faith

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.  ~C.S. Lewis

A few Sundays ago, we the Gospel lesson was the story of the Good Samaritan. This teaching of Jesus came after a lawyer, wanting to justify himself, asked Jesus if he could define not just what it means to love your neighbor but who that neighbor actually is.

After my post on Finding Your Calling in Life, several people emailed to ask me a similar question.

It’s a great question too and one that I’ve thought about long and hard.  If you look at the actual meaning of the word, it just means someone who is near, from the word nigh.

So, the first answer is—EVERYBODY is not your neighbor.  God has not placed everyone in your actual life, but very specific people.  There’s comfort in that, if you let it sink in.  Look around at the landscape of your life and take note of who is near.  Your family is the nearest, then go from there to your actual neighbors, your church family, your work or school family, etc.  You are not called to love and serve everyone, but instead you are called to love and serve very specific people that God has placed in your path.  Vocation is beautiful, in that, it gives your neighbor a name.  You are not everybody’s wife, mother, teacher, etc.  You have been given these certain people on purpose.  (great teaching on this subject here—->(Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller on Vocation.)

The phrase, love  everyone,  kinda lets you off the hook, because it’s so vague.  But, love YOUR wife does not.  How can you love and serve your specific wife?  What are her actual needs?  Does she need you to go to your job everyday to pay the mortgage?  That’s a great way to serve your neighbor.  Maybe help with the kids? Take out the trash?  Honor her and love her?  Yes, yes, and yes.  All good works rendered to her, sanctified by Christ, as if they were rendered to Christ Himself.

In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus beautifully demonstrates that He is our ultimate neighbor.  He finds us beaten, half dead, in a ditch, and rescues us, takes us to the Inn (the church) where He provides for everything we need and then pays the bill!  And so, He is present with us, as we find ways to serve our neighbor.   Whether we are serving or being served, Christ has hidden Himself in our vocation, but He has also hidden Himself in our neighbor.  When we look at our neighbor, we should see Christ.   Gene Veith says in God At Work,

He accepts what we do for others as if we had done it for Him.  It turns out that when we love and serve our neighbors, we are loving and serving Him after all.

This changes everything and helps us see why is vocation so freeing.

For years, I chased after some spiritual high—some evidence that God was near to me.  I wanted every worship service to take me that emotional mountaintop.  I wanted that feeling of nearness to God, that always seemed impossible to reproduce.  Perhaps, that’s part of the reason why modern churches have so orchestrated Sunday morning, with all the lights and the cameras and the screens.  We want to KNOW God is near.

Vocation has saved us from the tyranny of this emotional roller coaster.  We don’t have to chase after God in some grand experience.

He is sitting right next to you.  He looks like your husband.  And he’s hungry and needs dinner.  Maybe even a big smooch.   Or he looks like your ten year old.  And she wants to play Monopoly and learn how to make cookies.  Or he looks like your boss.  And he needs you to do work that is honest and noble.

God doesn’t need your good works.  But, your neighbor does.

And you will never be closer to Him than when you are face to face with His children, loving them and meeting their needs.

Your neighbor?  Is right next to you.  Jesus, incognito.

You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspect,’ is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.  ~C.S. Lewis

Stevie and I sat cozied up together in church.  He put his arm around me and leaned in close, just like I like it.  It was a beautiful Advent service—where together, we received the Absolution, Communion, and heard a perfect law/Gospel sermon.  We hopped into the car with a spring in our step, two forgiven sinners, and within 30 minutes, we were in a fight. Harsh words, hurt feelings, and misunderstandings aplenty.  Y’all.  This is two people who agree on EVERY point of theology, who share a bed, a home, children, a mortgage, and two smelly dogs.  We are two people who love each other in every sense of the word.  And we spent two hours airing our grievances, asking for forgiveness, and wondering how on earth we got to here and how to live together with more love—to better serve each other and bear each other’s burdens, without always pushing our own self-serving agendas.

This is what it’s like to live together as sinners.  It’s messy.  It’s complicated.  It seems nearly impossible to do without both people having the right understanding of their utter depravity before God.  Just when I’m about to accuse Stevie of some justifiable offense against me, my own sin pierces my conscience.  We’re both wrong. We’re both stubborn.  We’re both guilty before God. Theology matters because it teaches us who we are and gives us hope of redemption. It keeps us from so blatantly seeing the sin of others, while letting ourselves go scott free.

It’s become popular and very post-modern to say that  theology doesn’t matter anymore— that we’ve managed to progress beyond the need for proper theological understanding and training.  We want to be inclusive and tolerant and loving—so we dismiss the stodgy, theological types as narrow-minded and conservative.  We’re past all that, we think.  Many modern (or post-modern) churches have dismissed with creeds altogether, as passe and divisive.  We all just love Jesus, we say. That seems to be the new unspoken creed.  But, there’s a sly piece of trickery that sneaks in when you toss out 2,000 years of church practice and teaching.  In dismissing with all that theology and all those dogmatic statements about our faith, we’ve inadvertently made a new creed and created our own system of theology. Perhaps a new golden calf, if you will.

Only this time, the creed wasn’t written by church fathers, after hours and months of study, prayer, and debate.  It was wheeled out, shiny and new, without so much as a discussion, to make us look all generous and accepting.  This new creed says absolutely nothing about Jesus and what He has done for us.  This by-default creed is all about us—that we supposedly love Jesus and love our neighbor.   Except that we don’t.  We don’t love Him with our whole heart and we don’t love our neighbor as ourselves.  At least not according to His own impossible definition of love.  His mandate for us to love was always meant to be fulfilled by Him, not us.   We live on the borrowed righteousness and love of the One whose love is always pure and just and true.  And, hence  the problem with replacing creeds about Jesus with creeds about us.  When we make Christianity about deeds, not creeds, we become idolators,  because Christianity is not a religion of doing, it’s a simple trusting in Christ for everything.  He does every. last. thing.  And, we need a creed, a truth claim from Scripture, to tell us that.

Our disdain for and misuse of theology has left us in a peculiar predicament in our modern culture.  If we still hold fast to the truth claims of Scripture, we often use those dogmas to accuse our neighbor of his particular sin, instead of letting the law do its work on our own hearts.  The sin of others, of them, is so easy to see.  Or it would be, except for that huge log in my own eye.   I can hardly get riled up about the sin of homosexuality because my own heterosexual sin is choking the life out of me.  I lust, I covet, I fail to love the way I should.  Sexual sin abounds in all of us, all the time and Jesus was not shy about condemning it.  He calls for repentance, from all of us—homosexual and heterosexual alike.  We need the grace of Jesus to rescue us from ourselves and our own depraved desires.

Then, there are those who want to do away with dogmas altogether.  We’re told emphatically, dogmatically even,  that we can no longer make judgements about anything, because that’s harsh and divisive.  So, our new dogma is that it’s wrong to have dogmas.  We get a pass with our righteous anger, if that anger is directed at those who make judgements.  It’s the perfect case of reverse discrimination.  In an effort to avoid all the dogmatism of theological systems, we’ve set up our own (dogmatic) system.   But, beware.  Just because this new theology doesn’t have a set of textbooks to go with it doesn’t mean it’s any less of a system.  When there’s a void of good, sound doctrine,  we will always fill the void with something.

So, the new theology goes something like this— love Jesus, love your neighbor, live on mission,  embrace the lifestyles of the LGBT community, support women’s ordination, etc.  And in this new system, nearly every view and lifestyle is acceptable UNLESS you critique the system.  Then, you’ll have hell to pay.  You’ll be called  a bigot, an intolerant, stodgy old curmudgeon. In all actuality, it’s a pretty harsh system too, with some very sketchy hermeneutics.  This theological system, while seeming so tolerant and loving has no real Gospel at all. Because without the proper teaching on sin, we don’t even know we need Jesus.  And this new creed is just watered down law—all things we are supposed to do.  It’s a system based on deeds, many of which go directly against the best and brightest minds in the history of the Christian faith—including  Augustine,  Martin Luther, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, every pope,  St. Paul, and ultimately God Himself.

But, Jesus has the answer for this sin, too.  He calls for repentance.  He calls for us to yield to His ways, even if they don’t make sense, even if they aren’t logical, even if they seem outdated and discriminatory.   When our reason and experience go against His words, we bend low and listen and learn.  He is God, and we are not.  His kingdom is radical and hidden and mysterious and we shouldn’t expect our world to get it, nor should we expect it to conform to our modern sensibilities.  In love, He levels the playing field.  Both camps are wrong—whether we use our theology as  a weapon to condemn others, or whether we reinvent it every few years based on our own personal experiences and preferences.   He condemns us ALL as sinners and begs us to repent—not just from our plethora of sexual sins, but from every category of our outright rebellion toward Him and His ways. Why?  Because only when we can admit the depth of our depravity can we know the heights of His love.  Only when we see the wretched state we’re all in, can we know  how desperately we need to be rescued.

And here’s an important side note:  Even if we stop making judgements about our own specific sins or the sins of others, our consciences won’t stop accusing us. We can rationalize until we’re blue in the face.  But, there is no peace for any of us, when we are living outside the beautiful limitations that God places in our lives.  The limitations are as important to the artist’s work as anything else and when God was creating us, He made us in a very specific way, for a very specific purpose.  When we learn to yield to that design and purpose, we find peace.  When we live rebellious and unrepentant, we wrestle with God and seek for ways to justify ourselves.

None of us are free to do as we please.  We must yield, all of us, to Christ’s will and His ways. Christ doesn’t elevate one sin over another, nor are we free to do so. He sees us all as sinners in need of a Savior.  And the paradox of Jesus is this—He speaks harsher than we do about sin and sweeter than we do about grace.  He’s willing to be dogmatic about judgement and mercy.  He’s willing to risk everything—including His reputation, to rescue us.  His love is tenacious and exacting and He does not intend to leave us as He found us—not me, not you, not Phil Robertson, not any of us.

The only solution to our perilous dilemma is the Advent, the blessed coming, of our Lord.  He is the author a revolutionary theological system that not only condemns sinners to die, but in one great act of mercy,  dies in their stead, to ransom their souls back to the Father.  The most important words in the Christmas story are these—unto you.  He comes, not to random sinful people, but unto you.  Not just to bear the sin of them, but to bear your specific sin.  Whatever it is that terrifies your conscience has been answered in Jesus. He paid a steep price to give you the gift of forgiveness.   This is not just a baby born in a manger.  This is a baby, born in a manger, with His eyes set on Calvary, to die, for you.

The incarnation of Christ is the ultimate, reckless love of God on display for all of us.  We need Him so desperately to come and be born in us—to restore what sin has wrecked, to redeem what we have squandered,  to forgive us for the mess we’ve made of our lives and of the world.

Love has come.

Thanks be to God for His unspeakable Gift.

We pray:

O holy Child of Bethlehem, 
	descend to us, we pray; 
	cast out our sin, and enter in, 
	be born in us today. 
	We hear the Christmas angels 
	the great glad tidings tell; 
	o come to us, abide with us, 
	our Lord Emmanuel!

For I was determined to know nothing among you, except Christ, and Him crucified.  1 Cor. 2:12

There’s a new wave of churches taking root in America and abroad that may surprise you—the athiest mega-church.  This fascinating article about this movement starts like this:

 It looked like a typical Sunday morning at any mega-church. Several hundred people, including families with small children, packed in for more than an hour of rousing music, an inspirational talk and some quiet reflection. The only thing missing was God.

These groups of athiests gather to hear  good music,  inspirational speaking about ways to become better people, and then are sent out to fight social injustice.  Craig Parton points out that, unfortunately, they take their cues from American pop Christianity, which has been doing this same thing for years, only with a little God thrown in.  He points out that the one thing often missing from many Christian church services is Jesus and the scandal of the cross.

Martin Luther first coined this phrase, the theology of the cross, in the Heidelberg Disputation, but many descendants of the Reformation may have never heard the term.

What it means is this:  When I want to know how it is between God and me, I must look to the cross.

Everything for the christian must be viewed through the lens of this one, pivotal event.  That is our center point, the hinge of our faith.  We must know God there or we will not know Him aright.  Jesus dying on the cross is the beginning of Christian theology.  Our natural theology, a theology of glory, says that I can know how it is between God and me by looking at my life, my circumstances—in other words, a ‘me-centered’ theology.

And we do this all the time without thinking about it.

When we lost our home to fire in December of 2010,  I couldn’t help but struggle with doubt.  Why us? Why this?  Why now? Where is God in this tragedy?   It’s hauntingly similar to what Jesus uttered on the cross, when he said, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”  And even though this question came from the lips of the Son of God himself, the heavens were silent.  The cross stands as God’s final answer to all our ‘why’ questions.

The cross speaks across the centuries, across every barrier, and shouts to us in our suffering.  The God who suffers unspeakable grief,  loves us  and gives Himself over to death on our behalf.    The cross gives meaning to our suffering, to our doubt.  The song of redemption rings loud and clear from the mouth of the suffering Savior as He speaks forgiveness.

But,  we are theologians of glory.  We have replaced the cross with everything under the sun. We don’t want its shame.   We want to believe that man is basically good and his faults can be overcome by  moral improvement, powerful spiritual experiences, or intellectual ascension.  Maybe we sense that God is angry with us and we believe there is something we can do to appease that anger.  We turn the Scriptures into a How-To manual and spend our lives climbing ladders to God.  The most popular ladder in the past twenty years seems to be the mystical ladder of experience-based faith and worship.  We chase spiritual worship experiences in order to feel connected to God.  We’ve become masters at the carefully tailored worship service—so much so that the athiests can copy us and have their own inspirational services, often without changing much of anything.

But, Jesus offers us all He has at the cross.  He delivers the salvation and forgiveness won for us there on Sunday morning in the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of The Lord’s Supper.  And where those two things are missing, what we’re often left with is music and teaching that is designed to inspire and motivate, or worse manipulate.  The preaching of God’s law and Gospel are not meant to inspire us, but to kill and make alive.  The law, preached in its fullness leaves us no wiggle room to justify ourselves.  We have sinned and are the enemies of God.  The Gospel rescues us with finished work of Christ on the cross.  It is finished still rings through the ages.

The theology of the cross is the theology of Scripture.

And when we forget, we live as slaves to our circumstances. We  try to figure out where we stand with God by looking all around us or by looking into our bank accounts or our 401K’s.  We want some tangible sign—hopefully in the form of health, wealth or fame, or some mountain top spiritual experience—to know that God is pleased with us.

But, there is one sure way to know where we stand with God—a signpost rooted firmly in the Scriptures that never changes.

It’s called a cross.

When you look at the cross, you can know exactly where you stand with God.  At the cross, you don’t have to wonder whether or not you’re measuring up. You don’t have to wonder if you’re “spiritual enough.” You don’t have to worry if your sin has been too great.  Your sin and your righteousness alike fall away here. You don’t have to battle the demons that rage against you and make you question whether or not God brought this suffering your way.  He has crushed your demons, your sin, your self-righteousness, and your doubt, and He has taken your suffering into His own body.  He has answered every accusation against you.  Every single one.

Here, at the foot of this cross, the God of the universe has crawled into your skin, into your suffering, into your doubt and has rescued you from death, hell, and every snare of the Enemy.  This is the place where you must learn to take refuge.  Here, at the cross, you know you are loved with a love that will never fail.  This is the perfect love of God on display for you.

This is your sign.

We can go almost anywhere and hear good music and inspirational speeches.  We can venture out into nature and know there is a God.   God may, indeed, be everywhere, at all times. He is certainly the author of all good things.  But only here, at Calvary, can you know Him in love and mercy.

Only at the cross—where Jesus stretches out His arms forever, to the ends of the earth, in love for all mankind—do you know that God is for you.

Beautiful are the feet of those who bring us this good news.

I remember when our pastor made the sign of the cross on my little one’s forehead and on her heart when she was baptized, to mark her as one redeemed.

He has marked us with His cross forever—the sign from heaven that all has been renewed and all is well.

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