St Andrew's Presbyterian Church – Duncan, BC

One of the ironies of our Christian faith is that we are constantly met with apparently contrasting assertions in which the “true truth” lies in the tension.

In our evangelical tradition, for instance, we put great emphasis on the fact that faith must be personal. That is, believers are called to discover and nourish a living, personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. Our faith must be individually chosen. Each of us must make that commitment to know, love, follow and serve Jesus as his disciple. While faith is transferred from one generation of believers to another, the simple fact is that the faith of our fathers will die if it does not become the living and personal faith of our fathers’ children. Mere rote parroting of another generation’s faith, thought, traditions or practices does not, by itself, produce a living, dynamic, contagious faith for the next. Or as Martin Luther put it, each man must do his own believing even as he must do his own dying. Faith becomes authentic and real only when it becomes personal faith.

And yet, there is another reality at work that our generation has too easily and thoughtlessly dismissed. Writing in a recent issue of Christianity Today, author Leslie Fields helpfully reminds readers that scripture regularly asserts that our faith is a precious gift we inherit and one which is much, much bigger than our tiny portion. Faith in Christ is a holy treasure that is gifted to the saints, to the church, and to the Body of believers as a whole (Jude 1:20-21). It is the same faith delivered to all the saints in the world through all of time. Fields rightly contends that while the faith belongs to us if we choose it, far more do we belong to the faith that has grasped hold of us. The danger of too strong an emphasis on the personal dimension of faith, Fields argues, is that “it ends up being about the wrong person – me.”

Paul warned about believers who would abandon the faith in favour of chasing after what their itching ears wanted to hear. The danger remains still (some writers have called it Protestantism run amuck!) in which we presume our tiny personal experience and understanding of the Christian faith is the sum total of the church’s faith. A friend of mine used to say that trying to get the mystery of God into his tiny head was akin to trying to get the Pacific Ocean into a teacup. The faith “that was delivered to the saints” will always be so much bigger than our puny grasp of it, and yet we will so cavalierly make judgment upon other people’s experiences and understandings, as if we had perfect grasp of the whole counsel of God. Worse, we will presume that God himself is confined to our little grasp of the mystery of his holiness, goodness and will.

It’s this presumption that causes many to fall away. While few would ever readily admit it, the sad truth is that many who abandon the faith do so because God refused to jump through their own theological hoops or respond according to their self-centered timelines. That is, we presume the value of faith and in essence dare to measure God’s worthiness and value to us based on whether or not life works out to our satisfaction. If God delivers the goodies on schedule, well and fine. But if the sovereign Lord chooses to act in ways to stretch us, challenge us, discipline us, redeem us from sin and self and narrowness, and otherwise seek to form us into the image of his Son and to do so at cost to our comfort and ease, how quickly will we abandon the faith and decide discipleship is not for us.

The early church often used militaristic images to remind believers that when God enlists us as disciples, we are a people under orders and under discipline. Paul often talked about his being a slave to Christ. Faith is not a smorgasbord affair in which we get to choose what suits us our sweet tooth while ignoring what would nourish and give us health and strength. When the Lord summons us to the adventure of faith, he conscripts us into the boot camp of being made into saints and soldiers for the kingdom of God, and the Lord’s training will often be difficult, strenuous and painful. The sad reality is that too many of us want only a spectator faith in which Jesus shows up to serve out the preferred blessing of the day when we snap our fingers, rather than letting faith take hold of us and make us true servants of our Saviour who are ready to be made into the people who themselves become the blessings to our world.

The dilemma is that most of us are happy to be in control; we do not, however, respond very generously or wisely to the concept of letting God conform us to his plan, especially when that involves surrendering not only to his Word and Spirit, but also to the discipline of his Church in its theologies and holy traditions, its leadership structures and historical wisdom, or to the teachers and elders of the faith, be they lay or clergy. Our selfish tendency is to want God, faith, church, etc., all to be on our terms, and when God, faith or church prove to have a logic, purpose and will that clashes with ours, guess what and who gets rejected?

Faith must be personal, in that it is my placing of trust and my very life into Christ’s hands. But the individual choosing that makes faith real and personal must always be a ready and repeated surrendering to the authority of scripture, the commands and demands of Christ, and the godly mentoring and discipling that would flow from the Church in the power of the Spirit. I must choose to believe, but in doing so, I need affirm that the Faith has also chosen me, and now my journey of discipleship has to be far less about me and my wants and everything about Jesus and his purposes for my life, no matter how challenging or discomforting that may be. And if I am not ready to make that surrender, the question may be whether I’ve ever truly chosen to make that personal decision of faith in Christ in the first place.

There is a big difference between being a wannabe-be soldier and the real thing. So too with discipleship. Maybe that is why Jesus emphasized that following him involved picking up and carrying a cross. Yet it is the carrying of a cross that alone will make our faith truly personal.

We were getting ready for a funeral service. Eleanor, as she often does, went through the sanctuary, making certain that everything was neat and tidy. In particular, she wanted to be sure that there were boxes of tissue in the pews where the mourners would be sitting. She came into my office, laughing. “I don’t know what kind of church this is, but I found a box of tissue in every single pew. We must cry a lot.”

As I thought about her observation afterwards, I decided I like being pastor of a church that has tissue boxes scattered everywhere. I think it does say something about the kind of church that we are. (And not just one with lots of people who suffer from seasonal allergies!)

I hope that those boxes of tissue indicate that this is a church that allows, welcomes, respects, and hallows tears. We are, after all, a broken people—sinners needing to find the saving grace of Jesus. We are a mourning people—folk who have tasted all manners of grief in life. It might be from the death, suffering, waywardness, or folly of ourselves or a loved one. Our tears might flow because of the cruelties inflicted upon us by people that we expected we could trust, or again as much because of their betrayal as their action. And often we are simply a frightened people, overwhelmed by the events life throws at us, and our tears become wept prayers raised to heaven.

Of course, we often may weep tears of thankfulness and joy as we ponder the unimaginable grace of God that has reached out to us, or reflect upon the amazing blessings that touch our lives through the people who love us. Gladness as well as grief can summon forth the deepest emotional responses of our heart, and all are precious to God. And make necessary the nearby box of tissue.

Perhaps most of all, the boxes of tissue speak of a spirit of openness, honesty, and vulnerability that is cherished within this family of faith. Sadly, some churches would prefer that everyone puts on both their “Sunday-go-to-meeting” clothes and their “Sunday-pretend-everything-is-all-right” faces. Some congregations have not only perfected the charade of having life altogether, but demand conformity to that false portrayal by their members. Few things more disconcerting could happen in such churches on a Sunday morning than to have people cry out their pain, longing, and humanity. It might have been fine for Jesus to have wept at Lazarus’ graveside, but it would be considered unseemly for good Presbyterians (or substitute your denomination of choice) such as us to show such brokenness or weakness.

I thank God that our church is far messier and more human than that, and pray only that we dare to let the Spirit make us even more messy and honest if that is what it takes to have hearts open and yearning for the mercy, strength, comfort, and love of Christ. Because only where tears are hallowed, I believe, can healing truly flow.

I’ve been working in my back yard building a lattice privacy screen for a new patio area. The overall plan is somewhat ambitious. We are moving our current patio area into what is now garden area, while moving the garden to what is now all paving blocks. As part of the process, I’ve built a raised  planter with a pergola and lattice wall, which eventually be covered with some form of flowering vine, thus giving us a privacy wall for the new patio area. While our current patio is adequate, it is somewhat public, as we sit virtually beside a busy sidewalk, and sometimes, it is simply nice to have a place of retreat and quiet.

And yet…despite the sometimes lack of insight, couth or appropriate reticence practised by folk on social networks and in our media, there is also a growing trend in our age towards an unhealthy isolation. In the more familiar language of popularized psychology, we call it the putting up of walls around our emotions and our true selves in order to keep others at a distance. The sad reality, though, is that many of us have been so wounded or are so afraid of being hurt in relationships that we effectively detach ourselves from any sort of honest, open or vulnerable connection with other people, and ultimately, with God. We may not have become actual hermits living in physical isolation from others, but emotionally, we have put up so many barricades, facades and pretenses that not only are we essentially “unknown” by other people, we often end up losing touch with our own human need for relationship. The poet John Donne said famously that no man is an island, yet many of us exist in such lonely relational detachment from others, that we are virtual recluses.

It was not for isolation but for community that we were created. God formed us for meaningful, mutual relationship with himself and with others. From our beginning in Eden, our very nature is to find our souls taught, nurtured, completed and blessed in loving relationship with our Creator and our fellow creatures. One of the tragic consequences of the Fall has been the severing of the intimate trust and dependency that God desired us to have with himself and each other, and carried to extreme, the result of sin is that we live in this state of fractured disconnect.

Part of our restoration in Christ is surely discovering the God-ordained freedom, courage, joy and trust to risk ourselves in openness and vulnerability with the Lord, and, I suppose, more cautiously, with others. Certainly, we can trust that He who made us, watches over us, knows all about us (including the number of hairs on our heads and the words we are about to speak ever before they are on our tongue), and gave His Son to die for us, is more than able to deal with, forgive and heal us for every sin, every shame, every failure and weakness and fear in our hearts. Indeed, the more we stop hiding, isolating and wall-building, and instead release our past, our pain and the whole of our hearts into his care, the more will we find ourselves renewed, made whole and given peace.

But equally, our restoration involves daring and discovering a new openness and vulnerability and honesty in our human relationships as well. Sadly, as human beings, we do not have the limitless graciousness of God, and undoubtedly we will hurt and be hurt by one another. Yet miraculously, it is within human relationships that the amazing graciousness of God does get manifest and shared, and often my first sense of the unconditional love of God will be glimpsed in the readiness of another person to forgive, accept and care for me just as I am.

And the true healing and formation of community within the Christian family, the church, must surely be where we above all give permission to ourselves and to one another to be less than perfect; to be mess-ups, sinners and failures; to be God’s incredible masterpieces who are yet very much under construction and far from complete; to be men and women struggling in recovery from our addiction to self and to sin and who are ready to encourage and support each other in the journey towards Christ-likeness rather than judge and damn one another for our incompleteness.

One of the best compliments I have ever heard given to our church is when one Sunday morning during our time for sharing of praises, an individual got up and said: “I like coming to this church. I’m a bit of a misfit, but somehow, I seem to fit in with you people!” Oh, that we could be such a motley crew of misfits who rejoice that God is at work in us, and that it is in compassionate, vulnerable, wall-less community together, that we find healing, are being fashioned more fully into the people who God made us to become.

There is a lovely phrase in the 26^th chapter of the Book of Leviticus (an Old Testament book that is too often skipped over). The focus of that chapter is God’s reminder to Israel that in obedience to his word, there was great blessing to be received. If they were to refrain from idol worship but were to hold the Sabbath in reverence, they would discover the Lord raining down upon them gifts of abundance in harvest, peace in the land and success in all their doings. God would place his dwelling among them and would walk among them and be their God and Israel would be his people.

The promise of blessing then ends with God’s reaffirmation that it was he, the Lord, who had brought them out of Egypt so that they would no longer be slaves to the Egyptians. It was he, the Lord, who had broken “the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk with heads held high.”

What a glorious metaphor for the freedom which can only be found within the grace of our God! For like slaves bent and burdened under physical yokes with which they carried their loads of brick, so any who have carried the weight of whatever things have imprisoned us, know only too well what it is to be bent over spiritually with guilt and shame. We hobble under the burden of our sin, our addictions, our anxieties and our anger, our unwillingness to forgive those who have hurt us and our inability to forgive ourselves for the hurts and failures we’ve caused. The pain, lies, wounds and sins of our past are this vast encumbrance under which we stagger and strain. Like hunchbacks perpetually cursed to stare only downwards at the dirt, we crippled, broken slaves to sin might yearn to stand straight and tall, with heads held high, and taste the freedom of being slaves no longer, weighed down no longer, imprisoned no longer to those taskmasters of shame that care only to double our burdens.

We were not made by God to go through life bent over and shackled as slaves. We were made to walk in freedom with heads held high in the embrace of his delight and blessing. We were made to be creatures who could look up to our God with no shame (Genesis 2:25), but our human sin, rebellion and pride has left us otherwise. As Paul noted in his great letter to the church in Rome, we are “unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do…. It is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me…. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Paul answered his own question then, as he gave thanks to God for the gift of Jesus Christ.

One of the great words that the church once used to describe Jesus was that of “Emancipator.” That is, as Isaiah prophesied, Jesus is the One who sets the captives free, liberates the imprisoned, gives sight to the blind, brings good news to the poor and proclaims the year of the Lord’s favour.

In the ancient world where slavery was a major institution in society, the Emancipator was a person of noble intent who would grant a slave manumission or full freedom. Some emancipators would purchase slaves for the simple purpose of giving freedom. That is what Jesus has done for us before God. He has quite literally paid the price of for our freedom and ransomed us with his own blood. He has taken upon himself our punishment and whatever debt we had owed, he has caused to be wiped away through his own self-sacrifice. He has set us free, at ultimate cost to himself. Again, as Paul told the Galatians, it was for freedom that we have been set free through the mercy and grace of our saviour.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who complained that Christians were altogether a much too gloomy lot when one considered the magnificent freedom and grace that has been bestowed upon us in Jesus. We have been given release from being slaves bent over with sin and shame, to stand tall, head held high, in the full glory and wonder of a new relationship with  God. Yet too often we refuse to embrace the freedom and go plodding about as if new life in Christ was still something we had to force and forge for ourselves, instead of embrace and celebrate. It’s been said that when God forgives our sins and wipes clean our past, he takes all those ugly things and casts them into the deepest part of the ocean, and then posts a sign that says “No Fishing.” Yet we will not leave those things alone but go dredging back into the depths to find our filthy rags, as if we cannot imagine our identity as anything other than helpless slaves. How terribly tragic! For Christ did not suffer the cross that I should continue to live in relentless sorrow for the past; if I do, all I will accomplish is to completely miss the wonder of the life for which he died to set me free.

I praise God that I can stand tall in the freedom won for me upon the Cross. Yet if anything must be confessed is my failure fully to understand, revel in and receive all the grace and power and possibility that the Lord wants me to know. I praise God that he has set me free (if the Son has set me free, than I am free indeed), but to how much do I still cling to my past rather than to Jesus? While he may have swung wide open the prison door, how much do I still huddle in the corner of my prison, afraid to rise and walk out into the light of the glory of his mercy and love? Too many of us still try to labour under the burdens of grief and guilt which we will not let go of, though the Saviour has done all so that the yokes of our sin and past could be cast off forever.

There is no sin or slavery from which Christ’s saving grace cannot set us free. There is no addiction from which his power will not redeem. There is no dark shame of our past into which the light of his love cannot or will not shine with liberating joy.

I find it interesting that in several of the stories of miraculous healing, Jesus bids the one who had been crippled to rise. I like to think that he means they were to stand tall, with heads held high. I believe the Lord desires no less for you or for me.

“And I believe in Jesus Christ, who was… crucified, dead and buried. He descended into hell. The third day, he rose again from the dead!”

Those ancient words of the Apostle’s Creed speak of two central convictions of faith for the church. They also raise one poser of a challenge.

The first conviction is the absolute uniqueness and centrality of Jesus as the Son of God who took flesh and became fully human for us and with us. That conviction is that God’s own sinless Son walked this earth, wept over it, faced rejection by it, suffered on it, and gave his very life for it. He lived our life and died our death and went, quite literally, to hell and back for our sake. And he rose again. And therefore, He alone is our ransom, our reconciliation, our atonement and our hope. Thus we shout our hallelujahs and our praise: Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Christ is Lord! He is Lord indeed. Thanks be to God!

The second conviction is that our God is not only a God of infinite, fierce, extravagant and unconquerable love in the lengths to which God would go to save us, free us and win us, but more amazingly, our God is a God of resurrection! To speak of God raising Jesus from the dead is to declare that not even death, nor the grave, not even the prison of hell itself can stand against the sovereign purpose and power of the Lord. When St. Paul wrote to the church in Rome saying that absolutely nothing could separate us from the love of God, he was not simply writing with poetic grandeur. He was telling gospel truth. Our God is a God who brings to life where death held sway. He brings salvation where sin seemed to have a strangle hold. He brings victorious hope where despair seemed all powerful, and our God brings impossible joy into the depths of anguish, fear and shame.

The massive challenge to us, however, is to remember and accept that for resurrection to occur, first there must be death.

I fear that oftentimes we are more prone to believe in resuscitation than we are in resurrection. I often witness this tendency within our church life, where we will pour in massive amounts of effort to keep well-loved programs and valued ministries on life-support; yet all the time, God may be asking us to surrender and release those things that were for a season because the new life He wants to release can only happen when we have first allowed things to die. Just as in the art of pruning a rose bush, the very best blooms can only be produced when we are ready to cut away not only the dead branches, but also the sick branches and those that are the least strong. I tend to be a timid pruner at times, and wonder why my rose bushes do not flourish.

But the real challenge is in our readiness to let God prune and kill off in us the dead, sin-sick and less than healthy attitudes and behaviours that keep us from growing into new Christ-like graciousness and discipleship. The challenge is letting the Lord cut away and eradicate from our hearts the death-dealing resentments and jealousies, the life-sapping addictions and anxieties, the soul-crippling lies, lusts and laziness that would leave us crippled and living a tepid and passionless Christianity, when all the time God wants to raise us from the dead of our past into the glorious wonder of life in Christ. When Jesus talked about dying to self, he was not asking us to embrace a drab, colourless existence of self-deprivation. He was inviting us to surrender ourselves to God’s transforming grace and find ourselves embraced by a life far grander, more glorious and beautiful than ever we could imagine. But we would need to die to self in order to live to God.

Easter is certainly the most glorious season of the Christian year, but I fear we want to make it tiny, tame and insignificant, because we would rather not have to its terrifying challenge to faith and obedience. Jesus really did suffer and die. His was a corpse, dead and buried, not just a comatose body in need of a rest. And he really did rise from the grave, overcoming every power of darkness and evil that had presumed to be able to defeat the Son of God. And he really is the living saviour and King of Kings who invites us into the banquet and dance of his risen life.

But we can taste the delight and glory of that new life only as we let our old self be crucified with Christ so that his life really can take hold of us and make us a new creation.

Or do we prefer just a little bit of self-help methodology, a bit of feel-good inspiration and a dash of trying harder?

More and more, I understand what Paul was asserting when he said that he wanted to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, which meant also being ready to know the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and thus somehow, to attain to the resurrection of the dead (Philippians 3:10). We may indeed have to die to live, but the majesty and might of resurrection life in Christ so far outshines the paltry resuscitated religious life most of us try to hold onto, there really is no comparison.

The statistics tell a story all by themselves. During the ten days of Proclamation, over 400 people joined together to read the whole of the Bible aloud, from the book of Genesis through to the end of the Book of Revelation. Countless more came simply to listen to the richness and beauty of God’s Word, read from almost twenty different English translations, as well as in French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Swedish, Dutch and Japanese.  Readers were men and women from across the generations, from twelve different congregations along with two Christian organizations. All were bound together by their faith in Christ and their love for the scriptures.

While the facts and figures are amazing in themselves, what really mattered, however, was that God showed up. This was not just a human undertaking. God was present through the Holy Spirit to bring about something far more important. People from our different churches gathered together and gained a fresh sense of being one people of God here in the Cowichan Valley. It did not matter if Baptists were reading scripture in the Presbyterian church, or folks from the Alliance congregation were proclaiming the Word within an Anglican place of worship. We were all Christians together, feasting on the manna of God’s Word, hungry for his truth and blessed with being together in his praise.

New relationships were forged, and a deeper mutual regard and esteem was forged. While the folk from the Nazarene or Pentecostal churches might have differing traditions in worship from those who normally attend St. Peter’s Anglican, or there might be variations of emphasis on a few fine points of doctrine between the Salvation Army and we Presbyterians (for that matter,  there are often more than a few points of disagreement over doctrine within congregations!) all that mattered during the ten days of Proclamation was that God’s Word was being read, heard, celebrated and enjoyed.

After virtually every portion of scripture was completed, the reader would end by saying “This is the Word of the Lord.” And the folk in the pew listening would respond with this profound note of awe and respect:  “Thanks be to God!”  We found ourselves bound by this sense of wonder as to how this ancient text resounded in our contemporary lives with such clarity, power and meaning. God’s Word is truly alive and moving, as relevant for our lives and churches today as when those words were uttered centuries ago by storytellers and priests, prophets and apostles.

But something else happened as God’s Word was read and we sensed God’s Spirit at work in our midst. I believe something shook and moved within the heavenly, spiritual realms. It was not that the scriptures were read aloud in a couple of church buildings. God’s people in this Valley were proclaiming the very Word of the Lord and its power was echoing over this whole community. God’s sovereign claim and truth was being affirmed over every power and principality that would try to hold sway in opposition to the Kingdom, and I believe his Word will not return to him empty. Something profound happened not only in the heart of those of us who shared directly in this Proclamation, making us more determined and eager to be the means by which God’s truth would penetrate every dark corner and the promise and grace of Christ would confront and claim every heart and mind in this region.  I believe, to use imagery from the book of Revelation, that the angel of the Church of the Valley was roused from a sleep of timidity and uncertainty, and made strong to assert the challenge and invitation of the gospel to the watching world around us. While no single event is, by itself, the beginning of a revival, I believe none the less that this Proclamation of God’s Word has summoned a renewed longing and commitment to work and pray together for that end, that revival would happen in us by the Word and Spirit and flow like a mighty force of hope and blessing across this Valley and across this Island.

Near the end of the Book of Revelation, we read: The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life. My prayer is that, having drunk of that water of life flowing in the Bible, the Bride and Body of Christ here in the Cowichan Valley has found afresh its cry, “Come, Lord Jesus. Come!”

The little orphan boy, in Charles Dicken’s classic, Oliver Twist, dared to pose the outrageous request for a second helping before the orphanage manager, Mr. Bumble: “Please sir, I want some more.”

I couldn’t help but remember that line as over these past several days I have had the pleasure of simply sitting and listening to hour after hour of readings from the scriptures. During the Proclamation event (the ten day event in which the whole of the Bible is read aloud) I have found my heart blessed tenfold in listening to men and women read aloud from the scriptures. Some of the days, I have been able to listen for as much as eight out of the fourteen hours of reading, yet at the end, there was no sense of exhaustion, only exultation, because of the richness of the Word. And I wanted more.

Others who have been participants have said much the same. The sweet stream of truth and light and grace that flows from God’s Word has not only a wondrous refreshing quality, but also a stimulating one in which my appetite for the story of God’s saving work and redeeming power simply grows and grows. The Word sparks a deeper thirst even as it satisfies, so that each hour of reading made me long to hear more of it proclaimed afresh. There is something altogether powerful in the Word read aloud—after all it is first of all an oral text meant for hearing long before it is one meant for merely reading. How ear deprived we are of the Word, and how deprived for big, meaty, solid banquets of the Word when often we try surviving on mere nibbles. Oh, how we need more.

What stops us? Certainly not the Lord. Seconds and thirds and endless helpings of his truth and grace await us every time we begin to read the scriptures. Oh, that God would make us insatiable in wanting the more that He longs to provide.