John 13:31-35
Acts 11:1-8
Revelation 21
Lately I haven’t felt a whole lot like loving people.
I don’t necessarily mean the people that we meet and greet and see everyday, I don’t really mean family, I mean, filled with that all reaching love for all our fellow people in the world. The kind of Love that Christ is talking about through this verse in John.
Honestly, I’ve felt like kicking the tar out of a couple of people in the world. My mother calls that reaction “righteous fire,” which she says, and I believe her, that I received from her blood. There seems to have been a rash of bad news lately. Starting with the university shooting, and ending, for me at least, with an interview with an author on TV.
The author they were interviewing was Christopher Hitchens, who recently came out with a book entitled, “god is not Great.” I’d like to show him some righteous fire right where it counts. I repeat, I do not feel like loving people.
If you haven’t heard of this book yet, its subtitle tells it all: “How religions poison everything.” He begins in the book to dislike the three big world religions equally, that is Judaism, Islam, and Christianity – but it becomes quickly apparent he reserves a special viciousness for the Christians. In this book he espouses that we have no more need to call upon God, when “God is entirely superfluous in order to make sense of the world.” I tell you the world doesn’t make any sense to me at all without God at the core of it.
The rest of the book is ill conceived and poorly thought out garbage about how all the wars in the past 300 years were created by religion. Which is true only to the extent that it was the people of these religions, not God, who began and fought these wars. So, if anything the book should be called, “People are not Great,” which is something I’m sure we all know very well!
I would like to leave room in my anger, however, CS Lewis was, after all, a staunch atheist before his powerful conversion experience, so I will say that many of the criticisms that the book has about the people who profess Christianity are pretty well founded. He talks about blatant money-grubbing, jaw dropping hypocrisy, and sex scandals, of course. And rightfully, these are all the things that any person of faith would be able to conceded that the denominations should do without, and in fact do struggle against constantly. Again though, I’ll point out, that’s all about people not being great, not God.
And yet, Hitchen’s opinions are often echoed by the atheist society. Which just really boils my blood. The truly great scientists will be the first to tell you that there are things, even now, that exceed the greatest of our understanding. The physicist Freeman Dyson said that, “the universe behaves as though it knew we were coming!” The more we learn the more is revealed how little we know. Einstein himself was a God-fearing man, who is often misquoted by the atheists as their poster child. Even when he was alive they did this, much to his great disgust! Einstein began his early adulthood as a devout Jew who then at one point in his live, gave up his faith entirely. And yet, at the age of 50 he began the journey back to God, because what he was uncovering about the universe, for him, held no other explanation. And when even asked about Christ he replied in and interview that “ No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates ion every word. No myth is filled with such life!”
This is the great atheist mascot.
And yet, in some way, some how, the faithful out there when reading this book, or listening to the interview, or when approached by a colleague or co-worker, will have their faith shaken by the information, by the inquiries into their faith. Some will be undone.
Though who among us hasn’t lost faith? A hiccup in an unshakeable understanding? For some the devil’s words of doubt can reach us just after a time of great crisis, or pain in our lives. We can be culled from the herd of the faithful more easily when we are spiritually sick. I have felt faith slipping away, heard the panting of temptation close by, and wondered what I was going to hold on too. There is a song that says, “my faith is like shifting sands, and so I stand on Grace.” And what is Grace but Love? The Love that Christ has, that the Father has, that Love that accepts the children into the fold regardless of deed, the love that does not expect works, the Love that is the stable stalwart thing that makes this existence mean something.
We are more easily broken I think the more rigid we are. The more we think we know everything about God, or Christ, or the Holy Bible the more easily we are felled when tragedy comes. In John 13:33 Jesus calls us children, and how true is that? Like children we cling to things we think we understand and when something new comes along we shout and stamp and say NO NO NO! It has to be THIS way! The Jewish church in Judea we exactly the same. Peter, and remember now this is Peter, who was WITH Jesus during his ministry, there in the garden as he prayed, on of the closest to him of the apostles, and yet they balk at his understanding of Christ’s teaching for the world. They did more than that really, the Greek form of the word, contend, or criticize is diek rin onto which means truly to stand against, to oppose, to create a division. They were lining up on the other side of the room, ready to have it out with him.
And we can identify with that can’t we? Here are the believers who, up to this point assume three things about Christianity: (1) that followers will have to be Jews first, (2) that they will commit to the Law of Moses, and (3) that they will observe all the ceremonies and rituals of Judaism. After all they saw Christ as the Jewish messiah that had been awaited. And they were right. But that wasn’t the whole story.
Their faith was shaken, and to the core really, because what Peter does us upsets the basic foundation of the religion up to that point. This is huge, and when he gets back they are ready for him boy, they have been stewing about this the whole time and they are ready to bring him to the ground for this. Because their faith has been shaken. I’ve been reading a book recently by Rob Bell in which he compares an unhealthy faith is like a brick wall. Everything is built up on top on another, and if one of the bricks at the very bottom is found to be flawed--the whole thing comes crashing down. And that’s what was happening here in Judea and what can happen here just as easily.
This same book by Rob Bell, suggested that a healthy faith is more like a trampoline. Our faith really is like the fabric part, the part we bounce on, the part that lifts us up. The spring supporting the fabric, are the tenants that we believe that support our faith. You can take one out, examine it, look at it, and the trampoline still works. You can even change it a little, make it longer, or shorter so that it changes the bounce. Yet, through all of this it still remains a spring.
Peter is preparing the people of the church in Judea for the revelation of John years later. Part of the reading this week covered a chapter in Revelation, the beginning of Chapter Twenty-One to be exact. In that reading it talks about John seeing the promise of the new heaven and the new earth and the old things passing away, and the promise that there would be no more tears or sorrow in this new place. Look deeper into the prophecy though, and what do you find?
We must be willing to accept the passing away of the old things, before we can exist in the new. And at first that might sound easy, but how often we find our bad habits to be the most ingrained. We cannot let them go! Yet, the vision f John says that we can only have the sorrowless life if we can let the old things pass away.
Peter says that in order to come into the fullest expression of the Love Christ charged us with we must do this new thing! We must have this New understanding, as told to me by God.
So let the Atheist come. I’m not afraid of Hitchens and his book, let it be published, let it be wrung out in the streets, I’ll host him a book signing in my own living room even. Because this church, this collection of the faithful I know will stand firm or Grace. Will stand firm on that love of Christ. Love will be that KEY spring in the trampoline of our Faith together. Go ahead, take it out examine it! Look at it, dissect it, and try to twist it. Put it back and I’ll be lifted up twice as high.
Then we can all say, “I have new understanding every day. I see the new heaven and a new earth. I am ready to let the old fall away.”
Let’s let Peter come back to a welcome, instead of war. Lets bring him back and say, “Pete, what is this new thing you are doing? It sounds CRAZY, but tell us more. What’s God been saying to you?” Because you know what? I am determined, not to build a wall out of my faith.
We can make our faith stronger, so that in the times of trouble when we are going to be vulnerable, we will survive without being shaken. We can meet tragedy with the knowledge that God is Lord. That the great I am, IS, and will always be.
Because what does Christ tell us? That there will be love. This is one of the greatest in the last of the instructions that he is giving to the apostles before the crucifixion. If you want people to know you as my followers, the love each other.
And in this moment, there are no parables, no stories, just utter simplicity. Love each other.
That my friends is how we support one another through these trials of faith, through these great tests that life is going to inevitably throw at each and every one of us. Because in a community of faith there isn’t just one person on a trampoline, it’s a whole field full of people on trampolines all hooked in together. And it’s up to us all to say to the person that has all their spring taken out, “hey, that’s ok, hook up to my springs and you can bounce on them for a while till we get your back.” And it might be easy to think about a few people in a church who you wouldn’t mind really sharing with, or holding up, and that’s ok, because the natural tendency is to gravitate like towards like, but the true purpose of the faith, as charged to us by Christ himself is to be prepared, ready and able to meet with true and honest love all the members of the body. Because what was Christ love if not true and honest and the most pure and free of maliciousness or hurtful thoughts? And it’s his model we follow.
So let’s look to the vision of John at Patmos and seek out the New World that God has prepared for us, let’s look to Peter and see what new understanding is coming to us on the horizon, and lets meet all of these with emotion of Christ’s love and support for one another. Because, even when I feel like I can’t love, or when I am in no mood to view the world with the Kindness of Christ, I know I can turn to my brothers and sisters to hold me up, and make me strong, until I can do so again in the name of Jesus’ love.
