Longing for Peace in a Fear-filled World

We focused our Retreat on the call to be Fearless. This Advent season we are centering on one of its most basic, comforting, challenging ideas: Peace. The two interact together. We start from Isaiah’s celebration of the birth of a child (Handel’s Messiah, Isa 9:6). In the NT this passage echoes in Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ birth, in Matthew’s description of the start of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus is this "Prince of Peace." But what does it mean?

Isaiah began prophesying in a time of powers pressing in on Judah (Israel, Syria, Assyria). Peace was a dream. A son is born in the Davidic royal family, possibly Hezekiah born to Ahaz. That child is a symbol of hope in a time of disaster. The prophet gives him the long prophetic name: Pele-yoets El-gibor Aviad Shar-shalom. Like the famous prophecy of a virgin conceiving (Isa 7:14; Mt 1:23), these words had an impact in their own time.

Reading Prophetic Scripture in Unfolding Events

But the hope the words expressed was so vast! And the prophecy lived on when people could hardly remember the troubles of Jotham and Ahaz. Here was the hope of a Davidic King, the Messiah. The hope of justice and peace. The hope of light in darkness, the end of war, increasing joy, God himself, a Prince of Peace. Did God just let it go with Hezekiah’s time?

The NT is very aware that events in human history are always limited, time-bound. Hezekiah was good, but his son Manasseh was awful. Josiah was good, but then things collapsed. Hezekiah could be a kind of prince of peace, but very limited like every human ruler.

The prophecies point beyond immediate fulfillment to God’s larger surprising intentions.

Is He a Prince? What Kind of Peace is This?

NT times had a Prince of Peace: Augustus Caesar. Rome conquered and called it peace. That was a peace that people understood: Power, order, easy commerce, silencing.

Could there be a Prince who doesn’t impose peace by conquest? Who doesn’t squash division but releases people’s freedom and woos them by self-giving love? Who gives real life?

Could a Prince of Peace take humanity’s violence on himself and free people from fear?

01:45 - Gloria Barreto by Tom Barreto and Family - Mother

3/23/33 - 12/18/15………04:50 - Eddie Moloney by June Chang - Good Friend

4/2/67 - 1/28/16………06:14 - Dee Andrews by Erin Holland - Aunt (Mother’s Sister)

3/2/45 - 2/17/16………08:12 - William "Bill" Milford Minor by Leighton Minor - Grandfather

12/15/30 - 3/11/16………18:22 - Arturo "Arthur" James by Yanela Stephenson - Father

12/4/19 - 3/21/16………19:22 - Carmen "Pam" Wisdom by Melanie Rivers (Cousin)

5/18/50 - 4/14/16………20:09 - Malcom X. Bell by Diamond McDonald - Uncle (Maternal)

4/13/67 - 5/4/16………21:56 - Ilene Levin Shulman by Betsy Shulman - Mother

6/11/26 - 5/15/16………25:13 - Allena Ann Robinson Kendall by Tom Robinson - Sister

8/28/48 - 5/16/16………29:53 - Joe Moriarty by Matt Henegar - Grandfather

2/11/28 - 6/1/16………33:29 - Jean Davidson by Erin Holland - Grandmother (Maternal)

12/19/21 - 6/8/16………36:22 - Norman Samuel by Mary Joseph - Friend

10/28/56 - 6/28/16………38:40 - John Boyles by Evan Eley - Close Family Friend

3/9/1946 - 7/23/16………41:34 Frank Peoples AND BROTHER JOE by Carl Garrison - Friend

Passed away during the week of November 15, 2016

From Grief to Celebration - Following the Paths of God

Paul began Rom 9-11 with great grief for his Jewish kin - so many were missing out on what they should have delighted in, what was their own story. He ends celebrating what God is doing in this complicated history that reaches back across scripture and into the lives of the believers in Rome. It is challenging and complex! God made human life complex. It’s often hard even to understand ourselves, our own rebellious wills, our hopes, our loves.

If the problem were simple, we could have a book of do-it-yourself resolutions. It would not have required the incarnation and death of God, the defeat of death, resurrection life.

Paul sees the drama of Jews and Gentiles, played out in his own life and ministry, as a sign of God’s choice of a particular human path leading to his faithfulness and mercy to all people.

Jew and Gentile - A Dance of Brokenness and Mercy

Paul, a Jew, knows the power of Gentile prejudice against Jews and vice versa. God wants both. Gentiles lost knowledge of God and substituted a thousand names for our favorite gods of money, sex, power, self, tribe, etc., etc. God chose to work through one family, Abraham. He gave a Torah/covenant, that brought clarity: Brokenness became transgression; idolatry, the rejection of the one God, creator, sustainer, redeemer. Israel was a paradigm of the sin of all humanity. God’s relation with Israel provided the frame for God’s own intervention. There the meanings of Messiah, redemption, forgiveness, mercy, judgment etc. were set.

Then came the event of Jesus - God coming in that story in an unexpected, challenging way. Israel’s brokenness and Gentile idolatry of power combined to reject and crucify Jesus. Even Jesus’ disciples shared in the failure. But God! He conquered death by resurrection life.

All the first disciples were Jews. But Jewish power saw the "Good News" as scandalous and fought it, as Paul knew well. That war drove the Jewish disciples out into the Gentile world. It also drove them to re-read the scriptures, to re-learn the story of Messiah and Suffering Servant, of God as creator of all, to hear what Jesus meant in sending them to the nations.

This was the turmoil of human brokenness, seen in Jesus’ crucifixion. Israel wrestling with God. It’s God’s love finding a way to use each side’s failure as a means of Grace to the other. All are dying. All receive life only by the mercy and forgiveness embodied in Jesus, God with us!

The All-Encompassing God

This is not easy. At our best we only see parts of it. God honors our freedom and calls us all to full humanity as true creatures of God, the image of God in his beautiful, complex world. False paths are often simple attractive formulae. Reality - human, divine - is complicated.

But within it all there is a deep complex unity: God, Father-Son-Spirit. All is from God. God works in all pervasively. All moves toward God. That is our glory and hope and God’s glory forever.

Tensions in a Diverse Community

In building a community, there are basic principles, and also particular problems that arise. The church in Rome likely started after Pentecost (ad 30) as the "visitors from Rome, Jews and proselytes" (Acts 2:10) who became believers returned home (25 yrs before Romans, ad 56). Many Roman Jews were from freed slave families, from Pompey’s conquests a century earlier, not citizens. In c. ad 49 emperor Claudius expelled all Jews from Rome because of conflicts over the new faith (Aquila and Priscilla, Acts 18:2). Claudius died ad 54. Jews returned. The church had been non-Jewish (Gentile) and now has returning leaders. How is all this supposed to play out. Some Gentiles said God rejected the Jews and brought in Gentiles.

Paul, the Pharisee who became apostle to Gentiles, wants to deal with the issue. Not just with practical advice but by understanding the whole narrative of Scripture and their place in it. He has worked with many of the returning Jews and is committed to the nations/Gentiles.

The Troublesome Grace that Makes New People

People were familiar with scattered ethnic groups - Jews, Germans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Ethiopians, etc., living in ethnic enclaves or assimilating. There was a pattern. But Christian communities didn’t fit. One of the main themes of Romans is how God has exploded those ethnic, cultural, class, gender, wealth divides. All are broken sinners in need of new life.

That life is given not by ethnic identity marked by distinct practices, but through God’s grace embodied in Jesus, a man in time, a Jew, son of David, Messiah, Adam, resurrection life, giver of Spirit, God! Jews were called as a "light to the nations," but mostly saw that as light scattered in Gentile darkness. Jesus says that God wants to include all peoples he created.

Israel’s national/ethnic identity became a focus of failure, crisis, a blindness, a trap, Paul says. Jews knew the prophets spoke of a "remnant" (Isa 10:2, Rm 9:27), but that seemed a pure segment within the ethnic group (Pharisees, Essenes). Now the temptation is for Gentiles to repeat the familiar pattern of ethnic identity and conflict in reverse: God chose me not you. Grace affirms peoples’ real identities but breaks down all identities as boundary barriers.

Wild Olive Branches and the Ever-Unfolding Story

Paul uses the strange illustration of olive grafting. In reverse of good olive cultivation, God has grafted wild branches (known for poor, inedible olives) onto cultivated trunks and roots. That is the grace of a God who calls everyone, foreigners, family, of every status, into a new humanity of transforming love. He has not rejected Jews in favor of Gentiles; he calls all!

But that transforming grace/love challenges and changes the Roman, Egyptian, New Yorker, just as much as it ever challenged Israel. It remakes thought (faith) and action (love) to give life.

A Journey through Centuries

499 years ago tomorrow, a monk named Martin Luther, moved by what he saw as the corruption in the church, walked to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, and nailed up a series of 95 "theses" for debate. This event and what followed set off the "Protestant Reformation." We are heirs of those events in many ways.

Paul traced God’s amazing paths leading to his own time. The story went on. For 300 years the Good News spread in the Roman Empire and beyond, in spite of strong opposition. In the 4th cent. emperor Constantine became a patron of the church. The church gradually took on the hierarchy and government pattern of the empire. At the top it used tools of empire to enforce conformity. Many wonderful things, but also deep transformations as it became Christendom, the religious governing culture of Europe. With the political and violent power of the state often came corruption and conflict.

As Christendom came to its zenith in the "Middle Ages," the church, crossing all political boundaries of Europe, had vast power, but often poor leadership at the top.

Early Signs of Reform

One of the key elements of dispute was access to the Bible. Jerome’s 1000-year-old Latin translation, the Vulgate, was the only authoritative Bible used in all churches.

John Wycliffe, a philosopher at Oxford, criticized the privileges of the clergy and began translating the Bible into English (Middle English, Chaucer). Many people had never heard scripture read in their own language. Eagerly copied. Manuscripts banned.

Jan Hus in Prague was influenced by Wycliffe. He challenged indulgences, and called for lay people to be able to take the wine of the eucharist. He was burned at the stake.

John Wycliffe, 1320- 1384, England

Jan Hus, 1372-1415, Czech

Martin Luther, 1483- 1546, Germany

Erasmus of Rotterdam, was one of many Christian Humanists in the early 16th cent. to go "back to the sources" (ad fontes), learning Greek and classical Latin, seeking out forgotten manuscripts. Erasmus called for reform in the church, used the new technology of printing to print the first Greek New Testament in 1516. He also printed his own Latin translation, challenging much of the language of the Vulgate.

Rediscovering the Authority of Scripture and Its Message

Martin Luther attacked the sale of indulgences to raise funds for St. Peter’s Basilica. ("As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs!"). In 1520, Luther was excommunicated, but supported by his local German prince.

In 1521 at the Diet of Worms he stood firm: "Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since ... they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience." Hidden in Wartburg Castle, he translated the NT into German.

"Sola Scriptura" — "Scripture alone" as authority for Christian life was the revolutionary core of all that Luther did. Looking at scripture anew one discovered new light on repentance, faith, grace, priesthood of all believers and so much else.

William Tyndale, influenced by Luther, translated the Bible into English in Germany in the 1520s, though under threat of death by Henry VIII. Betrayed, he was imprisoned, strangled, and his body burned. Ironically, his translation became the basis of the "King James Version" in 1611.

Searching for the Form of the Church

Ulrich Zwingli began preaching reform in Zurich in 1519. He wanted to restore the primitive simplicity of congregational worship: "Everything that is added to the true institutions of Christ is an abuse." He developed the idea of the silence of scripture as exclusive.

Discovering the Community of Believers

The Radical Reformation was called "Anabaptist" (rebaptizers) because they practiced believers baptism rather than infant baptism. (First, Jan. 1525) They also broke with the authority of the state and sought to create voluntary communities based not on nationality but on faith and personal commitment. They began the free church tradition. Balthasar Hubmaier (a theologian and preacher). Conrad Grebel (1498-1526), others.

Persecuted by both Catholics and "Magisterial" reformers (state based). Often drowned.

Envisioning the Sovereignty of God

John Calvin, theologian, lawyer, city governor of Geneva. Systematizing a vision of absolute divine initiative and action: the Sovereignty of God. Institutes of the Christian Religion.

He developed the doctrine of predestination, and set the course of the "Reformed" tradition that is seen through Hugenots, Puritans, Presbyterians, and many others.

Our Heritage from Their Work

Most important is the fundamental idea of going back to the origins of Christianity, back to the scriptures, to Jesus, Paul, Peter, in order to understand what this faith is about. If later tradition (magisterium) overrides scripture, the faith loses its basic identity in Jesus.
By going back, they rediscovered faith and grace and freedom from works-based life.

Their era played out the struggles of authority and unity. Most still thought a nation could have only one expression of faith, enforced by the state. The Radical Reformation challenged that through baptism. North America was the first extensive experiment in an entirely voluntary expression of faith. That pattern is now spreading through the world.

Communities of Identities - God’s complex Creatures

We are finite beings, defined, limited. I’m the child of two parents, and theirs ... an ethnic descent, a gender. I’m from a location in place and time. I’m shaped by a family, society, culture, traditions, political possibilities, power structures (race, gender, money, etc.), history. I’m shaped by my own story, choices, relationships, actions, experiences, faith, beliefs, education, hopes, abilities, dreams.... It’s a God-given complexity that makes every person distinct and interesting. A world of fascination and conflict. In communities we interact and shape each other’s identities. Jews and Gentiles faced such conflict in Rome.

Paul is telling the event of Jesus, a very specific person in a limited time, place, history, faith, who sends a shock wave out into the world that can influence every human identity. God is working within human freedom and limitation. The story of Israel gives definition to Jesus - Exodus, Messiah, Lord, suffering servant, Spirit, resurrection, redemption, etc.

But the event of Jesus, fills up and stamps that story with a surprising character. It is not just for Israel, but for all nations and peoples, even those ignorant of Israel’s covenants. All kinds of identities can be drawn into a transformed identity as God’s beloved children.

"Has God Rejected His People?" - God’s vast Plans

Paul knows the "Good News" of Jesus as crucified Messiah open to all people is not anything he as a Jew had wanted to hear as he defined his own faith identity in a Roman world. But he looked at scripture again and found pointers to God’s intent throughout the texts.

He faces the painful question: Does all this mean rejection? He reshapes Samuel’s assurance when his ancestor Saul was anointed king of Israel. Paul’s answer is an emphatic No...but! God has certainly not rejected his people. The first generations of believers were Jews, including Paul! But just as emphatically God is doing something unexpected. Just as in Elijah’s day God was doing something bigger than even the great prophet could see.

The Grace that marked the twists of God’s choices in Israel’s ethnic story, was the real purpose of God, not just a highlight. Jesus was the explosion of that Grace for the whole world.

An Identity of Grace in a Grace-Blind World

God the creator comes in his unique way in Jesus, son of God, suffering servant! He creates something new, fulfills Israel’s promises but also touches the identity of every human at the deep level of life, death, fear and hope. His grace opens a new level of reality, a new possibility for all. That event of grace questions who I am! Can I see myself in a new story of life I never imagined. I resist, ok with my old brokenness and fears. Or does Grace choose?

We see only a remnant, as in Rome. But God’s grace has universal reach, even to broken me!

I can be in Christ, living with God’s Spirit, seeing how my own identity grows into God’s life!

Wrestling with God’s Good News

In Rm 9-11 Paul is striving to express the journey of struggle and discovery that has defined his life. All his life he knew that God defined his relation with the world through Israel and Torah all his life. A crucified Messiah did not fit. He fought it. Then Jesus confronted him.

God called him to proclaim a crucified Messiah to Gentiles, to people outside the ancient covenant, to people not even interested in Israel’s God or Messiah. Wrestling began.

Paul is taking us through a highly compressed summary of his journey of scripture study and experience in preaching, seeing inclusive communities breaking down society’s barriers. Even in Rome a community of Jews/Gentiles, Greeks/Romans/barbarians/slaves/women. New words shine in scripture: "Everyone," "all the earth," "those not seeking me."

From Event to the Transformation of People

From experience and scripture Paul sees how God works. God acts, he intervenes by his own love and grace to do something to recreate human life in relation to God, to reality. An astonishing event: God comes as Israel’s anointed king/Messiah, in Jesus. He becomes one of us. Drawing near. So astonishing we can’t grasp it. We Crucify him! He is raised!

The event reveals that the world, values, hopes are fundamentally different than we thought. But how can that event spread to transform people throughout the world. So simple! The story must be told. Messengers sent out (like Paul). People listen, learn what God did. Some trust in what it tells: they learn of this self-giving, loving God in Jesus. They call on the name of God in Jesus as their loving Lord and life-giver. As that trust and lordship takes hold (they obey the Good News), they are transformed. Even Gentiles can do it.

Too Unexpected to Be Believed

It’s an amazing process, anticipated by Isaiah 52. Beautiful messengers of good. God’s kingdom breaking in, the Lord returning to Zion, redeeming Jerusalem, himself intervening with his "holy arm," and all nations/Gentiles brought to see the salvation of God.

If everything went as it should, Israel would be following God in their Messiah and leading a mighty throng of transformed peoples to experience a transformed world: God’s reign.

But Paul has a limp from his wrestling. He grieves over his own people, Israel. Many have believed - most of the first generations of believers - but nothing like all. A far smaller portion of Gentile have believed. But it’s so remarkable that any (!) believed, and there are so many more Gentiles than Jews. Gentiles are becoming the majority in churches. The challenge of bringing together different ethnic groups, races, genders, religious backgrounds, classes, etc. etc. was everywhere. But somehow this Good News did it.

Isaiah 53 shows that the problem is built into the Good News by God. When God himself intervenes (his arm is revealed), he comes in such a form, so counter-intuitive, so at odds with the image of God we want to construct, that we all find it nearly impossible to believe. He avoids our images of grandeur and plunges into our sorrows and our evils. He looks punished by God. How could that be God?! But his wounds heal us with peace.

God always for Everyone!

For Paul, the amazing thing is that this challenging, wrestling process has always been a subtext in the story. Moses and Isaiah pointed to Israel’s disbelief and the Gentile factor.

Paul himself had experienced the deep struggle. The church in Rome felt it. We all have to wrestle with what we hear. Can we believe it, trust it. Can we call on this self-giving Lord?

Through an examination of Jacob's struggles in the book of Genesis, this sermon encourages Christians to trust the great promises of God over against self-reliance. Within this context, Jacob's limp offers an example of the ways human vulnerability and God's grace make it possible for each human person to be a place where heaven and earth can meet. This capacity calls us away from wrestling with earthly circumstances toward God's miraculous provision.

Israel, the Torah, and the Messiah

In Rm 9-11 Paul explores a powerful dynamic of Scripture. God creates us humans to whom he gives life and freedom. He desires our good, but the greatest good is bound to that freedom: moral choice, love, trust, faithfulness, creativity, relationship. We rebel. God promises to open a path to a renewed relationship of love, forgiveness, right standing. He chooses Abraham as the conduit for all the world to deal with human sin and death.

Then the path has twists and turns as God makes choices, creates a covenant people, gives Torah, promises a Messiah, deals with deep division and rebelliousness, begins radical transformation through exile, empires, oppression ... all the way to a Messiah crucified!

Moses in Deuteronomy tells of the disasters and sketches the shape of renewal. God’s healing word will be brought near, within people. Many counted on rigorous obedience and purity to internalize the word of Law, define God’s people. Paul knew it had not worked.

God had chosen a wholly surprising path. God took on the role of Messiah in Jesus, coming near to humans in the deepest possible way. Jesus - Word in flesh, crucified, resurrected - comes as Lord over empires, LORD of scripture, Lord over all people, Jew and Gentile. The aim of the Torah was that Messiah who fulfilled God’s promises for the whole world.

God’s Righteousness and Human Righteousness

Here Paul sets basic ideas within the flow of God’s story. "Righteousness" (dikaiosyne) has two sides. God’s righteousness is his faithful fulfilling of his promises of blessing, forgiveness, deliverance and renewal for all humanity in spite of human brokenness and rebellion brought into focus in Israel’s persistent rebellion recorded in scripture.

Human righteousness is people being brought into a right relationship or righteous standing with God through what God has done in Jesus, building a relationship, forgiving sin, etc. It’s not something sinful humans can ever achieve on their own. It is grace, new creation.

From God’s Faithfulness in Jesus to our Faith

So also "Faith" (pistis) has two sides. First is God’s faithfulness (Rm 3:5) made visible especially in Jesus’ faithfulness (Rm 3:22-25) in crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus is Israel’s Messiah, the new human, God’s own presence in his creation - faithfulness on a new scale.

Human faith, trust, belief, confession is our response to God’s faithfulness in Jesus. It is seeing and trusting in Jesus the LORD of scripture, fulfilling his promises. Seeing him as Lord over all the world, who overturns all human power structures, as the Lord who is the One God of all peoples. Most basic, he is the Lord over death as God raises him, uniting Father Son and Spirit and creating new Life of resurrection. Faith reveals a new world.

One God, One Lord of all People

The fact that the Law is a step toward the Messiah as its goal means that the Messiah as Lord of all redefines the people of God not by "works of law" to mark out an ethnic people, but by a relationship open to all. Every human is invited to trust God, become God’s child.

Distinctions are overcome in a welcoming invitation, trusting God’s long faithfulness to us all.

Reading Scripture to Understand God's Ways

In Rm 9-11 Paul moves from grief to perception and hope to praise through scripture. He develops key points of Rm 1-8: "Righteousness": both God's righteousness in faithfully being true to his promises and the way he draws humans into a righteous standing with him through Jesus. "Faith": both God's faithfulness embodied in Jesus' life, crucifixion, and resurrection and our faith/trust in what Jesus has done.

But Paul is painfully aware that many of his fellow Jews do not trust that God was at work in Jesus. Rather Torah/Law is God's final revelation defining an ethnic people marked by circumcision, purity laws, temple, and Torah. The Messiah must fit and confirm these.

Paul had agreed but was confronted by Jesus. He looks back across scripture observing how God repeatedly chose a path for his faithfulness that surprised people: Isaac, Jacob, Israel in slavery, rebellious Israel after the golden calf. These show God's surprising ways as he interacts with people who are beloved but also rebellious. But they point to the great destruction and remaking of the people through exile, the crucifixion of Israel's Messiah by the Romans, and the fulfillment of God's covenant promise to include all the World.

The Potter Who Smashes and Remakes the Clay

Paul meditates on God's ways seen in Hosea and Isaiah, in the time of the destruction of northern Israel and in Jeremiah anticipating Babylonian exile. Crimes and faithlessness of Israel and Judah made them vessels of wrath that God judges but longs to remake and save. Israel's leaders simply want God to be a force on their side without change.

God intends radical change. Isaiah in the opening words of his prophecy expresses how radical the judgment is -- only a seed is left -- even as God longs for healing. But the seed is enough for God's recreating power. Jeremiah enacts the signs of the reshaped clay and the broken pot. Judgment will be like a smashed pot, but God is able to reshape the clay.

Note that Paul is not talking about personal predestination, as these verses are sometimes taken. God, in radically choosing the path of his mercy, remakes the nature of his people.

"Not My People" Become "God's Children"

Hosea's shows how being God's people has always depended not on physical descent but on God's calling. God's ways are always challenging to humans who seek power and control.

But God's intentions are to transform those who are "not my people" into God's children. That meant faithless Israel through restoration. But ultimately it points to the vast world of "not my people" across all nations. God performs his "word" of promise.

The Faithful and Transforming God

Paul mingles Isa 8:14 and 28:16. The precious cornerstone that God sets is also a stone of stumbling for many. The crucified Messiah, God among us, God's embodied love, is God's radical reshaping of the clay. But many saw it as foolish and weak. They wanted righteous standing with God but based on controllable criteria of law. Many could not trust such a radical sign of love and grace, a righteous standing based on trusting God's faithfulness.

God calls us to trust his unexpected paths of grace and be his inclusive people of promise.