War and the power of death

 How should a Christian assess war?

Of course our history is full of the oxymoronic "Christian wars" - but we aren't going on precedent here.

It seems to me that how Christians should view war, falls right on that line between the way things are supposed to be, and the way things are.

The problem, even when it comes to a war like this awful thing imposed on Ukrainians who were just living their lives, is that Jesus gives us no example at all of ever defending himself. 

Nope, not even in that table-turning incident.

Jesus of course instructed us, when assaulted, to "turn the other cheek," as in offer the other side of one's face for a second shot.  Prodded to carry an oppressor soldier's backpack for a mile, Jesus told us to offer to carry it for a second mile.  He told us to love our enemies.  

If we are his followers, that sets us up badly for how our hearts really want to respond to Putin's aggression against Ukraine.

And for those Jesus-followers who lead countries - what should they do?

These are very hard things to think through.  But one response we should reject right away is one I've heard many times:  it's NOT that "Jesus didn't really mean it."

He meant it quite sincerely, in that this is exactly what he himself was about to do for us.  When he was (wrongfully, unjustly) arrested, he could have called down a legion of angels to stop it and protect him, but he didn't. He wouldn't even let his disciples fight for him.  

No, he did his fighting before those soldiers ever arrived.  In the Garden of Gethsemane, on his face before his father, tempted not to go through with what he was sent to do:  to die on the cross  He decided then and there, "Not my will, by yours (God's)."  So Jesus set his face toward taking whatever they were going to dish out, including an execution for a crime he didn't do, including all the humiliation that they packed into it - even a crown of thorns.  

Did Jesus really want us to do the same, under all circumstances?

Jesus did know that his followers would be persecuted for being his followers, and yes - he expected them to "take it" in the same way - because it was a demonstration of who really wins.

Jesus didn't stay dead, right?  Those who wanted him dead, wanted him gone - but he was raised from the dead, in a redeemed body, which he took to heaven with him.  His resurrection was the beginning of a whole new way of being, one that is promised to us, too, in our own resurrection.  

It was a lot of things, that event, but one of the things it was, was a repudiation of death.  Death didn't get to win, and they didn't get rid of him, and they didn't win, either. 

And among many other things we are to learn from Jesus' death and resurrection, we who are his followers are meant to take a very different attitude towards death as a result.  It isn't what it looks like:  it isn't the end, it doesn't win and even when we die in this old body, we aren't finished.  The victory over death has already been won.

Jesus calls us to live a life that reflects that knowledge, so that those who may oppose us, who threaten us with death, would know it has no power over us.  They are disarmed.

Now, does that help us when it comes to war being waged on our planet, witih all kinds of possible implications for us all?  Not directly  Not right away.  But we need at least that much of a background to begin to consider it.

Because it also figures into whether Jesus-followers ought to be "waging death" toward others.  Should we be using death as a weapon, when we have been delivered from it ourselves?  Should we be trusting in death's power, when Jesus went to the cross to reveal it defanged?

I'm thinking about that question today.  

Love God? Why?

 I have too many thoughts about the Bible's commands to love to fit into one sermon, so I'm blogging about them - today, the command to love God "with all our heart, soul, strength and mind."

The children of Israel are commanded to love God at least 6 times in the Hebrew scriptures, along with "fearing him," walking in obedience to him," and serving him, and in connection with keeping his "decrees, laws and commands, always."  See Deut 6:5, 10:12, 11:1, 30:16, 30:20; Joshua 22:5, 23:11.

And of course Jesus, asked to name the greatest commandment, easily repeats this command to love God:  Matt 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27, quoting the Deuteronomy 6 passage as above.

But Jesus quickly adds a second greatest commandment, "love your neighbor as yourself," which comes from Leviticus 19. 

But, is "loving God" really anything like "loving your neighbor"?  

To love my neighbor as we are taught in Leviticus, I need to consider my neighbor's needs and interests as being much like my own, and as valid as my own, and make plans not to violate and even to help fulfill his or her needs and interests as much as it is up to me.  This kind of love is a call into community, to create the kind of community where we can rest knowing our neighbor does not mean to rob or lie to me, and I am also not intending to rob or lie to him/her.  

I'll talk about all this in another blog - but is that kind of love anything like "loving God"?

Does God need me to keep in mind his interests, and to imagine they are anything like my own?

A couple of days I was swimming in a community pool, and there was a young family there - Dad, Mom, a girl about 4 years old and a boy about 15 months old, I'd say.  

The dad was holding the toddler in his arms in the shallow end when the mom took the 4-year-old for a float further into the pool - and this change in distance from mom set the toddler off!  He began to scream for mom.  Clearly, to him, a distance of 20 feet from mom, in this unnatural and strange watery environment, was beyond his comfort zone.

Why?  Well, for that little guy, his mom is his original "secure base."  He has known her since before birth, and has depended on her all that time.  He knows her smell, what she sounds like, what her hands feel like - and he has found her to be the source of many things he needs and can't supply for himself, AND to be TRUSTWORTHY.

He knows he needs her and relies on her, and he trusts her to be the one he needs.  He doesn't yet know the words, but he knows she loves him, and is "for" him.  She loved him first, and he has found that good!

Does he love her?

Do we love God?

In this relationship, "loving" her is "trusting" her.  As their relationship moves forward and he discovers his own will and ability to do what he wants, he will most of the time align his will with hers BECAUSE he trusts her.  His willingness to do that will be a sign of his love.

And if we love God with everything we've got, it means we have come to rely on him and find him trustworthy, and for those reasons we will do what he instructs us to do.

Now the metaphor breaks down because that little toddler boy is meant to grow up and leave his mom behind, to develop a separate will and conscience and even to become somebody else's dad.

But in our relationship with the Father, we are not meant to grow away from him.  We are meant to grow "up" in him, to become mature in the relationship with God for which we are made.  We will learn more and more deeply what it means that God loves us and always has, and we will begin to want what God wants, even for God to have what he wants, so to speak.  

So, when God commands us to "love" him, he is not commanding us to develop warm and fuzzy feelings for him, though they may come!  He is commanding us to examine his relationship with us, to find him dependable, good and trustworthy, and then to intentionally respond with trust through doing what he says to do...living the way he calls us to live.

God shows us his love, we read in the New Testament, in Jesus.  If we want to know what God is like, we read in the Apostle Paul's letter to the Colossians, we should watch Jesus:  he is "the image of the invisible God."  Jesus came to us FROM God's love for us, to show us God's love for us, and to initiate a new relationship for us WITH God, that we would find out how much we are loved by our Father, and become those who truly can love God.

It is not a burdensome commandment; it is the most natural response to being so loved, first.  

Why Did I React That Way?

I struggle with a need to be right - I know this about myself.  

So I have to pay attention when I am getting riled up, trying to prove to someone else how they are wrong, particularly online - particularly when it comes to the many things that are both debated and so destructive in our current context.

I understand that the 'need to be right' is for me an outworking of what the Bible, partcularly the Apostle Paul, calls "the flesh."  

Paul doesn't really mean our bodies.  He is using our body and the world "flesh" as a metaphor for what we'd call our survival instincts and how they influence our egos.  Our amygdalas, that part of our brain interested in keeping us alive (always watching for threats), influences how we perceive some things as life-or-death (when they're not). 

So we can respond in outsized ways to things we perceive as threats our very survival, even if what they are, are threats to our status, our identity, our way of life, the way we think about "our people," etc.

We operate out of "the flesh" all the time, but Paul is teaching us that because we belong to Jesus, we not only shouldn't but don't have to - we now have the Spirit of God within us (see: Pentecost) and we live a new life in the Spirit.  

The trick is, we have to choose to live in the Spirit, and not the flesh.  Read Romans 7 and 8, or Galatians 5, for example.

This week, what Paul says in Romans 7:5-6 is speaking to me about how I react to the folks who won't be vaccinated, won't wear a mask, and will mock those who do, even in the face of rising case counts and increasing deaths from COVID in the US.  To me, these are not different opinions; they are wrong, dangerous, threatening and damaging - this is seen in the very different rates of disease and death from COVID in the states where such attitudes are not just primary but pushed by the authorities.

But, Paul says, to me:

"While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.  But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit." - Romans 7:5-6 NRSV

What bears fruit for death in our lives?  Our "sinful passions" - those emotions that override our desire not to sin.  Why does this happen?  Because we are living in the flesh, that "survival self" mindset where the things that are "life and death" to us are not examined for what they are - we just react to them.  We are enslaved to these things, in the flesh.

But in v 6, Paul says, we are DEAD to what has held us captive (the flesh).  Why?  See Romans 6 - by faith, we are joined to Jesus. We died with him to our old selves, to our flesh; we were raised WITH HIM to a new life.  That life is worked in us by the Holy Spirit who came to dwell in us when we put our faith in Jesus.  This is what baptism represents!

So the Holy Spirit also lives in us - and we can be "dead" to the perspective, demands and imperatives of our survivor-selves, our flesh which lies to us about what is so important, when the threats are not actually life-and-death.

We don't have to respond to the amygdala's alerts that our very selves are in danger  - in my case, just because someone else is wrong (maybe).

We don't have to, because our old selves, that self that thinks it is alone in the world coping to survive, died with Jesus, and a new self has emerged, the new me that Jesus is growing.

That new me?  It doesn't have to be restrained by laws and rules because it is inherently peaceful, inherently whole and harmonious with God and the world.  That new self is life "in the Spirit" and according to Paul in chapter 8, without that new life in the Spirit, we can't please God.  

When we are living according to the flesh, it is as though we are blind and deaf to God and God's long perspective on life and death.  We are ripe for terror, alarm and fury  - because we think it is all up to us.

When we are living according to the Spirit, we have no need to react like that to everything (life and death isn't up to us), and in a more peaceful state we are in a better place to have perspective on the things that trigger us (in my case, on other people "being wrong" and why they might think that way - and even whether *I* might be wrong and have something to learn).  It doesn't mean there aren't things that demand my response - there are.  It does mean that I don't need to respond from fear and fury.

How do we turn away from the alarm of the flesh, to the peace of the Spirit?  Only by intentionally turning our attention to Christ, in his word and in prayer.  The temptation is of course to attend to what is so alarming, to pour our energies into what is such a threat - but by our experience in walking with Jesus we will come to understand that the sense of alarm is the VERY thing that ought to announce to us a need to pray, to go to the scriptures, to worship.  The sense of alarm (unless the house is indeed on fire!) is the key that we are in need of the Spirit's help.

I confess, the reason  we don't need to react with alarm is that in Christ, we already died is, in these days of COVID, ironic...but then again, I suppose the Apostle Paul in his day lived much closer to issues of life and death than most of us do under ordinary circumstances.  Which is to say, he got it, that throwing around the words dead and died are alarming in themselves!

Aleady-having-died, though, is only good news if we also have already-been-resurrected, because we are "hidden in Christ" who has already done all that for us.  It is a perspective change on the whole concept of life, death and time, that by the Spirit we adopt.  

In the Spirit, we may understand better that the person I am arguing with (because they are WRONG) matters more to God (and ought to, to me) than whether they are right or wrong - and that the existential threat their wrongness holds (even if it is actually very dangerous) is well within the power of God to manage.  Jesus told me to love them, even to forgive them, even if they are a literal threat to me.  That is supposed to be my priority because I follow him.  Even if I still need to act on behalf of what is just or right.

It is in my FLESH (my survivor-self) that I want to trounce them.  The Spirit knows better.

So  in these fraught days of COVID, I need to prioritize my perspective-change in the presence of God.  Shalom (mine and others around me) depends on it.  My witness to Jesus depends on it.  My transformation into the who the Spirit is making me to be, depends on it.  

May I have courage to do it.

DEVOTIONAL: Philippians 1:1-3

PHILIPPIANS 1:1-3    

1Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,

To all God’s holy people in Christ Jesus at Philippi, together with the overseers and deacons

2 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

3 I thank my God every time I remember you. 4 In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, 6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

The Apostle Paul’s letter to the Christians in Philippi is one of our best-loved, with so many “memorizable” verses that bolster our faith!

It’s amazing when you consider who he is writing to, and under what circumstances.  Paul is imprisoned, under Roman guard – and he’s writing to the believers in Philippi, which was a colony of retired Roman soldiers! 

But those retired Roman soldiers, made new in Christ, became his friends and supporters for the rest of his life – and his reason for writing to them was to thank them for the collection they took, and sent to him via the man named Epaphroditus, mentioned in the last chapter, to help him.  (In those days, jailers didn’t provide anything to prisoners – you had to have your own resources, or family, to care for yourself.)

These former soldiers are living examples of the truth that Jesus makes us new and Jesus makes us family to one another.  Under other circumstances, you can imagine that Paul wouldn’t trust these folks, and they’d consider him worthless, if he’s been imprisoned! 

But they know the truth of the new life Paul preached to them when he was in Philippi.  And he knows that they are indeed “born anew” by the Holy Spirit – and so he remembers them with joy and prays for them as partners with him in living out and telling out the good news of life in Jesus.

This is a good lesson to us if we are tempted to write anyone off as too-far-gone or not-worthy of the love of God, the grace of Christ, the renewing of the Holy Spirit!  That God is all about reconciling us to Him AND to one another is the very center of this good news.

And then Paul gives them, and us, even more good news, in one sentence, because he says he’s confident (Latin: “with faith”) about it: 

He who began a good work in you WILL CARRY IT ON TO COMPLETION until the day of Christ Jesus.

Who began the work?  GOD did!  The new life in me and you, is God’s project: we don’t make it, we don’t earn it. 

And God doesn’t walk away from his projects!  God is on a mission in you and in me, and he will keep it up until it’s done, until we are indeed “made holy” – made to be all we were meant to be, in Christ.

And it will be complete, when Jesus comes again for us.  There’s a date on God’s calendar, so to speak, for our complete redemption, the fullness of our “newness,” the unveiling of the real me, and the real you.  Paul says in Colossians, that who we really are will be revealed THEN.  I’m pretty excited to see that!

Paul can call these hardened, formerly brutal, Roman soldiers partners and brothers, because he knows that God is making them new.  And Paul, who confesses his own role in pursuing and jailing followers of Jesus in his own former life, knows that he is being made new, too.   The writer and the readers have been reconciled to God by Jesus, and they have been reconciled to each other, too – and something new and beautiful is coming to life instead. 

And God isn’t going to give up on it until it all comes to pass in its fullness.

God’s not giving up on us, either.  And it’s probable he has some surprising new brothers and sisters for us in this new family!   May we trust the Lord to do this new thing in us and in others, and BETWEEN us, for his glory.

Let’s pray:  Father, in your mercy, you shocked Saul of Tarsus with your glory, and brought him into your new covenant.  In your mercy, Paul brought the good news of Jesus to former Roman soldiers in Philippi  who became his partners in your work!  In your mercy, bring us to a confidence like Paul’s, that your work of making people new will not stop until it is done, in us and in others.  Give us faith like Paul’s that this is a real change, enough to befriend even our former enemies (or they, to befriend us).  May we live in the power of such faith.  In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.

Thoughts in the wake of George Floyd's murder

The central thing we have to think about, before we can talk about anything else going on right now, is the murder of George Floyd.

I know, that it was a murder is still to be adjudicated.  But we saw from many angles that Mr. Floyd was not resisting arrest.  We saw close up, that he was cuffed.  And we saw the police officer press his knee into Mr. Floyd's neck while he protested that his breathing was being cut off, until he went limp - and then for almost three minutes more.  The man was murdered.

On one level, I think we have to consider that possibility that the police has something wrong with him, as an individual. I mean, I suspect he has sociopathic tendencies.  I'm not a doctor and I've never met the officer, but who could calmly press his knee into another human's neck until he died, like that?  No one with any empathy.

Or, perhaps the office has been trained in the ways of war.  Soldiers are trained to be able to kill like that, I think.  But first, they have to view that "other"  they are killing as "enemy," as therefore in fundamental ways not human, not in the same way. 

Is that what happened to that officer?

Because so many police killings of black people lend some credence to that idea:  that for various reasons police officers have been trained, or maybe habituated, to think that black men are not human in the same way as white men.  And after all, that's certainly what slaveholders believed - that's how they justified owning other humans, treating them like livestock, having them do the hard work in the sun:  they're not like us.  They were made for that work.  They need us to survive. 

And that's why we have to look hard at what happened.  At all the "what happeneds."  Anti-Blackness lives in our history.  It lives in parts of our culture.  And it lives in our hearts, whether we want it to or not.  I have read that even Black people struggle to overcome the inherited idea that their bodies are worth less than White ones.  I don't want to believe it, but it's true.  And the most scrupulously careful White person has had a moment where we discovered in our assumptions something we didn't know was there:  a racist thought, unbidden, rises to our consciousness.

So we have to believe this all is true.  And we have to repent of it, all the time.  We White people have the luxury of walking away and forgetting about it, but even if we do that - it won't go away.  And we who follow Jesus do not have the right to exercise that luxury, because our Lord has commanded us to love one another as he loved us, and that means the brothers and sisters of all races.  We must ask the Lord to cause to rise to the top of our awareness the racist assmptions we have living in us, and we must ask the Lord's help so that we can repent of them.

Repentance, in the New Testament, is a translation of a Greek word that means to "change your mind," or better, "to change out your mind" - the old one, for a new one. 

We desperately need a new mind, that we could begin to see things as they are, and not as the poison of racism has tinged them for us.  Paul tells us we need the "renewing of our minds" so that we can tell what the will of God is.  Yes, we do.

So let us pray for that for ourselves, and for one another.  Please pray for it for me!  This is the only way for us to "be the change" we hope for, that we know we need, so that we will no longer be a multi-level society, where we reserve the best of the goods for only some of us, only those who by virtue of genetics have white skin.  Where we deliberately ostracize and belittle others merely for having more melanin.  Where we embue authority in some to freely kill others, because somehow it seems right.  Lord, have mercy on us.

The Drug of Outrage

"Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice."
Ephesians 4:31 NIV
https://ephesians.bible/ephesians-4-31

This passage struck me differently this morning, from the way I've always read it.

I mean, it's clear from the context that the Apostle Paul is writing to a church community, and that bitterness, rage, anger  and malice (!) have no place among a people devoted to one another in the love of God, shown us in Christ

That doesn't mean it doesn't happen; it does mean it has to be faced, confessed, repented of. It does mean a new way of being together must be found...and CAN be found by the power of the Holy Spirit among us. And i've seen it happen!

But it struck me this morning that this verse has something to say about Outrage Culture.

The world around us is gleefully taking sides and franky, I have, too:  on a lot of things, i do think there is one choice that is much "righter" than others. (I'd be glad to tell you all about it, too....)

But it's been sneaking up on me that I have to admit our culture is currently stoking outrage, and its accompanying anger, rage, bitterness and  even malice.

Which is a self-sustaining loop. The contempt of of others for me, draws up an equal and even bigger contempt from me. And 'round it goes.

Now, I'm not going to say that we should all embrace all points of view and call that peace...Jesus didn't. 

But I do think it is necessary to at least examine and interrogate the outrage,  and analyze whether I am addicted to it. Am I seeking it, because of the brain chemicals it stirs up, because I like the arousal I feel, and am gratified by my sense of superiority  that it engenders?

Because i think that is what we are being sold. And I hate to admit it.

So Paul writes, get rid of it! Not the commitment to what matters. Not necessarily being deeply troubled by injustice and cruelty.

But do get rid of the habits of allowing outrage to be stoked all day long...because we must not become addicted to bitterness, rage, slander, malice. Those are the works of the devil, not Christ! We become enslaved again.

How to do that? Well, we only kill off bad habits by replacing them with good ones. More scripture. More prayer. More worship. More music that lifts up Jesus! More music, in general. More other engagements of my mind and body.

Pointing myself, intentionally, in a new direction.

Pray for me. I will pray for you!

This was our worship service this morning!