Prayer

As part of our New Year's resolutions, my wife and I committed to praying together daily.  We used to make this a normal part of our day but over the past couple of years we have gone through some tough times when it seemed God just wasn't hearing or, worse, just didn't seem to care.  Because of that we let this habit fall out of our lives and we prayed, if we prayed, separately.

Over the past few weeks the thing I have re-discovered is that our times of prayer together change my day.  I have been more encouraged because we have determined not just to petition God for our needs but to praise Him for who He is and to thank Him for all we can see at present He is doing in our lives and in the lives of those we love particularly.  When we do that together we end up praying in our petitions for different things, we have built a platform of trust in Him by praise and thanksgiving and our desires for which we make supplication have been altered and set on higher things.

The last couple of days we have been "too busy to pray together."  She has had things to do and I have been busy with other people and we haven't taken the time to pray.  I notice that I don't feel the same this morning and I know that is because I have been simply tossing up needs based prayers as I go through my day and not taking the time for praise and worship in my prayers.  I sense the distance I have put between me and Him by being too busy to spend that time.

How do we learn to pray with one another in the church?  We need to set aside times for prayer together.  Who's in?

A Tale of Two Trees

There were two trees in the Garden of Eden that are specifically mentioned in Genesis 2 - "The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."  When God gives Adam instructions concerning trees He singles out one tree, "“You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”  

This brings up a great many questions? Why does God only draw Adam's attention to the prohibited tree and not the tree of life?  Do we assume that Adam knew about the tree of life?  What, in fact, would Adam have thought that life and death meant?  What if they had eaten of the tree of life before eating of the tree of knowledge?  Why hadn't they eaten of the tree of life?  Why did God create the tree if it was prohibited?  Why create the possibility for sin at all?

Let's consider the last question first.

We were created in God's image and given a certain kind of life.  When He created the animals they had the breath of life in them (Gen. 1.30)  Genesis 2 tells us that when man was created God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, animating a lump of earth He had formed to become a living creature.  The Jewish sages speak of two different kinds of souls.  In animals there is only the nephesh, that animating life of inclination, will and desire.  Humans have an additional component to the soul, the neshama, and this is the intellect and our ability to relate to God, to have an awareness of Him.  We alone of all creation have this ability. 

Creation in the image of God implies that we are like God doesn't it?  What is the temptation posed by the serpent?  "God knows that when you eat of (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  The temptation is to be like God.  We are already "like God."  Is knowing the difference between good and evil what makes us not like God?  It would seem that life was what makes us different, we were dependent on Him for life and He was before we were, so isn't the real difference related to life?  

We are like God because He chose to carefully create us in His image in the way Isaiah talks about a potter or woodworker creating an idol in chapters 40 and 44 of his prophecy.   We are like God because He breathed life into us directly.  Our lives, unlike His, are contingent.  He is life, I AM.  Adam was told that his life was contingent, contingent on obedience to the command to not eat of that one tree.  To eat that tree was to die but death is clearly something more than physical since they did not die physically at the moment they ingested the fruit.  

To be like God includes the possibility of choices.  Of all the possible worlds God could have created, out of all the forms He could have chosen to create in His image, He chose this world and this form.  There were other choices He could have made that were not good weren't there?  Good is itself a comparative word and implies that there are some things that are not good.  God chose to create good things.  Adam had the possibility of choosing either good, obedience to God, believing God that if he ate something bad, death, would happen, and evil, disobedience to God.  God took the great gamble and gave us a choice because He created us in His image. Part of that is we were given great dignity, the dignity to choose.

When Moses gave his final speech to the people, the book we know as Deuteronomy, he ultimately poses the same possibility to the people.  "I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days.."  

Once the choice was made, the other choice, to eat of the tree of life, was forbidden.  It wasn't enough to prohibit it, we had already chosen disobedience.  Now it must be guarded against us.   Death involves the dying of the will, separation from God who no longer walked with Adam in the garden.  We could do no other than choose disobedience once we had first chosen.

We have a new tree of life, the cross, and in order to choose life, we must choose the via dolorosa, the way of suffering, the way of Jesus. The denial of self that Jesus calls us to is exactly what Adam and Eve chose not to do in the garden.  If it were not for the Holy Spirit, being born again, born from above, we cannot choose to deny ourselves.  Jesus, however, has made it possible for us to choose life and He is our life.  As Paul wrote, to live is Christ, to die is gain.  Now we can again be true image bearers, the possibilities are again limitless.

 

Call to Holy Lent 2014

When the Lord gave Moses the commands for the Passover feast and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, He included this commandment - "For seven days no leaven is to be found in your houses. If anyone eats what is leavened, that person will be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a sojourner or a native of the land." - Exodus 12.19

It is a serious penalty to be cut off from the congregation, especially when you consider that it is applies only to owning some yeast and only owning it on  a few days out the year.  That isn't the only prohibition on yeast though. The bread that was sacrificed on the altar in certain rituals also could contain no leaven.  What does God have against leaven and what in the world does it have to do with Lent?

There are many answers to the question of why leaven is prohibited, the Jewish sages and rabbis have proposed a great many reasons and I want to give you a couple of them and one suggestion of my own as we consider what Lent means and how we keep a holy Lent.

According to Scripture, the eating of unleavened bread commemorates the original Exodus from Egypt. Since there wasn't enough time for the dough to rise when the Jews fled, the LORD memorialized the event with the commandment to eat only unleavened bread for seven days: "Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, the bread of affliction, for you came out of the land of Egypt in haste -- that all the days of your life you may remember the day when you came out of the land of Egypt" (Deut. 16:3).

One of the greatest rabbinic teachers, Moses Maimonides, aka the Rambam (12^th century rabbi in Morocco and Egypt), suggested that yeast was forbidden as a burnt sacrifice because it was the sacrifice of the common man to the pagan gods of the era.  A true sacrifice in God’s estimation, was that which was rejected by the false gods. 

Other suggestions have included that leaven is considered a corrupting influence, a hidden uncleanness that manipulates purer elements. Like the influence of a lump of leaven in a batch of dough, "spiritual" leaven functions as an evil impulse within us that corrupts and "sours" our soul.  This "yeast in the soul" is essentially pride that manifests itself in idolatrous desires and lusts.

Some teachers have linked yeast with what the Jewish people call the yetzer hara or the evil inclination within us that tempts us to follow "too much the devices and desires of our own hearts" as the confession in our Daily Office of Morning Prayer says.  They see leaven as a symbol of death and decay.  The "rise of dough" is only possible by means of the natural processes of decay. In other words, were it not for the curse of death (i.e., the Fall of Adam and Eve), there could be no leavened bread. When the leaven is purged from Jewish homes, they are sanctifying themselves by removing corrupting influences from their lives.

As you can see, there are many and varied thoughts on why leaven is forbidden in the home during the Passover feast.  I would suggest one more idea and that has to do with the reality that yeasts are indigenous species.  There are different yeasts in different cultures as they are airborne.  Therefore, the yeast of Egypt would be different from the yeast of the Land of Israel.  If you want to make San Francisco sourdough bread you need to start with a leaven that comes from San Francisco.  All yeasts are not created equally.  We need to search out our lives for the influence of foreign leaven and ensure it does not affect us going forward.  The Israelites were forbidden leaven in that first Passover they kept in Egypt which also ensured that the leaven of Egypt didn't go with them into the Land.

Leaven is a little thing but a living thing, nothing more than tiny microbes which corrupt the dough and change the flour into something remarkably different and the particular leaven used changes the flavor and properties of the dough.  The fact that it is a living thing is important also because so long as it lives it continues to corrupt and decay.  The only solution to the "problem" of leaven is to get rid of it, to starve it of something to eat.

Paul wrote, " You know the saying, “A little leaven makes the whole batch of dough rise.” You must remove the old leaven of sin so that you will be entirely pure. Then you will be like a new batch of dough with no leaven, as indeed I know that you actually are. For our Passover Festival is ready, now that Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us celebrate our Passover, then, not with bread having the old leaven of sin and wickedness, but with the bread that has no leaven, the bread of purity and truth." [1 Cor. 5.6-9]

Lent is a time when we are called to more than giving up something in order to lose weight or purify our digestive system.  It is a time of searching for leaven in our lives, what is corrupting us and keeping us from following Jesus with our whole hearts.  Sometimes that leaven is the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees, self-righteousness or unbelief, and sometimes we have to recognize we have allowed foreign leaven into our lives, our beliefs, attitudes and dreams are those of Egypt and not of God.  The Sermon on the Mount that we have been preaching through on Sundays is a good reminder of where foreign leaven has come into our lives and we are called to rid that and hear afresh the Lord's teachings on who we are called to be.

Lent is our call to not only search out that old leaven but to rid our lives of it and all its influence.  Searching the home for leaven is a most diligent process and we are called to a forty day period of self-examination to prepare ourselves to rejoice at Easter that Christ is risen.  He is to be our new leaven through the power of the indwelling Spirit.  Lent is a time of preparation and expectation, just as Passover is for the Jews.  We always need grace but the ministry of John the Baptist was a work of preparing a people to meet their king as those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.  Lent is for those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.

With these thoughts I bid you consider how best to purge your lives of the old leaven to make room for the joy of Easter.  I bid you to search and destroy that old leaven but also to seek out the leaven of Christ and incorporate that leaven more fully into your lives.

Reflection on Advent and Mass Murder of children in Connecticut

We live in a world broken by sin.  We laugh together that I continually point to Genesis 3 for explanations but it does go back to that one little thing, that little sin of disobedience in the garden.  Over the years you have surely heard marijuana referred to as a "gateway drug", that it is non-addictive but the pleasure derived from it leads to seeking other pleasures in other places.  Whether that is true or not is debatable but it applies to sin and nowhere is it clearer than in Genesis.  After the sin of eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil we didn't get wisdom.  We may have known good and evil but we didn't get the wisdom and will to choose the good.

God asked two simple questions of Adam, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”  Adam's response was to shift blame first to the woman and then, quickly, to God Himself, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.”  Eve did somewhat better in her moment in the box, at least she didn't blame God: Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”  Why didn't God intervene to stop them? 

It seems such a small thing but it brought sin and disobedience and death into the world.  No longer would we know anything that was truly good until Jesus came into the world and we proved that after millennia of searching and even being given revelation of God by God we had no idea what good looks like and we destroyed it by mutilating Him and putting Him on a cross. 

Only one chapter later in Genesis we have the first murder, Cain killed Abel because he was jealous that God had regard for Abel's sacrifice but Cain's was not regarded.  Cain sought to do away with the competition by killing his brother but we know that God saw this heinous act and confronted Cain.  Why didn't God stop it?  Why allow Cain to live once He knew that this was conceived in his heart? 

Why didn't God intervene?  That is the question that is always asked in such situations, it is the question the world is asking today, the day after the murder of those innocent children in Connecticut.  They were simply at school, counting the days until Christmas, singing songs, playing and learning so that when they grew up they could take their place in society when a young man entered their school and ended all the hopes and dreams their parents had for them, killing 20 of those who are precious in His sight. 

We become like Adam, blaming God when in reality it is sin that is to blame, sin that entered the world through the serpent in the garden.  The Bible is brutally honest about who is to blame, we are, we allowed our desire to be like God to triumph over humility and dependence on Him.  The serpent merely offered us the way to independence and we took it.  We take it all the time, we can't blame Adam.

In this season of Advent we are reminded that the Lord desires a people who are different from the world, who are striving through their own effort and the power of the Holy Spirit working within them against desire and against the drive to be independent, who know they are radically dependent on Him if they are to be true image-bearers.  The world is living in darkness and under the power of satan who thought the kingdoms of the world were his to offer Jesus.  Sin reigns.  The first of God's creations was light, John tells us that Jesus is the true light and that His life is the light of men and that " The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." 

In this dark hour we are to be the light of Christ to the world.  We are to be those who bring hope and life in the midst of despair and death. 

Nearly fifty years ago an Episcopal organist named Kathleen Thomerson wrote a song called, I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light.  There has never been a more appropriate moment to truly sing this song and mean it with all our hearts, the world needs a people who are dedicated to becoming children of the light.

I want to walk as a child of the Light I want to follow Jesus.  God set the stars To give light to the world The Star of my life is Jesus.

In Him there is no darkness at all. The night and the day are both alike. The lamb is the Light of the city of God.  Shine in my heart Lord Jesus.

I want to see the Brightness of God. I want to look at Jesus.  Clear Son of righteousness shine on my path And show me the way to the Father.

I’m looking for the coming of Christ.  I want to be with Jesus.  When we have run, with patience, the race We shall know the joy of Jesus.

The purpose and intent of Marriage and Sex

Adam couldn't receive, much less fulfill, the command to be fruitful and multiply prior to the creation of Eve.  All the rest of creation could procreate but Adam could not do so on his own.  Creation requires a way to procreate in order for  a life form to persevere and so it is in Eve that God's creation is perfected and the future of the image bearers secure.  The relationship between humans, however, is not the same as the other animals, it is deeper in every way and intended to last.

For the two to become one flesh expresses the relationship of the Godhead, God in three persons who are One.  (See the Creed of Athanasius)  In theology we use the term perichoresis when we speak of the relationships of the Trinity.

Perichoresis is a Greek term used to describe the triune relationship between each person of the Godhead. It can be defined as co-indwelling, co-inhering, and mutual interpenetration. Alister McGrath writes that it "allows the individuality of the persons to be maintained, while insisting that each person shares in the life of the other two. An image often used to express this idea is that of a 'community of being,' in which each person, while maintaining its distinctive identity, penetrates the others and is penetrated by them." (Source - Theopedia)

The two image bearers are to have the same relationship as the persons of the Trinity.  In the high priestly prayer of John 17, Jesus prays for his followers that they would be one as He and the Father are one.  Marriage is the ultimate fulfillment of the unity of persons and sex becomes sacrament rather than simply the fulfillment of lust. 

Within marriage lust is not wrong, but if sex within marriage is nothing more than satisfaction of lust, it loses the deeper significance we should see in it.  We should take seriously the reality that in sex we become truly one flesh in a unique and God-ordered way, it is the highest expression of love and our appreciation for the created order that allows sex to be both for pleasure and reproduction.

Marriage is intended for many reasons, not the least of which is reproduction of new image bearers that God might never lack a representative on earth.  That shouldn't be reduced to a slogan that belittles other forms of relationships, it should, rather, emphasize the sacred in sexual reproduction.  Our union has a higher purpose than that of other animals and we have cheapened it through the sexualization of all things.  The first place to reclaim marriage as a Christian concept is at this point, reclaiming the primacy of marriage as the domain within which sex is to be confined, like the old illustration of the fire which is good in the home if confined to the fireplace but bad if it is found elsewhere.

Betrayal

When God showed up they had already hidden from one another and now they hid from the Lord. Their new knowledge had seemingly only brought the knowledge of "evil", that which was not good.  The Lord had already told them that what "is" was good so what benefit was there in the knowledge of that which was evil?  Evil was their disobedience and the opening of their eyes, not their nakedness.  As the southern comedian Lewis Grizzard once said, "Southerners can use the same word and create new meanings by pronunciation.  There is "naked" which means you ain't got no clothes on and then there is "nekkid" which means you ain't got no clothes on and you are up to something."  They were now nekkid so they knew shame and hid themselves from God, a futile activity.

When God questions Adam where he got the knowledge that he was naked, responds, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.”  He threw her under the bus, blamed her even though it was he who was given the commandment by God.  In fact, he also blames God who had given him the woman.  The woman gave him the fruit and God gave him the woman.  Sure, he ate the fruit, but surely it was okay since the woman gave it to him and God had given her to him, perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, but if not it really wasn't his fault.  After Adam blamed Eve for his sin it is amazing that they ever got together to be fruitful and multiply.  Now he needed forgiveness from her as well.

Eve's excuse was that the serpent tricked her but he hadn't deceived her at all had he?  We are told she saw it was good for food, a delight to the eyes and desirable to make one wise, all on her own, not because of the serpent.  At least she didn't blame Adam but that would be an outright lie, not a little fudging of truth because there is a difference between the two isn't there?  No.  

Now, sin has entered the world and has to be dealt with but they do not in fact surely die, but they will, and now an animal loses its life to cover their sin, a pattern for what will come in the covenant sacrificial system.  God gives grace to them both but now things will be more difficult for them, there is a price to pay for sin.

We don't hear the conversation between the humans so we don't know how they sorted out their issues, but the fulfillment of the command to be fruitful and multiply is now a part of the curse, the pain of childbirth is multiplied and also, their relationship is different, her desire will be for her husband but he will rule over her, their partnership is more alienated, the man will seek to have dominion over her as he does the rest of creation.  She will be less in his eyes than originally, no longer an equal.   

Eden and disaster

So it started out wonderfully, Adam was appropriately joyous and thankful for God's provision of a companion and helper.  He recognized immediately that this was God's gift to him and rejoiced over her.  Eve surely received this song of joy with gladness and she knew her mate's pleasure in her over all else in creation.

Then, we get to chapter 3, that fateful day in the garden where everything was ruined forever.  She spoke with the serpent, over whom humans were to have dominion, and she trusted it.  Apparently she was not surprised that the serpent could talk and believed it might have some wisdom, it might know something about the fruit and about God.  He was, after all, here before she was, so perhaps he knew things she didn't.  Adam had been told not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and if he did they would surely die.  The serpent seems to have other information.

We don't know if Eve had experience of God but the serpent questions whether God is truly good and whether He is truly great.  If He were truly good He wouldn't be so insecure about Himself, He wouldn't prohibit something that was so good as this knowledge, knowledge the serpent says will make them like God.  Is all that separates us from God this knowledge?  Surely there is more between us and the one who created all things that a bit of knowledge.  Second, the serpent questions God's greatness, "you will not surely die."  God either lacks the power to bring about their demise or He lacks the will to do so. 

Eve's temptations are creaturely temptations, the fruit was good for food, a delight to the eyes and desirable to make one wise.  She has been created in the image of God, unlike the serpent, she has the power to rise above creaturely temptations and say no but she chooses to live below her birthright.  Adam, seeing she didn't die from eating the fruit, takes and eats.  He, who was given the command directly by God, who has spent time with the Lord, has no excuse for his actions other than, she didn't die so what the heck, I will eat also, I don't want to be left out. 

The only evidence that they gained knowledge of good and evil is their reaction to God's presence.  They had decided that naked wasn't good now that they had eaten of the fruit, so they hid from themselves.  They knew evil because they had been disobedient so they hid from him.  Estrangement was the new rule of the day.