Author: Steve

I liked watching Guy Fieri travel around to “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives,” munching on BBQ, giant burritos, and huge pancakes. And I vividly recall an episode of “Man vs. Food,” where Adam Richman tackled a six-pound platter of king crab legs, salmon and a huge circle of reindeer sausage at an Anchorage, Alaska restaurant. Fortunately, I think, we no longer have a cable package that includes the Food Channel.

This week’s deadly sin, gluttony, is tough to pin down in relation to our society. On the one hand, Will Willimon argues that it’s the only one of the seven which we do not need anyone to tell us is a sin. The social pressure on those who overeat is already huge. Any number of doctors, health experts and fitness instructors seem to be warning us against gluttony. Overweight people are ostracized and discriminated against enough to make them feel plenty guilty for any excessive eating which contributes to their size.

On the other hand, there is the Food Channel. We Americans have available an incredible variety of food and we seem obsessed with it. Even if we don’t overeat, we seem very near to the description we find in this week’s text from Philippians 3:17 – 4:1, verse 19, “Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; their minds are set on earthly things.”

Gluttony is definitely mass overconsumption of food, but the evil spirit of gluttony is also present in other forms of food obsession, whether it’s an excessively gourmet taste or anorexia. It may not seem like much of sin, just over-indulging or over-focusing on a basic need. Yet gluttony makes the deadly list because it takes our attention away from God. It literally puts something else at the center of our beings.

I paraphrased Peter Kreeft last week to say that lust is not the greatest sin, just the most popular. I’m wondering now if that might not be better said of gluttony. We are all constantly tempted in relation to food. A person can be celibate and live, even live a happy, good life. But no one can go without eating. Our problems with food force us to confront how sin distorts and ruins even the simplest and best things in life, using them to draw us away from God.

We’ll need to think more about this together. In the meantime I just closed up the bag of Fritos rather than take another handful or two. May God have mercy on us all.

We’ve come a long way from 1976 presidential candidate Jimmy Carter admitted publicly in an interview with Playboy magazine that he had committed the sin Jesus condemns in our text this week, Matthew 5:27-30. “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” From any other lips it might have been merely a humble bit of transparency that most males would resonate with, but it was an embarrassing moment for Americans who viewed the Baptist Sunday School teacher candidate as a squeaky-clean replacement for the previous corrupt and foul-mouthed administration.

We’ve come a long way because it’s difficult to imagine many people being similarly shocked if a public figure were to make such a statement today. Appeals to lust have become entrenched in our entertainment as never before, and any sort of public moral censure has all but evaporated. Television shows regularly feature dialogue and images which would have earned a movie an “R” rating 20 or 30 years ago.

It is easy for Christian people to come down hard and condemning on all of this because the warnings in Scripture, including our text, are so clear. Yet we must not forget that this deadly sin of lust is not our worst problem. C. S. Lewis says, “The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst sins are spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and backbiting; the pleasures of power, of hatred.”

Having acknowledged that spiritual sins which use and abuse others are worse, we must still face the fact our Lord recognized when He condemned lust, even secret “in the heart” lust. Lust unchecked is horribly destructive both of one’s own soul and of one’s relationships.

Ariel Castro is a poster boy for the destructive effects of lust and of a particular virulent and horrible form lust has taken in our time. Standing shackled in a courtroom, accused of kidnapping, raping and imprisoning three women, Castor said, “I believe I am addicted to porn, to the point where I am impulsive, and I just don’t realize that what I am doing is wrong.”

Easy access to pornography through the Internet is eating away at the souls of men, and of some women, in our time. It’s a 10 billion dollar a year industry in our country and much of that is advertising revenue so that a huge amount of free pornographic material is available at the click of a mouse or the swipe of a finger to anyone looking for it. 12 percent of all Internet searches are for pornography and that becomes 20 percent on mobile devices.

It’s not just that pornography leads to horrific deeds like Ariel Castro’s, although use of pornography is clearly correlated with increased likelihood of using various forms of sexual coercion and with the commission of rape. Use of pornography is also connected with marital problems and divorce. In 2002, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers determined that “obsessive interest in Internet pornography” was a factor in 56 percent of divorce cases the prior year.

When we seriously consider Jesus’ call not to “look at a woman with lust,” we must grapple with the fact that current technology has made that “looking” easier and more tempting than ever before. And we must also not be so literal as to imagine Jesus is only concerned with men or that all “lusting” is heterosexual. I can attest directly to the havoc wreaked by homosexual Internet pornography on a young couple whom I married a few years ago.

Peter Kreeft suggests something to the effect that lust is not the worst sin, just the most popular. And it’s popular from two angles. On one hand, it may be the most prevalent sin of our time. On the other hand, it may be the sin most in the mind of both Christians and non-Christians. Note that the word “morality,” which in its ordinary sense means the whole range of ethical matters, has come to often mean in the popular mind only sexual ethics. So talk about “immorality” and many people will automatically assume you are talking about sexual misconduct. It’s almost as if there were no other sins.

But even if it’s not the worst, the sheer popularity and prevalence of the sin of lust make it a major challenge for Christians today, particularly Christian men. We must look honestly into our own hearts and dig deep into God’s Word for the help and grace to stem the tide of lust and its destructive force in our lives.

What makes a man calmly and deliberately get into car, sneak past barriers, and drive down a boardwalk full of helpless pedestrians, hitting as many as he can? We may soon hear about the effects of drugs or alcohol, or mental illness, but whatever the root there was clearly a seething, deadly anger at work in Nathan Campbell this past Saturday.

We are all intimately acquainted with the deadliness of anger. We see its effects in crazed acts of public violence, in terrorism, and in domestic abuse. On a smaller scale we know well what anger can do to personal relationships and even to community and business relationships. Anger is horribly and visibly destructive.

In our text, Matthew 5:21-26, Jesus prohibits anger against a brother [or sister, we presume]. It’s the first of the Sermon on the Mount’s antitheses, wherein Jesus refers to ancient Old Testament law and practice and intensifies those requirements. So God does not forbid merely the violence arising out of anger, but anger itself, including the forms which issue in such seemingly innocuous behavior as name calling (verse 22).

However, unlike many of the other deadly sins, anger is more complex in that there appear to be good and justified occasions for anger. The Bible says that God Himself is wrathful toward sin (Romans 1:18) and we see Jesus clearly displaying anger in His cleansing of the Temple (Matthew 21:12). We can also hear Jesus’ anger at points in His condemnation of injustice and empty religious display (i.e., the “woes” of Matthew 23). So the emotion of anger in and of itself is not necessarily wrong.

Here is the point where our understanding of vice needs to be connected with our grasp of virtue. Anger is sinful when it lacks justice. Thomas Aquinas sees anger as essentially a desire for revenge. But when the desired revenge is unjust, when it is undeserved or goes beyond fair punishment, then it is wrong. And Jesus in our text warns us about anger because we so easily go beyond those just limits. It’s very easy to slip from a righteous anger with some evil to an unrighteous anger that itself perpetrates evil on others.

Jesus invites us to temper our anger with a focus on quick reconciliation in the larger part of our text, verse 23-26. That is how God Himself deals with us, though He has great cause to be angry with us for our sins. Instead of seeking His revenge out of hand, He offers us reconciliation through the grace of Jesus. May we learn to be more like God in His anger, first letting go of any wrath which has no cause or reason and then even in justified anger learning to gently offer of forgiveness and restoration of relationship to those who have offended us.

I’ve been casting for an hour without success. Then out of the corner of my eye I notice a little flurry of motion downstream. I look there to see another fisherman with a bent rod, clearly playing a nice fish. At that point, the deadly sin for this week kicks in and I stand there watching, filled with pure, green envy for that other angler’s success.

Most of us probably don’t worry too much about that little green worm which eats at us in situations like mine on the stream or when the neighbor gets a new car or a co-worker receives a promotion. Many times, it’s a mere passing annoyance and we are able to return to our own fishing or get back to work not too much the worse for a little bout of envy.

However, envy is a serious matter. As William Willimon says, it’s very much a social sin and it has the capacity to poison almost any relationship. Scripture has some serious warnings about envy, including the primordial story of Cain and Abel, when envy between brothers led to the world’s first murder. Our text this week is James 3:13-18 and James takes the sin of envy very seriously, naming in verse 14 the problem of “bitter envy.”

Like all the deadly sins, part of the evil of envy is that it is a seedbed for further sin. As James says in verse 16, “For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.”

Thomas Aquinas describes envy as “sorrow at another’s good.” Envy is being sad when another person is fortunate or blessed, because that fortune or blessing does not belong to oneself.

In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean speaks through the voice of an older brother who tells how he had figured out the hatch on a trout stream in Montana and was catching lots of fish. Suddenly his younger brother appeared, throwing rocks into the hole he was fishing, scaring away the fish and spoiling the fun. Brotherly envy turned into malicious behavior, actively wrecking the good fortune of a sibling.

It’s not too hard to see envy going full steam in our Christian church communities. Every inequality and difference is ripe with the possibility of envying each other. Willimon believes the worst envy arises among those who are near to each other both in community and in station in life. Envy of Bill Gates doesn’t amount to much, but envy of my brother or sister in Christ who sits next to me in worship can truly turn bitter.

May God deliver us from envy and send us the peace of which James speaks in verses 17 and 18.

Driving with our family on a picnic we listened a bit to Stephen Fry talk about oddities of the English language. At one point he talked about how quotations get modified so that the exact words of the original are sometimes forgotten. That has happened with verse 10 of our text this week, I Timothy 6:6-10.

“Money is the root of all evil,” is how popular culture has transformed the actual words Paul wrote, which are in fact “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” There was even a pop song in the 1940s which repeated over and over that misquotation.

Like many things in human life, money itself is neither good nor bad. It’s our attitudes toward it which have moral character and can be good or evil. So the root of all kinds of evil is not money itself, but the overvaluing of money to the point of loving it.

“Love of money” is all one word in Greek and is basically equivalent to the old-fashioned word “avarice,” or as we would more usually say, “greed.” We are looking this week at greed as the second of the seven deadly sins. Like pride and the other “deadlies,” greed is a condition of character, of the heart, which is not an action in itself, but which leads to many other sinful actions.

The answer to greed is laid out by Paul in the first verse of the text, verse 6, when he says, “there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment.” That thought reflects Jesus own call not to be anxious about food and drink and clothing (all the things money buys), but to seek God and His kingdom and be content with what we have. Such an attitude is not resignation or stoicism, it’s a living trust in God’s provision. That trusting faith is the antidote to greed.

G. K. Chesterton said, “If I only had one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride.” He subscribed to the ancient belief that pride was the root sin and was the worst of the “seven deadly sins.” We’ve just finished a look at the seven Christian virtues and now we turn to the classical list of sins.

One of the things to note about these seven, which are pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony and sloth, is that they are not so much particular actions as they are conditions of the heart, defects of character. They may lead to sinful actions like lying, fornication or theft, but they live beneath the surface of what we do.

Pride is such a damaging attitude of the heart that Chesterton says that it “not only poisons the virtues; it even poisons the other vices.” That is, pride has the effect of compounding and hardening other sins. It is one thing to be prone to telling untruths. It is quite another and worse to take pride in one’s ability as a liar.

Our text for this Sunday is God’s warning against the arrogant pride of His people in Isaiah 2:5-22. It’s not enough that they are greedy idolaters, collecting and worshipping silver and gold. They are arrogant about it, proud of their greed and idolatry. So the Lord announces how they will be humbled.

But better still would be the spirit which seeks humility before humbling comes as judgment. This, Peter Kreeft would argue, is why the Beatitudes are antidote to the seven deadly sins. “Blessed are the meek,” is an invitation to be the sort of person honored by God rather than a person who honors oneself.

May the Lord forgive us our pride and teach us humility.

There’s something about deep water. I’m a good swimmer and enjoy being in a boat. But there’s something about looking down into the water and not being able to see the bottom that elevates my pulse a little. I know that swimming in an 8 foot deep swimming pool is no different than swimming across a lake that’s 50 feet deep, but it feels different. It challenges my courage.

We turn to the fourth cardinal virtue by looking at Peter’s little journey across deep water in Matthew 14:22-33. In this text we can see clearly the need for the old-fashioned term “fortitude” to name this virtue because we might easily think that Peter had plenty of what we ordinarily call courage. He was immediately ready and willing to crawl out of the boat when Jesus called him to come.

Pure physical daring is only one part of the virtue of fortitude. It’s a great and good habit, the kind of character which makes a lifeguard dive into high waves or a firefighter run into a burning building to save a life. But what we may not realize is the need for that sort of courage to be coupled with something longer lasting and more enduring that mere daring. Fortitude is what keeps the lifeguard swimming toward a drowning person in spite of his own fears and what holds the firefighter in that building searching for victims when her heart and mind are crying out for escape and safety.

Fortitude is what Peter lacked when he saw the wind and the waves rising around him on the water. That’s why he began to sink. His fears overcame his courage and his trust in Jesus.

Fortitude applies to more than persistent physical danger. As a man muses beside the sickbed of a dying woman in an old science fiction novel, A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn, he wishes her disease were an actual dragon to slay. But “the real dragons are always quiet, without form.” One needs, he thinks, a courage “against the attack of shadows.” That sort of courage is Christian fortitude.

Only a few of us will be called to rush into an actual battle or risk our bodies to save someone else. But almost all of us will be called to remain courageous against shadows like heartbreak, chronic pain, family strife, dementia, financial loss, death of a loved one, and so on. We need the courage to take yet another step toward Jesus when the wind is howling and the waves are crashing. May our Lord reach out His hand and lift us into that habit of fortitude.

For me the word “temperance” conjures up images from 7th grade American history of women marching in the streets and the prohibition years. The WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) seemed a bit comical to a 12 year-old boy in the 1960s. I even poked fun at them in a parody based on Robert Service’s poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

Given what I know now about the struggles of addiction and how lives without the virtue of temperance are often ruined, along with family and friends, I am not so near inclined to laugh at what still might seem to some an old-fashioned virtue.

In our text for this week, Titus 2:1-15, “temperance” is used by the NRSV in verse 2 to translate a word that typically means to avoid the excess of drink, to be sober. It’s part of an admonition to older men. Paul goes on to admonish older women, young women, and young men, as well as slaves. Using another word group, translated “self-control” he touches the theme of temperance at least three more times in this text. It’s clear that he believes it’s a key Christian virtue.

While we typically associate temperance with moderation or abstinence in regard to alcohol, the ancient virtue was also concerned with avoiding excess of food, pride, anger, sexual desire and other extremes of passion and action. Temperance is as much opposed to workaholism or all-night video game binges as it is to a drunken bender. Temperance challenges the excessive life-styles of the rich and famous and challenges many of our not so rich and famous lives whenever we are tempted to excess.

In the words of Joseph Pieper in The Four Cardinal Virtues, temperance is “unselfish self-preservation.” We tend to excess in the very arenas that are needed for life: food, drink, sexual activity. Temperance calls us to moderate our activity in those arenas in a way that is actually healthy and life-preserving.

Ultimately, as Paul clearly shows in his epistle to Titus, temperance aims at a way of life that is spiritually healthy. The call in verse 12 is to renounce excess worldly passions in favor of, in verse 13, a focus on our coming life in God’s kingdom at the return of Christ. We are to be pure, gentle, humble people giving no just cause for criticism. That’s the thrust of verse 15, “Let no one look down on you.” May God give us the virtue of temperance.

You make your mortgage payments. When a neighbor does you a favor, you do one for him. You work hard in return for the wages you are paid. Your spouse loves and cares for you, and you love and care for your spouse. Then by the classical definition, you are practicing “justice.” You are giving to others what is due to them.

Though the biblical view of justice comes at it from a very different angle, that same concept of treating others as they are due figures into it. When we look at our text for this Sunday, Isaiah 58:1-8a, we see concern for what is due in the complaint about those who engage in fasting as a form of righteousness before God, but who “serve your own interest… and oppress all your workers” in verse 3. The prophecy calls for that sort of injustice, that failure to treat others as they are do, to be corrected.

In classical thinking, then, the second cardinal virtue is justice. It is the regular habit of acting toward others as they are due. So justice has two dimensions. Justice is the state of things when people behave justly toward each other, and justice is also a virtue, a character trait of a good person.

Among a number of Christians these days, aiding the poor and helping those who are oppressed or disadvantaged is sometimes called “justice.” But on the classical definition we might suppose that such activity is not about justice. We have no obligation to the poor or to illegal aliens. They have done nothing to place us in their debt and to make helping them a matter of justice. If we help those in need, it is out a different virtue, out of love, out of charity.

Yet Scripture clearly expects that the just person will help and share with the poor. As Isaiah speaks about the kind of fast God desires, he says in verse 6, “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds on injustice…” and then in verse 7, “Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house…”

The NIV translates Proverbs 29:7 as “The righteous care about justice for the poor.” The NRSV reads, “The righteous know the rights of the poor.” In either case, there is a clear indication that being righteous includes a sense that something is due to those who are in need. One cannot be just in the biblical sense without fulfilling obligations that go beyond mere legal justice.

One way to understand the broader scope of biblical justice is to remember each of us owes everything to God. Not only are we His creation, owing Him our very existence, we also owe Him our redemption purchased by the sacrifice of Christ. As Scripture often states, we are all debtors before God.

Thus if God is concerned about the poor, if he lumps us together with them as debtors to His grace, then we find ourselves obligated to them by our obligation to God. Which is what Jesus suggests by the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, that a failure to help those in need is failure to help Jesus Himself, and help given to the needy is help offered to Jesus Himself.

Jesus demonstrates that same doing of justice to the poor in our Gospel lesson this week from Luke 7:11-17 when He raises a (poor) widow’s son from death. He takes pity on the poverty into which she will sink without her son to help support her and brings a bit of justice to her situation.

There’s much, much more to say about justice and about how the virtue of justice is cultivated and displayed in a complex world with many competing definitions for and claims on justice. Yet anyone who wants to live a whole and complete Christian life cannot ignore the call to do justice.

What’s foolish about a good retirement plan? In contemporary terms that’s the question we might ask of the parable Jesus tells in our text for this Sunday, Luke 12:13-21. Here’s a man who seems to be displaying keen business acumen, taking needed steps to prepare for his future and achieving a comfortable retirement. What could be a better achievement of the American dream?

As we move from the theological virtues to the cardinal virtues, the four key character traits Christianity inherited from the classical tradition, the man building bigger barns actually seems to be displaying the first of these virtues, prudence. He’s prudently managing his resources for a lasting return.

“Prudence” is of course not a word we use often and so Christians have been inclined to replace it with the more biblical and spiritual-sounding term “wisdom.” To do so, however, loses the original sense that this virtue is very practical. If it’s wisdom, it’s not grand, sage-like wisdom that plums the depths of the universe. The wisdom of prudence is an understanding of the right way to behave in a given situation. It’s practical wisdom, like that of farmer, a craftsman, or a good parent.

By that standard of prudence as practical wisdom, then, what makes the wealthy landowner storing his grain a “fool,” as God addresses him in verse 20? The answer is right in the text, bracketing the story. The man is foolish in his mistaken apprehension that the substance of life is to be found in possessions, and that, having an abundance of material provision, one may safely ignore God.

The larger question we might want to ask ourselves is the meaning of what Jesus said the rich man failed to do. As we are taking care of daily business, planning for the future, and all the other practical matters that face us, what does it mean, prudently, to be “rich toward God?”

It seems like a small thing in light of the disaster and heartache in Oklahoma, but Beth and I once lived in a place where the lights went out whenever the wind blew hard. And eventually, if the power was off long enough, the water stopped running. We were out in the country and our water came from a well. The pump ran off an internal tank of compressed air and without power for the compressor the pressure dropped until no water flowed.

I tell that story about our rural water system to draw an analogy to the relationship between faith, hope and love. One might see faith as the power source, the electricity; hope as the pump and water pipes; and love as the water itself. You can see the electricity and plumbing as means to what is most important, the water necessary to survive. Faith and hope are wonderful gifts, vital virtues, but ultimately their purpose is to bring us into connection with God’s love and enable us to love each other.

You see that relationship between the three Christian virtues spelled out in our text for this Sunday, Romans 5:1-5. Verse 1 talks about our justification, our forgiveness for sin and redirection to righteousness, by faith. Verse 2 says that as we’ve gained access to grace, we boast in our hope. Verses 3 and 4 give a little account of the development of the virtue of hope, through suffering, endurance and the growth of character.

However, verse 5 takes us to the point of it all, saying that “hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit…” So just as electricity and plumbing in our well system culminate in water pouring from the faucet into a drinking glass, faith and hope culminate in love being poured into us from its source in God.

This is also Trinity Sunday and at the same time our text displays the triad of faith, hope and love, it shows us the Trinity at work by the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The same three-person work of God is displayed in the Gospel reading from John 16:12-15, with the Jesus the Son promising the coming of the Holy Spirit, who will take what Jesus has received from the Father and in turn teach it to us. Reading the larger context which includes John 15:10-12, we can be sure that a large measure of what comes from the Father, through the grace of Jesus, and by the gift of the Spirit, is love.

We often repeat I John 4:8, “God is love.” That can be true only because there is genuine interpersonal love within God’s own being. God is love because God is from eternity Father, Son and Holy Spirit, loving each other. It’s that divine, eternal love which is poured into us when we come into relationship with God through faith and hope.

May God pour even more of that gracious drink of love into our hearts.

The philosopher in me slips out now and then. I see that the message for Pentecost this Sunday is the second sermon this year I’ve given a title with the word “truth” in it. Our text is John 14:8-17, the end of which is the first mention of the Paraclete, John’s unique term for the Holy Spirit.

“Paraclete” has been variously translated as “Advocate,” “Counselor,” “Helper” or “Comforter.” It means literally one “called alongside,” and implies support and encouragement. It had a primarily legal sense in the Greek world, so the idea of an advocate in court should be heard in the term.

It’s tempting to take John’s naming of the Paraclete as the “Spirit of Truth” and go off on a rant about how little our present culture cares for truth and how often truth is distorted or ignored. That’s all well and good, but probably not at all what Jesus had in mind as He promised the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth.

Instead, with the Paraclete/Advocate concept in focus we can see the Spirit as the one who comes to the aid of believers by presenting the truth. This is the Gospel truth, the truth about Jesus. The Spirit is the one who instructs the Apostles in the Gospel and sends them out to bear witness to its truth. Like an honorable attorney in court, the Spirit’s aim is to bring the truth to light.

In verse 17, Jesus goes on to say that the Spirit of truth “abides with you, and he will be in you.” It’s the Spirit who comes down upon the disciples on Pentecost to push them out into the streets of Jerusalem speaking the truth they have come to know about Jesus. From that point on, the understanding is that the Holy Spirit lives in every believer with the same goal of presenting the Gospel truth.

I’m going to be thinking about how that same Spirit of Truth moves us out into the world to witness to the Gospel.

Last week I got a call to tell me that Brian, a leader among our friends at Church of the Servant King, had dropped dead of a heart attack after coming in from a run. I’ve known Brian for about twenty years and he was a bit younger than I am. He leaves behind his wife and two teenage children.

Then this week the evangelical world received the news that Dallas Willard lost his battle to cancer at age 77. Willard was a professional philosopher who turned his intellect toward writing about very practical matters of Christian discipleship and life. Willard’s writing about character and discipleship are part of the influence on me which is producing this series of sermons on the seven central Christian virtues.

So I feel very much in need of and prepared for thinking this week about the virtue of hope. And today, Thursday May 9 is Ascension Day, which our church will observe this coming Sunday. This is a holy day completely centered around hope. Acts 1:1-11 gives the first disciples, together with you and me, the promise that Jesus will return. Jesus’ departure into heaven is not the end of the story, but the beginning of a season of hope for His return.

As I contemplate the passing of Brian and of Dallas Willard I know that they will be mourned and missed. Brian’s memorial service will be here in our sanctuary on Saturday and everyone expects the place to be packed to capacity as we remember this good man. I imagine something on an even larger scale will happen in regard to Willard.

There will be tears and sorrow at those gatherings, but I am also very confident that a large portion of the preaching will be devoted to the hope we have which reaches beyond death. The virtue of Christian hope is a way of life which reaches beyond what ordinarily passes for hope in our lives. Our hopes for marriage, success, good health, grandchildren, and so on, all have termination points, ultimately in our own deaths. Yet the Christian hope is one that looks beyond those end points to an eternal future in God’s kingdom. Death gives way to resurrection, just as it did for Jesus. Parting gives way to return.

Dallas Willard constantly emphasized that Christian virtues like hope have a very practical outcome in daily life. If we really do hope in God through Christ, it will show up in the way we live. As the angels told the disciples, hope is not standing around waiting to see what happens next, it’s actively living in new ways because of our confidence in the outcome, the return of Christ and the completion of God’s kingdom.

Writing in 2006, Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. reviewed Willard’s work saying:

He is a brilliant, modest, immensely experienced Christian older brother, calling to us from the Resurrection side of things. His books all call out, in one way or another: Come on over. It’s going to be okay to die first. You have to do it, and you can do it. Not even Jesus got a resurrection without a death, and he’ll be at your side when you surrender your old life. Trust me on this. If you die with Jesus Christ, God will walk you out of your tomb into a life of incomparable joy and purpose inside his boundless and competent love.

Our friend Brian also lived a life of hope which showed up in the way he treated those around him. Street people, people with handicaps, all received tangible, visible love from Brian that showed his hope for them which went beyond their limitations or situations.

Whatever your situation or sorrow this week, I pray that God will renew and strengthen your hope. It may even be through occasions of sorrow like our community’s loss of Brian and evangelicalism’s loss of Dallas Willard. Our Lord is teaching us not to focus on the departures, but to go out and live hopeful lives confident in His return and the restoration of all things.

Habit gets a bad rap these days. It’s an insult to call a person a “creature of habit,” suggesting that the one who lives life by rote, by a set of habitual activities, is almost beast-like, somehow sub-human.

Instead we prize novelty and spontaneity. The person who is truly living is the one who finds herself free to do as she pleases on a moment’s notice. She is not bound by convention nor even by her own customary way of acting. One Hollywood film after another suggests that the best way to live is to overturn the habits and patterns of years and head off freely into the great spontaneous unknown.

The problem with this low view of regular and habitual behavior is that it absolutely ruins any basis for the development of character, of what used to be called “virtue.” A good character is nothing more than regularly, habitually doing what is good and right.

When we place our trust in another person we do so because we’ve found that they habitually do the right thing or treat us well. If we find that what we thought was a pattern of kindness, generosity and patience might any moment be overturned and a person fly off in other directions, trust evaporates.

The Christian faith has traditionally placed three virtues or habits above all the rest, the triad of faith, hope and love which appears at the end of I Corinthians 13. We also find Paul commending the church at Thessalonica for exemplifying these virtues in verse 3 of our text for this Sunday, I Thessalonians 1:1-10.

For the next few weeks I plan to look at these three Christian virtues plus the four virtues Christians inherited from classical Greece, typically called the “cardinal” virtues: justice, prudence, temperance and courage. This coming Sunday we will focus on faith, which is the root of all the others and for which Paul most commends the Thessalonians.

For now it’s enough to say that faith is way of living, a habit of trusting God. It’s the regular practice of living in such a way that our actions are directed toward God. That’s very different from our usual understanding of faith as primarily belief. Faith certainly involves what you believe, but it only becomes the virtue of faith as you develop of habit of action which trusts in God.

May God give us grace to grow in all the virtues.

I was the only white boy at the birthday party. I have no direct, clear memory of that fact, but my mother told me about it when I was older and I know it because of her memory. It was second or third grade and we accepted an invitation to celebrate a schoomate’s birthday. Evidently the birthday boy and all the other boys who came were African-American.

I would like to think that my heart is still that innocent second grader’s, oblivious to the race and color of those around me, simply accepting everyone as fellow human beings, as God’s children loved by Him. I’d like to think I don’t need 2×4 vision over the head like Peter’s in Acts 10, where he’s forced by God to confront his prejudices regarding Gentiles and bring them the Gospel. I’d like to think I’m much further along than Peter was.

The fact is that I can distinctly remember for myself losing that second grade innocence about race not more than a couple years later as I walked home from a school summer program with a craft I’d made. Another boy walked along with me, admired my handiwork, then grabbed it and ran off. And that time I did remember the color of his skin, which was different from mine.

Yes, I would like to consider myself innocent of racial feeling, but I know it’s not true. I still can find myself wary around people of other colors. Driving with my daughter a couple years ago through particular neighborhoods near her school in Chicago, I was uneasy for us to be the only white people around. And there are all sorts of other ways that kind of feeling arises in me.

Which is all to say that our text for this week, Acts 11:1-18, which retells for the church in Jerusalem Peter’s experience at the Gentile household of Cornelius, is not just ancient church history. It addresses what is still a challenge for most of us. The challenge is the same one the Holy Spirit gave Peter in verse 12, to be with those who are different from us and “not to make a distinction between them and us.”

The text for this Sunday more or less repeats the story of chapter 10, and more space is given to this incident than any other event in Acts, save Pentecost. That tells us how crucial this matter of overcoming racial distinction is to the Gospel we believe. In fact, the coming of the Holy Spirit to Cornelius’ house is sometimes called the “Gentile Pentecost.”

So my hope for our attention to this text is to honestly appraise how far we each still have to go in becoming the kind of people, the kind of community, God is creating in Christ. As Peter says of himself in verse 17, who are we, with our prejudices, to hinder God in bringing anyone to Himself?

This lesson in no distinctions is simply the outworking of Jesus’ own words found in our Gospel text for Sunday, John 13:35, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”