Faith: Best Expressed In Heart and Mind

Faith                            June 23, 2019              Ps. 22: 19-28                Galatians 3: 23-29

            We give our hearts to the Lord eagerly and sincerely.  That presupposes a commitment to our faith.  It assumes that we know the love God has for us and understand its implications in our lives.  But it also means that it excites us!  This is a wonderful thing! 

How many of you have heard the expression that “the heart wants what the heart wants”?  That expression is usually used to justify someone’s behavior when the head “knows better”.  There is an emotional desire in defiance of an intellectual agreement, if we can divide a person up so crassly. 

In that expression, the heart represents the emotional part of our being.  If there was some part of the human anatomy used as an analogy of the coming together of heart and mind, it might be the gut.  I have a gut reaction to something.  It feels right or it feels wrong.  It’s an emotional reaction, but more, it is informed by what my mind is telling me-often working faster than I can track. 

            In the language of our faith, in the expression ‘giving our hearts to the Lord…’, the heart is better understood metaphorically as ‘the gut’.  The heart is the gathering of emotion and intellect.  If, for example, we decided to use the metaphor that the spleen represented our emotional lives, we could talk about the heart being the gathering of our minds and our spleens. 

Yes, I know that really does not work very well.

            We see both emotion and intellect being appealed to in Scripture.  We see that fairly clearly in our passages for this morning. 

            Our passage from the Psalms is of the emotional appeal.  In time of need, we call upon the Lord, in salvation, we offer thanks and praise, as in verses 21-22

Save me from the mouth of the lion! From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me.

I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:

It appears that David is writing as the king, asking for deliverance from something that threatens the nation.  It is in the nation, that David offers his praise in return.  But this is not just an emotional outburst, it is built upon the knowledge David has of his God.  David here sings to the Lord because of what he knows, what he relays in verse 28: For dominion belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations.  

In Paul’s letter to the Galatians-from God Eats Pop Corn in our New Testament-Paul is laying down a more academic lesson.  The Jews coming to Jesus were governed under the law of Moses.  The claims of Jesus are that he has come to fulfill that law.  What does that mean?  This is what Paul is explaining.  

3:23 Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed.

3:24 Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith.

3:25 But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian,

3:26 for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.

In other words, the law was a guide to understanding sinful behavior, the prescriber of punishment for our sins.  Jesus came to give us justice, to justify us instead.  In him, by faith, we are made children of God, not by following a code of conduct designed to tell us we are wrong.

Yet this knowledge does not stand on its own merits.  It provokes an emotional reaction, the triumph of Jesus in our lives, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  In Christ, all that divides us from one another, all the barriers of race, of privilege, of gender, all that creates power relationships in our lives, those things that provide so much sin in our lives, those things are undone when we are in Jesus Christ and that is a cause to celebrate! 

            Our faith is a gathering of our emotions and our intellect, our head knowledge and our emotional expression of being children of God.  Yet Christian worship can stretch these to extremes.  We Presbyterians are on one end, sarcastically known as God’s “Frozen Chosen”.  This is a quiet, more reverential form of worship, more intellectual in its intent, from the head if you will.  In the extreme, the sermons seem more like academic theological lectures.  A bomb could go off and the people would offer a quiet “Amen” while composing a protest to the Worship committee about the rollicking that took place before God.

            The other extreme comes under the sarcastic title of being “Sloppy Agape”, it is arm waving, singing, call and response, if the pastor has a cold and blows his nose, the people will respond with a huge “AMEN”!  In the extreme, the sermons seem more like choruses from a praise hymn, providing a dance beat more than anything else.  In the movie “The Blues Brothers”, there is such a scene, with James Brown playing the pastor.  It provides the extreme flavor quite well.    

            Most worship services can be viewed on a spectrum between these extremes, to get a little mocking, somewhere between the dirge and the disco.  It reflects a tension of our faith between our thoughtful selves and our emotional selves.  Both are at work, but at any given moment, one may be more prominent than the other.

            Offering our hearts to the Lord, eagerly and sincerely is offering our hearts to the Lord emotionally and thoughtfully.  Coming to Christ, truly coming to him, it is like the spark of a new romance.  The power of God-the power of love-is made manifest in our lives and it is overwhelming.  Could be a miraculous healing.  Could be a dignified ending to a life well lived.  Could be a moment of acceptance when no one else is accepting us.  For isn’t that the start of a relationship in life?  A spark?  A moment?  A glance?  Saying ‘yes’ to coffee?  And while God might not ask us out for a cuppa, when we feel God’s love, there is an eagerness to experience more. 

            The trouble comes when the things of life happen.  Someone whose relationship to the Lord is emotional, but uninformed, upbeat, enthusiastic, but without depth, when things happen, its like the rug has been pulled out from under them.  Jesus loves me….but…how?  God is a disappointment.

But our relationship with God is not just about that romantic opening.  To continue using human love as an analogy, what begins as the attraction of love becomes something deeper.  God not only loves us, but God has saved us!  God is not just our miracle worker, God is working to change our lives to be more like Jesus.  God is not just in it for us, God is in it for the whole world.  Loving as God loves is the greater fulfillment to things of the earth.  How does the old song go?  “Getting to know you…getting to know all about you…”  When we experience the love of God, we have a sincerity, an authenticity about our faith that others will see. 

            However, if our relationship to the Lord is simply academic, a grand thought experiment, it’s comfortable, but empty.  Where’s the love?  Where is the caring?  Enthusiasm is anathema.  In the end, that faith is boring. 

            To give our hearts to the Lord eagerly and sincerely means that our faith is invested emotionally and thoughtfully, that these are brought together in the hearts we offer up to the Lord’s service.  It means, in turn, that when we look out to the world around us, we see a world of opportunity for God’s work to be done.

            It means that every place where there is need, there is opportunity for the Lord’s power to be brought to bear.  In those moments, the wonder of God increases in our own lives.  We know, as the Psalmist does, that God has dominion over all the earth.  Yet when someone actually cries out in need, when we come before the Lord and ask for deliverance, when we take seriously that prayers are answered (and we are willing to listen to what those answers are-not just what we think they should be), we can be ever more sincere in the offering of our hearts because we KNOW, proof upon proof that God is in control. 

            We know, as Paul did, that Jesus’ death and resurrection, that we are justified by faith, that we are made right with God, that we are not servants, not slaves, not destined for punishment and death because we have sinned against God, but that we are healed, that we are forgiven, that by grace we have been made free, made children of God, made new, that we are taking the first steps into the renewed heaven and the renewed earth, here, now, in this place, in this time, that in Christ, everything that separates us from Him and from our brothers and sisters is breaking down, that true equality as God’s children can take hold…

            As we KNOW these things to be true, the power of that truth, not just for ourselves, but for our fellow human beings, the expression of the loving power and mercy of our Risen Lord comes in our eagerness to take this faith and see it lived out in the world around us. 

            In our thoughts, in our emotions, in our hearts, in our minds, in our bodies, in our beings, in our souls, in our spirits, in all that is US, we will know the power of love that IS God, we will find expression of our faith, and it will change the way we live.

So then have we given our hearts to the Lord.    Amen

Rev. Peter Hofstra

Three in One; One in Three-The God of Christianity

There is a charge leveled against religions all around the world.  It is that the faiths and the structures of faiths-the deities, the practices, the beliefs, the dogmas, the technical language-that these come not from a transcendent reality, but that they are constructs of the human mind.

It is one heck of a charge to level at humanity.  What is gathered in with charges like these is the blame for the violence that takes place in the name of religious belief.  If we can deny the transcendent, then the full weight and responsibility for the horrors that humans can commit upon their fellow human beings falls directly back into our laps.

It would be very disheartening to learn that the vocation I have chosen to devote my life to is in fact a construct of the human mind.  To put it another way, it would be disheartening to find out that the Creator that I worship, whom I recognize in the beauty of God's creation, is in fact created by we, the pinnacle of the Creator's creation....

However, there is some truth in the charge that humans create their own divine reality.  We seek explanation for that which we cannot explain.  Imagining the Sun to be a golden chariot that is drawn across the sky by a higher level being, it kind of makes sense in that frame of reference.  

I have a different explanation for it.  I believe that we humans are created with an innate sense of the transcendent.  We know at some deeply spiritual level that there is something more.  As a Christian pastor, I have the humble arrogance to believe that the Biblical revelation of God is that transcendent reality.  

When we consider the Trinity, the way the Church has come to understand the revelation of God to us, we see in it the work of a God who is not trying to mystify us, but rather One who is at work to help us wrap limited, created minds around the unlimited, uncreated things of Perfection and Eternity.  

Our human attempts to create divine systems to explain that in which we live, they reveal the gift of the knowledge of the transcendent, and our struggle, as creatures of meaning, to find meaning in the Great Beyond.  

That connection is the goal of the Sermon for this Trinity Sunday, June 16, 2019.

The Trinity: Trinity Sunday-June 16, 2019

Trinity                   June 16, 2019       Proverbs 8: 1-4; 22-31   Romans 5: 1-5

                Church meetings run on Robert’s Rules of Order.  Motions are made and seconded, discussion ensues, and a vote is taken.  In a meeting, there is a moderator, someone to bang the gavel, and people who get up to speak address themselves to the moderator instead of one another.  At the parliamentary level, the rules include forms of address when one person is referring to another, like “the gentleman from Aberdeen”.  If it is a particularly divisive debate that is going on, the person who refers to the other as “the gentleman from Aberdeen” may be thinking about that man in terms of “that filthy rotten scoundrel”…well, in this day and age, the language is probably a bit more graphic.

                In the British Parliament, the distance between the government and the opposition is just slightly beyond the distance of dueling swords, because dueling is how disagreements were resolved.  There is a ceremonial mace that is brought in and laid down for the conduct of business to happen, because the mace of battle was laid down that a more peaceful way of government could take place.  These continue the rules that Robert came up with to provide for the peaceful conduct of the people’s business in the English democratic system. 

                We have rules like these in our own Congress as well, but we don’t have the age of the British system to continue all these fascinating traditions to remind ourselves that democracy is a system of peace and benefit to all people.

                What we do have in this country are laws on two levels.  We have the laws of the land, passed by the various levels of government, municipal, county, state, and federal.  But then we have a higher law that governs how we do things.  We have the Constitution.  We use almost religious level language to talk about that document, how it is sacrosanct, a word that is synonymous with sacred.  The President swears an oath to defend the Constitution.  And for more than two hundred and forty years, no man, no matter how power hungry or partisan or doltish, has ever sought to overstay their executive power.

                Why is this important?  Because it is what we humans have attempted to construct as a political system that is bigger and better than ourselves.  We have looked to the lessons of the past, to the excesses of royalty and dictatorship and we have determined, to mess up Winston Churchill, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”  It is a system from the people, by the people, for the people. 

                This is us, attempting to build something that is bigger and better than we are for the benefit of everyone.  Is the system perfect?  Of course not.  That is the genius of checks and balances.  But there are the best ideals of our Founding Fathers built in, tinkered with and fought over in the years since.  What we are trying to do here is build a divine level system for the benefit of everyone.  Ever looked up in the Capital Dome in Washington DC?  It is painted in the style of the ancient Greeks, idealized and portraying the gods and their work among humans, providing a vision of what is being sought.

                Humans have been attempting to create divine level systems from the earliest days of our existence.  How do we explain natural phenomena?  How do we explain who is in charge here, in this region?  There is a deity behind it.  How does the sun travel through the sky?  The Greeks thought it was Helios in his golden chariot.  What happens after we die?  The Egyptians considered Osiris to be the judge of those seeking to gain access to the underworld.  Read the Old Testament and there is reference to Baals in the plural.  There was more than one, he/they/it were connected to particular regions of the world.  It would be like if Perth Amboy had a Baal, and Woodbridge, well, several, Baal-Avenel, Baal-Iselin, Baal-Fords, Baal-Woodbridge downtown… 

                It still shows up in popular culture.  Thor, God of Thunder-not the God of Hammers, is part of the Marvel Universe of movies and comics.  But he is evolved in our perception from Viking days, not really a god, just an alien of the race of Asgard, big, powerful, and really hard to kill.  The thunder and lightning makes him a good super hero, not so much a god in the worshipping sense.

                Why is this so important?  Why is it important to seek to understand that humans, even to this very day, seek to build ideas and concepts about things that are bigger than ourselves and couch them in ideal, divine terms? 

                Today is Trinity Sunday, the Sunday when we focus on the three in one thing that is our religious focus.  The trinity, the three we are talking about is our God, traditionally formulated as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  A more modern formulation, seeking to remove the gender stigma, is Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.  Our ancient creeds, the Apostles and the Nicene both take pains to help us figure out who these ‘persons’ are.

                There is God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.  Genesis 1 is the story of God’s creative power making everything.  There are a lot of “all” words attached to God the Father, all-mighty, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-loving.  One of the crazy things about the world is that there is something of a universal god-consciousness about this all-powerful being in the background of everything.  Most cultures with a lot of gods had a nebulous, powerful God the Father kind of figure in the background.  Sometimes, it gets very close to us.  When missionaries first contacted the Inca’s in South America, they found that there were hymns to such a figure that was part of their worship experience and the missionaries thought, at first, that these people were already a part of Christianity.

                But notice how we humans create things on a deified level.  We construct these things to serve a purpose.  It is either to explain a natural phenomenon or it is to construct a way of doing things that is better than our baser instincts.  These deities or deified ideals serve a purpose in our lives.  It may be relatively easy to worship something as the all-powerful God who created the heavens and the earth.  It may be easy to say things like “God is love”, but it is a whole lot harder to translate that hugeness into decisions of everyday life. 

                Which is why God has done that for us, in the person of Jesus, God’s only begotten Son.  He is the embodiment of what it means to love one another.  He is integrated into the creation story in the Gospel of John, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word was God…  He loved us so much that he died for us.  We have the results from our passage in Romans.  We are justified by faith, because of Jesus, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.  He has given us access to the grace in which we stand, the grace that led to the forgiveness of our sins and our reuniting with God as God’s children with the gift of eternal life.  It is such that even if we were to suffer, according to verse 3, Christ turns even that to our advantage.

                There is a reason we push the question “What Would Jesus Do?” when it comes to considering this life.

                But there is one more to the three in one, God the Holy Spirit.  And Proverbs gives us a beautiful rendering of the Holy Ghost.  The first verses speak of the Holy Spirit as Wisdom.  I do need to point out some trouble here.  Wisdom is designated female in this passage.  Some have used it to balance the maleness of Jesus and the male-pronouns of God the Father with the female of the Holy Spirit.  That is another sermon.  Just remember that God is without gender, and don’t have that fight again, but rather, that we are doing the best we can with the limits of human vocabulary to understand “God”.

                In verse 22, we have yet another rendering of the creation story, this time with the Holy Spirit, Wisdom, describing their presence at that event in a first person accounting.  “When he established the heavens, I was there…when he drew a circle on the face of the deep…when God did all those things, “I was beside him, like a master builder…”

                And whereas Jesus was born into our presence, with the Holy Spirit, “The lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago…”  We confirm that in the language of the Nicene Creed where the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (and the Son). 

                What is the Holy Spirit?  She is wisdom.  If God is the Creator of All, Jesus the Redeemer of All, the wisdom of the Spirit sustains us all.  The thing that the bible keeps describing as the Holy Spirit of God is this Godliness that descends upon those to whom it is granted.  Jesus received it and it began his ministry.  The disciples received it at Pentecost and it began their ministry.  Moses received it and began to lead the people, as did Joshua, and Elijah, and the craftsmen who built God’s house, and David. 

                Whereas Jesus shows us how to live in the divine way appointed by God for Christians, the Holy Spirit does something more.  It gives us the capacity to do so. 

                What does that mean?  Well, use the example of our Constitution.  It sets up our nation, as I said, with checks and balances.  The President and the Congress and the Supreme Court are the tops of the three branches of government.  This is built on the premise that humans are sinful, self-absorbed beings and there must be balance in force to keep us on the journey to the American dream. 

                The Holy Spirit gives us another way to do the right thing.  That is to have the wisdom of God indwelling our souls to help us live the life of love, the law of love, the path of forgiveness and grace, over and against the life of sin and evil.  Instead of being balanced by others to do what is right, the Spirit opens that possibility to each of us directly.

                  Yet we still run our meetings on Robert’s Rules of Order, even with the gift of the Holy Spirit, of wisdom, granted to us.  We still have rules in place to do the right thing even though we have been shown the right way to do things by the life and example of our Lord Jesus Christ.  We follow a system that can seem slow and convoluted when we gather as servants of the All-powerful God who art in heaven.  And we do so because we are human.

                And we have the gift of Jesus, so that when we do hurt someone else, we have His death and resurrection giving us the gift of divine forgiveness, that we may make things right and move forward.

                And we have God the All-Mighty Father, the All-Powerful Mother, the creator of everything , who reveals God’s self as Son and Holy Spirit for our benefit, to know more powerfully who our God is and experience more personally God’s love for us all.

Amen

Pentecost 2019 Sermon: The Holy Spirit

Acts 2: 1-21

          Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, the birth of the church, the return of God to be upon the people, the fulfillment of the promises of Jesus that the disciples would not be left alone, the dove that descended upon the Lord Jesus at the beginning of his ministry and the dove that will descend upon each of us at the beginning of our own ministry.

          Because that is what we are celebrating today.  Christmas marks the birthday of Jesus, Easter marks the re-birthday of Jesus, Pentecost marks the birthday of the Jesus’ church, of the body of Christ.  Today marks the celebration of the birth of the ministry that each one of us has in Christ Jesus if we have so chosen to follow him.  What’s more, if we give our hearts to the Lord eagerly and sincerely.  If we have dedicated our lives to the worship of the Lord in all that we do.

          So the first question for each of us to consider is, are we heart-ready to serve the Lord?  Have we truly given ourselves to Him?  Have we partaken of the prayer of Invitation, “Dear Lord, I Need You, please come into my heart today?”  In the process of confirmation, we recognize a decision that each has made to take the promises of the Lord onto ourselves. 

          The greatest thing we receive when we accept the gift of the Holy Spirit is the knowledge of how much we just don’t know, yet.  Living in Jesus means that everything is new, everything is different, everything makes sense in a way that living without Jesus just plain does not. 

          What does that mean?  It means we need to offer our hearts eagerly, sincerely, and humbly to the service of the Lord.  Have you ever met someone who has given their hearts to Jesus Christ but, in that moment, the experiences of others who are not of Christ, or apparently not of Christ, or of a different, unapproved version of Christ, how their experiences are suddenly disparaged?  Someone of a different faith, their belief system is obviously wrong and to be rejected because it is not of Jesus.  Someone without faith is ultimately without worth until we can win their soul for Christ Jesus.  Or worse, they are hell bound because they do not believe right. 

          Let me try and give an example.  During the Second World War, Canada, my home country, actively participated in the battle against the Nazi’s.  Because of the manpower situation, and calling men up for active service, an assessment of the services was done and it was found that there was a substantial surplus of men serving in the air force when the needs were in the army.  It made sense to move those men over, supplement their training, and use them more effectively within the military service.  But then stupid things began to happen.  All of these men had received their inoculations upon entering the Air Force, but the Army insisted they get them all over again, because those were ‘air force’ shots.

          Those coming to Christ without a fundamental humility about the power and plan of Jesus Christ can be just as dense.  The people they have love and known forever-but who aren’t ‘of the faith’ are suddenly turned away from or disparaged because they don’t have the Jesus stamp upon their brow.

          Accepting the Holy Spirit means offering our heart to the Lord eagerly and sincerely and broadly.  All too often, Christians fall into the trap of dualist thinking.  But our faith is NOT about right and wrong, black and white, us and them, saved and condemned.  We must fight the temptation to accept that Jesus is right, therefore the rest are wrong, and since I am in Christ, I am right and they are wrong.  Whoever they are.  Our faith is based on the broadening assumption that we are ALL God’s children and we have to fight the notions of the sinful world that would categorize somebody as ‘other’, as evil, as not worthy.

          People have been marginalized and cast out of the family of God’s children in the minds and hearts of Christians for all kinds of reasons, for skin color, for language, for immigrant status, for economic level, for hygienic practices, for disability, for appearance, for perceived intelligence, or the lack there of, for who they are. 

          Let’s talk about the people at the southern border, trying to get in.  They have fallen off the radar insofar as the news in concerned, but not because we fixed the problem.  What is the Christian response?  They are God’s children.  Their lives are in danger.  They are fellow Christians.  They are Latin American.  They are Spanish speaking.  They are poor.  There is no way around it, no Christian reason they should be left behind.

          Living in the faith can be difficult.

          In the Holy Spirit, we give our hearts to the Lord eagerly and sincerely and deeply.  The whole depth of human experience comes under the power of God.

          Some people come to Jesus Christ expecting that the ills of the world will no longer affect them.  One version of this is the influence of capitalism on Christianity.   You may have seen this brand of faith preached on the television.  Be faithful to Jesus and you will be blessed.  That is true.  The problem comes in the definition of blessing.  Faith in Christ has been conflated with the American dream and material prosperity is the resultant definition of God’s blessings.  That means if you are poor, you either are not faithful enough, or you are being punished for something.  That is very much Old Testament thinking where the prosperity of God’s People in the Promised Land was tied to their obedience and devotion to their Lord.  Jesus changed that game.

          Some people come to Jesus Christ expecting that tragedy can no longer touch their lives.  In the face of a sudden illness or a tragic accident, when the prayers come fast and furious and the miracle is expected, but it doesn’t happen-is it a measure of our lack of faith?  Is it punishment for something I did?  Jesus takes care of his own-except that he doesn’t.  And then we come up with the most damaging platitudes to try and cover our bases.  “Our loss is heaven’s gain.”  “Jesus wanted another angel.”  “God wanted them for the heavenly chorus.” 

          One of the most painful moments I have had in observing pastoral leadership was in college.  There was a tragedy in the congregation, a young person taken before their time.  I was part of the group that this person was a member of.  We were gathered with friends and family, and the pastor was there.  He was a good man, strong preacher, good friend to us.  He was talking about the stages of grief, I think you know what I mean, denial, anger, bargaining. 

          As a pastor, I have come to view those as gifts from God to keep humans from exploding in the face of overwhelming tragedy.  But the way he was approaching it was that each of those feelings was a manifestation of sin unleashed in us by the weight of the tragedy.  We will experience them, all humans do, but being in Jesus, we will be forgiven for feeling that way when we get back to our “proper” relationship with God. 

          It twists my guts to this day to think back on the ignorance of God’s creation that this pastor was showing.  He was trying to help.  His heart was in it for the Lord, sincerely.  But he was not in the Holy Spirit in that moment.  Maybe the only thing worse than this kind of ignorance is an assumption that we should be essentially suicidal in our thinking, wanting to die for the next life because this life of sin and evil is worth little more than being thrown in the dumpster.

          Blessed be God the Father Almighty, blessed be God’s only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, blessed be the granting of the gift of the Holy Spirit to be upon us and to guide as seek to live and minister as Christians.  When we offer our hearts to the Lord, eagerly and sincerely, the Lord returns the blessing, if we open ourselves, to the power and grace and teaching of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit will teach our hearts to be humble in their attitude, to be broad in their outlook, and to be deep in our experience of God’s love in our lives.

          May this Pentecost be for us the renewal of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in our church.

Amen