Word of Life Church Podcast

Every person is sacred. If we are going to talk about recovering the sacred in a secular world, we have to talk about the unique sacredness of the human being. There is a sacredness that belongs to all of God’s creation, the oceans and forests, the mountains and plains, the planets and stars, the plants and animals. But there is a unique human sacredness. It’s called the Imago Dei, the Image of God.

For most of the last half of Christian history we've made the gospel mostly juridical. We have made our salvation a study of how to be acquitted for our crimes and be declared innocent before the court of divine justice. But our problem is not just that we’ve run afoul of the law and stand guilty before God. Our deeper problem is that we are ill. We need a gospel that is therapeutic and healing. We need a physician to heal us from our harms. We are ill because of our addiction to mimesis and violence. We’re sick because we look at each other through the distorted lens of competitive fear. We harm ourselves because of our irrational obsession with wealth and power. The kingdom of God is enacted when the sick, both bodily sick and spiritually sick, are being healed!

The Bible is the word of God that bears witness to the Word of God: Jesus Christ. The Bible did not create the Heavens and Earth. The Bible did not become flesh. The divine Word of God did these things. Jesus is God. The Bible is not. We worship Jesus; we do not worship the Bible. We worship the God revealed in Scripture. The Bible is not perfect. Christ is the perfection of God as a human being. What the Bible does infallibly is point us to Jesus Christ. The Bible is the inspired witness to the true Word of God who is Jesus Christ. The Church must always be in conversation with our sacred text, but to the end that we might submit to the rule of the living Christ.

When it comes to being chosen in a favorable sense, we all want to be picked. Whether it's chosen for the baseball team, as a cheerleader, for the prom, or for the job, we all want to be special. To find yourself not among the chosen can be a very painful experience. We want to be among the chosen people, we want to be a chosen person. Within our own stories that we tell we are the chosen. Every nation and ethnicity have stories that affirm they are special and chosen: the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Native Americans, modern Americans, and of course, the Hebrew people. Within our own stories, we relate ourselves as the ones that are great and blessed, bringing wisdom and bringing liberty. We need the sense of chosenness to produce the necessary sense of community. But as we engage with other people, other tribes, other nations, and other ethnicities, we need a more contemplative view. This is exactly what the prophets do! They help us see life from a contemplative perspective.

Christianity is a sacramental faith. It is not a faith of mere theological ideas, but of sacraments. Sacrament is an interface between the spiritual and the material, between heaven and earth. Jesus Christ as the Incarnation of the Word of God is the ultimate Sacrament. Because of the Incarnation and Resurrection Christianity is a sacramental faith. To be properly practiced, Christianity requires not just prayer and scripture, but water, bread, and wine. These are the necessary elements for the sacraments of baptism and communion. These sacraments are portals for interaction with Christ, who is the ultimate Sacrament.

Mankind was created for more than what we're living for. Created in God's likeness to bear his image, we strayed far from the life of God. It is Jesus who calls us, as he did Nicodemus, out of the "Circus of Systems" and into the life of the age to come, the life we are created for. Will we have the faith of Nicodemus and enter this new life?

Secularism is a philosophy that says nothing is truly sacred. At best there are only ideas we call sacred. But there are no real sacred objects or places or times or things. The secular West has generally accepted this premise; but we feel it as a great loss. The modern premise that there are no sacred things is simply untrue. Christians insist that the sacred is more than a mere idea; there are sacred realities. Christian insistence upon the reality of the sacred is based upon one confession: The Word became flesh. Words are symbols signifying something beyond themselves. Words are not the thing themselves, but they are how we describe and communicate the idea of a thing. The Word of God, however, is God. The Word of God is Life and Light, and that Word became flesh! The Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, perfectly reveals God because he is God made flesh. The Incarnation settles the question of whether or not there are sacred things: Jesus is sacred flesh and blood!

The role of art is to remind us of this beauty, to help us see what we've overlooked. Those who labor in the visual arts help us see what we have lost sight of. The poets and writers remind us of what we too easily forget: Life is beautiful. Even when life is tragic and painful, there is still beauty in it. We can say similar things about the artists working in music, theater, film, dance. They don’t just create beauty, they call attention to the beauty that already belongs to life. Life is beautiful. And ultimately life is beautiful because God is an artist. God doesn't mass produce anything. Not mountains, not snowflakes. He doesn't manufacture cheap clones. We share a common faith; the faith that confesses Jesus Christ is Lord. But each of us also has a unique story. We need to allow more latitude for diverse stories of saving grace. And not just diversity in how people encounter Christ, but diversity for how the life in Christ is lived out. Don't compare your story with others. We don't need an enforced conformity. We are each a unique poem of God.

21st century Western culture no longer has the sense of a God-saturated world. Modern people are not very religious at all. Today most people, though not atheists, feel God is somehow absent or far away. Instead we feel that we live in a secular world with God a long way off. Collectively we feel this as a kind of loss. The Western world in modernity is like a person haunted by a nagging feeling that something has been lost. That something is the Sacred. The sacred has been lost; but it can be recovered. However, this is NOT done by taking up arms in the culture wars. The culture wars are mostly a debate about the nature of civil religion in America. We cannot try to enforce the sacred on a secular culture. Instead, we need to help the church recover the beauty of the sacred. It is sacred beauty, not angry protest, that can make Christianity alluring again.

To have a sense of the kind of time in which you are living is part of being prophetic. Malachi was a prophet. He had a sense of the time in which he lived. Malachi knew he lived in a dark time. But as a prophet, Malachi believed the day would come, that there would be a dawn. This dawn (as all the prophets said) would be the coming of Messiah. God's anointed king would bring the day of God's glorious reign upon earth. The canon of the Hebrew scripture closes with a final prophetic picture of Messiah: The picture of a glorious sunrise where sun rays are seen as wings. With prophetic imagination Malachi sees healing conveyed in those radiant beams. This is Malachi's poetic prophesy of The Healing Sunrise.