next edge.

The article introduced the reader to an anthropologist named Helen Fisher at Rutgers University who studies “the biochemical pathways of love in all its manifestations: lust, romance, attachment, the way they wax and wane” (p. 35). It turns out that the chemical pathways in the brain that light up when you are “madly in love” are those that are associated with a chemical neurotransmitter called dopamine. “Dopamine [is a chemical in the brain that] creates intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and motivation to win rewards. [Dopamine] is why,” writes Slater, “when you are newly in love, you can stay up all night, watch the sun rise, run a race, ski fast down a slope ordinarily too steep for your skill. Love makes you bold, makes you bright, makes you run real risks, which you sometimes survive, and sometimes you don’t” (ibid.).

Donatella Marazziti is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pisa, in Italy. She studies another chemical pathway of love. Her studies of people who could be identified as “passionately in love” have shown that their blood levels of the chemical serotonin are 40% lower than normal, which corresponds to level of serotonin exhibited by people who have been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. In the best one-liner in the article Slater writes, “Love and mental illness may be difficult to tell apart” (p. 38). “More seriously,” she writes, “if the chemically altered state induced by romantic love is akin to a mental illness or a drug-induced euphoria, exposing yourself for too long could result in psychological damage” (p. 44). In fact, “Studies around the world confirm that indeed passion usually ends. Its conclusion is as common as its initial flare. No wonder some cultures think selecting a lifelong mate based on something so fleeting is folly” (pp. 43-44).

A few years ago, I sat with a group pastor-colleagues looking at each other in shock when we heard the news that a well-respected young colleague of ours had separated from his wife of five years because, they said, they just didn’t “have the same chemistry” any more. That’s what they said. They didn’t “have the same chemistry.” Duh. The chemistry of courtship is an unsustainable imbalance in the brain more akin to mental illness than to any other human condition. The brain chemistry of a couple in love is literally different after four or five years of intimacy.

Sustainable loving relationships inevitably move “from the dopamine-drenched state of romantic love to the relative quiet of an oxytocin-induced attachment,” writes Slater. “Oxytocin is a hormone that promotes a feeling of attachment, connectedness, bonding. It is released when we hug our long-term spouse, or hug our children. It is released when a mother nurses her infant” (p. 45). We tend to speak of the “chemistry of love” as metaphor, but it turns out that the literal chemistry of love in a long-term relationship is different from the heady brew of a romantic chase. Our body produces is less dopamine and more serotonin and oxytocin, so that long-term relationships are chemically less like mental illness than courtships are. It’s no wonder that our concept of love is sometimes so confused. The literal chemistry of our love changes over time.

Our relationship with God also changes over time. In this morning’s gospel lesson, Jesus said that there is no commandment greater than “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). That sounds almost dopamine drenched, serotonin-starved, enthusiastic and obsessive, doesn’t it? All, all, all, all! And there is a second, he says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). That one sounds oxytocin rich: attachment, connectedness, bonding with others. Who would have thought that biochemistry and the Bible, neuroscience and Scripture, could be so much alike?

Look at how the Old Testament book of Hosea talks about the growth and development of our relationship with God. In chapter 2, we read of God’s courtship, God’s wooing of God’s people Israel: “I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. . . . There she shall respond as in the days of her youth” (Hosea 2:14-15). Do you see the allure, the responsiveness, the underlying passion of courtship in these verses? But the relationship does not end there.

The relationship moves from short-term courtship to long-term commitment: “On that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband.’ . . . and I will take you for my wife forever” (Hosea 2:16,19). When the relationship moves from courtship to long-term commitment, we no longer read of allure and passion. The prevailing terms of the relationship shift to righteousness and justice, and steadfast love and mercy. “I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord” (Hosea 2:19-20). In Hosea 2, God’s relationship with Israel—and with us—is described as though it moves from a dopamine-drenched, serotonin-starved courtship in the wilderness to an oxytocin-rich relationship grounded in core covenantal commitments: righteousness, justice, steadfast love, mercy, faithfulness.” Those are some marriage vows! Those core covenantal commitments long outlive the initial energy and enthusiasm, obsession and compulsion in a relationship and replace them with attachment, connectedness, bonding.

Notice one more thing about this long-term commitment. It is only in the long-term relationship of attachment, connectedness, and bonding with God that the book of Hosea says we “know the Lord” (Hosea 2:20). So many recent converts to the Christian faith make the mistake of assuming that the way they feel at the beginning of their Christian walk—the energy, the enthusiasm, the passion, the obsession and the compulsion of their feelings for God—are the substance of a relationship with God. But the book of Hosea very clearly says that’s only the courtship phase. After the courtship phase comes settling down and settling in for the long haul in righteousness, justice, steadfast love, mercy, and faithfulness, the core covenantal commitments.

There are entire churches that are designed for courtship. Their mission is centered almost exclusively on match-making between God and new believers. They design their worship experiences and their ministries to elicit energy, enthusiasm, passion and obsession for God and for the church. Those are exciting and lively churches. After all, Psalm 47:1 says, “Clap your hands, all you peoples, shout to God with loud songs of joy”; and Psalm 150:4 says, “Praise God with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe!” Those churches are as noisy as teenagers in love. Every Sunday is Valentine’s Day.

But other churches are designed almost exclusively for marriage, the long-haul relationship with God in this life that is characterized not so much by obsession and passion but by familiarity and trust, in “the relative quiet of an oxytocin-induced attachment.” Habakkuk 2:20 tells us, “the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him!” There’s no clapping and shouting there, but silence in the presence of the holy one. “The effect of righteousness,” says Isaiah 32:17, “will be peace . . . quietness and trust forever.” Every Sunday in those churches marks an Anniversary Day decades long in the making.

One of the unfortunate things about the American church scene in our time is that these two kinds of churches talk about each other as though each is the only kind of church that is really church. The old marriage churches call the new courtship churches “all style and no substance,” while the new courtship churches call the old marriage churches “cold and dead.” And even some people inside their own church sometimes launch attacks based on “hot” and “cold,” “style” and “substance,” “loud” and “quiet.” And all the while, those criticisms are signs of arrogance and ignorance.

It’s arrogance, because that criticism asserts that where I am in my relationship with God and my walk with God and my worship of God is where everyone else should be. And it’s ignorance, because it knows nothing about the chemistry of love, the profound and powerful ways that our deepest and most intimate relationships begin in enthusiasm, passion and obsession, and then develop and change over time in attachment and connectedness and bonding, “quietness and trust.”

Whichever church you’re in, don’t get caught up in the arrogance and the ignorance of criticism.

By the way, it turns out that I was in the grocery store for love at 10:00 p.m. on a weeknight. It isn’t the dopamine-drenched, serotonin-suppressed love of the first four or five years of Bev’s and my romance. Instead, it’s the oxytocin-rich love of 34 years of marriage and four children and all the joy and the anguish, all the gratitude and the disappointment, all the happiness and the heartache that comes with the chemistry and the core covenantal commitments that are at the heart of love that lasts.

And I’m still in love with the local church more than 30 years after my ordination, not for the rush of it that it was in the beginning, but for the core covenantal commitments between God and God’s people at the intersection of time and eternity in Jesus Christ.

So if ever find yourself asking, “What is it I’m here for?” I suggest that you consider answering this way: I’m here for love in all its manifestations, and above all, love for God with heart and soul and mind and strength and love for neighbor as for self.

Copyrighted © 2012 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.

Reservoirs and Cisterns: The Spirit Dwells in You

The Orangeburg Series

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Ezekiel 36:24-30; Romans 8:1-14
January 22, 2012

I want to begin this morning by taking you on a quick tour of three locations in the mountains of Upstate South Carolina.

Our first stop is the iconic Table Rock. It’s picturesque in every season from almost any angle. But my interest this morning is not the mountain. It’s Table Rock Lake at the foot of the mountain. Table Rock Lake is a man-made lake. It was completed in 1930 to provide drinking water for the city of Greenville. As reservoirs go, it’s relatively small by today’s standards, covering 36 acres and holding an estimated 9.25 billion gallons of water. East of Table Rock, the newer and larger North Saluda Reservoir was completed in 1961 and stores approximately 25 billion gallons. Larger still, to the west in Oconee and Pickens Counties is Lake Keowee, which began to fill in 1970 and covers more than 18,000 acres with some 300 miles of shoreline.

One of the seldom-told stories about the growth of Greenville over the last 50 years is the role of these three reservoirs. Without them, its expansion in population and business and industry and quality of life would have been impossible. Now, the point of this quick tour is not to promote Greenville. After all, self-promotion is one of Greenville’s favorite pastimes. And besides, these days I’m wearing City of Orangeburg cufflinks; and I love walking along the North Fork of the Edisto River, the longest free-flowing blackwater river in North America; and every chance I get, I stop to smell the magnificent roses right here in Orangeburg.

The point of the quick tour through the mountains of the Upstate is to get us thinking about reservoirs. “Reservoir” is a French word for “storehouse,” a place where what you need is stored up, reserved for when you need it. Let me show you a set of reservoirs from the time of Jesus. Out in the Judean wilderness, down near the southernmost tip of the Dead Sea, there is a massive, rocky outcropping called Masada. It rises over 1,400 feet above the Dead Sea. On top of Masada, Herod the Great of biblical fame built a luxurious three-level palace and a nearly impregnable fortress.

One of the most impressive parts of Herod’s Masada was its water-storage system. Masada is located 20 miles from the nearest source of fresh water, so Herod’s engineers designed and excavated twelve huge cisterns—underground reservoirs—carved out of solid rock and plastered from top to bottom to keep them from leaking. They were fed by rainwater and could hold some 40,000 cubic meters of water. That’s more than 10.5 million gallons, enough to provide Masada with drinking water for an entire year and to fill Herod’s several swimming pools and Roman-style bathhouses and to provide irrigation for small-scale agriculture.

I call your attention to Herod’s cisterns at Masada to remind you that in addition to external reservoirs—lakes laid out on land—there are also internal reservoirs, cisterns carved out on the inside. Do you have an internal reservoir? Do you have a spiritual cistern? Do you have a place where you are able to store up, to reserve, what you need to sustain your relationship with God, even in the dry seasons of your life? Do you have a place where “the Spirit of God dwells in you”?

In last Sunday’s sermon, I encouraged you to “Receive the Holy Spirit,” as Jesus says in the gospel of John (20:22), to embrace the constant, continuing, empowering, and purifying presence of God in your life. Next Sunday, I will begin a series of series on what the apostle Paul calls “the fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22). Jesus says, “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” (John 15:5). In Romans 7:4, the apostle Paul says that we are to “bear fruit for God.” This morning, I want you to consider what it is going to take for you to “bear fruit for God,” as Paul says, and “to bear much fruit,” as Jesus puts it.

One of the distinctive things about the cultivation of fruit is that fruit-bearing shrubs and trees don’t spring up quickly like the grasses and flowers of the field. Fruit-bearing plants grow and bear slowly over a long period of time, and they require reliable and sustained sources of water to bear fruit. Do you have a reservoir, a spiritual cistern within you, so that you can provide reliable and sustained irrigation to your life to bear fruit, as Jesus and Paul say? Especially in the dry seasons of our lives, we need spiritual reservoirs, deep cisterns within us for the Spirit of God to dwell in us.

Sometimes we think of the Spirit of God as a force or power that comes to us from far away, like the rain-bearing storms that sweep across the United States from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, or the ones that flow up from the south out of the Gulf of Mexico or from the Gulfstream of the Atlantic. In that way of thinking, the Spirit of comes to us intermittently, unpredictably, from somewhere far away. Other times, we think of the Spirit of God as located somewhere not so far away where we can gain access to it more consistently than just waiting for it to rain down on us from above. For example, we keep a goodly pool of the Holy Spirit right here at 1240 Russell Street on The Square in Orangeburg. This room, this congregation, is a reservoir for the Holy Spirit. Whenever we need a little or a lot, we can come here to get it, right? Those are common ways of thinking about the Spirit of God, and both of them reflect something true and authentic and entirely biblical about the way we experience the Holy Spirit.

But in this morning’s New Testament lesson, the apostle Paul offers a third way of thinking about the Spirit when he says in Romans 8:9, “the Spirit of God dwells in you.” “The Spirit of God dwells in you.” Paul says that the Spirit of God does not come to us intermittently or unpredictably from someplace far away. Paul says that the Spirit of God is not in some location where we must go to experience it there. Paul says the Spirit of God is in you. “For those who are in Christ Jesus,” Paul says in Romans 8:9, “the Spirit of God dwells in you.”

Now, Paul didn’t invent that idea. He got it from his Bible, the Jewish Scriptures, what we Christians now call the “Old Testament.” In Ezekiel 36:7, in this morning’s Old Testament lesson, God promises, “I will put my spirit within you”; and so in 1 Corinthians 3:16, the apostle Paul asks, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” Not far away. Not just in this place. In you.

How about you? This morning I want you to think about how much room there is in you for the Holy Spirit. Is there room for the Holy Spirit in you? Or are you so busy, crowded cluttered and distracted on the inside that the only room for the Holy Spirit in your life is on your outside? Or maybe in your case, it’s not busy-ness or clutter or distraction, but you are simply impervious to the Spirit. You are one of those folks who doesn’t let anything inside you. Your insides are like the rock of Masada before Herod’s engineers went to work carving out the cisterns. Is there room for the Holy Spirit in you?

The great 16-century Spanish pastor and reformer and mystic, John of the Cross, spoke of “deep caverns of the soul” (Living Flame, 3.18). He said, “The capacity of these caverns is deep, because that which they can hold is deep and infinite; and that is God” (Living Flame, 3.22). God becomes present “wherever [God] finds space,” John said (Living Flame, 1.15).

According to John of the Cross, most people who struggle to “find God” present and active in their lives just haven’t made room for God. They haven’t cleared the space in their lives and in their souls for God who always becomes present “wherever [God] finds space.” John writes sadly of people who come to God but then “leave God just as they came.” They “leave God just as they came because their hands were already full, and they could not take what God was giving” (Letter dated 11/18/1586).

If we want to experience God’s presence and activity in our lives—not intermittently and unpredictably, not somewhere we must go to find go, but with us and in us day and night, day-by-day and hour-by-hour—then we must create space for God in our lives. We must carve out or expand our internal reservoirs, our spiritual cisterns, for the Holy Spirit of God to “dwell in us” to irrigate our lives so that we may “bear fruit,” as Jesus says, even in the dry seasons and the droughts that come our way in life.

Creating space for God, making room for God to dwell in us, takes three things. First, it takes vision. Vision. Vision is the capacity to see an alternative future. Some people never make room for God in their lives because they cannot see beyond the conditions and the circumstances of the present. Whether the conditions of the present are desperate and degrading or comfortable and convenient, some people cannot imagine, see, envision, a life with God and in God and God in them any different than the life they are living. It takes vision to motivate us to take the necessary steps to dedicate precious time and energy and resources and interior space to prepare for bearing fruit, fruit that will last, in our lives. Some people never develop interior reservoirs, spiritual cisterns, because they never see the need.

The truth is, interior space may not be necessary to sustain physical existence at some level or another. Human beings can survive without it, as some of us here this morning are living testimony. But there is a huge difference between surviving and thriving. When Jesus said that we are capable of bearing much fruit, he was not using an image of subsistence farming, of merely scratching out an existence from the land. In a dry and rocky region of the world, the Palestinian landscape of Jesus’ day, “fruit” is an image of opulence, luxury, the abundant blessing of God.

In Ezekiel 36, God says, “I will summon the grain and make it abundant. . . . I will make the fruit of the tree and the produce of the field abundant, so that you may never again suffer.” In gospel of John, Jesus does not say, “I came that they may have life and barely survive at it.” No. Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Bearing fruit is a sign and symbol of that quality of life that Jesus calls “abundant.” Vision is the capacity to see or imagine a new quality of life that God offers us in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit in us in order to motivate us to move toward a better future with God and in God and God in us.

In addition to vision, creating space for God, making room for God to dwell in us, takes will. Will. It takes an act of extraordinary will to build a reservoir. Because Orangeburg takes its water from the free-flowing North Fork of the Edisto, you may not have experienced the battles of will among civic and business leaders and the general citizenry that are necessary to set land aside for submersion. Bev and I were living in the Research Triangle of North Carolina when the B. Everett Jordan Dam was built to create Jordan Lake in Chatham County and when the Cane Creek Reservoir was under development in Orange County. It’s not a pretty sight when a municipality or a county determines that it is necessary to take a Carolinian’s land away to put it under water.

“They’re stealin’ my granddaddy’s farm!” we heard, and they were. “Our gubbermint’s finishin’ what Sherman started! He burned it, and they’re drownin’ it.” And they were. Whether we are talking about literal reservoirs or spiritual reservoirs, it takes an act of extraordinary will to create them. The parts of your life that need to be claimed and cleared—cut down and bulldozed—to make room for the Holy Spirit in you will fight back, I promise you. Nature abhors a vacuum. The laws of physics favor inertia. The status quo always resists change. It takes an act of extraordinary will to create internal reservoirs, spiritual cisterns, for the Holy Spirit. You have to decide—and decide again and again and again against the resistance you will experience—that making room for God in your life is worth the effort.

And that brings us to Work. Vision, Will, and Work. In addition to an act of extraordinary will, it takes an enormous amount of work to make room for God in your life. The reservoirs that we know as Cane Creek and Jordan Lake and Keowee and North Saluda and Table Rock didn’t happen on their own, any more than those enormous cisterns in the rocky outcropping of Masada did. There are spiritual analogies to acquiring the land and clearing it, building the dams, reinforcing the shoreline, or cutting the rock and lining the cisterns with plaster. It takes years and years and years of work to build adequate reservoirs, to cut sufficient cisterns to provide water for the dry seasons and the droughts.

Some people start out with the best of intentions. They try some worship; they try some Bible study; they try some quiet-time devotions; they try some prayer. They try for a while, and then they abandon the enterprise because they didn’t get filled up quick enough to satisfy them. “It just didn’t happen for me,” they say. “I went a few times, but I didn’t really feel anything happening.” Of course you didn’t. The hard truth is it takes years.

You have to acquire the interior ground; you have to clear it of obstructions; you have to reinforce the shoreline and dam up the outflow. And even then, after years of work, when the reservoir is ready, it takes more than a single rainy season to fill a reservoir or cistern large enough to carry you through the dry season and the droughts. It takes years and years of dedicated and determined effort in faith and in works, in worship and in Bible study, in fellowship and in prayer, in repentance and in confession, in forgiveness and in reconciliation, to create space for God, to make room for the Spirit to dwell in us so that when the dry season arrives or when the drought sets in, we are steadfast in our faith; we are tenacious in our hope; and we are unfailing in our love. Nothing less will do if you want do what Jesus says: “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22), and “Bear much fruit” (John 15:5).

Engage your Vision, your Will, and your Work to make room for the Spirit to dwell in you. Start today: acquiring and clearing the land, building the dam, reinforcing the shoreline, carving out the rock and lining it with plaster, to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Start today.

Copyrighted © 2012 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.

The Holy Spirit and Fire

The Orangeburg Series

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Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 3:15-17
January 15, 2012

Are you old enough to remember when the words “Baptist preaching” were nearly synonymous with the words “hellfire and damnation”? Do you remember the day when if the preacher wasn’t shoutin’, then he—and it was always “he”—wasn’t preachin’?

Several years ago, I supervised an African-American Baptist seminary student in an internship for his field education experience in seminary, and one of his internship opportunities was to preach in worship at First Baptist Greenville. As we were getting ready for worship the morning he was to preach, he said his wife had told him as he was leaving the house, “Now John, don’t you get to shoutin’ this mornin’. White people don’t like to be shouted at.”

But out and about on the highways and byways of white Baptist life in the American South, the enthusiastic revivalism of what Baptist historians call the “Sandy Creek tradition” birthed and bred generations of loud-shoutin’, high-whinin’, Baptist preachers dedicated to scaring the hell out of people in order to get them into heaven and into the church.

I confess that I don’t understand the psychology of coming to church Sunday after Sunday to be yelled at from the pulpit, but I also admit that I have never lived the hard-scrabble life of tooth-and-claw existence of so many of our Baptist forebears in the woods and on the farm and in the mill.

Not all Baptist preaching was that way, even “back in the day.” Among the genteel and cultured representatives of what Baptist historians call the “Charleston tradition,” modeled on the worship and preaching of the stately and orderly First Baptist Church of Charleston, shoutin’ preachers and hellfire and damnation sermons were the exception rather than the rule.

Over time, as we Baptists—especially we citified First Baptists—have left the woods and the farms and the mills, as we have become more educated and our lives have become more comfortable, we have become less and less comfortable with whinin’ and shoutin’ and hellfire and damnation. And along the way, we have lost something entirely biblical that we would do well to reclaim in our preaching and our teaching and our living.

It’s the Holy Spirit and fire. In this morning’s gospel lesson from the third chapter of Luke, John the Baptist says to the crowds who are coming to hear him preach, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming. . . . He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16).

If I were a Pentecostal preacher, I would point out to you that when it comes to baptism, Baptists have spent a whole lot of time fussin’ and fumin’ over how much water is to be used and when it is to be applied when all the while, the Bible says that the baptism of John was a baptism of water; but the baptism of Jesus is a baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire.

So how come we Baptists almost never talk about the Holy Spirit and fire, and especially so at baptism when Luke’s gospel, at least, suggests that the Holy Spirit and fire are distinguishing marks of the ministry of Jesus Christ?

At the beginning of the book of Acts, Jesus says to the disciples, “This is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 1:5). So this morning, let’s talk about the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit and fire.

First the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the constant and continuing presence of God in the world and in the church and in the life of every baptized believer.

In the historic Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the “third person” in the distinctively Christian understanding of God as Three in One and One in Three: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit; Lover, Beloved, and Love.

Outside the enthusiastic confines of Pentecostal and charismatic congregations, the “third person” in the Trinity is routinely overlooked—or at least underemphasized—compared to the Father and the Son, the Creator and the Christ, the Lover and the Beloved. But the gospel of Luke doesn’t overlook or underemphasize the Holy Spirit at all.

At the baptism of Jesus, as Luke tells the story in chapter 3, “when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.” From the baptism of Jesus on, in the gospel of Luke, the ministry of Jesus himself is driven and empowered by the Holy Spirit.

In Luke 4:1 we are told that following his baptism, “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness.” In Luke 4:14 we read, “Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Holy Spirit returned to Galilee” where he began his ministry of teaching and preaching and healing. Luke 4 also tells us that when Jesus returned home to Nazareth to teach in the synagogue there, he read from Isaiah 61, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19).

After the resurrection, Jesus said to the disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8), which is precisely what happens on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2:2-4 when “suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.”

From Pentecost on in the book of Acts, individuals who minister in Jesus’ name are said again and again and again to be “filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 4:8,31; 7:55; 9:17; 13:9,52) and “full of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 11:24). In fact, the Holy Spirit plays so prominent a role in the life of the early church in the book of Acts that more than one commentator has suggested that instead of being called “The Book of the Acts of the Apostles,” as the church has traditionally named it, it should be called “The Book of the Acts of the Holy Spirit.”

According to the gospel of Luke, the Holy Spirit empowered life and ministry of Jesus Christ; and according to the book of Acts, the Holy Spirit empowers the life and ministry of the church and empowers the life of every baptized believer. One and the same empowering presence of God was at work in Jesus Christ, in the church of Jesus Christ, and in every baptized believer in Jesus Christ.

So don’t make the mistake that most non-Pentecostals and non-charismatics have made by reducing the Holy Spirit to the “third person of the Trinity.” Instead, “receive the Holy Spirit,” as Jesus puts in John 20:22. Embrace the Holy Spirit as the constant, continuing, empowering presence of God in your life.

Now for the fire. Fire as a biblical sign and symbol of the presence of God is as old as the covenant of God with Abraham (Genesis 15:17), the appearance of God to Moses at the bush that was burning but not consumed (Exodus 3:2) and to all Israel at Mt. Sinai (Exodus 19:18). Consider this fire imagery on Mt. Sinai in Exodus 24:17: “Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel.” A devouring fire.

In this morning’s gospel lesson, fire is an image of judgment. John the Baptizer says that the one who is coming “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Luke 2:16-17). There it is. “Unquenchable fire.” Can’t you just smell the sulfuric vapors of the brimstone? “Hellfire and damnation,” anyone?

The fire reminds us that in addition to being the constant, continuing, and empowering presence of God in our lives, the Holy Spirit is the constant, continuing, and purifying presence of God in our lives. The fire that burns the chaff, the husk, the waste material of the wheat is like the “refiner’s fire” of our Old Testament lesson this morning from the prophet Malachi: “For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord” (Malachi 3:2-4).

Malachi speaks hard words of judgment with the imagery of fire, but notice that the point of that judgment is to purify rather than to destroy. The refiner’s fire burns away the dross, the impurities, and leaves behind only the pure metal. In our citified Baptist discomfort with hellfire-and-damnation preaching, we run from the refiner’s fire. And when we do, we are left with nothing to burn away the useless stuff, the wasteful stuff, the unnecessary, and impure stuff that weighs down our hearts and minds and souls and lives and separates us from God.

The image of the fire of judgment in this morning’s gospel lesson is a reminder that none of us is so pure that we don’t need the fire of judgment, the refiner’s fire, in our lives to burn away what is useless, wasteful, unnecessary, and impure. No church is so pure that it doesn’t need the fire of judgment, the refiner’s fire, in its life to burn away what is useless, wasteful, unnecessary, and impure. As individuals and as a church, we must not reduce the Holy Spirit to the “third person of the Trinity” but embrace the Holy Spirit as the constant, continuing, and purifying presence of God in our lives and in our church.

The image of the refiner’s fire in Malachi 3 and fire of judgment in Luke 3 is also a reminder that your “Stop-Doing List” is every bit as important as your “To-Do List.” Do you have a “Stop-Doing List”? Probably not. If you don’t have a Stop-Doing list, then you need to start one. I learned about Stop-Doing lists several years ago from an article in Harvard Business Review.

Effective companies and organizations plan for and implement abandonment strategies for their products and services and processes every bit as carefully and thoroughly as they plan for and implement their launch strategies. Companies and organizations that survive and thrive understand that sooner or later their products and services and processes will diminish in their effectiveness, will become obsolete, will no longer meet the markets for which they were originally designed. The same is true for churches. Sooner or later the various ways we do worship and ministry and missions will no longer meet the needs for which they were originally designed. If you don’t plan to abandon and replace what you are doing and how you are doing it, sooner or later, it will abandon you.

It’s so obvious that we shouldn’t even have to say it, but we do. There is a time to abandon the womb and be born. No matter how warm and comfortable it may be in there, it can’t go on forever, can it? There is a time to abandon the only life we know for a life that is still to come. There is a time to abandon high school and your parents and to move on to college—and don’t come back! (Just kidding. Come back anytime; stay as long as you need to. I guess.) There is a time to abandon the house you have been living in and move into assisted living where you get the care that you can no longer provide for yourself. There is a time to abandon “the earthly tent we live in,” as the apostle Paul puts it, to move on to “a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (1 Corinthians 5:1). Our abandonment strategy is every bit as important as our launch strategy.

Start a “Stop-Doing List” today. Every individual and every congregation should have one. Plan for abandonment and replacement. The refiner’s fire of the Stop-Doing List is a reminder of the purifying presence of God among us and around us and in us that burns away the untimely, the unworthy, the useless and wasteful and unnecessary and impure stuff that holds us back as individuals and as a congregation from loving and serving God and from loving and serving our neighbor as we ought.

Whatever it is in your life, whatever it is in our congregational life together, that needs to be burned away like chaff, like the husk, like the waste material of the wheat, pray this day that the Holy Spirit and fire will refine and purify you. So receive the Holy Spirit, and receive the fire that comes with it. Embrace the constant, continuing, empowering, and purifying presence of God in your life and in our life together.

Let us pray.


Copyrighted © 2012 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.

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice? Nails and Gold and Everything Bold!

The Orangeburg Series

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2 Kings 5:1-5; Luke 4:22-30
January 8, 2012

NOTE: This sermon is adapted from “Like a Child,” in Building a House for All God’s Children: Diversity Leadership in the Church (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2008), pp. 76-84.

“What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice. That’s what little girls are made of.” These days, we know better than to put much stock in such old-fashioned, gender-biased adages, if for no other reason than the fact that our experience has introduced us to at least some girls and women who are obviously composed of anything but “sugar and spice and everything nice”—all present company excluded, of course.

Even so, we might be surprised to see in this morning’s Old Testament lesson a girl of an entirely different mettle than in the nursery rhyme. We never learn her name or anything more about her than what we read in 2 Kings 5:2-4. But from what we do learn about her in these three verses, I want to suggest an alternative adage to characterize this na‘ărâ qĕtannâ, this “little girl” from the land of Israel: Nails and gold and everything bold. That’s what this girl is made of.

There is a cast of powerful people in the fifth chapter of 2 Kings. There is Naaman, the Syrian general. There is the king of Syria and the king of Israel. And there is the prophet Elisha who lives in Samaria, the capital of Israel. It would be all too easy for us to assume that we can learn the most from the most powerful people in the story. But it turns out that it’s the “little girl” from whom we can learn the most. Recognizing that the most important person in the story is the one who appears to be the least powerful person in it is a striking reminder that our assumptions and our expectations and our conventional interpretations frequently limit what we can learn from reading the Bible.

Perhaps you have read 1 Peter 3:7, which speaks of women as “the weaker sex.” Those three words in 1 Peter 3:7 have created centuries of assumptions and expectations and conventional interpretations in the church and in our culture. But 1 Peter ignores the biblical woman named Deborah who was a judge and a prophet over Israel without whom Barak, the commander of the Israelite army, refused to go to war unless she went with him (Judges 4:4,8). It ignores the biblical woman named Athaliah who was queen over Judah for six years when there was no king in the land (2 Kings 11:3). It ignores the biblical woman named Esther whose cunning and courage saved her people from a massacre (Esther). It ignores the biblical woman named Phoebe whom the apostle Paul refers to as “a deacon of the church” in Romans 16:1. And it ignores the biblical woman named Eve in Genesis 2.

Genesis 2:7 reads, “God formed a man from the dust of the ground.” The Hebrew verb in that verse is yatzar, “to mold” or “shape” or “form.” It’s what a potter does to make a clay vessel. Contrast that with verse 22, the creation of Eve: “the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man [God] made into a woman.” So the man is made of dust, and the woman is made of bone. Which one might be stronger? Dust or bone? The Bible says men are made of dust and women are made of bone. Who looks like “the weaker sex” now?

In fact, Bible translators don’t play fair with you or with Eve either one when they use the generic English word “made” to describe the creation of Eve. The Hebrew verb in that verse is banah, and it means “to build” or “to construct.” Eve was not just “made.” Eve was built. Elsewhere in the Bible, houses are built, city walls are built, towers are built, fortresses are built. There is nothing weak about this woman created in Genesis 2.

So when I say that the little girl in 2 Kings 5 is made of nails and gold and everything bold, you shouldn’t be surprised. Because 1 Peter 3:7 may call women “the weaker sex,” but the rest of the Bible pictures women very differently than 1 Peter does. Nails and gold and everything bold.

I say, “nails,” because she was “tough as.” Consider what we know about this girl’s situation. She was an Israelite captive who had been carried away from her village by Syrian raiders. Naaman the general must have selected her as part of the spoils of war to give to his wife as a household slave. So when this girl suggests in verse 3 that Naaman could be cured of his disease if he would pay a visit to “the prophet who lives in Samaria,” she reveals an amazing spiritual toughness. In spite of the terror, misfortune and dislocation she has experienced, she has not abandoned her confidence in her God and in the religious institutions of her upbringing. How could her faith be so tenacious as to survive and even thrive as a captive slave in a foreign land instead of a child at home? Tough as nails.

This “little girl from the land of Israel” models for us the toughness and the tenacity of faith that is required for citizenship in the kingdom of God. The author of the book of Revelation understood what it takes when he wrote, “as a follower of Jesus I am your partner in patiently enduring the suffering that comes to those who belong to his Kingdom” (Revelation 1:9). That’s not the kind of talk we like to hear about citizenship in the kingdom of God. When’s the last time you saw a sign outside a church that read, “Come suffer patiently with us”?

That’s not a gospel you and I want to hear or to preach, much less to live. We buy the conquering savior who vanquished sin and death and evil, and we sell the suffering servant because we want no part of servanthood or suffering either one. We preach a Christ who conquers, overcomes, protects and defends us against all comers, a national championship Jesus. And then we find ourselves and our theology utterly unprepared for the adversity that eventually comes our way in life when there is no triumph, only travail, when the losses in our lives pile up and the wins are few and far between at best or evidently all in the past. In adversity, our faith slips away like sand through our fingers, and we fall into despair or cynicism, unlike the girl from the land of Israel, who had not sold her soul to a theology of victory and success. Nails, I say, because she was tough as. Nails and gold.

I say “gold” because she had “a heart of.” Why it ever occurred to this child to be so astonishingly compassionate as to wish that her captor could be cured of his disease we will never know. Perhaps she is an ancient example of what is called the “Stockholm Syndrome” or “capture-bonding,” in which persons who are held hostage, such as prisoners of war, kidnap victims, battered wives and abused children, become emotionally attached and intensely loyal to their captors. Or maybe her circumstances as a household slave in the home of a wealthy and pampered Syrian woman was actually an easier and happier condition than she had known in the home of her rude, impoverished Israelite father who had no good use for a daughter who was no help to him in the fields. Or maybe it was her character. Maybe she was one of those unusually empathetic children you come across from time to time, that child with a sensitivity to others that takes everyone by surprise.

We can’t get behind the text in front of us to reconstruct her feelings, but what we can see in the text is an astonishing compassion that looks right past differences in nationality and religion and disparities in power and wealth to see the commonality of human suffering and need. And so she said, “I wish that my master could go to the prophet who lives in Samaria! He would cure him of his disease.” That is astonishing compassion on the part of a victim of conquest and coercion. And it is precisely the compassion that is required for citizenship in the Kingdom of God, as Jesus puts it in the sermon on the mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43-44). That’s another piece of the gospel for which it is hard to find a practitioner in these days of religious, political, and national partisanship, polemics and polarization. But we’ve found one in 2 Kings 5. This little girl from the land of Israel exhibits Kingdom-of-God compassion for her enemy and her oppressor. Nails and gold, I say, because she had a heart of.

Nails and gold and everything bold. I say, “everything bold,” because this girl makes an outrageously bold claim on the grace and mercy of God. We have no idea how she knew that the prophet Elisha and the God of Israel would cure the Syrian general of this disease. Perhaps she had suffered from it herself, or perhaps someone in her family had, or perhaps the reputation of this prophet was so widespread that she needed no personal experience with his gift of healing. However she knew it—or perhaps only believed it or hoped it or prayed it, she was outrageously bold in her offer to Naaman. She invited this foreigner to avail himself of the health and wellbeing that was available in her own community of faith. She invited the wolf into the sheepfold, for heaven’s sake. And when she did, she made an outrageous claim on the grace and mercy of God by suggesting that God would act to heal an enemy of God’s people, that God whom she worshiped was every bit as interested in and concerned for Naaman’s health and wellbeing as for her own.

Syrians were historic enemies of Israelites, so much so that more than 800 years later the good people of Nazareth in Luke’s gospel became so incensed at Jesus that they wanted to kill him when he reminded them of this passage that contradicted their assumptions and their expectations and their conventional interpretations. A leprous Syrian warrior is healed while Israelite men, women and children are not? They became furious with Jesus when he proclaimed as “the truth” (v 25) an understanding of God that insists that God does not discriminate against people we despise or detest.

In Luke 6, Jesus says, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:32-36).

In the end, it’s not the sociological imperative—“love your enemies”—that infuriates Jesus’ audience then and now. It’s the theological declarative that angers us most: God is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked,” Jesus says, and God is merciful to our enemies. As Jesus preaches and teaches it, citizenship in the Kingdom of God requires worshiping and serving a God who loves even people who do not love God, a God who is good even to people who are not. That’s what this “little girl from the land of Israel” understood about God that many of us have not yet been willing to understand or to accept or to live by. Nails and gold and everything bold. That’s what it takes to be a follower of Jesus and to belong to Jesus’ kingdom.

And as for “the weaker sex”? Only in 1 Peter 3:7. The visionary words of the apostle Paul characterize Jesus’ kingdom this way: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

May we never fail to live into and live up to Paul’s vision of Jesus’ kingdom. It’s nails and gold and everything bold.

Copyrighted © 2012 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.

New Beginnings

The Orangeburg Series

John 1:1-18

New Year’s Day 2012

Every year, more than a million people gather in Times Square in New York City for the annual Ball Drop that begins at 11:59 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. Many millions more watch on television, while others party in the new year in their respective downtowns, hotels, and homes. It’s the most raucous holiday of the year. If you look only at the surface of the New Year’s celebrations and New Year’s dissipations you might not recognize that underneath it all is a deep hunger and thirst in the human soul for a fresh start, a new beginning.

A couple years ago, a few days before Christmas, I was helping one of my sons change a flat tire on his truck in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. To tell you the truth, I was enjoying myself. I’m not a fan of flat tires, mind you; but once your son leaves home for college, even changing a flat tire together can feel like “quality time” with each other. We weren’t quite finished when we were approached by a man in his late 30s or early 40s asking for a meal. He said he was embarrassed to ask for help, and he didn’t want money. But he said he was an out-of-work construction worker, and he had four mouths to feed; and if I would buy him supper, he would sure be grateful to me. I confess to you that my first thought was “Can’t you see you’re interrupting a father-son thing here? Leave us alone.” Then I thought to myself, “Go scam someone else, man. I don’t have time for this, and your supper is not in my budget.” Not to mention the fact that we were in the parking lot of a burger joint and he wanted dinner for four from the chicken place a half a mile away. Right.

But it was a couple days before Christmas, and he sure enough looked as though he was down on his luck. And he didn’t ask for cash, and I thought about what I would want somebody to do for my son if he was ever out of work with four mouths to feed. And besides, it had only been about ten days or so since I had preached a sermon about God being in the business of filling the hungry with good things, as the gospel of Luke puts it (Luke 1:53; 6:21). So the next thing I knew, I was standing at the counter of that chicken place buying dinner to go for four. I still don’t know whether I got scammed or whether I actually helped someone; but on the way to the chicken place, the fellow I bought dinner for said this: “I’ll be glad when this year is over. I sure hope next year is better than this one was.”

Have you ever felt that way at the end of one year and the beginning of the next? At one time or another in our lives, every one of us experiences the deep need to turn the calendar to a new year. Sooner or later, every one of us comes to a place in our lives where we need a fresh start, a new beginning.

New beginnings are different from New Year’s resolutions. For one thing, the need for a new beginning doesn’t always coincide with a new year. The circumstances of our lives, the conditions of our hearts, and the movement of our souls—not the calendar—determine the timing of our need for a new beginning. For another thing, a new beginning is a fresh start, a clean slate. It’s not just a list of a few new things that you’re going to do or old things you’re going to stop doing. It’s starting all over again.

On the morning of my father’s funeral, my mother walked into the den of the church parsonage where my parents were living when my father died and asked those of us sitting there, “You know what song I’ve been singing since I woke up this morning?” We didn’t even try to name that tune. She said, “I’ve been singing, ‘I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.’” Nellie’s song from the Broadway musical, South Pacific. That was more than 25 years ago, and there is still an occasional night when she calls his name in her sleep. But she recognized that morning that she had arrived at a “starting-all-over” moment in her life. A new beginning.

New beginnings are a lot harder than New Year’s resolutions, but they last a lot longer. New beginnings are also more biblical than New Year’s resolutions. God called Abraham and Sarah out of the Ur of the Chaldees to a new beginning in Canaan. God called the Israelites up out of Egypt to a new beginning in a land of promise. God called the exiles home from Babylon to a new beginning in Jerusalem. God called Peter away from his nets on the Sea of Galilee to a new beginning as an apostle fishing for people. God called Nicodemus away from his life as a Pharisee to a new beginning, “born from above” or “born again.” God called Saul of Tarsus from persecuting the Way to a new beginning as the greatest champion of the Way.

And then there’s the biblical new beginning in verse 14 of this morning’s gospel lesson: “The Word became flesh and lived among us . . . full of grace and truth.” The Word that was in the beginning, the Word that was with God and the Word that was God, the Word through whom all things were made, the source of all beginnings, began anew when the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth. That new beginning—the “incarnation,” it’s called in theological jargon—is the ground of all our new beginnings. Incarnational new beginnings—not merely resolutions—are necessarily “full of grace and truth.”

Grace has to do with letting go of what has been. Grace is about letting go of what has been in order to embrace what yet can be. That’s what God’s grace does: God lets go of our has-been in order to embrace the yet-can-be in us. Let me be very clear about what grace is not. Grace is not a “do-over.” There is no such thing as a do-over. What you’ve done, you’ve done; and what you left undone, you’ve left undone. There is no such thing as a do-over; but there is do better. There is do wiser. There is do new. And in order to do better and wiser and new, you have to let go of what has been: good, bad, or indifferent. Just as by grace God let go of our sin, we must let go of our guilt, our loss, our pain, our grief, our anger, our disappointment—our own or others. Whatever it is about the past that you are dragging with you into the present, you must let that go. Grace is washing what has been out of your hair to start a new day or a new year fresh and clean and anew. That’s what new beginnings take: Grace.

And truth also. Truth has to do with recognizing in the present that nothing less than a new beginning will do. Tony Compolo tells the story (Let Me Tell You a Story, p. 96) of an old guy in the backwoods of Kentucky who could always be counted on to show up at revival meetings whenever an evangelist came to town. At the end of each service when the invitation was given, he would come down the aisle, get down on his knees, raise his arms to heaven and cry out, “Fill, Jesus! Fill me! Fill me, Jesus!” Then, within a week or two after the revival was over, he would slip back into his old ways of living. But when the next round of revival meetings was held, he would once again show up, walk down the aisle, and pray the same prayer over and over. One time, he was down on his knees yelling to the ceiling, “Fill me! Fill me, Jesus! Fill me, fill me! Fill me, Jesus!” when suddenly from the back of the church a lady called out, “Don’t do it, Lord! He leaks!” The truth is, of course, we all leak. If you only have a small leak, and all you need is a minor tune-up, then making a few New Year’s resolutions will do for you. But if what you need is an overhaul, a rebuild, a restoration, a spiritual “make-over,” if you will, then the truth is, nothing less than a new beginning will do.

It wasn’t enough for Abraham and Sarah to make a few New Year’s resolutions in Ur of the Chaldees and then a few weeks later just go on with things as they were where they were. It wasn’t enough for the Israelites in Egypt or Babylon, either one, to make a few New Year’s resolutions and keep on living where they were as they were. It wasn’t enough for Nicodemus or for Peter or for Saul to resolve to do a few things a little differently. In every case, it required an entirely new beginning. And truth is what it takes to recognize that the game you have been playing, the life you have been living, the circumstances of the present, are no longer viable as a vehicle to carry you to a healthy, sustainable, and redemptive future in right relationship with God, in right relationship with others, and in right relationship with yourself. Only a new beginning will do.

When “the Word became flesh and lived among us. . . full of grace and truth,” it opened up to you and to me and to the world the ever-present possibility of a new beginning. The gospel of Jesus Christ is all about new beginnings. The gospel is about “new life,” Paul says in Romans 7:6, and “a new creation,” he says in 2 Corinthians 5:17. The gospel is “new wine,” a “new garment,” a “new covenant” (Luke 5:36-37; 22:20). The gospel is about “a new self,” according to Ephesians 4:24. And God knows, every one of us needs a new self at least once in our lives; and some of us discover once is not enough for us.

No matter how many New Year’s resolutions we may make, our life remains soiled; our creation is spoiled; our covenant becomes tattered; our garment is torn; our wine becomes tasteless; and our self gets tarnished. The problem with New Year’s resolutions is that they are a self-help enterprise. And the problem with “self-help” is that it just doesn’t work. Have you ever thought about why it is that “self-help” books are a billion-dollar business? It’s because self-help doesn’t work. If self-help worked, you could buy one good self-help book, and you’d be done. But have you noticed how those of us who buy self-help books can’t buy just one? It’s like those potato chips: you can’t eat just one. You have to have another and another and another because self-help can’t create a new self. It only nurtures the deep hunger and thirst of the human soul for a new beginning.

The new beginning that leads to a new self can only come when the hunger and thirst on our inside is met by the nourishment we need from the outside. Think about it. When you are hungry, your body can feed on itself. In the short-term, your body feeds on itself by burning the fat it has stored up in order to keep itself alive and functioning. And when you are hungry, your body can feed on itself by devouring the muscle you have built in order to keep itself alive and functioning. But your body cannot feed on itself forever. Sooner or later, your body must receive nourishment from the outside—protein and carbohydrates and nutrients—that will restore the muscle and replenish the fat reserves that your body can live on but for only so long. Like body, like soul.

The words of Jesus later in the gospel of John express this biological and spiritual reality when Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry” (John 6:35). Jesus said, “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). How can that be? Never hungry? Never thirsty? We don’t know any condition of the human body or the human soul in this life in which hunger and thirst are permanently satisfied.

But here’s the thing. It’s not one-and-done. It’s not eat and never eat again. It’s not drink and never drink again. It is the constant, saving presence of Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, “God is with us,” feeding our hunger and satisfying our thirst, offering us again and again and again the bread of life and the cup of new life, the spiritual food that nourishes our souls the way physical food nourishes our bodies. New beginnings come from the outside in, not the inside out.

Look at John 1:12 in this morning’s gospel lesson. There are three biblical steps to a new beginning in John 1:12. “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” I want you to see the three steps in the three verbs in that sentence: received, believed, to become. The first step in a new beginning is to receive—to receive the constant, saving presence of the Lord Jesus Christ in your life, whether it is for the first time or for the hundredth time to receive—the bread of life and the spring of water gushing up to eternal life. It is God’s initiative, not ours, that opens us to the possibility of a new beginning when we open ourselves to God in Jesus Christ to receive God’s constant, saving presence in our life, guiding, sustaining, directing, correcting us on our way. The first step is to receive.

The second step is to believe. Notice that we don’t receive because we believe. A lot of people have it backwards. A lot of believers and unbelievers alike misrepresent the Christian faith as an act of believing that leads to receiving. From the book of Genesis to the book of Revelation, the Bible could not be more clear that we don’t receive because we believe. We believe because we have received. In Genesis 15:5-6, Abraham received the promise of a future from God: God brought Abraham outside his tent “and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then [God] said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ And [Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” Abraham received, and then he believed. The apostle Paul put it this way in Romans 5:8: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” We all received the promise of salvation in Jesus Christ long before any of us believed it. Believing comes from receiving, not the other way around.

The redemptive new beginning of the Christian faith germinates and takes root and sprouts and grows in the darkness of doubt and sin and guilt and loss and pain and grief and anger and disappointment whenever and wherever we come to the recognition that God has already provided all we need to address the hunger and thirst on our inside, so that when we receive, we believe.

And when we believe, we become. “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” If grace is about letting go of the past, and truth is about recognizing in the present that nothing less than a new beginning will do, then “the power to become” is the God-given capacity to step into the future of a new beginning with God, in God, for God.

Oddly enough, it just might be that the people who understand best what a new beginning is are those folks among us who play video games. In a video game, there comes a point when the screen is filled by the words, “GAME OVER.” If you want to keep on playing, there’s nothing else to do but to start an entirely new game, begin an entirely new life. A new beginning is a “game over”/“start new game” moment. By the mercy of God, revealed in Jesus the Christ, by grace and truth, any new day can begin a brand new year when you decide to receive, to believe, and to become.

This New Year’s Day can be that day for you. Any day in this new year can be that day for you. The invitation of God in Jesus Christ is open now to you to receive, to believe, and to become.


Copyrighted © 2011 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.