Word of Life Church Podcast

What are prophets? Prophets are channels, conductors, conduits of holy imagination. Prophets have enough of the spirit of God to imagine the world other than it is. They give artistic expression to an alternative way of arranging the world. Today we tend to call them poets—but prophets are really just spirit-filled poets. In Blowin’ In The Wind we have a modern day poet asking a prophetic question: “How many roads must a man walk down? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” But what does that even mean? Is the answer just too ethereal to grasp? Or does it mean the answer is right in front of us? Perhaps the answer is from the breath of God, from the deep spirit of God, from the blowin’ wind of God.

When we feel hurt, threatened, angered by a person, an incident, or some situation, we instinctively view it through a perspective of self-defense. If you are a non-contemplative person you will think your perspective is the total truth. We must have a change in perspective, or we will forever look at the world the same way. There are breakthroughs in perspective that occur through the practice of contemplative prayer that can happen no other way. Contemplative prayer is prayer without agenda and largely without words. In contemplative prayer, you sit with your problems and issues in the presence of Jesus. Jesus can give us an entirely new perspective outside of ourselves.

In his gospel John strategically places seven miracles of Jesus as signs to guide us. These signs are intended to point us to the right way to believe in Jesus the Christ. In the final installment of the Seven Signs In The Gospel of John series, we have a surprise. There is actually an eighth, hidden sign in John's book. It is the sign of new beginnings. New beginning is one of John's major themes in his gospel. And when we read the account of Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb early on the third day after Christ's crucifixion, only to find the tomb empty, we are seeing the new beginning of the world. Jesus Christ is the firstborn of the new humanity. In Jesus Christ humanity finds its second genesis. In Jesus Christ we recover our original vocation: to make the world a garden.

Jesus' received word that his friend Lazarus was sick and Jesus responded by waiting two whole days before he went to see him. During this time Lazarus died. His sisters, Martha and Mary, were grief-stricken. When Jesus went to see them, he did not lecture them or preach at them, but he entered into their grief, encouraging them and weeping with them, shedding the very tears of God. When he went to the tomb of Lazarus he raised him from the dead signaling the defeat of death, so that all who put their faith in Jesus no longer fear death, as the sting of death had been removed.

While there are those who have attempted to strip all of the hardship out of the Christian life, the reality is life is hard and following Jesus is hard. The Apostle Paul said he chose to boast in his hardships, calling some of his hardships a “thorn in the flesh.” Jesus said the way he was blazing for us with narrow and hard, so we should accept hardship and expect it. The hard is what makes life great. Indeed everything we call great was bought by the hardship of someone.

When Jesus’ disciples saw a man who had been born blind they asked the a question framed around blame. Who sinned? Who can we blame? Whose bad karma is this? The disciples belief was essentially that because something bad has happened, someone must have sinned, and somehow they deserved it. People who blame suffering on bad karma (and Christians do this all the time) still have mud in their eyes; they are still blind. Jesus is the light of the world. And his light brings a whole new perspective to the works of God. The works of God are not to assign blame and condemn the victim. If we will wash in the water of Jesus, we will get the mud out of our eyes and begin to see. It doesn’t matter who sinned; the way of God is grace and the work of God is mercy!

Often, we confuse God for a malevolent monster that intends us harm. Because of deep-seated shame the thought of God produces anxiety and avoidance and generates a “monster god” neurosis. This becomes the foundation for appeasement-based religion. The monster god narrative feeds into a wrong theology about Jesus— that Jesus came in order to save us from God. We are terrified of the One who is actually trying to help us. We mistakenly think the One coming to help us is coming to harm us. But the revelation of God based in Christ tells us something else: God is love! Jesus comes as the rising sun giving full revelation and dispelling the monster god. Jesus does not save us from God! Jesus reveals God to us! Jesus calls us into a world free from the monster god— A world created by the true and living God, the Father God who is love.

In Jewish culture, the sea is a representation of chaos and the origin of evil. The biblical Israelites were not a seafaring people. This is made evident by the way the bible uses the sea in metaphor. The book of Revelation the new earth has no more sea. Job, in praise of God, says, “God tramples the waves of the sea.” And in the book of Daniel, the author describes a vision of beasts that come up out of the sea. So when Jesus came walking on the sea to the disciples who were in great distress in the storm, it is a sign. It is a sign that leads us to life and informs our faith in Jesus. When we see Jesus walking on water on the rough sea in a dark and stormy night, it tells us that Jesus is Lord! When our life feels like a sinking ship and we are in a dark and stormy situation, we are not alone. Jesus will come to us and calm our fears. When Jesus comes to you everything will be alright!

At your worst, most sinful, backslidden, far from God state, God’s heart towards you is still one which burst with longing for reconciliation. God is not full of vengeance or angry with you. His attitude toward you is one of unwavering love, like a mother or father has towards his children. God knows you and loves you, and knows you have a complicated story. Unlike most people, God does not put all of the blame on you. God as your Father is responsible for you.

The human condition suffers from a kind of emptiness. We are born with a pervasive mentality of scarcity and insufficiency. We don't perceive ourselves as blessed with abundance, but cursed with scarcity. We fear there won't be enough oil, land, water, food, money, labor to go around, so we use force to guarantee us what we believe is ours. This way of viewing the world is absolutely dominant, And into this sad world dominated by the paradigm of scarcity the Son of God appears. Jesus came to save us from the cycle of conquest, war, famine, death. Jesus constantly tell us not to worry about scarcity, but to trust in God. The miracle of the loaves and fishes is the sign pointing us to Jesus and a new way. Christ is the single point at which the Infinity of God is poured into the finite Creation. We don't have to fight down here. To connect with Christ is to connect with the Infinite! This connecting point is called Jesus Christ. To connect with this point is called faith. To believe in Jesus in the right way is to connect our lives to The Beauty of the Infinite.