“The God who knows us” (Psalm 139)

It was my original intention this morning for us to look together at the Old Testament passage we read a few moments ago: the story of Samuel’s first encounter with God. The narrator opens the account with an observation that has to be one of the saddest statements in all of the Bible: “In those days the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions” (1 Samuel 3:1). Generations had elapsed since the time of Moses and the great events of the exodus. The voice that had thundered from the peak of Mount Sinai was scarcely a faint echo from the past. The worship of the tabernacle had degenerated into a hollow ritual. And the great moral principles that had made them unique among the nations had largely slipped from the people’s collective consciousness.

From this sad overview of the spiritual state of the nation of Israel the camera focuses in on a young lad fast asleep in the large tent structure that served as the centre of Israel’s worship. And in the stark silence of the night we hear a voice: “Samuel!” The young lad stirs, sits up, rubs his eyes and answers, “Here I am.” He gets up and runs to his master, the aged priest Eli. “You called me?” he asks. But the old man replies, “It wasn’t me; go back to bed.”

A second time it happens. “Samuel…” A second time he gets up and goes to the old man. And a second time he is sent back to his bed. He has barely fallen asleep when it happens again: “Samuel!” But this time the old priest has begun to figure out what’s going on. It’s all rather like what we read in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Narnia has been trapped in winter almost since anyone can remember, as suddenly the snow starts to melt, buds appear on the trees, and spring flowers begin to sprout and blossom. “Aslan is on the move!” So old Eli instructs the lad, “Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’” Back to his bed the young Samuel goes—and sure enough the Lord comes to him again, “Samuel! Samuel…”

You know me

And this brings me to Psalm 139, which begins with the words, “Lord, you have searched me, and you know me…” I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us that God knows us. After all, he is the creator of the universe! Several weeks ago Karen and I watched the film Citizenfour. It centres on the story of Edward Snowden and how government agencies in our western nations are increasingly able to snoop on seemingly every detail of our lives. 1984 is long in the past, but it appears that George Orwell’s catchphrase, “Big Brother is watching you,” has become a reality—and for many of us, who value our privacy and our freedom, it can be a frightening one.

So what does the psalm mean when it says, “Lord, you have searched me, and you know me”? Well of course it includes the idea that God knows all about us. He knows what’s in our emails and our bank accounts. He knew our DNA long before Francis Collins and others were able to map the human genome. Furthermore, the psalm tells us he knows what’s going on inside our hearts and minds—and that can be a scary thought! But all of that is not the point. For the Hebrew verb “to know” is not just about knowing facts. It is about knowing someone personally, having a relationship with them.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” the Lord says tenderly to Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:5). When Jesus speaks to his followers about his being the good shepherd, he tells them, “I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father” (John 10:14-15). So what we are talking about here is a personal knowing, an intimate knowing. To my mind we see it most poignantly in that scene outside the empty tomb on the first Easter morning. Mary Magdalene has come with her pounds of spices to anoint the body of Jesus. But the stone has been rolled away and the body has gone. Through her tears and the morning mist she sees a figure whom she mistakes as the gardener. “Tell me, sir,” she says to him, “where you have put him.” Then she hears the word that changes her life forever: “Mary…” (John 20:11-16)

“Mary…” “Adam…” “Emily…” “Alvin…” “Kewoba…” “Lolita…” “Gil…” “Brian…” “Samuel…” The Lord does not look on us only as a collectivity. He knows each of us by name. He knows our highs and our lows, our joys and our sorrows, our strengths and our weaknesses, our dreams and our secret fears—not to use them against us, but to come alongside us and to strengthen us along the journey of becoming the women and the men that he has created every one of us uniquely to be. And with that I have already arrived at my second point.

You hold me fast

That personal, intimate knowing of our hearts on God’s part inevitably leads to something more. So it is that we read in verses 9 and 10,

If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
     if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
     your right hand will hold me fast.

When we read these words we need to remember that ancient near-eastern cultures gave particular significance to the right hand as opposed to the left. The right hand is the strong hand. The right hand is the useful hand. The right hand is the hand of blessing. It is for this reason that through Isaiah God promises the people of Israel, “Do not fear, for I am with you… I will uphold you with my righteous right hand” (Isaiah 41:10). By the same token, when Jesus spoke about being struck on the right cheek, what he was referring to was a slap from the left hand, and that was a grievous affront. It was quite literally to add insult to injury. And so when we are failing or falling, it is with his right hand, the hand of strength, the hand of blessing, that God graciously reaches out to us and lifts us up and puts us in the place where we should be.

The apostle Paul expressed it memorably those magnificent verses in the eighth chapter of Romans when he wrote,

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35, 37-39)

The late Scottish theologian T.F. Torrance hit the nail on the head in an illustration that I have found myself going back to again and again. He wrote,

Many years ago I recall thinking of the marvellous way in which our faith is implicated in the faith of Jesus Christ and grasped by his faithfulness, when I was teaching my little daughter to walk. I can still feel her tiny fingers gripping my hand as tightly as she could. She did not rely upon her feeble grasp of my hand but upon my strong grasp of her hand which enfolded her grasp of mine within it. That is surely how God’s faithfulness actualized in Jesus Christ has hold of our weak and faltering faith and holds it securely in his hand.[1]

Torrance’s fellow countryman, the hymn writer George Matheson, put it lyrically in the successive verses of his hymn of 130 years ago: “O love that wilt not let me go… O light that followest all my way… O joy that seekest me through pain…”

As we read in the psalm, there is nowhere we can go, whether to the heights of ecstasy or to the depths of despair, or to the farthest place imaginable, that our gracious God is not able to reach out his hand to us and take us firmly into his grasp—and as we look at that hand we see on it the mark of a nail and the stain of his blood.

You lead me

All of these observations take us in the end, and as they should, to a prayer:

Search me, God, and know my heart;
     test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
     and lead me in the way everlasting.

If there is nothing else that we can learn from the verses of this psalm it is that we have a God whom we can trust to lead us through life, and trust to the uttermost.

Yet we would be horribly mistaken if we thought for one minute that following him turns our lives into a cakewalk. That is the false message being promulgated by the purveyors of the so-called “health, wealth and prosperity gospel”. The true gospel—and our faith—centres in the one who proclaimed, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me,” (Luke 9:23) and who warned those same followers, “In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33). A couple of generations later one of those followers would reiterate the same warning: “Do not be surprised, my brothers and sisters, if the world hates you” (1 John 3:13).

The Letter to the Hebrews dedicates an entire chapter to the stories of those who chose to follow God’s leading. It tells of some

who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawn in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated… They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect. (Hebrews 11:35-40)

Torture, floggings, stoning and imprisonment! All of this seems like a rather discouraging note on which to end a sermon. And it would be, were it not for two things: the companion and the destination. We have a God who promises, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). Do you remember the story of Daniel’s three companions whom King Nebuchadnezzar commanded to be thrown into a blazing furnace for their refusal to bow to a graven image? When the king looked into the furnace, he saw not three men but four. They trusted in God’s promise,

Do not fear, for I am with you;
     do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you;
     I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. (Isaiah 41:10)

And were not Jesus’ final words to his followers before he departed this world, “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20)?

When we come to the end of that journey (where the Lord has been with us at each step along the way) it will be to arrive at a destination to which nothing that we have ever experienced in this world can compare. It will be to set foot in the new Jerusalem, the very dwelling place of God, where God himself will be with us and we will know his unmediated presence, where he will wipe every tear from our eyes; where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away and everything will have been made new (Revelation 21:3-4). And our only possible response will be,

“Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory!” (Revelation 19:6-7)

Amen.

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[1]     The Mediation of Christ, page 83

“The Real Miracle of Pentecost” (Acts 2:42-47)

I wonder how many people had their TV sets switched on yesterday morning at 5 o’clock. That’s when the CBC coverage of the royal wedding began and for the next five hours I can only imagine that millions of viewers were glued to their screens, trying to catch a glimpse of this or that celebrity among the six hundred who were invited to the event.

Long before it took place, countless hours of television time had already gone into the anticipation of the wedding—and for the publicists it was all big money. While the costs of the wedding are estimated to top $36 million, it was expected to generate over $860 million in revenue. If it is anything to go by, memorabilia sales alone for the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton seven years ago amounted to more than $380 million.

By this time you may already have been asking yourself, “What is this preacher fellow getting at—and what does all of this business about royal weddings have to do with the Bible anyway?” Well, for Christians today is the anniversary of another big event, when three thousand souls were added to the fledgling group of Jesus’ followers who had come together that morning to pray.

Little could they have imagined when they gathered in the upper room that they would be swept off their feet (spiritually if not physically) by a “rushing mighty wind”, touched by fire, and speaking in languages never before heard from their lips! So completely strange was what happened to them that it is little wonder that it all began to attract a crowd of people who were no less amazed and perplexed than they were. “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”

So today, while the rest of the world is recovering from the royal wedding or preparing for Game Five in the playoffs between Vegas and the Jets, we Christians quietly celebrate the Feast of Pentecost. And quite rightly our attention is fixed on the miraculous events that occurred that morning: the mysterious whistling of the wind, the flames of fire that divided and settled on each of the believers, and the praises of God in all the varied languages of the known world.

It was a remarkable event—and I don’t know how many times I have preached on it over the past forty-plus years. Yet this year as I began my preparations, it dawned upon me that my attention has always been focused on the events in the opening verses of Acts, chapter 2. At the same time it began to occur to me that maybe what Luke wrote in the closing verses of that same chapter has even more to teach us about the real meaning of Pentecost and about the work that the Holy Spirit yearns to do in you and in me. So allow me to read them to you.

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Devotion

There are three aspects of this brief summary of the first days of the church I would like us to focus on. The first of them can be summarized by the word “devotion”. Luke begins, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”

My Greek lexicon tells me that those words “devoted themselves” can be translated in a whole variety of ways: “persist in”, “attach oneself to”, “be faithful to”, “be busily engaged in”, “hold fast to”, “persevere in”, “spend much time in”. By now probably you get the idea. Those first believers were not prepared to allow anything to stand in the way of learning from the apostles or from coming together regularly for fellowship, worship and prayer.

Early in my own walk with Christ many years ago, my pastor encouraged me to begin memorizing Scripture. The first verses I ever committed to memory were Psalm 119:9 and 11, and I quote them as I learned them in the old King James Version:

Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?
By taking heed thereto according to thy word…
Thy word have I hid in mine heart,
that I might not sin against thee.

It seems to me that those early believers did exactly what Psalm 119 counsels us to do: they were taking God’s word to heart with an unshakeable commitment to the apostles’ teaching. Now of course they had no New Testament and they wouldn’t for a couple of generations. But they had the apostles themselves and they spent time learning from them, drinking in their words—and we’re not just talking about a weekly twenty-minute sermon or even a forty-minute one. Acts 20 tells us of an evening when the apostle Paul went on talking till midnight—to the point where one young man drifted into sleep and fell out the window!

But the point was that they could never hear enough. Like the two companions who met with Jesus along the road to Emmaus on that first resurrection day, I can only imagine that their hearts burned within them as they learned from the apostles and opened the Scriptures together.

Some years ago we had the privilege of hosting Ernest Gordon, who had been held captive in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Burma along what was known as the railway of death. Although he was not a believer at the time, he and some of his men began reading the New Testament together. It did not take long before they found that they could not put it down, for they had the amazing experience that the same Jesus whom they found on its pages was there among them.

Yet much of this seems so far from the experience of the church in our part of the world today. A recent study revealed that only forty-five percent of those who regularly attend church read the Bible more than once a week. Almost twenty percent say they never read the Bible—and that is about the same percentage as those who read it on a daily basis. [1] That seems a far cry from our early forebears who lived in the shadow of Pentecost, who could not get enough the apostles’ teaching. Would that the Holy Spirit would stir the same thirst in us today!

Awe

Those first believers showed a devotion to the apostles’ teaching. But Luke also tells us in verse 43 that “everyone was filled with awe”. Again, if you read that verse in the old King James Version, it would sound like this: “And fear came upon every soul.” The word in the original in fact is phobos. We find it in words like “claustrophobia”, the fear of small spaces, “acrophobia”, the fear of heights, and “arachnophobia”, the fear of spiders.

There was a German philosopher of a century ago called Rudolf Otto, who came up with the phrase mysterium tremendum—the sense of something so mysterious that it causes you to tremble. This, he said, is what happens to us when we come into the presence of the living God.

We see it in Moses as he tended his flocks in the wilderness and approached that strange bush that burned but was not consumed. The book of Exodus tells us that when Moses began to realize in whose presence he stood, “he hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:6). Or think of Isaiah in the temple, as he gazed at the six-winged seraphs and heard their cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty…” and felt the stone floor shuddering beneath him. “Woe to me!” was all he could think to utter, “For I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:3-4).

Or we can turn to the New Testament, to the story of the centurion who came to Jesus on behalf of his servant. “Lord,” he said to him, “I do not deserve you to come under my roof…” (Matthew 8:5-9) Think too of the occasion when Peter and his companions had just hauled in an enormous load of fish because Jesus had told them to let down their nets in spite of there being no fish. He fell down before Jesus and wailed, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:1-10)

Our forebears in the faith had that same sense of awe as they gathered to learn from the apostles, to break bread and to pray together. The letter to Hebrews tells us,

You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Hebrews 12:22-24)

How we need to ask God to inspire in us that same sense of awe—each time we gather to take time to come before him consciously and deliberately and ask him to open our hearts afresh to the unfathomable mystery of his love and power. I have no doubt that we would know more of the Holy Spirit’s presence if we did.

Community

A devotion to the apostles’ teaching, awe in the presence of the living God—and a third characteristic of those first Christians I would like to emphasize comes in a word for which there is really no adequate English equivalent. It is the word koinonia. Most often it is rendered “fellowship” as we see it in this morning’s passage. But if you think of fellowship (as I suspect most of us do) as what happens over a cup of coffee after the worship service, then we have fallen woefully short of what the New Testament means when it uses the word koinonia.

What it really means is having something in common on a profound level—and Luke gives us a picture of how that works out in practical terms in those last verses of Acts 2. Let me read them to you once again:

All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts…

Now for us who have been immersed from infancy in the independent-minded, freedom-loving principles western society, that is a strange and even frightening picture. It may relieve you to know I am not advocating that we seek to replicate detail for detail all the practices of the early church.

What I am saying is that there was a genuine sense of caring and sharing among those first believers that you would not have found outside the church. I remember some years ago a pastor friend telling me of a member of his church who was part of a small group that met for Bible study and prayer. The man happened to work for a tobacco company. Over time he became convinced that as a Christian he could not in good conscience continue to do this and he shared it with the group. To his surprise, they all agreed that if he felt that this was the direction in which God was leading him, they would give him any financial support he might need in order to make the change—and they ended up caring for him and his family for the better part of a year until he found a new job.

Those people knew the meaning of the word koinonia. It was our Lord Jesus himself who said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). And so I don’t believe it was by coincidence that Luke concludes the day of Pentecost with these words: “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

As we look back on the mighty, rushing wind and on the tongues of fire that came upon those first believers, may we pray not for them to happen again, but for what they led to: to a wholehearted devotion to the apostles’ teaching, to a life-changing awe as we gather in the presence of the living God, and to a sense of community that is costly and real. In a word, may the Holy Spirit lead us to being the authentic body of Jesus in the world today.

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[1]     Ed Stetzer, “The Epidemic of Bible Illiteracy in Our Churches”, Christianity Today, July 2015

“The Other Side of Repentance” (Psalm 51)

In this morning’s New Testament reading we heard the story of what may be one of Jesus’ best-known miracles. Mark gives us the picture of Jesus in a house with people crowding around him on every side, jam-packed right to the door. As Jesus is teaching, noises are heard from above, then dust and little bits and pieces start falling from the ceiling, a shaft of light opens up, and last but not least, slowly a man is lowered on a mat into the middle of the room. I can only imagine that everyone was wondering what was going to happen next. But I bet no one could have predicted that Jesus would do what he did, as he turned to the man and said to him, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

Then the reaction began to set in. Not a word was uttered. It didn’t need to be. The atmosphere of shocked condemnation could be felt throughout the room as much as the dust still hanging in the air. “Why does this fellow talk like that?” “He’s blaspheming!” “Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

So what did it mean for Jesus to forgive that paralyzed man? What was he doing that seemed so radical, even heretical, to some of those in the room that day? To look for an answer, I want us to turn to the Old Testament passage we also read a few minutes ago, Psalm 51.

It is recognized as the greatest expression of penitence in all of Scripture. One Bible Commentary goes so far as to say, “As an expression of a heart overwhelmed by shame, humbled and broken by guiltiness, and yet saved from despair through penitential faith in the mercy of God, this poem is unsurpassed.”[1] No doubt that is why it forms the core of the Ash Wednesday service in many churches, including our own.

Of the 150 psalms in the Old Testament, half are attributed to King David. But of those seventy-five, only three contain a precise reference to the circumstances that gave rise to them. And curiously each of these arises out of a low point in David’s life. Two of them were composed during the uprising fomented by his rebellious son Absalom, when David was forced to flee for his life into the wilderness. The psalm we are looking at this morning, however, is the expression of what was undoubtedly the lowest point in David’s life—and unlike the others, it was a low point entirely of his own making.

Many of us will be familiar with the story of David’s infatuation with Bathsheba, the wife of his most loyal general, Uriah the Hittite; of how that infatuation led to adultery; of Bathsheba’s resulting pregnancy; and finally of how David cunningly engineered Uriah’s death in the field of battle. Had it not been for the courage of one man, the prophet Nathan, David’s treachery might never have been found out. Now we find David with his face to the ground, crying out through his tears, “Have mercy on me, O God…”

The psalm is a study in repentance. But that repentance would have been meaningless, were it not for a far greater fact—the fact of God’s forgiveness. The conviction that our God is a God who forgives is one that runs from one end of the Bible to the other. Way back on Mount Sinai God had revealed himself to Moses as “the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7a). Centuries later this same truth is echoed in Nehemiah’s prayer on behalf of his wayward people: “But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love” (Nehemiah 9:17). And elsewhere in the Psalms we read, “But with you there is forgiveness…” (Psalm 130:4a).

But what does it mean for God to forgive? That is what this morning’s psalm is all about. And it comes to us in a series of verb clusters. If you have a Bible open in front of you, we’ll take a look at each of them in turn.

Wipe, wash, cleanse

You can find the first cluster in verses 1, 2, 7 and 9. It involves words that all have to do with “wiping out”, “washing away” or “cleansing”. The first of them, which our New International Version Bibles translates “blot out”, has to do with making a correction in a book, whether it was removing a stain or cancelling a debt. I am told that in the ancient world the way you erased something on a leather scroll was not by blotting, but by washing or sponging off the ink. So perhaps “wipe out” is a better translation than “blot out”—especially when you consider that the word is used elsewhere for wiping a dish clean.[2]

Later, in the writings of the prophet Isaiah we read of the Lord,

“I, even I, am he who wipes out
     your transgressions, for my own sake,
     and remembers your sins no more.” (Isaiah 43:25)

So it is, when God wipes out our sins, not a trace of them is left—and this is made clear in the two other words that David uses in his prayer: in verses 2 and 7: “wash away” and “cleanse”.

When I was a boy there was a detergent called Omo. I haven’t checked the grocery store to see if it’s still on the market and I don’t think we ever used it in our household. But what I remember about it is the ads: “Omo washes not only clean, not only white, but bright! Omo adds bright, bright, brightness.”

Now in the ancient world there was no such thing as Omo. For clothes to be washed they had to be beaten on rocks. When I visited Haiti a few years ago I remember mothers doing this in a stream that ran by a school sponsored by our church—and I’ve never seen school children in such sparkling white clothes as I did there. So to quote one author the washing we’re talking about here is “not a polite rinse but a thorough scrub”.[3] And when it comes to the stain of sin, even that is not enough. As we read from the prophet Jeremiah,

“Although you wash yourself with soap
     and use an abundance of cleansing powder,
     the stain of your guilt is still before me,”
declares the Sovereign Lord. (Jeremiah 2:22)

Yet though we may not have the power to cleanse ourselves from our sins, we have a God who does. The Bible assures us,

If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
(1 John 1:9)

Though your sins are like scarlet,
     they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
     they shall be like wool. (Isaiah 1:18)

Hide your face

The next expression that David uses—and you’ll find it in verse 9—is a curious one: “Hide your face from my sins.” What does it mean for God to hide his face from my sins? Way back at the beginning of creation Adam and Eve tried to hide from God after they had sinned, and it didn’t work.

Last week our older son celebrated a significant birthday, and Karen and I presented him with an album of pictures we had taken of him over the years. Needless to say, we were careful to omit any that might be embarrassing or less than complimentary! One of the things I have said about myself more than once is that I have no desire to have to sit through the complete video of my life. There are just too many things that I have done, words that I have spoken, not to mention attitudes that I have harboured, of which I am ashamed.

So was David asking God to play pretend? I don’t believe so. In spite of the level of moral degradation to which his sin had plummeted him, David nevertheless still had a profound appreciation of the wonder of God’s forgiveness. That is, when God forgives our sins, he forgives them utterly. As we read from the prophet Micah, “You will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19). Corrie ten Boom shed vivid light on this truth in an experience she had following the Second World War. Perhaps some of you have heard it before, but I’ll repeat it again because it is so memorable.

The year was 1947, and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives. This was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed‐out land, and I gave them my favourite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown. “When we confess our sins,” I said, “God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. And even though I cannot find a scripture for it, I believe God then places a sign out there that says, NO FISHING ALLOWED.”[4]

“No fishing allowed.” When God forgives our sins, he forgives them fully, finally and forever.

Restore, rescue

We come now to our third set of words, the first of which is “restore”. If you check a concordance, you will find that the verb for “restore” is found more than a thousand times in the Old Testament. At its heart it means simply “turn around” or “return”. And so more often than not it is speaking about our human part in the process of repentance. Back in the dark ages when I was a teenager, our morning service at church would often begin with these words:

Seek ye the Lord while he may be found,
     call ye upon him while he is near:
Let the wicked forsake his way,
     and the unrighteous man his thoughts:
and let him return unto the Lord,
              and he will have mercy upon him;
     and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
(Isaiah 55:6-7)

Now you can see that these verses emphasize what is required of us in dealing with the sin in our lives. But when David uses this word it is the other way around. In verse 14, he uses exactly the same word when he calls upon God to “restore to me the joy of your salvation”. Why? Because David recognizes that without God’s sovereign intervention true restoration is not possible. The author of Psalm 126 had the same thought in mind when he sang, “Restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the desert” (Psalm 126:3).

Linked with that is another word David uses, this time in verse 14: “deliver”. I prefer to translate it, “rescue”, since when most people think about “deliver” these days, what they generally have in mind is a package from Amazon arriving at their door. At its root the word has the basic sense of pulling something out. As David cries out elsewhere,

I sink in the miry depths,
     where there is no foothold …
Rescue me from the mire,
     do not let me sink… (Psalm 69:2,14)

So it is that God finds us up to our necks in a substance that I won’t mention from the pulpit, and he reaches down and lifts us up and cleans us off and sets us on our feet again: another picture of forgiveness.

Now shift back to the little house in Capernaum and to Jesus’ words, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” In those five short words are concentrated all that I have been at pains to say for the last fifteen minutes. “Your sins have been wiped out.” “You are washed, cleaner than any human effort could make you.” “Your sins have been hidden in a place where even God himself chooses not to find them.” “You have been rescued, lifted out of a pit from which you could never have escaped on your own.”

Lent is a season of repentance. And today you and I have the freedom to repent because we have a God who forgives—and because we have a Saviour who cried, “Father, forgive them…” And those words were meant not only for those who stood beneath his cross, but for you and me today.

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[1]     Leslie S. M‘Caw & J.A. Motyer, “Psalms”, The New Bible Commentary Revised, 1970, page 483

[2]     See 2 Kings 21:13

[3]     John Goldingay, Songs From a Strange Land, page 162

[4]    “The Face of My Enemy”, https://www.biblegateway.com/devotionals/night-light-couples/2016/04/22

“Welcome Dave!” (1 Corinthians 1:26 – 2:5)

A sermon preached at the Installation of the Rev. David Mowers as Rector of Trinity Church, Baraboo, Wisconsin 

I have to admit I was a little tickled when your new rector informed me that, because it is St Matthias’ Day in the church calendar, one of the readings for the service this morning was to be about the choosing of Matthias as the twelfth apostle to fill the space left by Judas Iscariot. In one sense it is a most appropriate reading for the present occasion. After all, this service is a celebration of your choosing a new rector to serve in your parish. However, I rather doubt that you used the same method as the apostles did in going for Matthias. And on the slim chance that you did, you’re probably not going to admit it when the bishop is present!

My own theory about the passage (for whatever it’s worth) is that both candidates, Joseph and Matthias, were equally suited, equally qualified, equally gifted for the position. The little church in Jerusalem was in an enviable position. Good rectors are not always easy to come by—and I am sure that the members of your search committee worked and searched and prayed hard before they found the young man who stands before you this morning. And let me add from my own experience over a number of years (and as I suspect you yourselves have already begun to recognize) you have found a man of excellence.

So we’ll leave Matthias aside for now, because I suspect the other passages that we have read from the Bible this morning are Dave’s choice—and if we look at them we may find some clues about the kind of ministry he is going to have among you and in which I have no doubt he will want you to become engaged.

Consider your call…

In the reading from 1 Corinthians Paul is writing to the Christian community in a busy port and commercial center on the Mediterranean Sea near the southern tip of Greece. Unlike this church, which has ministered in Baraboo for more than 160 years, the church in Corinth was still in the toddler stage. It had been founded by Paul himself during his second missionary journey, just four years or so before he wrote the letter from which we have just read. So you can imagine the level of esteem in which some of those parishioners held Paul. There were some, in fact, who were proud to claim, “I’m one of Paul’s followers.”

It was a claim that horrified Paul, for it is a constant temptation to slip into the habit of focusing the ministry of the Christian community in one person. It happened in the first century and it happens in the twenty-first. In one church where I served there were some people who still looked back longingly to the rector who had gone there in 1897! But Paul turns the tables around in the opening words of this morning’s reading: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters…”

Now I can imagine what probably went through the minds of those people as these words were first read to them. “My call?” “But I don’t have a theological degree.” “I can’t get up in a pulpit and preach.” “I wouldn’t know how to counsel anybody.” And on and on the list goes. But Paul pulls the rug out from under all of that. Look how he describes the Corinthian church: “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.”

And this was nothing new. Think of Jesus’ followers. They were a ragtag group if ever there was one: a handful of fishermen, a tax collector (considered a turncoat by the locals), a radical freedom fighter, and on the list goes—including even one who would later betray him. They were constantly arguing with one another. They repeatedly missed the point of Jesus’ parables and miracles. They cowered in a locked room after he was crucified. Yet these were the ones who very soon would be turning the world upside down!

The point is that Jesus isn’t looking for superstars. He’s looking for women and men who are simply willing to live their lives in faithfulness to him.

Today, as you officially welcome Dave Mowers as your rector, you are giving recognition to the fact that you are on a journey together. The church has often been likened to a ship. It’s why we call the area where you are sitting the nave. But it’s not a luxury cruiser. It’s more like the ships that the Romans used to conquer the Mediterranean world, strenuously rowed by hundreds of men in the lower decks. (If you’ve ever seen the movie Ben Hur, you’ll know what I’m talking about.) The maneuverability of those ships depended on every oarsman pulling his weight. So too the mission of the church depends on each and every of us living in full and wholehearted response to God’s call in Jesus Christ.

When I came to you…

It is only after challenging the members of the Corinthian church to fulfill their calling that Paul goes on to write about his own. He tells them that he didn’t make any attempt to win them over by what one translator renders as “polished speeches and the latest philosophy”.[1] Perhaps Paul had learned from his experience in Athens, where that approach had been a bit of a flop only a few days before! And that in turn may also have been why he came to them “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling”.

Whatever the case, the sacred ministry is a solemn and awesome responsibility. I had that impressed on me at my ordination as a priest. We were still using the “old” Book of Common Prayer at the time, from which the bishop said to me,

Have always therefore printed in your remembrance, how great a treasure is committed to your charge. For they are the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood. The Church and Congregation whom you must serve, is his spouse and his body… Wherefore consider with yourselves the end of your ministry towards the children of God, towards the spouse and body of Christ; and see that you never cease your labour, your care and diligence, until you have done all that lieth in you…[2]

I remember years later sitting down behind my desk on my first day in a new parish and dialing my predecessor on the telephone. “How are you doing?” I asked him. “Well,” he said, “probably just like you. I’m sitting here feeling utterly incompetent.” We clergy may put on a veneer of bravado, but I believe the best of us recognize deep within ourselves that we are unequal to the task that has been committed to us.

It was for that reason Paul made a resolution that in both word and action he would seek to point to Jesus Christ and to him alone—and that he would do it not by falling back on his substantial rabbinical and academic training but by surrendering completely to the Holy Spirit. Now that does not mean that Paul flew by the seat of his pants. (I’ve seen preachers that do that and it doesn’t work!) No, it meant that everything he did was bathed in prayer.

I believe that in calling David Mowers to the ministry of word and sacrament in this parish you have invited into your midst a remarkable man with remarkable gifts. He has a deep commitment to Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and he has a deep love for the church. He is a preacher of extraordinary ability. He is a leader and a man of vision. He is gifted with a fine intellect and reads deeply and broadly. But none of that will come to any fruition unless it is enlivened and empowered by the Holy Spirit. And by the way, you may disagree with him about which baseball team to root for, but don’t let that stand in the way of coming alongside him and praying for the power and blessing of the Holy Spirit both upon him and upon your ministry together.

… So that your faith might rest on the power of God

Now all of this has a purpose. And that purpose, says Paul, is “that your faith might rest on the power of God”. There is always the temptation to put our faith in other things: in church programs, in budgets, in traditions, or whatever. I suspect our particular Episcopal inclination is to put our faith in thinking that we’re the only ones who know how to do it right, whether it’s our social justice agenda or just the fact that we seem to be the only ones who know better than to sing Christmas carols in Advent or Alleluias in Lent!

I remember hearing the story of a Chinese pastor visiting a group of pastors in our part of the world. He told them how in his church there were no hymnbooks, no computers, no budget, indeed not even a building. The pastors expressed their amazement that a church could function, much less thrive, without all these seemingly necessary tools. To which he replied, “And I am amazed at how your churches are able to continue without relying on the power of God!”

In this morning’s gospel reading we heard the story of those two downhearted men drearily making their way along the seven-and-half-mile walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Their hopes, their dreams, their whole world had crashed down upon them with the sight of Jesus hanging lifeless on the cross. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they confessed to the mysterious stranger who had joined them along the journey. It was not all that much later that they were staring at each other in amazement and stuttering, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the Scriptures to us?”

They realized that they had been in the presence of Jesus. Surely that’s the kind of thing Paul is getting at in this morning’s reading when he writes about “a demonstration of the Spirit” and about a faith that rests on the power of God. By his preaching and teaching, in his ministration of the sacraments, in his daily prayer and conversation, and above all by his life and character, Dave’s job is to help you live in the power of the Holy Spirit. He is here to help you discover Jesus as a present reality—as the one who has died and yet is alive forevermore.

There is no doubt in my mind that your search committee and your bishop were led by God to bring Dave Mowers to serve in this parish. And my prayer for you as you officially embark on this journey together is that you may indeed find your hearts burning within you, that you may know the daily presence of Jesus in your lives and in your midst, and that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may be bearers of his grace and his good news to a needy world.

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[1]     Eugene Peterson, The Message

[2]     The Book of Common Prayer, Canada, 1962, page 649