The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada is coming up very soon. This year there will be some debates on the agenda, yet again, about the place of LGBTQ people in the church. So, of course, the discussion boards of the church had been pretty active lately with people posting and discussing these weighty matters. I hardly want to spend all my time attending to these discussions, but I can’t help tuning in from time to time.
Lately, as you may have noticed, people who are strongly opposed to making any changes in our policies at this time, had been taking to labeling those they disagree with as “revisionists.” I don’t want to presume that this is their intention, but I can’t help but notice it often comes across as a pejorative label. They seem to be thinking, every time that they say it, that they are the true believers and that those who disagree with them are merely revising a time honoured approach to the Bible and to truth.
The other day, I stumbled into one of these discussions and caught on something that someone wrote. “The Old Testament is very clear on the definition of marriage,” they said (or something to the effect, I don’t recall the exact words). I thought, yes, that is quite true, the Old Testament is pretty clear on the definition.
But it also made me wonder, how would the Bible define revisionist? For example:
1) If you believe that marriage is between one man and one woman,
you might be a revisionist!
This is one that most people would be aware of. Many Biblical heroes, including Abraham, Jacob and many kings had multiple wives. The Bible never expresses a problem with it.
2) If don't agree that a woman is a piece of property and she belongs to her husband,
you might be a revisionist!
You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbour's wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.(Exodus 20:17) This is the Bible's primary law regarding wanting (and taking) someone else's property. The wife is simply listed as another example of your neighbour's property.
3) If you believe that sex should be consensual between the two people involved,
you might be a revisionist.
“If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbour's wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. (Deuteronomy 22:23-24) The issue in this law is consent. It might not seem to be at first glance because, in this case, a man and a woman could have freely chosen to have sex together. The reason why it is considered a capital crime is that the Bible did not consider that a woman had the right to consent to have sex. Only her father had the right of consent and if he had chosen that she should marry someone else, she did not have any choice in the matter.
4) If you believe that a woman shouldn't be forced to marry anyone (including someone who has raped her),
you might be a revisionist.
If a man meets a virgin who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are caught in the act, the man who lay with her shall give fifty shekels of silver to the young woman's father, and she shall become his wife. Because he violated her he shall not be permitted to divorce her as long as he lives. (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)
5) If you don't think that there is something inherently shameful about being a woman who engages in a sex act with a man (even if she is married to him),
you might be a revisionist.
"In the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error." (Romans 1:27) This one is not immediately obvious, but the key phrase is, "received in their own persons the due penalty for their error." This condemnation is based on an attitude towards sex that was taken for granted in the society of the Bible and which Paul repeats here uncritically. The idea is that there is someone inherently shameful about being on the receiving end of a sex act. It was all very well to be the sexual penetrator but to be penetrated in any way was to be degrated and was a punishment in and of itself. That is the assumption behind this verse. But think about what that statement implies about women who have sex with men!
Of course we're all revisionists, and thank God that we are! If we actually tried to apply biblical practices of marriage today, it would be horrible. The only question is the degree of revisionism that we each feel comfortable with.
Now, I am not really trying to make a big point here, other than a point about our language. I find the language that some people use in this debate a bit problematic. What does it mean to call someone else a revisionist if we are all revisionist to some degree or another? I don't necessarily have a better word for the position though.
he Bible doesn’t just talk about the afterlife in one way. There are all kinds of ways in which it is described. In some texts it is found in a place called Sheol, but then there are other places that talk about Heaven and Hell. There are references to Hades, Paradise and also to the Pit and the Lake of Fire. And this is not just a matter of using different words to describe the same thing. The various places and states are described in such different ways that they are very hard to reconcile with each other. But it is fun to watch people try.
Theologians and experts in religion seem to have this deep need to systematize and organize everything including what the Bible says about the afterlife so there are people w
ho have attempted to reconcile everything that the Bible says about it. The solution, in Christian theology, has usually been to describe an afterlife that changes over time. The theory is that the dead have been sent (and will be sent) to different places at different times in history. In Old Testament times they were sent to one place which had various departments but that system was changed when Jesus came and was raised from the dead and it will be changed again at the end of the world. It is a fascinating study, but, when I look at it, I can’t help but wonder if the people who make their careers sorting all of that sort of stuff out, have been missing the point entirely.
One of the things that especially makes me think that is the passage that we read this morning from the Gospel of Luke. In this passage Jesus tells his followers a parable in which all of the characters die and Jesus says interesting things about what happens to them in the afterlife. In particular, Jesus speaks about them going to places that are not really spoken about anywhere else in the Bible. The poor man, Lazarus, dies and is taken to a place called “Abraham’s Bosom.” The awkwardness of this is somewhat covered over in the translation that we read this morning where it is rendered that he “was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.” But the literal translation of the original text actually says that the man is taken to a place called “Abraham’s bosom” or “Abraham’s breast.”
The rich man, who is not named, but to whom tradition has given the name Dives, is taken to another place called Hades, which is of course the ancient Greek land of the dead. What’s more, there appears to be a great impassable chasm that separates the two men in death.
All of these are places and features that are a little bit hard to reconcile with the descriptions of the afterlife elsewhere in the Bible. And so theologians grappling with this parable often have a hard time fitting places like “Abraham’s bosom,” into their maps of heaven or hell or whatever. But they are missing, I think, the point of the parable that Jesus told.
To understand what Jesus is saying, you need to visualize the opening scene that he describes. “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.” Jesus says, “And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table.” Now how would you draw a picture of that scene? We would probably imagine this rich man (who I’m going to follow the tradition and call Dives) sitting at a well-appointed table dining on expensive foods, but you need to know that that picture is actually wrong.
Rich people in Jesus’ day did not sit down to eat. Anyone know how they ate? They laid down on couches to eat. Everyone agreed that it was the proper and civilized way to eat. And there were a number of reasons why they thought so. First of all, you will note, lying down on your side makes you kind of helpless. You can’t really reach any food that is not placed within a couple of feet from where you lie. This is by design. It means you have to be waited on hand and foot by an army of slaves and rich people in Jesus’ day loved to show off how many slaves they had.
It kind of makes you clumsy too, of course, and more likely to drop your food on the floor. But they kind of liked that too because there was no better way to show off how rich you were than to not care about the food you wasted by dropping it on the floor.
One other thing about the couches, though, they were actually much bigger than this one – big enough, in fact, that two or three people could share one comfortably. In a formal dining room, where we must imagine Dives dining, there would be a number of these couches where he would welcome his honoured guests. Every position in the room had its relative importance and honour but the most honoured position you could occupy was if you actually shared the couch at the head of the room with your host. The guest of honour would lie right here with his head resting against his host’s breast. Another way to put that would be to say that the guest of honour was in his host’s bosom. Now, remember that expression: in the bosom of the host.
So that is how you must imagine Dives. But what about Lazarus? Where is he? He interestingly enough is lying down too, but not in such a nice place. Lazarus is lying just outside the gate of the house. And where is that? It is directly opposite the couch where Dives lies on his dining couch – directly opposite. How do I know that for sure? Because every single rich person’s house in the first century was built in the same way. Every house that has been dug up had the same floor plan. The dining room was always directly opposite the front gate. This also was by design.
You see, when a rich man entertained important people for dinner, the whole point was so that everyone would know about it. So the house was laid out so that anyone who walked by the front gate could look in and see exactly who was lying in the place of honour at his host’s breast. For this purpose, the entire centre of the house was left as an open courtyard, open to the sky and planted with a lovely garden. Nothing would be allowed to obstruct the view of the people dining on the couches.
So don’t just imagine Lazarus lying at the gate of the house, imagine him lying right here, right outside the gate and watching every morsel of food that Dives eats, seeing all of the food wasted as it falls to the floor and dreaming, just dreaming, about being able to eat a few bites of that wasted food.
Of course, Dives can see Lazarus too and maybe it even crosses his mind that the poor man might appreciate having the food that he is wasting. But Dives knows that he could never share it with him. Even though there is only a pleasant garden the separates the two men, Dives knows that it is actually a yawning chasm, an impassable social barrier. For if ever Dives got up from his couch and crossed it to go to Lazarus, it would totally destroy his standing and reputation among other rich men.
That is the situation at the opening of the story and you need to see it because otherwise you cannot understand what happens next. What happens next is that Lazarus dies. Presumably he dies of his wounds and extreme malnutrition. “The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to the bosom of Abraham.” And if you see the situation at the opening of the story, you can understand now what that means. “Abraham’s Bosom” isn’t a place or a region of the underworld, it is a picture of Lazarus’ new situation. What it means is that Lazarus now finds himself lying on a couch with his head resting against Abraham’s breast.
The picture you are supposed to see is that Abraham is holding a feast and Lazarus is his guest of honour, sharing the great patriarch’s couch. It’s kind of an amazing image when you think of it. All his life Lazarus has watched these amazing feasts from a distance, knowing he will never belong on one of those couches. Now he feasts in more honour than Dives could ever imagine.
Meanwhile, Dives has also died. I am almost certain that he died choking on a pretzel or something like that. And where is he taken? We are told only that he (not needing the ministrations of angels) was buried but then somehow finds himself in a place called Hades which is clearly a place of great torment and suffering. And, yet, curiously enough, he can still clearly see Lazarus where his lies feasting on Abraham’s lap. Where then is Dives? Is he in some special department of the underworld where the flames burn alongside a bottomless cavern? Is that how we’re supposed to read the story?
Or is the point that Dives ends the story in the very place where Lazarus began, lying in agony watching the other fellow dining sumptuously on a couch? Is not the point of the story that both at the beginning and at the end the two men are separated by a divide that is so close that they can see and hear each other and yet, in both cases, the separation is inexplicably uncrossable. After all, Jesus, the guy telling this story used to say, “The first shall be last and the last first” and he also told a whole lot of other stories where everything at the beginning is totally turned upside down by the end. So I actually feel pretty comfortable saying that Jesus’ main interest in telling this story wasn’t to give us some sort of map of the afterlife. It was about demonstrating how the ways of this world could indeed be turned upside down.
In fact, the thing that I find absolutely fascinating about what Jesus says about the afterlife in this story is that it is so clearly a metaphor of everything he saw wrong about how things worked in his world. Note particularly the great chasm that Abraham talks about. “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed,” he says to Dives, “so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.” And, of course, the mention of such a major feature as a great chasm in the afterlife has sent Christian theologians scrambling to identify this chasm and its meaning in the underworld or wherever it is supposed to be located. But I note that, while Abraham says that it has been fixed or established, he doesn’t say who fixed it there. Of course, people have just assumed that it’s supposed to mean that God fixed it (which would mean that God has locked Dives into his torment), but Abraham doesn’t say that.
What if Jesus is saying that the one who fixed that chasm was Dives himself? All his life, Dives was over there on his couch feasting while Lazarus was over there lying at his gate. It was only a few meters! At any moment Dives could have gotten up and walked across his garden and given Lazarus bread from his table, but he did not do that because that garden was an uncrossable social divide. Indeed he could not be seen crossing without it causing him a loss in his social standing.
In a way, Jesus is saying that Dives created his own hell and is the author of his own torment because of the choices he made during life. He was the one who decided that there could be no contact between himself and Lazarus. That merely continued in the afterlife. He was the one who decided the chasm between them could not be crossed. That merely continued in the afterlife.
Somehow it seems, if you attend to this parable of Jesus (the only one he told that was set in the afterlife) – if you really attend to what it is saying, you will come away learning more about this life and its priorities than you will about what the afterlife is actually like. Somehow, I think, that was exactly what Jesus intended.
And it makes you think, doesn’t it? What are the chasms and divides that still exist in this world? Is God placing someone – some Lazarus – at your gate? Is there someone you could help, or give comfort to or speak a word of life to but you don’t? Maybe you don’t even see this person – at least you don’t notice them because, though they are nearby, somewhere on the path of your week, they seem to be on the other side of some chasm that has been erected by race, by prejudice, by economics or religion. The chasm may seem uncrossable, but what if it is only so in your own mind?
#140CharacterSermon Some think Parable of Lazarus & Dives is about the afterlife but it ends up teaching more about this life & what matters
2 Samuel 12:15b-23, Mark 12:18-27, Responsive: Selected
Y
ou all know that today is Mother’s Day. But do you know why? You might think that this day came into existence because of the efforts of the greeting card industry or the florists or the chocolatiers who banded together and came up with the day to make lots of sales during what would otherwise be the very slow month of May, but that is not the case. The existence of Mother’s Day as we know it today is largely due to the efforts of one woman named Anna Jarvis.
Anna Jarvis was not a mother herself, but she (like everyone I guess) had a mother – a very extraordinary mother named Ann Reeves Jarvis who had done amazing things in working for peace during the American Civil War and for reconciliation afterwards. But Ann Reeves Jarvis, as is the way of all flesh, did eventually die and more than anything her daughter created Mother’s Day and lobbied to have it recognized out of a desire to keep the memory of her mother alive – a way to make sure that the woman she had lost never really went away.
And that was it, by the way. Anna Jarvis didn’t want it to be about anything else and she absolutely deplored everything that Mother’s Day became once she got it established. She deplored the commercialization of it and spent most of the rest of her life feuding with card companies and florists and chocolatiers. Though she never became a mother herself, people from all over the United States would send her presents every year for Mother’s Day and she refused every single one of them.
She became bitter and angry and, in the end, died in poverty and obscurity. It is hard when something that you created according to your own vision goes in a direction that you never intend, but that is the risk you always take when you create something new. It is too bad that this was something that distressed her so, but I want to remember this woman’s vision and her desire, in her own way, to keep her beloved mother alive even after death.
We have been talking about the afterlife here at St Andrew’s, and today I would like to ask a very important question that always arises when we think about the afterlife in the church. It is a question that I think would have been very much on the heart of Anna Jarvis. What about the people that we have lost and that we have loved, what about our mothers if we have lost them in this life? Will we get to see those people in the afterlife? And, if so, what will the reunion be like? I think that, in many ways, the question of what happens to our loved ones and whether we will see them again is actually more important to many of us that is the question of what will happen to ourselves. After all, we figure, what is the point of an afterlife if you don’t get to share it with the people that you love?
Interestingly enough, the Bible doesn’t really have a whole lot to say about this whole idea of being united with our loved ones after death. There are plenty of passages that offer various pictures and metaphors of what the afterlife might look like, but none of them describe that grand reunion. In the Biblical images, the redeemed people are much more focussed on offering their praise and worship up to God and there is no talk about them interacting with each other. But, of course, just because the Bible doesn’t talk about something happening in the afterlife doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen.
The closest that the Bible comes to talking about seeing the people who are important to us in this life again is in the rather strange passage we read in the gospel this morning where there is this odd exchange between Jesus and a group of people called Sadducees. Now, we don’t actually know a whole lot about what Sadducees were like in the time of Jesus. They were a religious group who were closely associated with the Jewish temple and priesthood and both of those things came to an end shortly after the time of Jesus when the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. Records and memories of the Sadducees were mostly lost.
But one thing we do know about the Sadducees is that they took the Jewish Bible – especially the first five books which were called the Books of Moses – very seriously. If the Bible, as they honoured it, didn’t explicitly say something, they didn’t believe it. Well, one of the things that the first five books of the Bible doesn’t talk about is any concept of the afterlife. So the Sadducees didn’t believe in the afterlife.
So the Sadducees come up to Jesus with a question about the afterlife. But they are not asking because they are actually puzzled about something and want Jesus help them with it. Their question is actually about trying to demonstrate to everyone how much more clever they are than Jesus – that they are right to not believe in the afterlife and Jesus is wrong.
So, in their question, they set up a situation in the afterlife that is frankly ridiculous. You see, there was this law in one of the Books of Moses regarding marriage. Marriage in ancient Israel wasn’t really about love; it was about property and keeping property and inheritance in the family. For that reason it was considered a catastrophe if a man failed to have a son to pass his property down to. So this law was created to make sure, if a man died before having a son, there would be a male heir. His younger brother had to marry his widow and get a son on her and that child would grow up to inherit the big brother’s name and property. I know it sounds pretty crazy to us (it is) but this was how they took care of their priorities in these matters.
So these Sadducees come up to Jesus with a ridiculous application of this law. There are seven brothers who, because of this law, are all required to marry the same woman – the widow of the oldest brother. It is, of course, something that would never actually happen, but they don’t care about that. It is enough for them that the law means that it is possible. And if it is possible, they are trying to prove, that means that the very idea of an afterlife is impossible because, in their minds, a woman cannot have an independent existence. She must be under the authority of some man. She must be married to someone and since one woman cannot be married to several men at once (even though, of course, the opposite was allowed) their conclusion is that the afterlife itself must be impossible.
And I realize that the case that these Sadducees present is so absurd in many ways and is, even worse, steeped in patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes that we would find unacceptable, but I would like you to give their argument some consideration because there is something to it. They are pointing out that there is a bit of a problem with that idea of reunification in the afterlife as we usually think of it. The problem is that our relationships in this world are not static. They are in fact, constantly changing. In some cases the changes may be quite extreme like when someone (as a result of death or divorce) is married to completely different people at different times in their life.
But even when it is not as extreme as that, there are still constant and more subtle changes. Consider, for example, your relationship with someone like your mother. You have one relationship with her when you are an infant and are totally dependent on her, another when you an adolescent and trying to establish your independence and then you relate to her quite differently when you are an adult and maybe a parent yourself. There is not just one relationship but a constantly changing story that includes many ups and downs and various emotions. The relationship is so conditioned by where you are in your life and where she is in hers. So when you see her in the afterlife – in a place where time and phase of life don’t mean anything, how exactly are you supposed to reconnect with your mother maybe especially if you have gone through a lot since she passed on and you are no longer the person you were then.
So, as much as I hate to say it, I think that the Sadducees do have a bit of a point. It doesn’t make sense that the relationships we have here – relationships that are so defined by time and changeable circumstance and stage of life could just continue on in a place where none of those things exist. I can’t have, all in the same eternal moment, the same relationship that I had with my mother at all the different phases in my life. So maybe we do need to ask Jesus, together with the Sadducees, whether a reunion in the afterlife is really possible.
But, of course, Jesus has an answer for them, and what an answer it is! “Is not this the reason you are wrong,” he says, “that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” He tells us a number of important things about the afterlife here. He tells us first of all, the most important truth about it: that the afterlife is an existence completely unlike our present lives. There is really nothing in this life that can relate to it and we don’t really have the minds to grasp it or the words to describe it. The Sadducees have misunderstood because they have tried to define something that cannot be defined in human terms. That is their first mistake but it won’t be their last.
Secondly, Jesus makes it clear that we will not relate to people there in the same way that we do here. There will be no marriage, he says, not because he has anything against marriage but because that kind of earthly relationship has no meaning there. But it is not just marriage that he rules out, but also other human forms of relation. Note how he says it, “they neither marry nor are given in marriage.” He is speaking in terms of how marriage took place in that world where one party (the man) married while the other (the woman) was given in marriage. This practice marked the fundamental difference between the genders, that men were free but that women were pieces of property that were to be given, taken and traded. But Jesus says, thankfully, that such distinctions (which were fundamental to everything in their world) have no meaning in heaven.
How then is this an answer to the Sadducees’ question? Jesus is arguing that it is possible for there to be a grand reunion in heaven with our lost ones, that such a thing doesn’t have to end up creating endless difficulties because relationship is not limited there in the ways that it is limited here. I guess it’s not quite something we can understand here and now, but it is, I hope a great comfort.
But Jesus doesn’t just leave it there. He gives the Sadducees and us the ultimate proof of the truth of the afterlife. “Have you not read in the book of Moses,”he says, “how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the living.” Here Jesus anchors the proof of the afterlife not in our desires to be reunited but in the nature of Godself. The thing, Jesus says, that proves that the great patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, have entered into the afterlife is not found in their relationship with each other, not in their relationship to us, but only in their relationship with God. God is their God and God is, by nature, the God of the living. This makes it possible for them to have life even though they have died.
It is heartbreakingly sad to lose the people we love. We mourn for them, we miss them, and we know that we will never be fully complete without them. We can know that we will see them again, despite whatever complications that might cause, because we know the power of God, who has demonstrated he is able to raise the dead, will overcome any obstacle ever to be raised in all the universe. The God of the living is our God and theirs, and so we know we can have hope.
140CharacterSermon Will we see our loved ones again in the #afterlife? Yes. Will it be like anything we have ever experienced before? No!
decided that this year, in this season after Easter, I wanted to focus on the whole idea of an afterlife. For many people the promise of heaven is what the Christian faith is all about. In fact there are Christians who will look you straight in the eye and tell you that Christian faith and practice is something that you just have to put up with now for the sake of a tremendous reward later.
I mean, they may not say it in so many words, but the message seems to be: “I don’t really like all of this churchy stuff and I hardly want to be good and moral all the time. In fact I’m kind of miserable, but it is only because someday, after I die I’m going to be able to go to heaven and that will make it all worthwhile. Heaven, in other words, is supposed to be the carrot that entices us to be good and that there really is no other good reason to be good.
I have met many Christians over the years that seem to take that approach and I’ve got to say that I have never found it compelling. For me, we shouldn’t have to wait until someday and after we have died in order for this to be worthwhile. I’m not saying, of course, that our faith should never challenge us by making us uncomfortable or lead us to do what, in the moment, we don’t feel like doing, but the blessings that Christ promises us must be for this world, not just for the next. For that reason, I have often not wanted to dwell on the afterlife and have not preached on it often. This is not because I don’t believe in it – I do – but merely because I feel that we have been inclined to put too much emphasis on it.
But now, I wanted to counterbalance that tendency by spending some time focussing on the meaning of the afterlife. But, of course, when you talk about the afterlife, you can’t just focus on the carrot – the reward that is supposed to be waiting for us in heaven. There is also, in the Christian tradition, a stick. Again and again Christians have used the fear of another place – a place called hell – not to entice people to be good but rather to scare them out of being bad.
Now, hell, fire and brimstone have not generally been the major themes of the churches that I have attended over the years. But I do remember one time when I was in the United States and went, with a group of friends, to visit a Church on a Sunday morning and I had to sit through about an hour long sermon that was essentially an exhaustive description of all the pain, terror and suffering that was surely waiting in Hell for all of those evil people in the world who did not believe the same thing as the good fellow who was preaching the sermon that morning.
So I’m not naive. I know that hell has been a major theme in Christian preaching for a very long time. For centuries preachers have used imagery of Hell to frighten people into behaving in certain ways. But not all of that imagery comes from the Bible. Traditions of and descriptions of Hell have grown and changed dramatically through the centuries. For example, much of our idea of what Hell is like comes not from the Bible but from a fourteenth century book called Inferno written by a man named Dante. Why the word hell itself is not even a biblical word, it is an Old English word. It was the name for the place that pagan Anglo-Saxons believed people went after they died. So the question is what does the Bible actually teach about the place that we affectionately call hell?
So, as I say, hell is not a Biblical word. So what is the Biblical word? There are a few. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word that is used to describe the place of the dead is Sheol. It is not entirely clear what Sheol is because no literal descriptions are offered. One thing that is clear is that they saw it as a real place underneath the earth. They imagined the universe in very simplistic and primitive terms. The universe was like a triple layer cake. The top layer was Heaven above, the middle layer was the earth and the bottom layer was this place called Sheol. This description of the universe is taken for granted in many places in the Old Testament, and we should not read it as some kind of divine revelation of the actual shape of the universe but rather as the Bible speaking in terms that the people of that time could relate to.
But, in addition to being a literal place, ancient Hebrews also believed that Sheol was the place where people went after they died – all people apparently. Sheol for them was not a place of punishment or torment, but neither was it a place of reward, it was just kind of a place where you went. We read about their attitude towards the place in our Psalm this morning: “For in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can give you praise?” It hardly sounds like much of an existence, does it? No remembrance, no ability to speak, you are just there. So Sheol doesn’t really have much connection with our modern concept of hell, for that we need to turn to the New Testament.
Jesus, in the New Testament, does indeed talk about a place called hell. Or, at least, he uses a word that got translated into that Old English word hell in our Bibles. So, in our reading this morning, Jesus says, “It is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.” So what kind of a place is Jesus talking about when he says that?
Well the word that Jesus actually uses there is the word Gehenna. Even though the gospels were written in Greek, Gehenna is not a Greek word, it is an Aramaic word. Aramaic was the language that Jesus actually spoke so that means that the gospel writers did not translate the word into Greek but retained the actual word that Jesus probably said. That does not happen often in the New Testament and it is always important when it does.
So what did the word Gehenna mean to first century Aramaic speakers like Jesus? Well, that is the puzzling thing because we know exactly what it meant. Gehenna was an actual place – I mean a real earthly geographical location that you could actually visit and can still visit to this very day. Gehenna literally means “the Valley of the Son of Hinnom” and was an actual piece of land, a valley that had once belonged to the family of a man named Hinnom. The valley can still be found to this very day in the City of Jerusalem. It is the valley that is found on the southern and western side of Mount Zion where the temple of the Lord once stood and where the Dome of the Rock stands today.
Yet clearly, when Jesus refers to this place called Gehenna, he had more than just an ordinary valley outside of Jerusalem in mind. He speaks of it, in fact, as the very last place you would ever want to go – a place that you would be willing to pay an arm or a leg (or an eye) not to have to go there. I mean, I have heard of cities that have bad neighbourhoods but that sounds a little bit extreme!
What’s more, Jesus describes Gehenna as a place of “unquenchable fire” and a place “where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.” What would that have to do with what is today a fairly ordinary looking valley in the heart of Jerusalem? Clearly Jesus is using this valley as a metaphor for something. Somehow this valley carried a meaning that gave people a picture of some truly horrible fate that awaited some people after they died.
The most likely explanation seems to be that, in Jesus’ time, this particular valley just happened to be the place in Jerusalem where people left their garbage. It was the Jerusalem municipal landfill, the garbage dump. That would certainly explain why Jesus would speak of it as a place that people would certainly not want to go – the kind of place that you would give your right arm to not end up in. People did up living on the local trash heaps, you know. In fact, in some places people still do. They somehow manage to eke out an existence living off other people’s garbage but it is not the kind of life that anyone would choose.
It also explains the imagery of ever burning fires and worms continually feasting on rotting organic matter. That is exactly the kind of description that you might take away from your average ancient city dump.
Obviously when Jesus talks about people ending up in Gehenna, the Jerusalem city dump, he doesn’t mean that people were going to end up in that literal location. He is using that place – and it does indeed appear to have been a pretty awful place – as a metaphor for something that might happen to some people after death. But what, exactly, is that metaphor supposed to be? Of course, traditionally, the interpretation of that passage has been that Jesus was saying that, after some people died, they would be sent to a place where they spend the rest of the eternity in continual fully conscious torment. I suppose that is possible. But is that really the only thing that Jesus could have meant by referring to such a place?
If I were to say to you, “You’re going to wind up in the dump,” and you knew very well that you had no business there and that I was not literally sending you on an errand to the Waterloo Regional Landfill, how would you understand me? Would it seem that I was consigning you to an eternity of conscious suffering, especially if I happened to mention that there had been a tire fire burning in the dump non-stop since last week and the place was full of worms feasting on the garbage? Well, perhaps. But isn’t it equally possible that I might be rejecting you in some other way – essentially calling you a piece of garbage or suggesting that you were useless. Without more information and some context, how could you be sure what I meant?
And that is the problem with symbolic language; you can’t quite pin it down and know what exactly a speaker means. For two thousand years Christians have been thinking about and adorning the idea of hell with their own imaginations of the worst kind of torment in this never ending quest to create a stick that they can use to goad people into behaving in certain ways. But when you go back and try and load all of that onto a few brief references that Jesus made to a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem, I can’t help but wonder whether we might be pushing it a little bit.
Is there a hell awaiting the wicked of this earth after they die? Well, I can tell you one thing, I don’t believe that anyone is going to be thrown into Dante’s Inferno or that horrible place of eternal conscious torment that was once described to me in a sermon. Those are simply examples of people trying to nail down the description of something that cannot be described in human terms.
I also do not doubt that Jesus warned us against going astray in this life – that there are actions you can take that you should avoid at any cost. I also believe that he warned that one of the consequences of such actions would be that you were thrown upon a garbage heap that I suspect represented rejection and alienation from God, but I am not certain he intended to mean to include eternal conscious torment. In other words, I would say that I believe in hell, I am just not entirely certain that hell means exactly what Christian tradition has said that it means.
But more important than that, I do not believe that the God I have come to know through Jesus Christ is one who is all that interested in motivating us to be good through a carrot and stick approach. Yes, he is looking for certain things from us and rejoices when we trust him, act in faith and work for the kingdom of God in this world. But God, like any good parent, knows that the threat of punishment can only do so much to shape a child’s behaviours and is not actually all that helpful at teaching the child to internalize the values of the parent. God doesn’t just want to control our actions, he wants to transform us. That is why he sent Jesus, that is why he raised him from the dead and promised that we would be raised too. It is all about grace and love and God believing in us, not about him scaring us into behaving in certain ways with the threat of hell.
That is why I would say that, whatever exactly it means, hell or Gehenna should not be at the centre of our thinking about the afterlife. The Christian life is not about avoiding punishment. It is not even really about a heavenly reward. It is about meeting a God whose love for us (made real in Jesus Christ) is so powerful that it can transform our here and now.
140WordSermon Jesus spoke of Gehenna (translated: hell) but what did he mean by it & and how do we respond to it? That is another question.
ver five hundred years ago, an English king by the name of James commissioned the translation of the greatest book ever written, the Bible, into English. The result was a translation that was so good, so poetic and so beautiful that, for hundreds of years, it was essentially the only English Bible that mattered. But five centuries is a very long time and in all of that time the text of the King James Version never changed but other things did and that may have caused a few issues.
For example, in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John – in the King James Version of the passage that we read this morning – Jesus makes this rather stunning promise to his disciples. “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” It is the kind of promise that has a way of capturing people’s attention. What an afterlife to anticipate – a mansion for me in heaven after I die? Why, I’ll be just like the Beverley Hillbillies!
But when, eventually, newer and more modern English translations of the Bible finally began to appear, some people got extremely upset. You see, when they opened up their new Bibles and turned to the Gospel of John, they read this: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”
“What? Dwelling places? Is God planning to put me up in a Motel 6 or something? The King James promised me a mansion and now these fancy new translations say I can only have a dwelling place? This is a raw deal. I want my mansion!” So said many critics; so some still say to this day. Of all the complaints against the newer translations (and there have been many) the complete lack of mansions has got to be one that comes up most often.
But is it a valid complaint? Did the more recent scholars really set out to shortchange us all in heaven with their new translations. Is it some great conspiracy to cool off some sort of heavenly real estate bubble? Is the Wynne government involved? Well, I can explain what happened for you if you like. As it turns out, both the King James Version and the modern translations were absolutely correct translations. What? How can that be? How can both be correct when they make quite different promises?
Well, the key word in what I just said was the word were. You see, in the original text of the Gospel, what Jesus promises is that there are many monh,in his Father’s house. And that Greek word, monh,, means rooms or dwelling places. And when the King James Version was translated, a common English word for a dwelling place was, in fact, the word mansion. That’s right, when the King James was first translated, the word mansion didn’t have the same meaning that it has today.
Five hundred years ago, rich people didn’t live in mansions. They lived in manor houses or estates or villas, but not in mansions. So the word didn’t have any of the meaning of luxury or size that we attach to it. It was only over time that the word became attached to a particular kind of dwelling. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the King James translation of this particular passage (and its suggestion that a mansion was a heavenly kind of abode) that prompted people over time to call big and fancy houses mansions.
But the mere fact that people get so worked up over the question of whether Jesus was promising us rooms or mansions after we die is rather telling. It seems as if the way that people think of or imagine the life that comes after this life is really important to us. In fact, it’s the kind of thing that people often are willing to fight over – even kill over.
In some ways, I suppose, that is not very surprising. For many of us, when we get discouraged by the ups and downs of this life or when we lose somebody that we love and miss them terribly, we take great comfort in the promise of an afterlife. But somehow it is not enough for us just to be reassured that there is another existence beyond this one. We need to be able to visualize something whether it be mansions or pearly gates or streets paved with gold or whatever.
But there is a problem with that. I believe in an afterlife. I think that there is good reason to believe that the identity that I call me will still persist even after I die. I base that belief on many things including and especially my Christian faith. But I do not believe that I or anyone else has the language to actually describe what that new life is like.
Whatever it is, the afterlife is an existence that is completely unlike life as we experience it right now. I mean if anyone has come close to being able to give a literal description of the kind of existence that I suspect we are talking about here, it is the theoretical physicists who can talk about things like multidimensional universes or quantum nonlocality and can produce some pretty remarkable mathematical equations, but they can’t draw a picture of any of it.
If you want a picture of the afterlife, therefore, you are limited to what is called metaphorical language. In other words, you cannot say what it is, but you can say what it is like. A metaphor is a way of describing something that is not literally true, but that is true in profoundly more important ways.
For example, when I say, “God is my Father,” that is a metaphor. I do not mean by that that God is my biological father or that he is the man who raised me and lives in Toronto. It is not literally true but it is true in far more important ways. The phrase, God is my Father, tells me very important and very true things about my relationship with God, about God’s care for me and about so much more. A good metaphor is like that, it’s not literally true, but it is able to speak truths that you cannot normally put into words.
And that is why I would suggest that all of our language, everything we ever say about the afterlife, is metaphorical. And when I say that, I don’t mean that the afterlife isn’t real or that what we say about it isn’t true. I only mean that metaphors are the only way that we have to get at the deeper truth of the afterlife.
But one thing that means is that it is probably meaningless to fight over the particular metaphors that are used when talking about the afterlife. Does it matter, ultimately, whether I imagine that Jesus has prepared for me a room or a mansion in his Father’s house? After all, I hardly expect that things like architecture or interior design or, for that matter, space or time or dimensions have the same meaning in the afterlife that they do here. So, when Jesus calls it a dwelling place, how can we have even a clue what he is trying to describe? It is actually a little bit frustrating trying to understand what he means once you start to break it down.
And I think that some of the disciples (or at least one of them) felt that frustration because he spoke up right after Jesus said this. Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” In other words, Thomas is saying, we can’t really grasp the concepts you talking about here, how are we supposed to join you in this place where you say you are going. I think that there are many who struggle with that very issue. If they cannot have a description of what the afterlife looks like that corresponds to the physical realities of this world, how are they to take comfort in it?
But I think that Jesus’ response to Thomas shows a remarkable understanding of his frustration. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” Jesus says. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus is telling him that it is not about the place or about what it looks like. “Iam the way,” he is saying. If you trust me, I will get you to the destination. You don’t need to know what it looks like when you get there or how you’ll know when you have arrived. The afterlife is about trust more than it is about place.
All you really need to know is that, after you die, you will be in the hands of a gracious and loving God – the God revealed to us in and through Jesus. (That’s what he means when he says, “If you know me, you will know my Father also.”) When you know that you have a heavenly Father that you can trust, you really don’t need to worry about details like how many theoretical square feet you will have to live in. This, above all, is the message we need to keep in mind in all our thinking about the afterlife; it will help immensely when it comes to dealing with any worries or fears about death.
And, keeping that in mind, let us look a little closer at the promise Jesus gives his disciples (and us) at the Last Supper in the Gospel of John. If we can assume that he is not actually describing the heavenly housing market and that he is using a metaphor to get some idea of the afterlife over to his disciples, what is he really saying?
The image he is using is actually would have been pretty clear to anyone listening to him in the first century. The first clue is when he uses the words “Father’s house.” I think that it is important to note that the phrase “Father’s house” or “God’s house” is never used anywhere else in the Bible as a term for heaven. In fact, the phrase “God’s house” always and only means one thing everywhere else in the Bible – it is another name for a very earthly temple in Jerusalem. And Jesus clearly wasn’t talking about that temple when he said this, so I think that people would have understood that he was using a different and very human metaphor to describe what the afterlife with God was really about.
Everyone would have had a picture in their mind of what a father’s house with many rooms would have looked like because, in that world, it was very common for large extended families to live together in a house under the leadership of one patriarch or father figure. The centre of these households was an open courtyard where much of the common family life was lived out. Around this courtyard various buildings and rooms would be built including a kitchen and dining room but also rooms for the various smaller units of the families.
When a young son of the family would get married, for example, he would go out into the world and find his bride in her father’s household. He would seek the permission of her father to marry her (given that this was, after all, a very patriarchal society) and then he would leave her there for a time while he returned to his father’s house. There he would build another room onto the courtyard of his family home and when it was finished he would return to his bride and take her home to live in that room in his father’s house. This was, in fact, the normal pattern in marriage in that world.
So when Jesus describes his Father’s house with many rooms (or dwelling places or what they called mansions back in the sixteenth century) that is the kind of image that everyone would have had in their minds. For that matter, when he says, “I go to prepare a place for you? And… I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” They also had a clear image in mind. Jesus is speaking as if he is a groom who is telling his bride that he is going to his father’s house to build a room onto it for her before he returns to take her home as his wife. It is a metaphor for marriage and that is actually the primary thing that we need to understand in this passage.
You see, it turns out that when, in this passage, Jesus is trying to comfort his disciples by talking about the afterlife, he is not talking about a place (at least not in the way that we usually talk about places in terms of space or dimension), he is talking about a marriagebetween himself and the believers. He is talking about relationship more than place which is why he can also say that he himself is the way to get there. So maybe, if we are going to try and imagine what the afterlife is like, that is where we should start too.
The promise of life beyond this present one is real. Even if our limited minds cannot comprehend it, we can still have a sense of the comfort that the promise gives us because of our relationship with the promiser. That is where it all starts. That is what it is all about.
#140CharacterSermon Jesus promised his Father’s house had many rooms. This is not about a place in heaven so much as a relationship with God
Isaiah 51:9-11, Matthew 26:47-56, Colossians 1:13-22
A
few weeks ago I watched a movie you may have heard of. It was called “The Magnificent Seven.” It was a remake of an original 1960 western (which was itself a remake of a classic Japanese film), so I am betting that most of you have seen this movie in some form or another at some point in your life. That’s why I feel as if I am not going to spoil the movie for anybody if I give you a quick recap of the plot.
The story went like this. A very bad man got a bunch of very bad people together and they hurt and shot and killed some innocent people in a town. A group from that town went to get some help and found seven people (who were all magnificent) and they came and killed the bad people in the town. Those who were left alive all lived happily ever after.
I really enjoyed watching it. It was a great movie. And it made me think of another great movie I’ve seen recently. You know the one – that movie where there is this really evil gang who do terrible violence and destruction and then the good guys come in and put things right with lots of death and destruction. Oh, what was the name of that movie? (John Wick) No, that’s a good one but not the one I was thinking of. (Dredd) Yeah, that is the plot of that one too, but I wasn’t thinking of that one either. (Avengers) No. (Batman vs. Superman) No. (Lego Batman) Yes, that’s it.
But, you know, now that I think about it, there are an awful lot of movies that kind of have the same plot, aren’t there. The bad guy or the bad woman or group hurts or threatens innocent people with violence and the good guy (or Gal Godot or team) comes in and saves the day with more and better violence. It is what is called a happy ending. Do you realize that if that basic plot did not exist, Hollywood would produce about half as many movies a year as they presently do? It is just a story that we keep telling over and over again. The characters and the setting may change, they may throw in a few twists, but it is all just basically the same story. Why do we do that?
Well actually, it is something that human beings have always done. One of the things that distinguishes us from all the other animals is that we tell stories. Telling stories is what we do to make sense of the world and figure out where we fit into it. These stories may not be true in the literal sense – in fact they are usually not. There was never an actual group of seven gunslingers who saved a town in the old American west, for example. But on another level, we keep telling them because we see them as true in the sense that they are telling us true things about the world and how it works. Stories of this sort are called myths.
I realize, of course, that most of the time when modern people call some story a myth, they simply mean that it is not true. But that is not the classic definition of a myth. A myth is a story that is probably not literally true but that speaks of a truth that is widely accepted.
And one of the oldest recorded myths goes like this: there was once an evil dragon named, in some cultures, Tiamat (though in the Bible they called her Rahab as we read this morning). Tiamat was a monster who was only interested in bringing death, chaos and destruction. But then a hero, called by some people Anu, came and fought against Tiamat with all of his might. The struggle was long and hard but eventually he defeated the monster and out of her destroyed corpse, created the world as we know it today.
That is a myth that human beings have been telling since before recorded history – a story of an evil destructive monster who did violence and was destroyed by the better violence of a “good guy.” It is, I would suggest, a story that we are still telling today – not only because that myth is the plot of every other movie but also because we all still seem to believe that basic premise.
After all, when something goes wrong in this world, when some evil is done or somebody is a victim of violence, what is our first reaction? The first thing we always say is, we’ve got to fight back. We assume that the only way to defeat violence and destruction is with more violence and destruction.
We have actually seen that very thing played out in the last few days. Assad, the President of Syria, carried out an appallingly evil attack against a town in an area occupied by his enemies. The unspeakable violence was an attempt to destroy his almost equally evil enemies. And then, as we all heard, the United States responded with overwhelming violence through a targeted bombardment by 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles on an airbase. That is how we do it. Evil and violence, we assume, can only be countered by more violence. It is what makes the world a better place today – at least, that is what the myth promises us.
It just seems that we have yet to come across a problem that we are not willing to solve by shooting something, stabbing something or declaring war against it. Perhaps no one puts this myth better or more succinctly than American National Rifle Association when they say, “the only person who can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Because the basic assumption of this myth is that violence is the best way – maybe the only way – to make things better in this world, it is sometimes called the myth of redemptive violence. And I suggest to you that, at some level at least, we believe this myth. We must believe it. Otherwise we wouldn’t cheer when the Magnificent Seven come riding into town with their guns blazing. Otherwise we wouldn’t always be so ready to go to war when we see evidence of evil in the world. That is the power of a myth. It makes us believe it even when we may not want to.
The problem with this myth of redemptive violence is all the destruction that it causes. When, for example, a government tries to stop the terrible violence being planned by a group of terrorists by ordering a drone strike on the terrorist compound, that sounds, to us, like a smart thing to do. Surely the violence of the drone strike is the only thing that can prevent a greater evil. But it that doesn’t always work out that way in reality. In reality, what happens is that some people are killed – some of them with evil intentions, no doubt, but also some who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In reality, all the people who are killed are all connected to other people who then hate you and probably vow to kill you in vengeance. In reality, you often only manage to create more chaos, more hatred and more death.
There may be cases where a better world has been created by means of violence. I will admit that. But I suspect that more often it has quite the opposite effect. And yet we keep on believing in the myth of redemptive violence. Why? Probably because we think it’s the only answer that there is to what goes wrong in this world. But what if it isn’t?
As Christians we believe that Jesus came into this world because God loved the world so much that he wanted to save it. Jesus came as the response to all that is wrong with the world. There were people who seemed to recognize that about him right away. When he arrived in Jerusalem, for example, people turned out en masse to welcome him as the “one who comes in the name of the Lord” – the one who would set all things right. But how do you suppose that they thought that he was going to do that? Since they, just like us, had lived all their lives believing the myth of redemptive violence – believing that the only way to counter the unjust violence of the world was with more violence – you can just imagine how they thought that he was going to do it.
You don’t really have to imagine it, though; you just have to read what happened when everything finally came to a head. All week Jesus had been causing unrest in the City of Jerusalem by stirring up the crowds and the authorities had been trying to get rid of him but dared not make a move for fear it might provoke a riot. But finally, on Thursday night, they caught up with him while he only had a few followers with him in the Garden of Gethsemane. They made their move and at least one of Jesus’ followers decided that this was the moment to set everything right.
And how do you set everything right? According to the myth of redemptive violence he knew exactly what to do. He “put his hand on his sword, drew it, and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear.” He thought he was starting something – that his first blow he would set in motion the events that would put everything right again. That is how it is supposed to work according to the myth of redemptive violence. And if that had ever been Jesus’ intention for accomplishing the work he had come to do, that would have been the moment to do it – the spark that would have ignited the flame of violence in order to set everything right.
But what did Jesus do? “Put your sword back into its place;”he cried. He immediately rejected the possibility of putting things right through violence. Not only that, but he exposed the myth for what it was: a lie. “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” He was not only saying that violence doesn’t make anything better. He was saying that it only makes things worse – that violence only leads to more violence until the world spins completely out of control taking with it all the people you hoped to save by resorting to violence in the first place.
Jesus makes it clear that he isn’t saying this because he has no means of winning through violence. He has more power at his fingertips than the world’s worst tyrant could muster: “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” It is just that Jesus knows that such an approach can never work.
But this is not just a matter of Jesus rejecting violence under these specific circumstances. There is something much more important than that going on here. You see, one of the big problems in our world is, in fact this myth of redemptive violence. Because we believe this myth, because we don’t think that there is any other way of creating a better world than according to the dogma of this myth, the world is caught in a web of despair. So long as the myth of redemptive violence rules in our hearts, it will force itself upon us and will drive us deeper and deeper into the endless cycle of violence and hatred answering violence and evil until we have all died by the sword.
Jesus came to expose the myth as a lie. He did that, first of all, by always demanding a better world – a world where the poor, the meek, the weeping and the hungry were blessed – and yet by refusing to take up violence and extremism in order to make it happen.
But he did even more than that. This coming week we will have the chance to review the story once again of how, in response to Jesus’ demand for a better world, the world refused. The world resisted what Jesus was asking for because it was unwilling to change. And so the world responded to Jesus in the way that it always does to anything that threatens what it values. The world responded with violence because it believed the myth of redemptive violence that this would make everything better.
But Jesus, by becoming the ultimate victim of the world’s violence, by accepting the consequences of that violence without complaint and without condemnation, finally proved the myth of redemptive violence to be a lie by turning it on its head. On Good Friday, violence won and asserted its power over Christ fully and completely. And the God turned that defeat into a victory.
That is one of the things that we mean when we say that the death and resurrection of Jesus changed everything. It destroyed the power of a myth that has held sway over this world for many centuries and caused endless destruction. Jesus showed us a better way. Now if only we could learn to live out that truth in all our reality.
140CharacterSermon World teaches violence is the only way to fix what’s wrong in the world. Jesus’ death & resurrection teaches that’s a lie
f all the prophets in the Bible, Jonah, I think is the one who just gets me. I mean, here is a guy who is just going on about his own business one day when he receives a message from God. “Wow, Lord, me? You think that I’m important enough to give a message to me?” But then, as Jonah listens or attends or does whatever you do when you receive a message from God, he begins to realize that this is not really a message that he likes or wants to receive: “Jonah, go and preach my message to the people that you hate most in the world: the Ninevites.”
And then what does Jonah do? He behaves as if he was Donald Trump and the German Chancellor just asked him to shake hands. “What? Message? I didn’t receive any message. As a matter of fact,” Jonah goes on, “I think I just remembered that I gotta do something in completely the opposite direction of Nineveh. Yeah, that’s it, I have to get in this ship and travel to, uh, Tarshish instead. Yeah, Tarshish – it was planned months ago.”
What I’m saying is this: different people will react in different ways when they’re in an unwelcome situation like being asked to do something that they really don’t want to. Some will get aggressive and attack. Some will do it but complain the whole time. Some will talk themselves into thinking that it was all their own idea all along. But I love the way that Jonah deals with it. He just avoids the whole thing. He just gets out of town.
Why do I love that response? Because that’s exactly what I would do. Given a negative situation, something gone wrong, some unexpected conflict, my first instinct is always to avoid the situation in whatever way I can. You see, for the last eight weeks, I have been spending time here going through various personality types and trying to understand them according to Biblical characters who seem to represent them. I have found some common ground with some of these characters but there has not been one with whom I can completely identify – until now. But Jonah, I am just like Jonah in so many ways. And so he represents a personality type that I would very much like to explore.
You see, for whatever reason, when he was growing up Jonah felt kind of overlooked. I figure that he was probably a middle child and, for whatever reasons, the other kids, older than him and younger than him, just managed to capture the lion’s share of attention in the household. I don’t think it was that anyone purposely neglected him. It is just one of those things that sometimes happens.
So, when he was already feeling as if he was disappearing and no one was paying any attention, Jonah just developed the habit of actually disappearing in whatever ways he could when things didn’t go his way. And, what’s more, he convinced himself that that was that he really wanted anyways, that he didn’t care that much about anything and was only too happy to let everyone else have their way. This becomes a lifelong strategy for dealing with any unfavourable circumstances when you are somebody like a Jonah.
This why the sin of a Jonah – the one that besets people like him more than other types – is sloth. Sloth is, I would suggest to you, not quite the same thing as laziness, though it may look like it from the outside. Jonah avoids doing a job that God asks him to do, but he actually does so rather energetically. Laziness is about not being willing to expend any energy but Jonah actually expends lots of it. Sloth is more about actively avoiding something because there is something about it that you don’t like. It is a sin of active and sometimes energetic avoidance.
And that is why I can say that I identify so much with Jonah. I am not a lazy person. I know that I have the capacity to work very hard, especially when I am working on a project that I really care about. But I also know that, when I come up against a situation when I don’t feel comfortable, when there is conflict or when people are not being appreciated or treated right, my first instinct is not to fight or to submit, it is to avoid. Now, that doesn’t mean that I will always actually do that. I have had to learn that it is not always the best response. But there are reasons why that is my first inclination – reasons related to my personality type.
I am not alone in this. Jonah represents a personality type that is actually quite common in our world. There are some people who are so adverse to conflict that they will avoid it in whatever ways they can. But what is fascinating in the whole story of Jonah is how God deals with him in the whole arc of the story. I think it is representative of how God likes to work in the lives of people like him – maybe in people like me too.
The first and most obvious thing that I can observe in this story is that God has a way of thwarting all of Jonah’s attempts at avoidance. Jonah gets on a ship; God sends a storm. Jonah tells the other men in the boat that they might as well just throw him overboard because the storm is probably all his fault. (This is, by the way, a classic passive aggressive avoidance strategy that people like me employ all the time: “Oh, it’s all my fault, I can’t do anything right, just give me my punishment.”) So Jonah employs that strategy but God sends the big fish. When God has decided that we actually need to deal with something, he is not going to let our avoidance strategies get in the way and that is a good thing. God is doing it because he loves Jonah.
But God seems to be most intent to work on Jonah once he actually arrives in Nineveh. Now Jonah had a real reason why he didn’t want to go and it was, as far as he was concerned, a very good one. The Ninevites, you see, were pure evil. This is an established historical fact. Of all the horrible bloody empires that filled the history of the ancient Near East the Ninevites were the bloodiest and horriblest. They brought more death and destruction to their enemies than anyone else and Jonah had very good reason to hate them.
But here is something else you need to understand about Jonah’s personality type. They are people who, when they finally get into a situation where there is potential conflict – when they finally cannot avoid it any longer – have an incredible gift. They can understand the positions of people on both sides of an argument really well. They understand and appreciate where people are coming from.
I have experienced this myself often enough. I get in the middle of a discussion where people take opposing views and find that I, more than anyone else in the room, am prepared to understand everyone’s point of view at once and I am never inclined to move too quickly to judgement. This can be a problem sometimes, of course, when a choice must be quickly made but, when it comes to fostering peace and understanding between groups, this can be a remarkably valuable skill to have.
I think Jonah had it too because once he got to Nineveh and no matter how he had been taught all his life to hate Ninevites, he found that, in spite of himself, he could sympathize with them and their experience. That is the only way that I can explain what happened next. We are told that “Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk” into a city that took three days to walk across. “And he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’”
Now that, I’ve got to say, might be a powerful message, but it is not really a very encouraging one is it? How do you sell a message like that? Well Jonah obviously did sell it. After only one day of preaching that simple, discouraging message, people just started responding. “The people of Nineveh believed God,”it says. “They proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.” I think that the credit for such a strong response goes, not to the message itself, but to the man who was preaching it. Jonah, in spite of himself, connected with the Ninevites. Maybe he didn’t want to care about them, but he couldn’t help himself and he did. And the people of Nineveh picked up on that and, because of that, they responded positively and were willing to make some changes.
So God can use the gifts and talents of a Jonah in some surprising ways. If you can see some of yourself in Jonah or if you know someone who has those particular gifts, recognize that God has offered through you or through that person a real blessing to the world. There is so much misunderstanding in this world, so many opposing camps, that there is a desperate need for people who can bridge the divides and create some peace. God has given us people like Jonah because he wants them to use their special gifts to bring some measure of peace to the world.
But even after this, even after he is able to bridge an impossible gap between God and the Ninevites, Jonah still finds himself conflicted. He had persuaded them, in spite of himself, to repent. And Jonah knew God too well. As he himself in his bitterness declares to God, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” So Jonah gets angry at God and ultimately at his own success. We Jonah types can get like that so easily – internally conflicted and not even sure what we want from a difficult situation.
And so Jonah responds to that internal conflict in a way, once again, that is typical of his type. He withdraws and sulks. “Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.”
Jonah is trying to convince God (and ultimately himself) that he just doesn’t care anymore. He wants to withdraw and just watch without getting involved any more. This is the classic defence mechanism of a Jonah. But actually it is all an act. (I can speak of this from personal experience.) The reality is not the Jonah doesn’t care; it is that he actually cares too much. He is totally invested in everything that might happen and it is his fear that it won’t go well that makes him want to pretend that he is indifferent.
But God knows better. God knows how much Jonah actually cares and he goes about proving it to Jonah by making a small bush grow up and give the prophet some shade to relieve him from the sun. And then God takes the bush away which leaves Jonah in a position where had has to admit to himself and to God that he actually cares about whether a bush lives or dies and that, by extension, he cares about many other things including the lives of thousands of his enemies: the Ninevites.
God doesn’t put that sympathy into Jonah. It was always there. It has always been part of his personality type, and it was the thing that made him able to connect with Ninevites in the first place. But Jonah, like all people of his personality type was afraid of that sympathy and the feelings that went with it. That is why he shirked his job, that was why he ran away. A Jonah will only reach full maturity once he or she comes to terms with those deep inner feelings instead of hiding them behind cynicism, sloth and withdrawal.
But God didn’t give up on Jonah and he doesn’t give up on you either – not ever. Today we come to the end of the longest series of sermons I think I have ever preached. It needed to be this long as I dealt with all of the various personality types. The idea is that one of these types that I have covered should fit each one of you more than all the rest. The idea is that discovering who we are and how we operate can help us to reach our full potential.
But the only thing that makes that hope possible is our recognition that God understands us all better than we will ever understand ourselves, that God is committed to love us despite our flaws, to use our strengths and redeem us through the power of faith. This is the hope we live in, a hope made possible because of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is the good news that we proclaim and that is the foundation of all our hope.
140CharacterSermon Jonah was an avoider who ran away from unpleasant situations. God helped him discover the sympathy that made him special.
2 Samuel 11:27b-12:14, Psalm 101, 2 Timothy 2:20-26
S
ince back in February, I have been working my way through the famous list of the Seven Deadly Sins – a list that I have actually tweaked a bit by adding in two extras. So far we have talked about anger, pride, deceit, greed, envy, fear, and gluttony. There are two left – two of the classic deadly seven – lust and sloth and I haven’t really been looking forward to either one of them. I’ll tell you what my problem is with sloth next week, but today I’m going to focus on lust.
The problem I have with talking about lust is the tendency that has developed in western society to confuse sin with sexuality in general. It was something that mostly began with the Victorian Age as far as the English speaking world was concerned. Christians began to think and speak as if the only sin that mattered was any sin connected to sexuality. The connection became so strong that even to this very day when Christians hear the word sex, they automatically think of sin and when they hear sin they automatically think of sex. This is ultimately a very unhelpful association on the one hand because it definitely keeps us from dealing with the whole breadth of sin that can actually do a lot of damage in the various parts of our lives. On the other hand, it taints our view of sexuality in general in very unhelpful ways.
So before I can talk about lust I feel as if I have to affirm that there is, in fact, nothing inherently sinful about sex or about sexuality. It is, in fact, a very positive thing and a gift of God. It is a drive placed into us by the God who created us and who says to humanity in Genesis, “Be fruitful and multiply,” knowing full well that there ain’t but one way to do that. Sex is given for procreation but also for bringing people together in love and mutual support, of which we believe that marriage is the highest expression.
So, whatever it is, if it is sinful, lust is not an expression of the healthy sexuality that God has given us. I would, in fact, define lust in these terms: it is any violation of another person for pleasure or for passion. It is what happens when somebody is shamelessly used, taken possession of or suppressed. The helpful thing about that definition is that it makes it clear that lust is not exclusively a sexual thing. It is quite possible to violate or exploit somebody sexually, of course, and that is sadly how it is often expressed. But it is also possible to violate or exploit people in other ways. Avoiding lust is not a matter of avoiding sex as such, but it is always about respecting the honour and integrity of another person.
I think that it is important to understand this distinction because there is a certain type of person who is particularly susceptible to this sin. I think that the best way to describe such a person to you – with their strengths as well as their weaknesses – is to give you a Biblical example. There are many to chose from because many heroes of the Bible fit into this type, but the one who fits best is, perhaps, King David.
Think of what you have heard of the career of David. He started out as the youngest son of his family. A shepherd and a singer, he was never given anything. He had to have the courage to take it all for himself whether that meant challenging a giant like Goliath to one-on-one combat or fighting against the entire kingdom and army of his predecessor in the kingship: King Saul.
But David loved that kind of thing. He clearly thrived on the challenge of taking on the biggest enemies and overcoming them. He never gave up, never backed down, never surrendered. It was what gave meaning to his life and when he didn’t have that – when he didn’t have a big enemy to fight – he either created one or he got bored or depressed and that was when he made some of his biggest mistakes.
Fortunately, David’s tendency to oppose was not always in the service of his own interests. He actually had a feeling for the poor, the oppressed and the mistreated. And if anyone was able to make him see their needs or their plight he would always be quick to use his power and ability to set things right for them.
These personality traits made David the good king that he was. Sure he was a little rough around the edges and not everyone approved of his methods, but he got things done and they were usually the right things. But these personality traits are not exclusive to David alone. There have been many people down through the ages who have taken very similar traits and done great things in the world. Martin Luther King Jr. was one such person. His life was filled with a passion to oppose and destroy an evil system of racial inequality. He too thrived on the same kind of energy.
Other great examples of his type are Winston Churchill, Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein, Barbara Walters and Roseanne Barr. All of these people were at their best when they were challenging the established system, battling clear enemies and bringing about change. We may not appreciate what they accomplished in every case, of course, but, agree or not, we cannot deny that they had a big impact on the world and on human history.
So we definitely need people of David’s type. They are the people who often lead us into the breakthroughs that the world needs. But as helpful and necessary as they are, there is a dark side that tends to go with this personality type. They are led, in all things, by their passions and by a desire to make other people bend to their will or to their vision. That means that there is a constant temptation to violate the independence or the will of other people to bend them to their passions or desires. They tend to struggle with what I have defined as the sin of lust.
To be very clear, this does not mean that they are always tempted to use people sexually. For many this problem will manifest in how they use people in other ways. We see that in the case of David himself. He did have ways of using his power and influence to exploit people and their service. He used Mephibosheth, last surviving son of his old friend, Jonathan, to consolidate control over his kingdom. He used Joab, the commander of his army, to commit murder in order to cover up his adultery with Bathsheba. But, by far, the most famous example of the time that he used somebody is the time that came before that one: his adultery with Bathsheba.
The story goes that David was out on the roof of his palace (the highest building in the city and another expression of his power) and was spying on his subjects when he spotted a woman bathing. She wasn’t, by the way, doing anything wrong. I know that popular imagination says that she was bathing on the roof as ifshe was somehow trying to attract the king’s attention but it never says that in the Bible. If anyone was in the wrong place, it was the king, not her. The king sent for her, slept with her and then created a major crisis and made Joab commit murder, trying to cover the whole thing up.
It is a textbook illustration of lust, not because it was sexual but because it was all about David violating Bathsheba’s person. She had no power to refuse him when ordered to the palace and dared not refuse his invitation to bed either. This does indeed seem to be a sin that people of David’s personality type struggle with more than any others.
We see the same pattern in the life of Martin Luther King Jr. for example. He did great things and dreamt great things but somehow couldn’t escape the temptation to abuse both his wife’s trust and many other women with a long string of affairs. I hardly need to tell you that another one of my examples, Bill Clinton, has had a similar problem. I don’t know why there is a connection between this personality type and this sin but it seems to have something to do with the ability that such people have to engage people in the great schemes that they envision. The temptation to use that power to exploit other people for personal ends must seem irresistible at times.
So David fell into that trap pretty clearly in the case of Bathsheba and her husband Uriah. What’s more it is not too hard to see that it was pattern in his whole life. (Bathsheba wasn’t the first woman that he married after her husband died under questionable circumstances.) For that matter, both Bathsheba and that other woman, Abigail, were far from the first women that David married! I do not mean to excuse this kind of behaviour in anyway, of course, but I think it is fair to say that it comes from an attitude that seems to go with this particular personality type.
So there is a potential dark side to this personality, but there is a reason why David is a hero in the Bible. There is a reason why God seems so often to use people like him to do great things in the world. It is not because they are perfect and it is not because we are supposed to just overlook the things that they sometimes do in their lusts. But, while God can use them as they are (for nothing limits God’s ability), there are also things that God would like to do for them that they might be whole and complete.
In the case of David, I think we can see God working on him in our reading this morning through the agency of his friend and advisor, the Prophet Nathan. Nathan knows that David had done wrong – that he has sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah and that he has betrayed the trust of all the people in the quest to serve his own lusts and to cover up the consequences.
But Nathan is a wise man. He knows David and he knows how people like David operate. If Nathan were just to come in and confront David with what he has done, he would just respond with the classic defence mechanism of a David: denial. Imagine Bill Clinton when faced with a similar accusation. His denial, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” came to his lips so easily and so believably because he really believed that it was, in some sense, true. No one can do a denial like a David.
But Nathan’s confrontation did not go like that. Nathan came in and didn’t speak about what David had done wrong. He instead drew David into a scenario that appealed to the king’s deep commitment to justice. People of this personality type, perhaps because of their strong passions, have a strong sense of justice. When people are being mistreated, they see it and want to do something about it.
So Nathan, wisely, knowing that David has a blind spot when it comes to seeing his own lusts describes an injustice that somebody else committed that is (in a way) an analogy to what the king has done. Of course, David immediately gets angry and calls for justice to be done. That is when Nathan can reveal that he has actually been talking about the king all along.
Here, I think, Nathan has revealed to us how God likes to work in the life of someone like a David. Head on confrontation, forcing them to see their flaws, is rarely going to work. These are people who love confrontation and will only dig in when one arises. But that doesn’t mean that redemption of a David isn’t possible. God gave them their passions – including a passion for a better world. God wants to use them to create that better world and has done so often. But God also wants to use those passions, once he has broken down their defences and denials, to build a better them. God’s passion is always for us and that we might be the best people that God has created us to be.
So look beyond the associations that you might have with the idea of lust. Learn to appreciate the whole person who might struggle with this particular sin. We cannot excuse the sin and we cannot forget the damage that it can cause. God doesn’t. But part of helping people who struggle with such things is to recognize what about them actually makes them great and part of God’s plan to build a better world.
140CharacterSermon King David is an example of someone God can use to do great things. God also dealt with his dark side by challenging him.
Ecclesiastes 2:1-11, 22-26, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, Luke 18:18-30
“What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.” This is the rather bleak view of life that seems to lie behind much of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible.
Traditionally the book was said to have been written by none other the great King Solomon himself, but most scholars who have studied it have concluded that the book never actually claims to have been written by Solomon, though it might have been dedicated to him. Instead, the book seems to have been written by somebody named Qoheleth, but even that doesn’t come across in our English Bibles because the name, “Qoheleth,” usually gets translated, wrongly, as teacher or preacher, and so the name actually only appears in a footnote in your pew Bible.
On one level it doesn’t matter who wrote the book, of course, but on another it kind of does. I mean, it doesn’t matter what the person’s name was, but it matters what kind of person he was. (I am going to assume that Qoheleth was a man but his gender is not really what matters either.) It especially matters what kind of a person he was for a book like Ecclesiastes because this book seems to come out of the very personal struggles of the writer more than almost any other book in the Bible.
What, then, do we know about Qoheleth as a person? He leaves a number of clues in his work. The first thing we can say about him is that he is a man with some experience of pain. “For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest.”These are the words of someone who knows what he is talking about when he’s talking about pain.
I suspect that, at some point in his life – at some key point in his development – Qoheleth experienced some very real, frightening and overwhelming pain. I don’t know what kind of pain. It might have been physical, but my guess is that it was emotional trauma that he went through, which can often leave even longer lasting scars.
Now pain is, as Qoheleth says, a part of life. None of us goes through life without experiencing some trauma and all of it is painful and damaging. But there are some people for whom the trauma hits at a moment when they are simply not prepared to deal with it, maybe because of their age or their developmental stage. I believe that that is what happened to Qoheleth and that it left some deep and permanent scars.
You see, there is a certain personality type that tends to arise in that circumstance – the personality type represented by Qoheleth. Certainly Qoheleth behaves in the way that people of that personality type typically do. The common response of a person who has been overwhelmed in early life by pain is to hide from any further pain. It seems the obvious thing to do. You have been hurt once and deeply so you decide that you really want to avoid any future pain no matter what you have to do.
How did Qoheleth do that? How did he try to block out the pain? Well, he tells us, doesn’t he: “I said to myself, “Come now, I will make a test of pleasure; enjoy yourself. ...I searched with my mind how to cheer my body with wine... I made great works; I built houses and planted vineyards for myself; I made myself gardens and parks... I bought male and female slaves... I got singers, both men and women, and delights of the flesh, and many concubines.” From this description it seems clear that Qoheleth is seeking to distract himself from his pain with an excess of, well, everything.
To put this in traditional Christian language, Qoheleth is distracting himself with gluttony. You may have heard of gluttony, it is one of the church’s official seven deadly sins, but you may have thought of it as only having to do with people who overindulge on food. But the meaning of the word is much larger than that.
God has given us so many good gifts in this world – things like food, drink, sexuality, dance and so many more. There is nothing wrong (and everything right) with enjoying these gifts in appropriate ways and in reasonable measure; the glutton is the one who goes overboard in indulgence in anything or perhaps in everything – so much so that it becomes harmful to themselves or to others. But please do not fall into the traditional stereotype of gluttony to think that it is always about overeating. Do not assume, for example, that people who are overweight always have this personality type. Nevertheless, this type exists and you probably know people who fit into it.
The most common underlying cause of pathological gluttony is the avoidance of pain. That part of the struggle is what I hear Qoheleth talking about in our reading this morning from the Book of Ecclesiastes. And I don’t want to be too hard on people who are like Qoheleth. In general, they are terrific people to be around. They are always fun and usually very funny. Humour is, alongside overindulgence, one of the things they use to distract from pain. Indeed, I would suggest that some of the greatest comedians of all times fit into this type of personality: Curley Howard, John Candy, John Belushi, Chris Farley, John Pinette.
There are all kinds of wonderful things about this personality type, therefore, but there is also a dark side underneath the jovial surface. In fact, all of those comedians I just named to you were not only extremely funny but also died tragically in ways related to their tendency to overindulge. Therefore, if this personality type describes you or somebody that you love, there is likely some work that needs to be done – work that God needs to do in a person’s life – in order that there might be wholeness and healing.
In many ways, I think that Qoheleth’s book, the book that we call Ecclesiastes, recounts that man’s personal journey towards wholeness with God’s help. And I believe that he found wholeness at least in certain key places in his life. One indication of that is the passage that we read together responsively. It is the best known passage in the entire book and rightly so. It lays out a profound truth that is often very hard for people of Qoheleth’s personality type to hold on to: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”
You see, for people of this personality type, the strong tendency is to think that every time is a time to laugh, to dance, to gather, to love or to speak. There is, in other words, no time available to stop indulging in the gifts of life because, when you stop, you let the pain in and the last thing that a Qoheleth wants is to allow the pain to be felt. That is why this part of Qoheleth’s book is so important. In it we see the evidence that he did eventually find the balance that is a sign of wholeness for people of this personality type. The main task of such people is not to abandon the laughter, dancing and celebration that makes them such wonderful people to be around. The task is to make, alongside all of that, a time to deal with the pain of life in a healthful way.
People of this type do often try to improve and complete themselves through things like encouragement and positive thinking and reinforcement. This can be quite helpful for other types of personalities, but it has limited benefits for people like Qoheleth. They will not find the healing they need until they develop the capacity to grieve and mourn and to process the pain that they have suffered in their past and that may still be part of their present life as much as they try to ignore it. The simple fact that Qoheleth can allow himself the time to weep, to mourn, to die and to lose is an indication that he is on the road to becoming all that God created him to be.
There is one other task that a Qoheleth often has to work through, but it is not something that is easily seen in the Book of Ecclesiastes. There is one character in the New Testament, however, who seems to fit into this personality type. He is not named but is simply introduced as a rich young ruler who comes to Jesus to ask him how he can be a part of the kingdom of God. We are not told enough about him to observe his lifestyle but he is described as being extremely wealthy and so I don’t think that it is a stretch to imagine him living an extremely indulgent life.
Whatever exactly is going on in his life, Jesus seems to be able to evaluate the man instantly and to see what he needs most to reach his full potential as a human being. That is why Jesus says to him, “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” This is the most difficult but also the most redeeming thing that a Qoheleth can do. An abundance of wealth and possessions that provide the means to distract you with continual over-the-top consumption will only serve to keep you from dealing with the things that you need to deal with. Jesus is right that transformation will begin when you begin to get rid of all your stuff.
The young ruler who came to Jesus was unwilling to take that step. He left upset and angry. The price was just too high. But if only he had been willing to take that risk, I think that Jesus knew that amazing discipleship would have followed.
The greatest historical example of the potential of taking such a step is a man named Francisco who lived in Italy seven centuries ago. He was a very wealthy man who lived all his early life just like Qoheleth – a life of constant revelry, overconsumption and laughter. But one day he met a leper and heard the voice of Jesus challenging him to do the same thing that he had challenged the rich young ruler to do. Unlike the ruler, however, Francisco heeded that call and literally gave everything away. And with that act he started a movement that had a profound impact on the history of the world – an impact felt to this very day. Never underestimate what a redeemed Qoheleth can do – a redeemed Qoheleth like Francisco or, as we know him to day, Francis of Assisi.
The particular gift of a redeemed Qoheleth is joy. So long as they are tied to their diversions and hiding from their pain, the best that they can offer is humour and levity (which is fun, of course, but it has its limits). But when they have gotten in touch with their pain and let go of their dependence on consumption, a powerful joy can be released that transcends the power of even the darkest times of life to destroy us. This was the remarkable thing that everyone noticed about Francis of Assisi. Such powerful joy can set so many free.
I am so very thankful for all of the Qoheleths that I have known. They have made me laugh. They have taught me so much about enjoying life and all of God’s gifts. God loves them. And God doesn’t want to take away the things that make them who they are – especially not their enjoyment of life. God wants to make their joy complete, wants to help them to face their pain and free them from the power it has over them. If you are a Qoheleth, I pray that you would allow God to do that work in you. If you know a Qoheleth, you are blessed. Stand alongside him or her as they make that journey to discovering all that they were meant to be.
#140CharacterSermon Qoheleth is an example of someone who distracts from pain with gluttony & grew by learning to give space to process pain
ear: there is not a single person here who has not felt it, struggled with it and conquered it in some area of your life. Fear is a part of life. As a matter of fact, it is often a very helpful and even a necessary part of life. If it is fear of what might happen that keeps you from jumping into the tiger cage at the zoo or running out into traffic, then it is probably a good thing and even a kind of wisdom. But that is not the whole story that we need to tell about fear.
I would like to suggest to you today that fear can be a major sinful influence in a person’s life. I am not talking here about the normal everyday fear that we all experience and that is often useful and can make us wise. I am talking about what happens when fear becomes a central, destructive and driving force in somebody’s life. I’m talking about a fear that lies deep down at the root of a person’s life and manages to infect just about everything about how they see and interact with the world. When people are driven by fear, you have a problem and it is a sin problem.
The church has traditionally recognized seven root sins that can infect a person’s life. The seven deadly sins are anger, pride envy, gluttony, greed, lust and sloth. I don’t know if you have realized this but over the past few weeks we have been working our way through that list trying to give a new perspective on an old concept. But I have added two more to that classical list of sins. A few weeks ago we added deceit to that list and today I want to add fear.
I do not believe that this is true for everyone, but there are people for whom fear is a powerful and distorting energy in their life. They are so governed by fear that they will tend to act in certain unhealthy ways. They crave safety and security so strongly that they will cling to just about anything that will offer it to them.
These people, for example, are great supporters of authorities and institutions. They look to authorities – government, civic, church or otherwise – to offer them safety. They have much the same attitude towards laws, rules and regulations. They are great supporters, in fact, of anything that maintains order because that makes them feel safer. And this, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. Security is a good goal, but it is not the only one.
One problem that occurs particularly when large parts of a society become driven by fear is that people will just latch onto the most powerful authority figure that they can find hoping that it can save them. That is how tyrants gain power. It was the kind of thing that happened in Germany and Italy in the 1930’s as marginal people (like, for example, the Jews) were portrayed as people to be afraid of and the society’s response was to give unchecked power to people like Hitler and Mussolini. As you may have heard, it did not end well.
So this powerful motivating fear can have devastating effects on a society but it can also be pretty devastating on a personal level as well. People who are controlled by fear in this way often see the power of fear disrupting their course through life. They set out on a course of studies or a career path, but at some point they panic and are afraid that they won’t be successful and they drop out. Many will do this several times and continually regret what they see as their failures.
Their fear also often makes them look on others with suspicion. They hesitate to trust them and often talk themselves into believing that others are thinking and saying all kinds of bad things about them even when it is not true. This, as you can imagine, can cause many problems in their relationships.
You shouldn’t necessarily see these people as always completely paralyzed by their fears. That can happen, of course, but you can also see people who go to almost the opposite extreme. They become daredevils. They reject that deep internal fear by intentionally putting themselves in situations where they are in danger. This can become compulsive and, in the worst cases, extremely dangerous, though it can certainly feel pretty exciting until the paralyzing fear returns with a vengeance and at which point they will shut down. So the issue with these people is not that they are stopped by fear so much as they are controlled by fear.
You probably know people like this – people whose lives are controlled by their fears. They are actually a fairly common type in our society. And I don’t want you to think that I am here to badmouth such people. They are, in fact, wonderful people in so many ways. You know how I know? Because Jesus chose one of them for a key leadership role in the church.
Look at the trials and the ups and down of a disciple named Simon whom Jesus called Peter. He demonstrates all of characteristics of the kind of person I have been talking about. For example, think of the time when Jesus was asking his disciples what people were saying about him. The disciples, I think, were just joking around. “I heard someone say you were a prophet,” one of them said. “I heard you were Elijah” said another and then someone else said, “Get this: I heard someone say that you were John the Baptist come back to life.” I think that they all thought it was kind of hilarious.
But then, all of a sudden, Simon speaks up and he doesn’t think that it is a joke. He is all serious and he says, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Now wait a minute, Simon, what are you all uptight about? Well, I’ll tell you what. This was serious for Simon because he was someone who was motivated by fear and the need for security. This was serious because he needed Jesus to be the ultimate authority figure and he couldn’t think of a more authoritative title than messiah.
Now Simon was right, of course; Jesus was indeed God’s anointed one. Jesus praised Simon for knowing it and having the courage to say it. But just because Simon was right about who Jesus was doesn’t mean that he was approaching the question as he should. Clearly Simon was clinging to that title of messiah because it represented, for him, a figure of great power and authority.
But when Jesus went on from there to explain that, from his point of view, being messiah wasn’t really about having lots of power and authority but rather about being rejected and suffering and dying, Simon got really mad because, as far as he was concerned, what was the point of having a messiah if he wasn’t going to take over and get everything under control. This is a typical reaction of someone who craves security and is motivated by fear, they will latch onto any potential authority figure as long as they project strength and power but are the first to rebel when they show any weakness.
Simon Peter’s response to the fear that he feels inside is not usually to run and hide however. He is of the type that fights against the fear by living on the edge and becoming a bit of a daredevil. For example, when Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemane and the authorities came to arrest him, all of the disciples, I am sure, were terrified, but only Simon Peter (according to the Gospel of John) was motivated by his fear to do a very foolish thing by grabbing a sword and cutting someone’s ear off. He was also the only one who put himself in the very dangerous position of following Jesus and staying close by while he was on trial at the High Priest’s palace.
These are the kinds of overreactions to their fearfulness that people like Peter will often make. And it will often get them into trouble, as it did for Peter, as people began to ask him uncomfortable questions about who he was and why he was there until, in this mounting fear (and to his everlasting sorrow), he ended up denying Christ three times.
But perhaps the clearest example of his fear at work is in the account of Simon Peter and Jesus out on the Sea of Galilee. It is another situation where everyone is terrified. “When the disciples saw Jesus walking on the sea,”it says, “they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear.” They are all afraid but Peter is the one who has an over-the-top reaction to his fear. Peter says, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”
Peter may be attempting to defy his own fears but he soon finds that they are overwhelming. “When he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and [began] to sink.” No matter what he does, Peter cannot escape the power that controls him. He defiantly tries to master it by the sheer force of his will, but in the end it is about to undo him. This the pattern that people controlled by their fear go through again and again on their way through life.
So we have, in Simon Peter, a perfect example of a person for whom fear is a powerful root sin – something that infects his life with a controlling and deforming power. I have known a number of people who share that with Peter – a deep hunger for security and a controlling fear. They are people who often struggle because of their makeup, but I think that is wonderful how Jesus, throughout the gospel story, deals with Peter and helps him become the man that went on to do such great things in Jesus’ name. It is the work, I believe, that Jesus wants to do in the life of all people like Peter.
First of all, I would note that Jesus absolutely values Simon Peter for the man that he is. When Peter spoke up in front of the others and declared that Jesus was the messiah, I am sure that Jesus understood that he was speaking out of his insecurity and was looking for an authority figure of the type that Jesus was not interested in being. Nevertheless, Jesus does not only celebrate Simon’s correct answer, he also celebrates the man who gave the answer. “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!” he says. “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”
By giving Simon the nickname Peter (which means rock) Jesus is doing more than honouring Simon’s insightful answer. He is recognizing that the man will make an excellent leader – the kind of solid foundation that you can build a church on – because of who he is. In particular, Peter’s life has given him a deep respect for authorities and power structures that operate in the interest of the people. His own fear has given him this character trait but Jesus is announcing that God can use it to accomplish much good in the world.
So that is one way in which Jesus helps Peter. The second way is particularly on view in the story set during the crossing of the lake. When we last left Peter there, he was defying his own fear to step out of the fishing boat in order to pretend he wasn’t afraid to. Once he left that boat however, his fear began to overrule his recklessness and he panicked at the sight of the wind and the waves.
But Jesus responded to who Peter was in that moment by reaching out in care and compassion.Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” This is Jesus teaching Peter in that moment what he needed most of all, for Jesus knew that victory over the power of fear can only come through faith – by placing your trust wisely.
Jesus taught Peter well. He never forgot the fear that he felt inside, but he went on to live a life of extraordinary courage and faith. In the end, it is said, when a persecution broke out in Rome where he was staying, Peter could have run away but he didn’t, he turned back and chose to be crucified like his master (though, according to the legend that grew up, he chose to be crucified upside down in his own personal tribute to Christ.
Peter found his courage because people like him – people who mature in faith and understand their fears – have that ability. Their courage, when summoned, can be extraordinary – more than the rest of us can often muster. This is one of their gifts. So never underestimate what a person ruled by fear can become under the teaching of Christ.
God does wonderful things in the lives of those who will trust him. He did it for Peter, he can do it for anyone who struggles under the control of their fear. Thanks be to God for such transforming love!
#140CharacterSermon Simon Peter was largely motivated by fear and insecurity. Jesus helped him reach his potential by teaching him faith.
