Word of Life Church Podcast

Pastor Derek Vreeland delivers a sermon entitled, "The Useful God".

Jacob swaggered through life with the confidence typical of a con man. He was a success in the shallowest sense of the word. Jacob had a kind of success; but what he didn't have was dignity, integrity, holiness. God was at work in Jacob's life and would bring about holiness in Jacob. The tool that God would use to produce this holiness in Jacob’s life was pain. When Jacob came face to face with real pain he would see the face of God. Transformed by pain, Jacob limped the rest of his life. He had been blessed and broken— and his blessed brokenness gave him a new name and a new life.

Jesus breaks bread and calls it his body. His broken body becomes the source of our salvation This is breaking that is good and that belongs to redemption and resurrection. This is the kind of breaking we're called to share with Jesus. But there is a kind of breaking—a kind of response to pressure—that is not good. After receiving the broken bread, Judas departed into the night to betray Jesus. Judas' journey into the darkness was a response to pressure that is Breaking Bad. Pain, pressure, disappointment are the sources of inevitable breakage in our lives. As humans, you will experience these things. It's part of the human condition. How you respond to these pains determines whether you break good or break bad. We are called to follow the Jesus way of trusting God, and not breaking bad. When we trust God, God is faithful and becomes a source of healing. But when we break bad and try to take control, we inflict our wounds on others. Let's learn to trust in God!

We are to be gospel-centric and gospel-saturated in the life of the church, because the gospel creates a certain kind of culture, shaping how we think and how we live. In order to be this kind of church, we preach the gospel first and morality second. God has saved us and called us to a holy life, but we emphasize the gospel of God's great love first. This life then creates the kind of culture whereby we can flourish in the holy life, where the Spirit continues his work of transformation within us.

The idea that God could and would truly suffer is foreign and scandalous to us. From the dawn of religious consciousness, humanity has shared similar images of God: The Glorious God, The Almighty God, The Holy God, The Merciful God. But the idea that God could suffer is something altogether unexpected. But God did suffer; torture, crucifixion, and finally death. On the cross Jesus suffers with us as God. God not only became human, he became the kind of human we don't want to be; A despised and rejected outcast, a failure. Jesus Christ God with us in life, in struggle, in sorrow, in pain, and in death. Jesus died the worst kind of death, that he might go down to the ugliest depths of death. But this suffering is not just an act of solidarity; it's also an act of salvation. God in Christ suffered death that he might enter into death and lead the way out. God saves us by suffering death with us! Only the suffering God can help.

In the Bible, the new day doesn't begin at sunrise or at midnight, but rather, at sunset. God wants us to see that each new day begins with darkness. The new day does not begin by being able to see— The new day begins with being unable to see. Likewise, spiritual growth does not begin with knowing. Holding onto certitude and insisting you have all the answers prevents spiritual progress. The process of spiritual growth is knowing, unknowing, and then new knowing. There are some things you have to unlearn before you can make spiritual progress. We want to think that to make spiritual progress all we need is positive addition. But a lot of making spiritual progress is about negative subtraction. Unknowing is harder than not knowing. It's not the learning that is hard, it's the unlearning.

Religion can be misused as a way of avoiding the reality of pain. Religion becomes delusional and destructive when misconstrued as a guaranteed way of avoiding pain. This phenomenon is dramatized in the cycles of debate found in the Hebrew scriptures of Job. The first lesson we should learn from the book of Job is to be wary of explaining to sufferers why they are suffering. If we accept that Job was a blameless man who suffered outrageous and undeserved misfortune, as the scriptures says, then our false certitudes, our easy answers, and our trite clichés need to be called into question. Perhaps the main lesson we are to learn is that blame is the satan and serves no good purpose—whether it's the friends blaming Job, or Job nearly blaming God.

The bread and wine in communion are more than a symbol, but not less than that. In the broken bread we see not only a symbol of the brokenness of Christ given for the sins of the world, we also see a picture of the church. Jesus blesses us; he breaks us; he gives us to the world. This three-step Eucharistic action provides for us our core identity. We are blessed. We are broken. We are given. In our brokenness we admit we are broken by sin and we also choose to break open ourselves to allow people to see us as we are. This kind of vulnerability is the pathway of love. We cannot love or be loved if we do not trust. We do not trust and do not become trustworthy if we do not know. We do not know and are not known if we are not vulnerable.

Beginning at Bethlehem, Jesus enters the world of the wounded and is himself wounded. Yet there is a beautiful, sacred mystery: It is by those wounds that we are healed. In bringing our hurts to the wounds of Christ we begin to find our healing. But for this to happen we must first acknowledge our wounds, our own pain. In our culture we find this hard to do, because we are schooled in denial. We have been taught to deceive ourselves and deny our pains and our wounds. Of course that kind of denial only bottles up the pain until it poisons the soul. Depression, anger, addiction, sickness are what result from un-lamented pain. When we’re schooled in denial we earn a degree in how to stay miserable. But when we face our pain with honesty, when we grieve and lament openly, we open up space for the comfort of God, given by others, to come to us and heal us.

The Church is the society of Jesus. That is, it is God's alternative society built around Jesus. Within the various societies of the world there are pockets of the society of Jesus, consisting of baptized communities learning to live the Jesus way and embracing the politics of Jesus. As these Jesus societies are faithful to the Jesus way they are the light of the world, the salt of the earth. But if they are unfaithful, they become nothing more than religious versions of the wider culture. This is why our first task must always be to remain faithful to Jesus, not to be "effective" or "successful." At Word of Life Church, we want to learn to be a faithful society of Jesus in 21st century American society.