Author: Steve

Water was flowing out from under the altar. I’ve liked this week’s text from Ezekiel 47:1-12 ever since I was introduced to it at the age of 14. We literally saw water flowing out below the steps to the altar, because of a baptistery malfunction in our little Baptist church. Our pastor then was a great Bible student. He remembered this passage and pulled off an extemporaneous sermon on it for the evening service.

Ezekiel’s river effects a bit of a divide among biblical scholars, all of whom acknowledge its symbolic significance, but some of whom also insist on it as literal prophecy. They are quite convinced that, when Christ returns, part of the geographical features of the earth at that point will be a river flowing down from the (rebuilt?) temple in Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. I’m not quite sure how they make that literally consistent with Revelation 21:22 and the indication that there will no temple in the new Jerusalem.

Yet even the hyper-literalists agree that what is most important here is what is symbolized by the river Ezekiel is shown. It’s ever-deepening flow and its life-giving properties show us the grace and love of God flowing toward us, toward all the world to restore and heal not only human beings, but all the natural order.

It’s symbolic eschatology, apocalyptic vision, but it is also truth about how the grace of God in Christ flows out into the world today. It begins in the sanctuary, the place where God’s people meet God’s presence. We worship and then go out, carrying the love and grace of Christ with us into the world around us, just like Ezekiel’s river flows out of the temple to water even the most desolate land around it.

That river from the temple restores life to the Dead Sea in verses 8-10. God’s grace restores life to all of us who are dead in our sins and failures and hopelessness. May we receive that refreshing flow into our own hearts and then carry it along to everyone around us.

We watched my daughter hop from rock to rock. While the kids were home over Christmas, we dug out old home videos to embarrass our daughters in front of husband or boyfriend, respectively. One of the videos showed our oldest about age 7 gleefully hopping around the creek below our cabin in Oak Creek Canyon, Arizona. I remembered doing the same when I was her age. These days I still go to the creek, but I’m usually carrying a fishing rod and I step much more carefully.

In fact, as any reader of this blog might guess, I’ve now floated on or waded in any number of rivers around the US and Canada. The water calls and I can’t stay away. Time by or in a river is essential for me.

This blog is inspired by the fact that a River seems to be one of the keys to Scripture. From Genesis to Revelation, a River, sometimes specifically called “The River of God” keeps springing up as an image of God’s presence and blessing. So this Sunday I’m returning to and enhancing a sermon series from many years ago which focuses on that River of God in the Bible.

Of course, the beginning of rivers is water. The Gospel lesson for Sunday, Matthew 3:13-17 shows us the Spirit coming down upon Jesus as He was baptized in the Jordan River. But I’m choosing as my sermon text Genesis 1:1-10, where we see the Spirit first hovering over water at the beginning of creation.

That hovering Spirit, both over Jesus at His baptism and over the primal waters, is God gently present, watching and caring. That word to “hover” implies a mother bird caring for her young. That is how God loves His creation and calls it into fulfillment and completion. That is how God called His own Son into the fullness of His mission to save us.

The Spirit of God is still hovering over the waters of our lives, whether still and beautiful or deep and troubled. God broods over us, lifting, helping, encouraging, saving, making us the people He wants us to be. May that Spirit rest gently over whatever waters you are in right now.

I have a confidence that things can be made to work. As I went to write this blog entry yesterday, I discovered that the WordPress dashboard from which I enter my blog editor had disappeared. 10 minutes on hold and then 15 minutes with a tech from our web host produced no results. I tried again this morning, checking error logs myself and then called back. With the new information a different tech got the dashboard to display again and I thought all was well. However, after I hung up and went to begin writing I discovered that none of the links on the dashboard worked. I still couldn’t get to the editor. I considered calling back, then noticed a new version of WordPress was available. What could I lose? I updated and voila! everything was working again.

So here I am writing about faith for the fourth Sunday in Advent after that experience of “faith” in software and such breaking down for awhile. Yet I was confident there was a fix, because, well, that’s just how these things usually work.

One’s trust in computer systems and their accompanying technicians can be sorely tested, but faith in God is a story of a different order. At the beginning of Romans, 1:1-7, Paul declares his trust in, his service to the “gospel of God,” which he then in verse 3 says is the “the gospel concerning his Son,” that is, Jesus Christ.

Paul has this confidence in the Gospel he preaches because, as verse 2 says, God promised it “beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures.” Paul trusts what the Gospel says because it was confirmed beforehand by what God foretold through the prophets.

Then in verse 4 Paul cites further confirmation of the Gospel he trusts and preaches in the fact that Jesus was vindicated as the Son of God by the Holy Spirit who raised Him from the dead. In short, Paul has faith because he has heard and seen what God has done and so trusts in what God will do.

All this comes down to the point in verse 5 that his trust in Jesus Christ gives him a mission “to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles.” Paul’s own faith is to result the faith of others. His faith is to shine in the world in such a way that others come to faith.

I’ll just quickly note that Paul’s faith and Christian faith in general is a faith with content and with practical implications. That’s implied in the phrase in verse 5, unique to Romans, appearing at both the beginning and the end of the letter, “the obedience of faith.” It’s not just some vague faith in general, some Hollywood “just believe” injunction, but a solid trust in what God has done and will do in and through Jesus. And this faith in Jesus changes us, makes us obedient to its subject. As we grow in faith, in trust in Christ, the way we live is changed. We become more obedient to the form of life we see in Jesus, more full of grace, full of love, full of peace.

So the closing verse of this greeting which opens Romans is a benediction on those who experience faith in Christ and shine with that faith in obedience, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” May we obediently let our faith shine more and more so that with Paul we might invite others into that grace and peace.

It’s beautiful, but we’re ready for it to go now. I mean the snow, of course. After six days our street at home still looks like a woodsy winter postcard, fir trees and rooftops loaded with the white stuff. And our church parking lot still has two or three inches of packed ice and snow covering 90 percent of it. The main roads around town show a lot of bare pavement, but driving is still an adventure with intersections and side streets a challenge.

So everyone is growing a little impatient. Drivers move a little faster than they should and conversation about the weather just sounds dismal and frustrated as we hear forecasts of some possible freezing rain tomorrow afternoon.

But a week of waiting for the ice and snow to melt is pretty tiny compared to the centuries Christians have waited for the Lord’s return. It’s not surprising some of us might grow a little impatient, a little dismal and frustrated. I recently read how the Seventh Day Adventists were a little sad and frustrated to celebrate their 150th anniversary as a denomination this past year. The name “Adventist” indicates their founding vision as a group expecting the Lord’s second Advent to happen very soon, in their lifetimes. Yet here they are, a century and a half later, still waiting. So are we all.

Yet across those centuries, the apostle James still speaks to us in this Sunday’s text, James 5:7-11, which begins “Be patient, therefore, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord.” Our other texts strike similar notes as in Matthew 11:2-11 we find John the Baptist growing weary and unsure of Jesus as he languishes in prison. In Isaiah 35:1-10 the prophet calls for the strengthening of weak hands, the firming of feeble knees, the reassurance of fearful hearts, with the promise in verse 4, “He will come and save you!”

James, in verse 10, refers us to the example of patience in the prophets who suffered while announcing and waiting for the coming of the Messiah, only to have the first Advent of Christ delay until hundreds of years later. Yet their patience was blessed and ultimately rewarded. Their prophecy and patience was vindicated when Jesus was born. All this to say nothing of Job (verse 11) who knew very little of the “redeemer” he awaited.

Those ancient examples of patience are tough acts to follow, especially for folks like us who get worn down by the inconvenience of a little out-of-the-ordinary snow. Yet our hope is as sure as it was when Isaiah announced that God would come and that “everlasting joy shall be upon their heads,” for those who wait for Him. Let us seek that sort of patience as we continue the holy Christian practice of waiting for our Lord. As sure as all this slippery stuff is going to melt one of these days, He will come.

Maybe rightly so, Advent caught me busy and off guard enough that last week’s text and sermon went by without blogging anything. So here we are preparing for the second Sunday in Advent, following our church theme for the season of “Rise and Shine,” which was last Sunday’s sermon title.

For this week we turn to a text, Romans 15:4-13, which is largely about hope. There is a great deal we can say about this wonderful gift of God, which is also one of the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. Yet as I read through this text, which begins and ends with verses speaking about hope, I was particularly struck with how that hope is represented here, in a way that may be contrary to our usual grasp of what it means to hope.

George Frederick Watts painted an image which characterizes how we often think of hope. He portrays hope as a bent, bowed woman, blindfolded, in a tattered dress, sitting atop the world and playing a harp with only one string. Hope, then, is a person clinging desperately to some faint note of music heard only dimly despite hardship and tragedy.

There is value in understanding that hope can exist even in the cruelest and most desperate of circumstances. But the painting’s depiction of hope leaves out much that is important in the Christian understanding. G. K. Chesterton criticized the painting, saying that it would be better titled “Despair.”

The primary deficit of Watts’ painting is the loneliness of it. Hope for him is a solitary figure playing one lone string, listening to her own music. In contrast, after calling attention to the encouragement and hope promised in the Scriptures, Paul in verse 5 of our text speaks of our harmony and unity with each other. Hope is not the solitary desperate optimism of a person alone, but the united “one voice” of God’s people together.

Then in verses 7 to 12, Paul expounds on Scripture’s promised hope by talking about how we welcome each other in Christ because God has welcomed Gentiles into salvation alongside His chosen people, the Jews. Verses 8 and 9 argue that the confirmation of the promises made in Scripture to the Jewish patriarchs is this new welcome of all people into God’s love and mercy.

So Christian hope is a virtue we share in as a gathered, united people. It happens in company with one another, where barriers that divide us are transcended and broken down. If you wanted to follow out Watts’ imagery, hope would be several ragged figures, maybe each playing only a single string or raising a weak voice, but together creating a glorious symphony or chorus of praise to God.

I see hope, then, when we open our church doors on cold nights for warming those who need shelter. Volunteers, both from the homeless community and from well-off homes in our church, work side-by-side to care for those who will be guests for the night.

I see hope when I enter one of our Sunday School classrooms and see children of two or three different races and languages gathered around a little table learning about Jesus.

I see hope when our congregation exchanges greetings and pictures with Christians in India, supporting each other in mutual prayer.

I see hope whenever people come together and unite, despite differences of all sorts, in faith in Jesus Christ and with confidence in what He is doing in the world to heal our conflicts and divisions and bring God’s joy and peace to all people. That’s the hope Paul means here, when in verse 12 he points to Isaiah 11:10, who speaking of the Messiah, the “root of Jesse,” says, “in him the Gentiles will hope.” And then in verse 13 prays that the “God of hope” will fill all His people together with joy and peace, so that they may “abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

May we keep on rising and shining with that hope, showing the world how people can live together in joy and peace which come from God the Father through Christ our Savior by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Artistic depictions of the Crucifixion give us various perspectives. We often look straight on as if from a viewpoint suspended in the air somewhere in front ofJesus as He hangs there. Other paintings have us looking up at Jesus from the point of view of a Roman soldier or one of the grieving women. Salvador Dali’s “Christ of St. John of the Cross,” famously has us look down as if from God’s perspective viewing the top of the cross and Jesus’ bowed head.

With regard to our text this week, Luke 23:32-43, about the thieves hung alongside Jesus, there are only a couple of perspectives seen in Christian art. Many, many paintings, etc. show us the three crosses in a line, with the two criminals flanking Jesus. An occasional painting, like this one from Titian, focus in on the “good” thief and invite us into his conversation with Jesus. But no one ever lets us view the scene through one of the thieves own eyes, looking at Jesus sideways, across the beam of his own cross.

That unpainted perspective, the thief’s-eye view of Jesus, might help us toward the spiritual perspective for which this text almost cries out. The human race, you and I, are hanging there on either side of Jesus. The one great question is which side we are on. Will we, with the one thief, regard Jesus as no different from ourselves, an unfortunate person caught up in the same misery which we all at sometime suffer, with no hope or way out? Or will we look from the other side and see, yes, another suffering human being like ourselves, but also a Man who can offer grace and hope to those around Him? That second perspective is the way I’d like to see the Cross.

The last couple weeks I’ve been shopping around, trying to find a better deal on home and auto insurance. I’d like to quit spending so much, but be well prepared in case something awful happens.

Of course there is not really any way to prepare for the sort of disaster which struck the Philippines this past weekend. Like the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 or Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it’s hard to imagine how one might prepare. These catastrophic events simply roll over human lives and people are left mourning the dead and with some aid trying to rebuild what was destroyed.

Responding to the disciples’ admiration of the Temple stonework, Jesus in our text, Luke 21:5-19, predicts catastrophic disaster of the sort which allows little preparation. The primary focus is the man-made disaster to which He points in verse 6, prophesying the stones of the Temple being torn down in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.

Jesus seems to look farther ahead in verses 9-11, prophesying both more wars and also natural disasters, earthquakes, famines and plagues. These are the signs preceding His return.

In the remainder of the text, verses 12-15, there is a warning about persecution which covers both the crisis of 70 A.D. and the end times, as well as all the ages in between. This past Sunday we observed a time of prayer for the persecuted Church throughout the world.

Oddly enough, Jesus counsels no preparation of an apologia, a defense, against those who will and do arrest and try Christians. Verse 13 sees these moments as “an opportunity to testify,” but verse 14 directs His followers not to make up speeches to deliver in such times before the rulers of the world. Instead, we are invited to rely on the wisdom and words Christ will give in such moments.

What Jesus says seems to run counter to I Peter 3:15 which calls us to be ready to give an apologia, a defense, for the hope which is within us. My guess is that that Jesus wants us to forego the preparation of a legal defense. We are not to spend our time worrying about how to escape the false charges, etc. which are brought against Christians. But the very fact that imprisonment and trial is an opportunity to witness means that the sort of account Peter advises is always appropriate. And to our own knowledge of our faith and trust in Christ, the Lord will add a supernatural measure of help and wisdom when we need to speak before hostile authorities.

Ultimately, though, words run out in the face of hostility toward God and His Son, toward the truth. So verses 16 and 17 warn that even people close to Christians may betray them, and that hatred will be the order of the day. For all that, Jesus does not suggest any defense, but only the trust assured in verses 18 and 19, that we will not perish and that by enduring our souls will be saved.

It’s tough advice for people like us who are used to looking ahead and taking every measure to be prepared and ready for disaster. Jesus reminds us that our ultimate hope and defense is always God, always Himself. Staying close to Jesus is our best preparation for whatever comes.

As my wife likes to say, though it’s not quite literally true, we met in a class on the immortality of the soul. Joseph Bobik led a little seminar at Notre Dame on philosophical arguments for the soul’s immortality. There were three students: Beth, myself, and Jay, my best friend, who later became our best man. Since we “met” there thinking about things eternal, we took it as a sign that our love was to be eternal.

So at first glance I don’t like our text for this week, Luke 20:27-40. What Jesus has to say about marriage in the kingdom seems on the face of it to suggest our love is not destined to be eternal, but to come to an end as we assume some sort of genderless, passionless existence like the angels. So what happens to this wonderful relationship with my dear wife (34 years now) then?

As usual, we need to look at the larger context of what Jesus is saying, and His main concern is to refute the Sadducees’ disbelief in the resurrection. They’ve come up with what they think is a reductio ad absurdum of belief in the resurrection, that there will be no way to sort out prior marriage relationships when a person has had more than one spouse.

Thinking about my own family and my father’s two marriages and at least two additional relationships with women, it’s apparent to me that the Sadducees would have no lack of actual examples in our time. Families have gotten so disordered, that even assuming a Christian conversion for all involved, there would be no way to put all those relationships back together in any way that made sense. So does that make an afterlife, particularly a bodily resurrection of all believers, absurd?

No, Jesus wants us to see a couple things. First, if we are to be raised up to live forever, there will be no need for procreation to preserve the human race. It’s an old understanding that has been almost lost in our time, but the primary purpose of marriage, of the human family, is the begetting and nurturing of children. But if humanity will continue forever without procreation, marriage is not necessary.

The second thing to see is that Jesus focuses on the primary relationship any human being is meant to have, a relationship with God. The point of being like the angels in verse 36 is not a genderless existence, it’s what Jesus says it is, being children of God. As whole, healthy, complete children of God we will first and foremost be brothers and sisters in Him. That will be our primary identity, not spouse or friend or parent or child of human parents.

For what it’s worth, and Jesus and Scripture as a whole are silent on this, I can’t believe that the special relationships between husband and wife, between parent and child, or between really good friends for that matter, will simply dissolve in the resurrection as we enjoy eternal life. Instead, as mystical and murky as it sounds, I see them somehow being transcended and taken up into that greater and more perfect love we will enjoy with God as our Father, through the grace of Jesus, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. To be like the angels will not be to have all those human connections we cherish disappear, it will be to have them perfected and restored in a life and unity that is like God’s own unity as the Trinity.

But, as Paul says about other marriage matters in I Corinthians 7:12, that last paragraph is “I, not the Lord.” I can’t prove it strictly from the text or from any other text. I can only hope that it is in the spirit of what I know from the text and from the rest of Scripture about our Lord and His eternal design for us. If it’s not as I say, it can only be something better, something more intimate and full of grace and joy. So as Jesus tells us here in verse 28, God is the God of the living, of life, and if “to him all of them are alive,” then we all will live abundantly and joyfully, no matter what our marital status is.

I just got off a plane last night, very thankful that I had a good seat (exit row) with room to stretch out my long legs. Flying is probably the only situation where I am a bit unhappy to be somewhat tall and find myself so often so uncomfortable. Most of the time I’m happy to look at the world from a slightly elevated vantage point.

Yet my satisfaction with my height is chastened a bit by this week’s text, Luke 19:1-10, where I find Jesus very much favoring a shorter person. And Zacchaeus is not just physically short. Though he is wealthy, as a tax collector he comes out short in the social and spiritual dimensions of life. He is dishonest and disliked by most respectable people. Yet this is the man whose home Jesus decides to grace that day in Jericho.

I wonder how many “little” people, whether literally or figuratively small, I ignore or overlook in my daily life. Do I go looking for them like Jesus did, in order to treat them with dignity and respect? Or do I just focus on getting and keeping a nice roomy seat for myself in life’s journey.

The flip side of all this is the promise that when I’m genuinely feeling small, there is the promise that Jesus will be there. When we let ourselves be little rather than big, He says, “Today salvation has come to this house.” May we all learn from Zacchaeus a little smallness, and learn from our Lord a willingness to be with and among the little people of this world.

I always thought that this coming Sunday’s text, Luke 18:1-8, was about personal prayer. The last sermon I preached on it, 24 years ago, took that approach. Just keep after God long enough in prayer and you will get what you want. I said it a little more subtly than that, but that was the gist.

A little study and reflection today shows I was a bit misled. There is certainly a call here to persistence in prayer. That’s how the parable is introduced in verse 1. Yet this is not just a repeat of the themes of the parable of the neighbor coming at midnight in Luke 11. The call to persistent prayer is for the church together, the gathered community of Jesus people. And the object of prayer is not personal needs, but the coming of the kingdom, the final vindication of God’s people. It is prayer for justice.

It is very significant that the primary character of the parable is a judge. Unlike the parable in Luke 11, the object of the request is not food, not basic needs, but justice. Widows were one of the poorer and more abused classes of people in Jesus’ time. This parable is a window on the downtrodden, especially the downtrodden of God’s people, seeking a just response to their suffering.

Praying for justice is thus not quite like praying for daily bread or healing or even immediate economic well-being. It has a future focus. It’s the same focus as the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come…” So we need to read the last verse, verse 8, to fully understand the promised answer which will “quickly” come. It is the coming of the Son of Man which finally answers the constant and faithful prayer for justice. It’s when Jesus returns that God’s people, especially the poor, will be vindicated and given what is just.

Verse 8 also tells us the attitude this parable teaches. It’s faith in the midst of injustice and adversity. It’s clinging to trust in God and a habit of prayer even when evil and injustice seem to have the upper hand. And I think we could argue that it is also faithful working on the side of God against injustice wherever and whenever it is found, waiting in hope for the Lord to complete that work.

It’s a difficult parable, but read thoughtfully and carefully it has much more to offer than just a call to keep praying for personal needs.

Beth and I watched “Margin Call” the other night. It’s not my usual sort of film. I like lots of action and a happy ending. But I watched through to the end the fictionalized story of financial executives in a firm like Goldman Sachs dealing with their initial discovery of a crisis that would lead to a major sell-down, huge losses and eventually the recession of 2008.

The scene most relevant to this week’s sermon on Luke 16:19-31, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, is an elevator ride. Executives played by Simon Baker and Demi Moore share an elevator with a cleaning woman and her cart. For the whole time they talk to each other over her head as if she does not exist. They are discussing who will take the fall for the financial disaster about to happen and they totally ignore this person who will probably lose her job and all her savings.

Jesus gives us a picture (this is just a story like other parables, not true events as some have imagined) of a rich man who totally ignores the poor man Lazarus who sits at his gate. Unlike the movie, in Jesus’ parable there is judgment for this callous neglect of the poor by the rich. The rich man lands in Hades and Lazarus in “Abraham’s bosom,” a way of describing the abode of the righteous in the next life.

From the fiery torment of Hades, in verse 24, the rich man calls out for Abraham to send Lazarus with a cooling drop of water. He’s told that God has justly reversed things. He was comfortable in this life, now it is Lazarus’ turn to enjoy the comforts of God. It’s impossible to bridge the chasm between Paradise and Hades.

The depth of the rich man’s selfishness is evident in verse 27. His next concern is to have Lazarus go and warn the rich man’s brothers about their spiritual danger. He expresses no regret for his neglect of Lazarus and still sees the poor man as a lackey to come to the aid of his family.

There is a wonderful Christian irony in the last verse about whether one who rises from the dead will be believed, but the main message is a warning to all of us who are better off than others around us. Beware of ignoring the poor. The rich man ended up in the “hot seat,” but we are all in the hot seat when confronted with those in need. Will we do better?

So I just searched Google News for “Ponzi.” I was looking for one or two current examples of dishonest financial management to illustrate this week’s sermon on Luke 16:1-13, the parable of the “unjust steward,” or “dishonest manager,” or however you might find it translated and interpreted.

I was blown away to discover at least 7 or 8 current stories about the trial, convictions, etc. of various Ponzi schemers across the country and from several different professions and backgrounds. Among them were a former star University of Connecticut basketball player, an attorney, a house candidate and army reservist in Hawaii, and a Christian preacher and financial manager. Each of them had bilked people out of millions of dollars.

Most of us would be happy to see dishonest financial professionals locked up for years and all their assets taken to repay their victims, who often lose everything in these schemes. Yet when we look into our Gospel lesson for this week, we find Jesus setting up a dishonest manager as an example for us. It’s no wonder that most commentators see this parable as one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult parable of them all.

A few interpreters try to realign things here to suppose that this shifty fellow is actually doing something good in verses 5-7, the amounts removed from his master’s clients’ debts being either his own exorbitant commission or excessive interest charged by the master. As pretty as that picture might be, no, this fellow is slashing legitimate payments on his master’s accounts in order to garner favors from the debtors. Verse 8 calls him “dishonest” after this activity takes place.

The trait of the manager to be emulated is, of course, not the dishonest financial practice. It’s his shrewdness in how he uses money to build relationships that is the point of the parable. Our take away is exactly what is said in verse 9, to use our money in such a way that we will be welcomed into an eternal home, that is, to use what we have to glorify God and bless others. Basically that means we will be generous givers, letting go of “unrighteous mammon” (the literal words in verse 11) in order to be given the true riches of eternal life.

Jesus is trading on irony verse 8. When it comes to money, “the children of this age,” non-Christians, are smarter in using it to get what they want than the “children of light,” Christian believers, are in using what they have to seek their desire for God and His kingdom. The point is not to be dishonest, but to be as shrewd=wise in investing and using what we have for eternal purposes as others are shrewd in manipulating money for less honorable goals.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis talked about God sending the human race “good dreams,” before the coming of Christ, stories about a god who dies and comes to life again. He saw the pagan myths as foreshadows of what became reality in the death and resurrection of Jesus. I like to think that the same thing happened in regard to the primary image in our text this week, Luke 15:1-10.

I feel like I grew up familiar with the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd carrying home the lost lamb draped over His shoulders. It is a picture I probably first saw in early childhood in some poorly drawn Bible illustration or in one of those old Sunday School posters. I would recognize it anywhere as a symbol of our faith in a gentle, loving, saving Lord.

So imagine my surprise the first time I stood thirty years ago in the Acropolis Museum in Athens and gazed up at the sculpture pictured here. This is the moschophoros, the “calf-bearer,” and it is from nearly 600 years before Christ. Almost as ancient is the next picture of a kriophoros, a “ram bearer” which depicts the god Hermes carrying a ram on his shoulders, coming from the story that Hermes saved a city from a plague by carrying the ram around the walls.

God sent the ancient Greeks good dreams of the Savior who described Himself in our parables for this week, the One who seeks out and carries home the lost, rejoicing in their redemption.

Jewish people had their own background images of the shepherd-king in David and in the Old Testament’s depiction of God as the Shepherd of Israel. Yet because of preparation by the calf-bearer and ram-bearer images, the Greek-speaking ancient Christians picked up and fell in love with the image of the Good Shepherd carrying home a lost lamb. It became the most used image in the Christian art which decorated the catacombs.

These parables are small, but the picture especially of the first is a powerful description of God’s love for us in Christ. We are lost, helpless and alone and the love of Jesus seeks us out and brings us home. It’s something we do well to remember whoever we are. We don’t come to Jesus or merit His grace by our own efforts. We don’t find Jesus. He finds us. May we be humble and ready (that’s the essence of “repentance”) to be found and brought home, as many times as we drift away.

There may be some irony in the fact that the Senate is hearing arguments about military action against the government of Syria just as the assigned Gospel lesson, Luke 14:25-33, asks in verse 31, “Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand?”

Though the point of the parable of the warring kings and the preceding parable of building a tower is the cost of following Jesus, there does seem to be a more literal application of these verses in the present military discussion. Assad could be seen as the king with a lesser force, needing to consider whether he dare oppose the might of U.S. forces and persist in his fierce efforts to hold power in Syria. On the other hand, it might be well for the U.S. to put ourselves into the parable and consider the awful cost of entering yet another military arena, a cost in both American lives and money as well as in Syrian lives. Not to mention the very real possibility of furthering the destabilization of Syria and the larger Mideast.

Again, Jesus’ point is something else. Building and warfare are simply illustrations of costly endeavors which one considers well before beginning. Yet maybe tying these parables to very real situations will help us realize that the costs of following Christ are also very real. Belief in Jesus is not meant to be a quick, cheap insurance policy for eternity. Its consequences and demands are immediate and tangible.

T.W. Manson is supposed to have said, “Salvation may be free, but it is not cheap.” And of course there is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s masterful denunciation of “cheap grace” in The Cost of Discipleship. How can we preach and live the kind of expensive and demanding discipleship which Jesus is teaching us here?

“It’s a sin to bore a kid with the Gospel.” That’s the often-quoted line of Jim Rayburn, founder of Young Life. It means that those who witness Christ and Scripture to young people should do their best to keep their presentation exciting, lively and entertaining. I’ve always felt there was something not quite right about that approach, but recently I’ve come to the conclusion that instead of spending oodles of money and effort to keep kids entertained and not bored with Jesus, we should be teaching kids that it’s a sin to be bored, especially with the Gospel.

That boredom is a sin was the conclusion the Church came to in the fifth century when John Cassian wrote about the struggles of desert monks. Their particular problem was staying awake and alert in the heat of midday, when the body is sluggish and thoughts were easily distracted from prayer and Scripture. Those monks would think of other monasteries where the food was better and where spiritual life was deeper. They would look around and find their own situation dull and uninteresting. In short, they were bored.

Cassian identified this “noon-day devil” (from Psalm 91:6) with the Greek concept of acedia, what we now call “sloth,” and it came to be seen as one of the seven deadly sins. Our English word “sloth” is unfortunate because it suggests simple laziness. But acedia is a deeper problem of the soul, which the middle ages called a kind of sadness, a despair with regard to spiritual life. “Apathy” may be a closer concept in English.

We also need to distinguish the sin of sloth from mere laziness because excessive busyness can be a modern day cover for sloth (i.e., spiritual apathy or boredom). Picture the person who cannot remain in place for even brief times of prayer or worship. Picture the Christians who bop from church to church seeking new spiritual highs in new and different programs and ministries. Picture all of us rushing on-line to buy the latest Christian best-seller in the hope that it will refresh our lagging faith.

It’s all tied up with our consumer culture of course. We are deadly afraid of being bored, so retailers make fortunes providing us with constant novelty and newness of experience. We criticize books and films if they offer nothing new or different from previous entertainment. And we never stop to wonder if the problem is not with the goods we’re offered but with some spiritual deficit in ourselves which makes us bored with what both the world and God give us.

When we are bored with an activity we leave it and move on to some other way to stay busy. But bringing that habit to spiritual life leaves us open to disaster because we are tempted to leave the basic center of our faith and keep moving on trying to find new excitement.

Ultimately, sloth is a deadly sin because it causes us to despair of and make no effort toward spiritual good. Bored with our faith, feeling as though what we do makes no difference for ourselves or others, we abandon activity that is pleasing to God, like prayer, Bible study, worship and service. Again, we may mask the underlying slothful attitude toward Christian life by an outward busyness in many other activities.

Perhaps the deadliest form of sloth might be an appearance of extreme busyness in regard to spiritual things, whether it’s church activities or personal devotion. Yet underneath is a sad despair regarding the ultimate worth of spiritual life and an inward boredom with it all.

Let’s talk more about the sin of boredom.