Messages from the Body

Here is a sampling of some of the messages that have made a special impact at CCiPH, and that have been transcribed or written in manuscript.

Most weeks in our equipping assembly, at least one man has been asked to prepare a message that will build up believers. Often, the message is taken from the liturgical Gospel reading of the day, or it is a life message that God has been working into the fabric of that man. It is included here to build you up.

The Kingdom is Here. Don't Miss It.

Message from Ben Gregory on March 7, 2004

Luke 13:31-35

For those of you who are unaware, Ruthie and I are pretty big baseball fans.  We took a couple weeks last summer and went to Baltimore, New York and Boston to watch teams we don’t get to see much of in ballparks we’d never been to, and while we were out east we visited the Hall of Fame too.  It was fun.  We like to go to ballgames.

We like to go see the Reds play too, and a couple times we’ve gone down to the park with some of my friends from work.  That’s fun too.  We like them, they like baseball.  It’s win/win.  Some of my friends though have a different approach to watching baseball than Ruthie and I do.  Which is to not really watch it.  They go to Great American Ballpark a lot, but they don’t see many ballgames.  They wander around talking.  They run into old friends.  They make new ones.  They spend inning after inning standing out on that party deck in rightfield not even always facing the game.  They go on excursions looking for beer and food.  My friend Charlie spends nearly the entire game hovering above the visiting team’s bullpen heckling the pitchers.  (He’s quite good at it--very creative.)  If they get bored, if they get a better offer, if they forget why they came in the first place, they just leave.  Right in the middle of the game.  Unforgivable!  All of which seems to me to be missing the point.

When I go to a ballgame I sit in my seat for nine innings and keep score.  (I bring my own pencil.)  And I’m not anti-social--there’s plenty of time to talk during a baseball game.  I try to get seats in view of the scoreboard so I can get the Official Scorer’s ruling on close calls.  I only consume what I can get someone (whether it’s a vendor or Ruthie) to bring me.  I don’t even like to get up to go to the bathroom, so if I’m able I hold it.  (But I have taught Ruthie how I like to keep score so she can cover me in case of an emergency).  And only twice in my life have I left a game early.  When I go to watch a baseball game, I go to watch a baseball game.  I understand that not everyone is into keeping score, but to go and hardly acknowledge that there’s a game going on strikes me as unfortunate—like paying to see a movie and then spending the whole time in the lobby eating Twizzlers (which I like), playing video games and talking on the phone.

The lectionary has us at the end of Luke 13 today.  This is a tough place to jump into--we’re going to need to back up a bit to get some context, so we back up to the beginning of the chapter, which is still jumping into the middle of something, and it doesn’t immediately look very helpful.  We find goofy stories about people who died when a tower collapsed on them and about a fig tree that may or may not be cut down at some point in the future.  It can make you wonder why Luke puts these things together they way he does—why he puts things where he puts them.  It doesn’t always seem chronological—he seems to be trying to make a point most of the time.  So what’s the deal here?  Tricksy.  But if we’ll dig just a little lower we may find that Chapter 13 not only makes sense, but has a lot to say to believers in 2004.  So let’s take a look at it together.

Luke, chapter 13, beginning with verse 1.  “Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices.  Jesus answered, ‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way?  I tell you, no!  But unless you repent, you too will all perish.  Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem?  I tell you, no!  But unless you repent, you too will all perish.’”  And at first it looks like Jesus is teaching about repentance, but he’s not—any more than I was really talking about baseball a minute ago.  To help him make his point he tells a story about a tree.  Look at verse six.

“A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on in, but did not find any.  So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, ‘For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and I haven’t found any.  Cut it down!  Why should it use up the soil?’  ‘Sir,’ the man replied, ‘leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it.  If it bears fruit next year, fine!  If not, then cut it down.’"

And I think, “huh?”  That story doesn’t seem quite over—like maybe there’s a lost verse or something.  Does it produce fruit next year or not?  Do they cut it down or not?  Reminds me of how I felt at the end of the first Lord of the Rings movie.  But there’s no sequel here.  And lots of us have been so thoroughly conditioned that when we hear Jesus talk about bearing fruit we make all kinds of assumptions about what he talking about that are completely divorced of context and we miss what he’s saying.  This isn’t a teaching about the importance of being fruitful followers of Christ.  You can find that elsewhere in your New Testament, but not here.

So what is he talking about?  Specifically, that how good a person you are, or appear to be, has no bearing on when you will die.  He’s adamant that the people who died at the tower weren’t any more guilty than the people who didn’t and then he presents a fig tree that, based on its fruitfulness, ought to be dead but isn’t.  Apparently conventional wisdom back then held that bad things in life—such as illness and suffering and death—were a direct result of sinful behavior.  Do you remember the story in John where Jesus and his followers find a blind man along the road?  Immediately the disciples want to know, “who sinned?”  Jesus corrects them.  That’s not how it works.  Jesus wants these people to understand that God’s rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.  This is new information to them.

The next story Luke gives us is Jesus’ healing a crippled woman on the Sabbath.  I don’t want to bog down in this stuff, but the gist of it is that Jesus takes compassion on a lady who’d been bent in half by arthritis for eighteen years and heals her.  Happens to be on the Sabbath and the religious leaders of God’s Chosen People are predictably angry about it.  Jesus points out in very strong terms that this lady is more important than their religion.  And what looks like a teaching about the Sabbath, isn’t.  Stay with Luke.  Follow what he’s developing here.  The Tower and the Tree debunked a common misconception about the relationship between appearing righteous and long life.  Here Jesus and Luke use this crippled woman to further develop the idea that appearances and the assumptions that religious people make about them aren’t always accurate.  The person everyone would have assumed was sinful, based on her physical condition, was made well by Jesus—she didn’t look okay, but she was.  And it is the people who were thought, by themselves and by the people around, them to have it all together that Jesus corrects and defies.  They are the ones with the problem, regardless of appearance or the currently accepted worldview.  They look okay, but they’re not.

Next we have the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast.  “Then Jesus asked, ‘What is the kingdom of God like?  What shall I compare it to?  It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden.  It grew and became a tree and the birds of the air perched in its branches.’  Again he asked, ‘What shall I compare the kingdom of God to?  It is like yeast a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.” 

We learned in Sunday School that this meant that you didn’t have to have a lot of faith in order to hope to amount to something for God someday.  But what if it doesn’t mean that?  What if it never did?  What if it means that faith was never intended to be a gaudy, culturally-defined, over-the-top, in-everyone’s-face, billboard, obvious kind of a thing?  We’re learning here--aren’t we?--that what is obvious isn’t always what matters.  Mustard seeds are little.  But they’re there.  Yeast is tiny.  But it does what it’s supposed to.  Hmm…

The next teaching Luke records is another familiar one.  Here it is from The Message, beginning in verse 22: 

“He went on teaching from town to village, village to town, but keeping on a steady course for Jerusalem.  A bystander said, ‘Master, will only a few be saved?’  He said, ‘Whether few or many is none of your business.  Put your mind on your life in God.  The way to life—to God!—is vigorous and requires your total attention.  A lot of you are going to assume that you’ll sit down to God’s salvation banquet just because you’ve been hanging around the neighborhood all your lives.  Well, one day you’re going to be banging on the door, wanting to get in, but you’ll find the door locked and the Master saying, “Sorry, you’re not on my guest list.”  You’ll protest, “But we’ve known you all our lives!” only to be interrupted with his abrupt, “Your kind of knowing can hardly be called knowing.  You don’t know the first thing about me.”  That’s when you’ll find yourselves out in the cold, strangers to grace.  You’ll watch Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the prophets march into God’s kingdom.  You’ll watch outsiders stream in from east, west, north and south and sit down at the table of God’s kingdom.  And all the time you’ll be outside looking in—and wondering what happened.  This is the Great Reversal: the last in line put at the head of the line, and the so-called first ending up last.”

Did you catch that?  “Your kind of knowing can hardly be called knowing.”  “Your kind of knowing” Wow.  Here it is again.  They think they’re okay.  They look okay.  They seem to be doing all the right things.  This is the thing they were prouder of than anything else—they were God’s people.  And the truth is that they don’t even know God and he doesn’t know them.

Luke continues in verse 31 by describing a conversation between Jesus and some Pharisees.  The Pharisees (whether they’re truly concerned or just trying to get Jesus out of their hair) urge him to leave because Herod, the Governor, want to have him killed.  They think Herod is a factor.  After all he has the backing of the Roman government.  He’s a powerful man—they’ve seen it.  He’s never hesitated to have someone killed when it suited him.  These Pharisees expect this to motivate Jesus—to frighten him.  Further proof that they don’t get it and that appearances aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.  Herod looks powerful enough to be calling the shots.  Jesus looks like a wandering teacher with dirty feet.  Their kind of knowing can hardly be called knowing. 

Listen to his response to their warning, again from The Message:  “Tell that fox that I’ve no time for him right now.  Today and tomorrow I’m busy clearing out the demons and healing the sick; the third day I’m wrapping things up.  Besides, it’s not proper for a prophet to come to a bad end outside of Jerusalem.”  Jesus doesn’t sound any more concerned than a man checking his palm-pilot to see what his week looks like.  For reasons that these people are unable or unwilling to see, Jesus doesn’t consider Herod to have the power their eyes and their experience tell them that he has.

And now we’re back where we started.  Jesus is looking in his mind at the people of Israel, represented by Jerusalem, and he’s weeping for them.  He loves them—that’s clear.  In verse 34 he says that he has often longed to gather them all under his wings like a mother hen gathers her chicks.  (I would bet that some of you parents know the feeling he’s describing.)  And they wouldn’t let him.  Generation after generation they’ve not only disobeyed God, but they’ve killed his prophets and stoned anyone he’s sent to them.  And soon—very soon—they’re going to kill him too.  It’s tragic.  John’s gospel specifically points out that Jesus—the Word—came to his own, but his own did not receive him.

He’s looking at Jerusalem, and he might easily have been looking back across chapter 13.  They thought that dying and living were connected to how good a person you were, and Jesus says they’re not.  They thought that their observance of the Sabbath made them better people than a crippled and therefore apparently sinful woman.  Jesus says, you’ve got it all backward.  She’s fine and you’re hypocrites.  People are impressed by the obvious and Jesus compares the real kingdom to the smallest, least visible things his audience was aware of.  Mustard seeds and yeast.  (If he’d done his teaching twenty years ago I think he’d have talked about atoms and quarks.)  They assumed they’d be at the front of the line when the Messiah sat down to eat his victory banquet.  Jesus says that the Messiah won’t even know who they are.  They think that a person with Government-sanctioned authority can hinder God’s purpose in the world.  That they know what power looks like and it doesn’t look like a gentle, intelligent woodworker from the middle of nowhere.  Jesus barely hears them.  The people of God thought they had it all figured out.  And that is a horrific mistake to make.

Jesus is looking at Jerusalem and weeping at how badly they’re missing it.  Might he just as easily be looking at the 21^st Century Church?  There is a book in the world, which I have not yet read, by Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo called Adventures in Missing the Point.  That sounds like a title that’s been a long time coming.  Is it possible that today’s church is missing the point as badly as Jesus’ Jewish audience in Luke 13 was?  For years, as I’ve observed and been a part of different bodies of believers, I’ve had this sort of parable of my own in my head.  Not much of a story really, just this fictitious image of Jesus standing at the entrance to Heaven greeting people by smacking them in the back of the head and saying, “You didn’t get it.  You missed so much down there.  No go on in—everything’s cool.”

Are we missing the point?  This is from Finding Faith also by Brian McLaren:

“I often think that one of the greatest gifts we Christians could give to Jesus…would be to just shut up about him for twenty-five years or so, during which time we would try to come to terms with what a mess we’ve made of the simple path that he introduced to planet earth (and which we quickly complicated, confused and corrupted), during which time we’d simply try to practice what he preached, especially the parts about loving God and loving our neighbors, during which time we would stop producing Jesus-junk (pencils, T-shirts, computer screen-savers, bumper stickers, plastic mugs, refrigerator magnets, and the like, with his name embossed upon them, which successfully merchandise and therefore cheapen his name) and try to rediscover some sense of reverence, dignity and good taste.  After twenty-five years of that, perhaps we could say his name again on rare occasions and it wouldn’t sound so frivolous, so stained, so obscene.”  (Finding Faith, pg. 284) 

And I stand here this morning aware that I am in as much danger of missing the point as anyone else, but what if…

What if we’re so distracted by our obsession with revivalistic emotionalism and religious ritualism that sometimes borders on superstition and with an individualistic behavior-oriented approach to God and to faith that makes me and how I’m doing and my growth the center of things, that to Jesus we look like a group of people wandering around the ballpark looking for one more bucket of popcorn and one more flat, over-priced beer oblivious to the fact that down on the field someone has taken a no-hitter into the ninth inning?

What if we’re crippling our own ability to see the beauty in the world and the people and the art and the life around us?

What if, when Paul said to dwell on whatever is true and noble and right and pure and lovely and admirable and excellent or praiseworthy he didn’t mean for us to be so eager to be offended that we wear ourselves out protesting and boycotting?  What if he meant for us to look instead for the good in what we see?

What if, rather than approaching people as projects whom I need to coerce into becoming little clones of me and what I think God wants—what if instead of that I were free to respect everyone?  My bible says that God loved the world.  I’m not sure that I always do.

What if, rather than holing up in our own little self-created subculture with our own vocabulary and our own music and our own books and our own cable channels while we wait for something in the future to validate our lives—what if we were to look around and realize that the kingdom is here?

I’m not sure that what God wants is a group of people who seem spiritual.  Maybe what he wants are people whose lives are authentic, whose faith is honest and whose love is radical.

The kingdom is here.  Don’t miss it.