Author: Steve

It’s the second day of the air over our city being filled with smoke to “unhealthy” and sometimes “hazardous” levels. As it is all up and down the western states of the nation, fire is burning near us. The picture is from the Holiday Farm Fire which has devastated rural, riverside communities along the McKenzie River to the east of us. Winds blowing warm from the east have brought us the smoke and pushed the fire toward more communities, necessitating evacuations. Right now, information is confused and scanty and the extent of loss is unknown, although many homes and businesses are certainly destroyed. Places I have fished and shops like Christmas Treasures, which our family enjoyed, are now burned over and wiped out.

As I looked again at what to preach from our fourth week of Immerse reading in Prophets, which comprised Isaiah chapters 15 to 33, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the second half of chapter 33, which pictures the Assyrians both as a destroying fire and their own coming destruction as if by fire. God says to them, “Your people will be burned up completely, like thornbushes cut down and tossed in a fire.” And those in Jerusalem are also frightened by the “fire.” “‘Who can live with this devouring fire?’ they cry. ‘Who can survive this all-consuming fire?'”

This who section of Isaiah is a bit of a slog, which very few “greatest hits” passages like the messianic prophecies familiar from Advent found in the previous 14 chapters. Instead there are many oracles against other nations and cities and warnings of Israel and Judah’s own troubles. Chapters 25-27 and 32 and the end of chapter 33 following the fire verses do provide a little relief with promises of deliverance and peace and justice for Israel and Judah. But only chapter 25:6-9 rang a bell with me as a passage I’ve preached before, the promise of a rich feast on the Lord’s mountain and death swallowed up forever.

So I felt I needed to focus on the fire here in Isaiah 33 and the words of hope which follow it. As I’ve considered our own home’s situation up among some big trees in the southwest hills of Eugene, I wondered about its own susceptibility to that fire pushing on westward toward us. I took a little comfort in the thought that it would have to cross the wide expanse of the Willamette River. Now I look in the text at the words in verse 21, “The Lord will be our Mighty One. He will be like a wide river of protection that no enemy can cross, that no enemy ship can sail upon.” The fire of our enemies, both literal and spiritual, often scorches across the habitations of God’s people, but His river of salvation is always flowing.

As so many have observed, the trials and tribulations of 2020 just seem to keep coming. Many of us, and I definitely mean myself, are weary and feel helpless in the face of it all. So I also take reassurance from the last verse of the chapter which promises, “The people of Israel will no longer say, ‘We are sick and helpless,” for the Lord will forgive our sins. May the Lord forgive me, forgive all His people for our sins, and heal and bless and help us to walk in the justice which is so beautifully promised in the chapter prior to this one.

In modern literature, no figure quite so represents the ideal of a person standing up for justice in the American legal system as does Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird. I understand well that contemporary critique and Lee’s own long-delayed “sequel” make Finch a morally ambiguous figure who, while defending a black man unfairly accused, did little to challenge the racist systems around him.

So it may be time for the fictional Atticus to be replaced in the American imagination with someone like Bryan Stevenson, the author of Just Mercy and the real life defender of scores of unjustly accused people of color. He is also an activist for changes in the justice system to end bias and unfair treatment. We desperately need heroes like Stevenson who will stand up in court for the oppressed.

People of the Bible ought to understand that the Lord Himself is that kind of hero, a defender of the oppressed and champion in opposition to injustice. That’s the picture the prophet Micah paints for us in his book and particularly in our text for this Sunday, Micah 6:1-8. As the text begins, God is in court, with a case against His own people. Though a large measure of that “case” is God’s charge of unfaithfulness, their idolatry, against Judah, we can see in the rest of Micah that God is almost, if not equally, upset about His people’s injustices against each other. That can be seen just in what follows in chapter 6, verses 9-12, God’s complaint about wealth gained by lies, cheating, and violence.

But that God is concerned not just with His own honor is clear in the part of our text which deals with the legal concept of restitution, verses 6-8. The prophet wonders for himself (although the NLT has him speaking in the plural for his people) how to make restitution for the wrong done to God. He considers the offering of sacrifices as a way to “pay his fine,” for his sins. But God’s case has a different object in mind. Like Stevenson’s advocacy, as opposed to Atticus Finch’s, God wants wholesale changes in the system. He wants people who don’t just pay for particular offenses but who amend their lives so as not to commit injustice any longer.

So our text ends with God’s beautiful response to the prophet’s pondering about restitution through sacrifice. No, the Lord has said, this is what is required: “to do what is right [just], to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.” As all the pictures of judgment in Micah show us, God will win His case, has already won it. Now the question is whether we will abide by the judgment against and do what the Lord’s court has ordered us to do: justice and mercy in humble communion with that very same Lord.

“You ought to tell her how you feel,” or something to that effect, says Hathaway to Lewis as they sip their pints at a pub along the Thames in Oxford. This television series Beth and I enjoy created romantic tension by having Lewis lose his wife of many years and then eventually find himself attracted to the female pathologist he meets at so many murder scenes. But his memories of his wife and natural reticence make him unable to speak his feelings. So, in show after show, we see Lewis and the doctor drawn to each other but then held apart by Lewis’s inability to find the words to express his heart.

So it is perhaps appropriate that there is a need for words at the end of a prophetic book full of its own romantic tension. On the one hand there is, as one commentator put it, the “half-told” love story of Hosea and his unfaithful wife Gomer. On the other hand, there is God and His unfaithful people Israel. Like God tells Hosea to go and redeem his wife and bring her back to him, God is seeking to redeem Israel and bring them back to Himself. But a lack of words is standing in the way.

In our text for this Sunday, the closing chapter of Hosea, chapter 14, Hosea gives some words in verses 2-3 for Israel to say as they return to the Lord. Verse two begins in the NLT translation we are reading, “Bring your confessions, and return to the Lord.” But that is a bit of a paraphrase based on the content of what follows. Literally, the prophet told Israel to “Bring words, and return to the Lord.”

That “bring words” is a bit enigmatic. It could be based on one of the big themes of the prophets, the inadequacy of acts of worship and animal sacrifices when unaccompanied by genuine faith and commitment to God or by just/righteous living. Thus Psalm 51:16-17 says,

“For you have no delight in sacrifice,
if I were to give you a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

Presumably, then, in Hosea the idea would be that the “words” of confession being brought were evidence of a broken spirit and contrite heart. But while Hosea chastises Israel for its sacrifices to false gods, unlike the psalmist or other prophets (e.g. Amos last week) he does not really condemn legitimate sacrifice to the true God. So it’s probably better to take this injunction to “bring words” as shorthand for “bring [these] words,” meaning what follows, the actual prayer of confession Hosea offers.

Of course, as Scripture teaches in other places, words alone are not enough. So the confession contains actual commitment to forswear trusting in other sources of security (military resources, whether allies or their own cavalry) and worshipping those other gods with whom they have been unfaithful. It’s much like a human-to-human confession of unfaithfulness that includes a sincere “never again.”

As often in the Bible, the metaphors are mixed in Hosea and alongside the marriage and faithfulness imagery, we find parent-child imagery to describe God’s relationship with His people, particularly in the use of the tribe name “Ephraim” for the whole nation and in the naming of Hosea’s children in chapter 1, Lo-ruhamah, “not loved,” and Lo-ammi “not my people.” In  a sweet culmination to those images, as the prayer of confession rejects the other gods, it concludes, “No, in you alone do the orphans find mercy,” expressing the trust that this “orphan” people will mind mercy in God.

And God does respond in mercy in the following verses, promising love that knows no bounds and an anger “gone forever.” It’s interesting that God’s compassionate blessing is compared no less than three times to the natural beauty and provision of Lebanon. One suggestion is that the worship of Baal idols had its origin from the north, in Lebanon. Thus God is promising that He would give His people all that they had hoped to receive by worshipping a false god who came from that direction.

There are those Christians who have little use for rote prayers and perhaps even less for expressions of corporate confession. I would suggest that we might learn from Hosea (and perhaps from DI Lewis and our own human relationships) just how very much we sometimes need words, especially words of sorrow, confession, and repentance. If we cannot come up with our own, then may they be given to us, so that we may offer God true repentance and trust, and then receive His gracious forgiveness and blessing.

I enjoy puns. So does God, apparently. In our text from Amos 7 and 8 today, Amos is given four visions which foretell the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel. The fourth of these, at the beginning of chapter 8, is a basket of “ripe fruit,” possibly “summer” fruit. The Hebrew word for these fruit is something like kitz (I’m following an old more pronounceable transliteration scheme). Then God goes on to say, “The end [Hebrew something like keetz] has come for my people.”

Whether to translate kitz as “summer fruit” or “ripe fruit” is a toss up. Referring to the season is probably more literal, but the slight paraphrase “ripe” allows modern English translations like the New Living Translation from which we are reading the prophets to capture the pun a bit by having God say, “Israel is ripe for punishment!” The problem is that particular paraphrase doesn’t quite convey the idea that this is the actual keetz, the end for the northern kingdom. They are facing the Assyrian invasion which will obliterate their country, scatter the people, and leave them without any national identity. They are about to become the so-called “lost tribes” of Israel.

Keeping the more literal “summer fruit” in the first half of the pun would also help convey the idea that this is the end of the season for Israel. It’s that time right now in the northern hemisphere. Here in western Oregon, overabundant zucchini sometimes rotting in gardens or fallen overripe pears swarmed by yellow jackets are “fruits” which signal the end of summer. Temperatures will soon be cooling, daylight will grow shorter, and the rains will begin. In the Midwest, the shorter days may soon be marked by clouds and cold winds. In the same way, the summer fruits of ancient times would have signaled the end of that season.

It’s the opposite, then, of the beginning of Shakespeare’s Richard III, when Richard says,

Now is the winter of our discontent,
Made glorious summer. . .

Instead, here in Amos, the prophet foretells  that glorious summer (see throughout the book the prophet’s description of the luxury enjoyed by the elite of Israel) will turn into the terrible winter of a nation overrun by foreign powers and devastated to the point of extinction.

As we will see throughout the prophets in the next weeks, the cause for God’s bringing an end to summer for Israel is two-fold. The first is highlighted more by other prophets: the pursuit of false gods and neglect of authentic worship, though often with the outward form of genuine sacrifice and worship. In Amos, that failure of true faith shows up tangentially here in chapter 8 verse 5, in the declaration that the people of Israel ignore the spirit of the Sabbath and other holy days, all the while thinking only of getting back to their businesses.

The second cause of God’s judgment is what really stands out throughout this book and here surrounds that mention of Sabbath and holy day defamation: those with wealth and power are ignoring and exploiting the poor. Those waiting for the Sabbath to hurry up and be over wish to get back to dishonest business, selling basic food (and that the worst of the lot, “you mix the grain you sell with chaff swept from the floor”) to the poor by dishonest measures and inflated prices. It’s all done so that the powerful can wear nice shoes and keep the poor enslaved to generate more wealth.

Our modern American economy lets us enjoy many of the sorts of luxuries against which Amos rails. We may fail to take his message very much to heart, though, because we are far removed in the chain of commerce from poor people who may be exploited in the production of the food we eat or the clothes, household goods, or electronic devices we enjoy. We might do well to make the effort to become better informed about how our own abundant lifestyle is sustained. Amos said the Israelites enslaved the poor for silver or for a pair of sandals. Do we enslave the poor for a better return on our investments or for a pair of Nikes?

It may be that coronavirus and protests against racial injustice are a signal to us that summer is over for a world order that has grown complacent about faith and steadily more corrupt in its business dealings. Instead of foolishly hoping to extend the summer and hold onto fruit that will go from ripe to rotten, it may be well to listen to the prophet and seek God for a faith and hope that can weather a winter of discontent.

The lighthouses along the Oregon coast are a treasure of past times. Though GPS and other forms of modern navigation have rendered them mostly obsolete, they stand as a reminder of how important a light shining in the dark can be. The nearest to us, the Heceta Head lighthouse by Florence, was commissioned in 1888, along with a lighthouse at the Umpqua River, to fill in a 90 mile gap of coastal darkness between existing lighthouses. With very few interruptions, the Heceta Head lighthouse has shone in the dark since it began operation in 1894.

In our text for this Sunday, II Peter 1:16-21, verse 19 speaks of the prophetic message about Jesus and tells us, “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place. . .” Peter has been arguing that the prophecies regarding Jesus were confirmed by his and James’ and John’s experience of the Transfiguration of Jesus and God’s own voice declaring “This is my beloved Son.” Then he goes on to talk about the divine source of prophecy, the work of the Holy Spirit rather than human will.

This seemed like a fitting text with which to begin our congregation’s reading of the prophecy books of the Old Testament. Much in the prophets is difficult and obscure, using images from a different time and culture and referring to events which even fairly solid students of Scripture have a hard time keeping in order. Another challenge for the modern reader is an often gloomy outlook. The prophets addressed crises, sins, and injustices of their own times and their messages are frequently about divine judgment. The Jewish writer Abraham Joshua Heschel says, “In a stricken hour comes the word of the prophet.”

Yet, while the prophets seem to be speaking in dark times and often in dark words, they do offer light in that darkness. As our guest speaker suggested last Sunday, they remind us that God sees. He sees both the evil that human beings do and those to whom it is done. Heschel names the first characteristic of the prophet as a “sensitivity to evil.” The naming of that evil might seem the bulk of the prophetic word, but the light arrives in the further word that God will respond, with judgment yes, but also with compassion, with hope, and ultimately with saving deliverance.

In our New Testament text, Peter is convinced that the Old Testament, the Hebrew prophets, spoke of the “the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” not just His first coming but the second coming in glory. He sees the Transfiguration of Jesus as confirmation of those prophecies, that just as He shown in glory on the mountaintop, He will shine in glory one day for all the world. It is that prophetic word which points through the darkness of human evil to Jesus Christ which shines like a lighthouse on the point of dark coastline.

So we turn to the prophets now for several months. They shed light on their own times, revealing what was evil and declaring God’s judgment. They also offered a light pointing to redemption and salvation, both the temporal deliverance of rescue from their enemies and the spiritual and eternal deliverance of salvation through the Messiah, whom we know as Jesus Christ. May those same prophets shed light on and into our dark times and point us in the same direction.

Dating myself terribly, I’ll start reflections on this week’s text with an episode from “The Wrath of Kahn,” either the best or, in my opinion, second-best of the Star Trek films (I’m partial to “The Voyage Home”). Early in “Kahn,” Spock says, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

At the end of the movie, as Spock gives up his life for the crew, there is this exchange:

Spock: “Don’t grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh . . .”
Kirk: “The needs of the few.”
Spock: “Or the one.”

Perhaps even more relevant to our text for this Sunday, John 15:9-17, Spock, as he dies, says to Kirk, “You have been and always will be my friend.” In verse 13, Jesus says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” But the problem with comparing Jesus to Spock is that as admirable and Christ-like as Spock’s sacrifice might be, his “logic” for it is poor.

That “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” is not a dictate of logic, but of a moral system called utilitarianism. Utilitarianism imagines that one can “calculate” the moral worth of an action by how much it adds to or takes away from the sum total of happiness in the world. The happiness of many will always count more than that of few or of one.

The problems with utilitarianism are many and well-accounted for in moral philosophy, but on an unreflective level it is often attractive. Something like utilitarian calculation takes place when triage happens in an emergency room or military strategies accept some loss of life for the sake of victory or, more recently, it is argued that the deaths of some percentage of the population from COVID-19 is an acceptable price to pay for restoration of the economy. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

In a nutshell, the problem with utilitarianism is its disregard for justice. Why should the “many” profit from the misery of the “few?” Ursula LeGuin probably produced the definitive counter-example to utilitarianism in her famous short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In that story a whole city, Omelas, lives in peace and prosperity because one child lives in darkness, misery and filth. Most of the citizens are willing to accept that price for their happiness, but some walk away. Clearly the choice to walk away from Omelas is the morally superior course.

Sacrificing the happiness of a few for the sake of the happiness of the many is dictated neither by logic nor by moral duty. To imagine that it is so dictated is to set ourselves up for all sorts of atrocities, especially those involving making scapegoats out of some portion of the human race.

However, sacrifice of one or a few for the sake of others can be an admirable course of action when it is offered voluntarily. That is why both Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross and Spock’s death for his crew mates are genuinely praiseworthy. The real motivation, seemingly in both cases, is not moral calculation but love. Both Jesus and Spock give their lives for their friends.

In John 15:13, the word for “friends” is literally, “those who are loved.” Jesus is saying, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for those whom one loves.” The sacrifice which Jesus both asks for and offers is not a calculation of needs, but is a voluntary, free act of love.

As Jesus says here in verses 9 and 10, and again in verse 17, His intent is that we act as He did, for the same reason. We heard it in our text last week from I John 3:16, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us–and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” Love is to be the driving force behind the sacrifices we make, thus we cannot choose for such sacrifices to be made by others, only to be made by ourselves.

Let’s remember Spock and Omelas and, most of all, Jesus when we are tempted to make both political and personal choices on some false utilitarian principle that weighs needs (or happiness) against needs. Let us remember that our motivation as followers of Christ is the greatest of motivations, the very force which brought us into being and saved us from sin and death, the freely offered love of God by which God Himself laid down His life for His friends.

At the corner where I typically pull out of the Fred Meyer parking lot, at a light between the store and a McDonald’s, there is often a person holding up a sign requesting assistance in the form of money. Though I have occasionally purchased some food for people like that at the McDonald’s there, I typically roll right on by. I think about that now as I read this week’s text on love, I John 3:11-24. What does what the apostle says here mean for us in this age of systemic poverty, professional panhandlers, public welfare, and general suspicion of the motives of others?

I confess my temptation is to just throw up my hands and conclude that it is all just too complicated to sort out. First century society, I foolishly imagine, was simpler and more straightforward. One could encounter a beggar, or, even more, another Christian in need, and confidently respond with generosity, sure that one’s act of love was genuinely helpful.

Yet the status of those who begged in biblical times was likely as complex as it is today. While there are both Old Testament and New Testament and extra-biblical passages like our text for today, encouraging care for those in need, it is also clear that begging was frowned upon and even despised. In the Apocryphal books we recently studied in an adult Sunday school class, we read in Sirach 40:28-30:

²⁸ My child, don’t live the life of a beggar;
    it’s better to die than to beg.
²⁹ When people look to another person’s table,
    their way of life cannot be considered a life.
        They pollute themselves by eating someone else’s food,
            but a person who is intelligent and educated will guard
            against that.
³⁰ In the mouth of the shameless, begging is sweet,
    but a fire will burn inside of them.

That passage may be one of the good reasons Sirach is apocryphal rather than inspired Scripture, for it does not comport well with our text today. But, then, neither does my own bypassing of panhandlers seem to be in harmony with what we read from John about genuine love for others. I have been conflicted and filled with guilt about these things for much of my life.

As should be clear, I have no great answers to questions about how best to respond to the poor in our own time and society. Yet I am convinced that Scripture and our Lord are exceedingly clear that God expects us to do our best to sort out some way to actively respond to those in need. There may be individuals we know personally and can vouch for to whom we need to offer our help.  Or it may be that the best way to help an individual panhandler we do not know is to refuse the sort of gift being requested and encourage that person to seek help from an agency we support financially.

I would also suggest that while John’s illustration used here in verse 17 is of an individual in need, we may do well not to completely individualize our compassion. The prophets we will begin studying next month spoke against unfair societal practices which contributed to poverty, like false measures and balances used by merchants and the withholding of proper wages from employees. Part of a genuine, active Christian love almost surely needs to be attention to reducing the systemic practice of injustice, not just compassionate acts toward individual persons in need.

What John reminds me in verse 18 is that even if I deem it unhelpful or even harmful to drop some bills or coins in a panhandler’s hand, I cannot rest easy without doing anything at all, without addressing the poverty around me in some active way.

And when I am torn and conflicted about it all, I am very thankful for verses 19 and 20, which suggest that when we at least try to actively love in some way, we may “reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” That is most reassuring, for as I age I only grow in my conviction that I know very little about poverty, love, or almost anything.

Narcissism is often mentioned in these times. Generally understood as over-blown self-absorption or an excessive sense of self-importance, it is a concept used to characterize some people in public office, perhaps one such public figure in particular. The term is derived from the myth of Narcissus, a young man of exceptional beauty who fell in love with his own reflection and died staring at it.

Psychologists generally understand narcissism to be a spectrum, with most people exhibiting at least some degree of focus on oneself. The pathological end of the spectrum adds to intense self-focus a lack of empathy or understanding for others.

The question of narcissism arises as we consider the role of self-love in the Christian, biblical understanding of love. Last week I affirmed to some degree Anders Nygren’s distinction between eros, need-based, self-focused love and agape, unselfish, self-giving love. Yet when we turn to at least a couple of the key Bible texts on love, like the one for the sermon this week, Matthew 22:34-40, we find that self-love is paradoxically held up as the paradigm for loving others. “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

I confess that until I began recently to work through the idea of love in Scripture and Christian life once again, I had thought that what the Scriptures and our Lord say about love is pretty much a dismissal and denigration of self-love. Other texts from Jesus about “hating” and losing one’s life for His sake suggested to me the command to “Love your neighbor as yourself” in no way contained, as I’ve heard frequently suggested, an implicit command to love oneself. Thus things like the following sentence of pop psychology are often said: “You can’t learn to love someone else until you learn to love  yourself.” Then we land in the thicket of worries about self-esteem, etc., all of which seems terribly focused on oneself and begins to lose the whole direction of love for God and love for others.

So in the past I have been fairly hard on the concept of self-love, arguing that it is not a biblical concept and not something Christians should be concerned with. Instead, denying ourselves, as Jesus said frequently, we should focus on love for God and others and quit trying to love ourselves. But I have discovered that is not quite right. I’m not quite capitulating to the popular educational and psychological industry of self-esteem, but it is clear to me that the Bible and Jesus do emphasize the fact that self-love is a reality and a strange but necessary starting point for love of God and others.

The trick, the conceptual turn in all of this is that what Scripture says about love for others in relation to self-love all assumes a prevalent human tendency to self-love. To grasp that this is not just the popular idea of self-esteem, we need to realize that at least one major aspect of love is that it is a desire for the happiness, the well-being of another. That desire for happiness is, even in cases of low self-esteem, almost always operational in regard to our own selves. We want to be happy. That is self-love. Jesus and the apostles are asking us to desire for others the same happiness we desire for ourselves.

Now I don’t want to get lost again in modern psychological worries. With all our awareness of various pathologies of the psyche, we can’t quite as confidently as the ancients did declare that every human being desires happiness. Yet our very recognition that not desiring personal happiness is a pathology demonstrates that desire for happiness, and thus self-love in that sense, is a common human trait and experience.

Why then the contrast between the modern call for self-esteem, self-affirmation, individual pursuit of happiness and the Bible’s seemingly rather gloomy call to self-denial and pursuit of the happiness of others? The answer is right before us in the best examples of human love. It is just exactly when we turn from focus on our own happiness and truly seek the happiness of others in ways which contribute to their true well-being that we find our own selves most happy. This is exactly why we are called to love others as ourselves and why Jesus tells us that when we lose our lives for His sake (which includes for the sake of others) we find and save our lives. It’s the glorious and wonderful paradox at the heart of love and at the center of our nature as beings in the image of God.

So Narcissus is a warning to us all. We cannot find happiness or love by gazing into our own eyes or our own selves. That notion is where a lot of the popular psychology of self-love goes badly wrong. But we can truly love ourselves and find happiness by turning away from self and seeking for others to be as happy as we ourselves wish to be. That is what loving ourselves is truly about.

I love fishing. I love my wife. I love donuts. I love science fiction. I love Jesus. In those brief declarations I have barely scratched the surface of the multiple and various ways we use the English word “love.” When we look at the Christian idea of love, it is sometimes supposed that the several different words for love in the biblical languages help resolve some of the ambiguity of the term in English. We are sometimes encouraged to aspire to the form of love denoted by the Greek word used several times in I Corinthians 13, our text for this Sunday, the word agape as opposed to eros or philia.

It is true that the Greek Judaeo-Christian scriptures, the New Testament plus the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, seem to have created an emphasis on the use of the term agape (the verb form of the word in the Septuagint) which stands apart from its relatively seldom usage in other ancient Greek writings. And in the modern era, Anders Nygren famously pitted a Christian conception of agape as unconditional, self-giving, self-sacrificial love against eros as a self-focused, need-based, acquisitive form of love.

However, we use the word “love” in English for both the eros and agape ideas, as well as for other forms of relationship, for instance, for the love between friends denoted by philia in Greek. C. S. Lewis’s famous The Four Loves explores a few of the main ways in which we use the word.

One of the muddles of our single English word for love is in the use to which our text is often put in Christian worship. It’s one of the texts frequently read at weddings. As I typically, curmudgeonly point out to the couples I marry, Paul did not really have married or romantic love (perhaps more eros than agape) in mind at all when he included this hymn to love in his letter. He was writing to a church community, and to one which was split up in fighting factions to boot. I try to make that instructive for couples in considering just in what circumstances the love described in I Corinthians 13 is to hold sway.

However, we as Christians would do very well to recognize that, in talking about a wholly other-regarding form of love (verse 4-7 especially), Paul wants to describe the sort of interaction which ought to characterize us as believing communities, not just in limited marital, family or even friendship relations.

As I briefly touched on last week and in detail on Trinity Sunday several weeks ago, it is good to recall that the love Paul describes here is first and foremost the character of God, not just in His self-giving relationship with us, but in God’s own internal relations between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To be made in the image of God, then, is for us to live in community in a way which reflects that same self-giving love.

Yet Lewis in the first part of The Four Loves has an interesting reflection on how the needy, receiving love thought to be more eros than agape is also necessary for human relationship to God. It’s only as we come to Him desiring and in need that we can get close enough to God for Him to fully impart His own brand of self-giving love. Which is, once again, why love is a theological virtue, one given and infused rather than one we generate in ourselves by practice.

I look forward to exploring all the richness of this last and “greatest of these” theological virtues for the next four weeks.

Last Sunday I was on vacation. It felt odd taking time “off” after being mostly at home for the last three months. But the stress of preparing and recording on-line worship each week, plus trying to do some form of pastoral care, council meetings, Bible study, etc. via Zoom and telephone had taken its toll. So Beth and I checked out, turned over worship and various on-line meetings to others, and rested. We needed it.

And I did actually get away for a couple nights, camping at Gold Lake near Willamette Pass. I was out of cell phone range and my worries were reduced to a few mosquitoes and what I was going to eat. I got in my float tube and finned leisurely across the lake trolling a couple flies that occasionally hooked a lovely trout. I was doing stuff, but in a way that refreshed rather than drained energy. That’s a picture of the kind of life to which Jesus invites in this Sunday’s Gospel reading from Matthew 11:16-30.

The text begins with Jesus’ chiding those who found neither John the Baptist nor Himself satisfactory. He compares the people who reject both Him and John to bored children wishing to be entertained, but unhappy with any form of entertainment offered.

Such boredom is one of the results of pre-COVID-19 frenetic modern life, when we are engaged in constant activity but enjoying none of it. We keep expecting that the next job, the next purchase, the next romantic partner or business venture will somehow be more satisfying than those that preceded. So we rush on toward what is ahead, imagining that our activity will produce happiness.

That pursuit of happiness by endless activity is perhaps why weeks of stay-at-home have generated so much restlessness and so many people who refuse to take it seriously any longer. They suppose that the answer to their boredom is to get out and do something, even if it recklessly exposes them and others to coronavirus.

In the middle of the text, which the lectionary skips over, Jesus addresses cities in Galilee which had ignored and even disbelieved the miracles done in their midst. It’s a warning to us to pay more attention to what our Lord is doing and will do right in our midst, in our own homes and lives, if we will pay attention. Going out to shop or get a haircut or attend a party will not really offer near the personal fulfillment we suppose it might after a long stay at home. Instead, time in prayer or conversation on-line or deeper Bible study may actually provide both peaceful rest and a more satisfying relationship with our Lord.

So the text for Sunday appropriately ends with a call to take up Jesus’ easy yoke. Just prior to that, Jesus points out how the gifts of His Father are not given only to the wise and brilliant who pursue them tirelessly, but to those who come like children, willing to receive without boredom or distraction. His gifts are like those fish I caught last week without trying all that hard. May our Lord make this huge pause in so many of our lives a time when we discover again the blessings of that easy yoke.

A philosopher friend who teaches critical thinking recently posted on Facebook asking if anyone could suggest an article on “confirmation bias” which focuses on recent events like COVID-19 and the race protests.

Confirmation bias is the well-confirmed (ha!) human tendency to pay more attention to facts and data which confirm our existing beliefs and give less attention to that which is contrary to our present beliefs (or to beliefs which appear more desirable or in our own favor). Thus it can be difficult for us to change false beliefs because we give undue weight to information which continues to support those falsehoods.

The Greek historian Thucydides wrote “… for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.” As I come to the conclusion of a series of sermons on hope, it only seems right to give some attention to the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who called out his own Jewish people for their careless hope and confirmation bias during the Babylonian exile.

Our text, Jeremiah 29:1-15, is the beginning of a letter the prophet sent from Jerusalem to some of those who had already been carried into exile in Babylon. Towards the end of the text is verse 11, often lifted out of context (in a way which is probably confirmation bias in itself) to embroider on wall hangings or post of Facebook to express the confident hope that God is in control and has great plans for our lives. But just before that well-loved “promise” come verses 8 and 9, which say,

For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name.

In Hebrew, “the dreams that they dream” is literally something like “your dreams that you cause to dream.” An attempt to translate that more accurately is the NIV’s, “do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to dream.” In other words, God is warning His people through Jeremiah not to listen to prophets who just tell them what they want to hear. Such “dreams” are false hope.

The particular concern of Jeremiah is that the exiles are in for a long haul. Those who received this letter, the first wave of captured and deported exiles, were looking at seventy years before any Jew would return from Babylon to Jerusalem. Almost all of them, in fact, would be dead. Thus prophecies of a swift end to the exile and a restoration of their fortunes back in their own country were all false. Instead, Jeremiah counsels them to settle down in Babylon, build houses, plant gardens, get married, and have children. They will be in that foreign place a long time. Don’t let anyone tell them different.

As I said last week, we as Christians need to understand our hope in God in that same “long haul” way. We need to listen to Jeremiah and be skeptical of “prophets” who tell us the things we want to hear, such as that there will a coronavirus vaccine soon or that racial injustice will be easily remedied (or even that it doesn’t actually exist). We have dreams, but they are not the dreams the loud voices of this world dream, and they are not even the dreams we might like them to dream. If we listen to those dreams, it is only a “careless hope.” Jeremiah and the whole story of God’s people in the Scriptures calls us to a better hope.

I recently listened to one of those thrillers with a solitary protagonist who has incredible military fighting skills. He goes up alone against all odds in opposition to forces of evil, in this case an international ring of sex traffickers. Most of the book is in the first person narrative of the hero, and he is constantly saying to himself a refrain he learned in the military, “Hope is not a strategy.”

That phrase, “Hope is not a strategy,” is evidently a commonly expressed adage in the armed forces. The point seems to be that merely hoping a mission or battle will turn out well is no substitute for a well-thought-out plan and clear goals. That slogan and attitude has spawned adopters of the slogan beyond the military, including a book about making sales and a weight loss plan from Rachel Hollis. Don’t hope. Instead, make a plan.

Such demotion of hope to a sort of wishful thinking in serious endeavors stands in contrast to the almost constant popular encouragement to “have hope.” TV and movie characters are constantly saying something like that to each other. Though I am often critical of such popular cliches, there is something to the notion that hope does in fact lead to good outcomes. There is a recent article on the on-line journal of the U.S. Army War College which declares, “Hope is Not a Strategy: It’s the Only Strategy.” The author argues that large scale hope in significant benefit to human life and progress has strengthened and sustained just war efforts and good leaders of the past. Giving up on hope would be a poor strategy.

Those who adopt the “hope is not a strategy” mindset presumably believe that reliance on hope will produce disappointment. Without good planning, the hoped for outcome will not appear. The war will be lost, the sale will fall through, and the weight will come back. Yet our text for Sunday, Romans 5:1-5, offers in verses 3 and 4 a strange progression which begins with suffering and ends with hope. And then verse 5 proclaims, “and hope does not disappoint us.”

As Christians we have our own unique reasons for believing that hope does not disappoint us, and therefore hope may be a very good strategy indeed. We may flourish lines like Juliana of Norwich’s “And all shall be well,” or Rev. Al Sharpton’s beautiful declaration in his eulogy for George Floyd this week:

I turned to the end of the book. And I know how this story is going to end. The first will be last. The last will be first. The lion and the lamb is going to lay down together and God will take care of his children. We got some difficult days ahead, but I know how the story is going to end. There’s going to be justice for George Floyd. There’s going to be justice for Eric Garner. This story won’t end like this. God will never leave us, nor forsake us. I been to the end of the book. Let’s fight on. Let’s stand together. Let us not leave this family now that this ceremony is over.

We do truly have hope because our faith, because our holy Book teaches us that all will be well and that the story will have a happy ending. Yet at the same time we make those affirmations, we need to grasp what Paul is saying here in Romans 5 about the role suffering plays in growing that hope. Suffering is the ugly, muddy dirt from which the stem of hope grows. Suffering is the miry clay down through which we must plunge in order to reach the bedrock of hope. Without suffering we won’t be able to grasp and hold onto true and solid hope, hope which will in fact not disappoint.

That’s all why hope is, in fact, a strategy, but suffering is part of the tactics by which
God enables us to carry out that strategy. That tactic of letting us suffer may seem awful cruel on God’s part, but we still hope, because we know that whatever God does, He does in love, as Paul affirms at the end of verse 5, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” We hope in love because of our faith, and says Paul in another place, “Love never fails.”

Angry, grieving people around our country, and around the world, continue to march in protest against systemic racism which constantly causes injustice and violence against people of color. So as we approach the next Sunday in the church calendar, Trinity, what has that seemingly abstract doctrine got to do with what is going on? Does the fact that Christians believe that God is three-persons-yet-one-God offer any hope to our current crisis around race? The answer is yes.

I humbly, and with great hesitance in speaking for others, suggest that when people shout from the depths of their souls that “Black lives matter!” they want those of us who are white to grasp that race itself matters. We might wish to say something like, “It doesn’t matter what color a person is, we’re all the same.” But such a statement trivializes the life experience of a person who has continually found that color really does matter, both in the way one is treated by other individuals and by social systems. The upshot is that the differences do matter in profound ways.

That is why the significant differences within God Himself matter so much. Western Christianity has tended to focus more on the unity of God, but all Christian theology grasps that there are, at the core of God’s own being, fundamental differences between the persons, between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One classic way of representing that fact is the “Shield of the Trinity,” which appears to go back to at least the 13th century. I’ll follow this lovely image in Latin with a simpler version in English to help us all see what the Shield is meant to illustrate.

As you can see, on the perimeter of the triangle, the Shield clearly states (in a different order from the Latin image, but that is irrelevant) that the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father. There is difference in God. At the same time, the in-reaching lines toward the center state the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. There is unity in God. Difference in unity is one aspect of the eternal life of God’s own self.

When we remember that human beings are created in the image of God (as the Old Testament lesson for this Sunday from Genesis 1 teaches us), we begin to see how these abstract concepts about the Trinity offer hope. We are meant to reflect in human life that unity in difference which is God’s own nature. Race matters because our racial differences are one way in which God created us to reflect His Trinitarian encompassing of difference (our sexual difference is another way, but that’s another story).

Hope comes to us when we realize that the whole story of the Gospel is God crossing the infinite difference between God and us in order to invite us into the kind of life which God has always enjoyed, a life of unity in difference. In our Gospel lesson for this Sunday, Matthew 28:16-20, when we hear Jesus commanding the disciples to go forth and baptize people of “all nations” into the Trinitarian name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Jesus is giving them a mission to preach the possibility that people of every race on earth can come together in that name, different but in unity. That is what the church is meant to be, a great community of people who embody the image of God, the image of difference in unity, unity in difference.

The difficult part of this story is that we may not simply leap to unity over the differences, downplaying or ignoring them. As those images of the Trinity suggest, the differences are just as important as the unity. The differences between black and brown and white are as significant and important as whatever might make us the same. Any genuine community and any genuine justice is going to have to embrace and celebrate and work within those differences if it is going to be able to achieve any genuine unity.

Unity in difference is hard work, just as hard as the apostolic work of spreading the Gospel of Jesus to all the nations, a work that has taken centuries and still has further to go. It is actually the same work, for the Gospel which baptizes into the name of the Holy Trinity is only really the Gospel when it produces the kind of community which that Name names. As the last week has shown us so clearly, there is a huge amount of work yet to be done before the human community of the church is a true reflection of that Name. But there is hope because that Name names the fact that the kind of human life we are seeking already exists in the divine life. And the Ambassador and Author of that life has come to us and will, as He promised, always be with us. Let’s get on with the work, living in the hope.

I am not preaching this Sunday. So this post is to share a letter I sent to our congregation in response to recent events in our country.

Dear Valley Covenant friends,

Our African-American brothers and sisters in Christ are hurting right now. Yet another unarmed black man, George Floyd, has died while in police custody, to all appearances murdered by a police officer. I believe it is impossible for those of us who are white to completely grasp the impact this has on people of color around us. Yet as followers of Jesus Christ, I’d like to call us to respond in love, sympathy and support for those who are hurt, sorrowing, and angry today.

I might have talked about this in a sermon, but I am not preaching this week. So I’m using this method to note that as we celebrate Pentecost this Sunday the verses we will be reading from Acts 2 clearly state that many cultures, and probably several different races of people, were present that day to witness the gift of the Holy Spirit and to hear the good news of Jesus Christ. From the very beginning, God intended His kingdom to include all people and to heal the differences which separate us from each other. God’s multi-cultural, multi-racial kingdom vision is constantly under attack by the forces of evil in this world.

The Holy Spirit first appeared as tongues of flame upon the apostles. I would ask that we would let the Spirit set us on fire today in opposition to the evils of prejudice, racism, and racial violence of all sorts. Let us begin with honest introspection and then confess and repent of whatever racism we might find in ourselves.

The coronavirus has made this a fearful time, and a natural human response to fear is to be suspicious of and even hostile toward those around us who are different from us. Yet Paul wrote to Timothy (II Timothy 1:7) that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a Spirit of power, love, and self-control. On this Pentecost, let that Holy Spirit we have received give us power to do something about racism, a deep and abiding love toward those suffering from it, and self-control in regard to our own remaining prejudices.

In terms of doing something, I encourage us to share a word of sympathy and support to African-American friends we may know as well as to Asian friends who have also experienced irrational racist expressions during this time. Let us also pray for and work toward having public servants and leaders at all levels who do not voice racist views, engage in racist activity, or tolerate racism of any kind. Let us pray for God to give us leaders who actively deplore racism by both what they say and what they do.

Pentecost demonstrated that God’s kingdom is a realm where no one is treated less well than another because of skin color, ethnicity, or language. The Acts 2 reading for the day ends in verse 21, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” Let us truly believe the inclusiveness of that verse by being a community of love which stands by and cares about everyone in this world, especially those who are being oppressed and mistreated.

I do want to say thank you to the community of Valley Covenant Church for consistently offering a warm welcome to people of all races and colors as God has sent them to us over the years. This letter is simply a loving encouragement now to extend that same spirit, which I believe is the Holy Spirit of Pentecost, in love and concern toward hurting people of color around us as they grieve and sometimes rage at injustice. Moving beyond mere friendliness toward those who happen to enter our doors, let us feel some loving outrage toward what has happened, in sympathy and solidarity with people of color whoever and wherever they are.

Thank you for reading this and for being faithful followers of Jesus, filled with His Spirit, giving glory to the God and Father of all people.

In Christ,
Pastor Steve

In our look at the three theological virtues, faith, hope and love, we now turn to hope for a few weeks. My unscientific guess is that the word “hope” appears in ordinary conversation much more often than does the word “faith.” One effect of the common and frequent use of the term is that it seems to have several different senses.

As a Christian virtue, hope seems to be the next step in a progression that begins with faith. Hope goes beyond faith in its apprehension and grasp of things future, like the return of Christ or our own resurrection and “hope of glory.” Yet in regular usage, “hope” seems a little weaker than “faith.”

For instance, I may “hope” that the person I voted for wins the election, while having very little confidence that she will. So I can have hope for some future outcome without having much faith at all that it will happen. I can buy a lottery ticket and hope to win, while having almost no faith or any sort of expectation that I actually will win.

Yet for Christians hope is a further development of faith, and is in some way superior to faith. Author Peter Kreeft says that faith is the seed, hope is the stem, and love is the flower. If anything, Christian hope feels even more confidence than faith, rather than less. A traditional prayer at the graveside of a Christian believer begins, “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ…”

It’s that kind of “sure and certain hope” which we hear in our text for this Sunday, Ephesians 1:15-23. In verse 15, Paul says he has heard of the Ephesians’ faith, but then he goes on in verses 17 and 18 to pray for them to take the next step, as it were. He prays that they may be given further wisdom and revelation by the Spirit and then in verse 18, “so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints…”

In times like these we may often say we need hope, and we may often express the lesser, weaker form of hope in thoughts or words such as, “I hope this virus thing is over soon.” But the hope we have in Christ builds on our faith that Jesus is the true source of all that is good for us and that we believe in outcomes that go beyond anything which may or may not occur in either the immediate or distant future in this world and this life. As such, Christian hope, like Christian faith, is a gift from God which offers us a deeper assurance of things yet unseen than is available through any measure ordinary hoping.

As we celebrate Jesus’ ascension this Sunday we recall that our faith includes the promise of the angels to the disciples in Acts 1:11, that Jesus will return from heaven to this world once again. Even in the most difficult of times, faithful confidence in the witness of the apostles to that angelic word and Jesus’ own promise to return leads us further on to that “sure and certain hope” expressed in Christian liturgy on the saddest of occasions. Let us live in that hope in every occasion.