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View Archived Sermons<\/font>\u00a0\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/a> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And God spoke to Abraham and said, \u201cGo from here.\u00a0 Leave your country, your father and your land and go to a land that I will show you (Genesis 12:1) \u2026.. And Abraham believed God and God credited it to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6 and Romans 4:3)\u2026.And Jesus said to Nicodemus, you are a teacher of Israel and you do not know these things?\u00a0\u00a0 Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony.\u00a0 If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? <\/p>\n \u00a0Jesus\u2019 use of the word \u201cyou\u201d in this passage is plural by the way. This is no longer, if it ever was just about Nicodemus.\u00a0 It is about \u2018you\u2019 plural – \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And here is where Salvation History makes a surprise appearance in the darkness. Salvation history, starting with Abraham is the story of God\u2019s desire to Save the World. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But God, that unpredictable Spirit from above has always loved us like a mother loves the child she is bringing to birth.\u00a0 This love is as persistent as the contractions of labour and the pains that go with that labour \u2013 painful for mother and for the child who must be squeezed through such a narrow canal.\u00a0 Once the process of labour has begun as it did at the calling of Abraham it will continue until this new birth takes place.\u00a0\u00a0 For God so loved the world \u2013 the whole world, Japan and its people and creatures and Libya and Mohammar Gadhafi and his supporters and the allied nations, God loves the whole world and every person and creature within it, that he gave his only Son \u2013 the non-violent, crucified and raised Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 View Archived Sermons\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 Lent II.\u00a0 During Lent this year, we have chosen to preach from this Lectern, instead of the pulpit and I must admit, it makes me feel a bit more exposed.\u00a0 And for a time, maybe that\u2019s a good thing.This sermon is going to feel a bit like that as well, as I choose to share that lately I\u2019ve felt a bit more in the dark than I have in a while.\u00a0 I share that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons-a-worship-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Lent II.\u00a0 During Lent this year, we have chosen to preach from this Lectern, instead of the pulpit and I must admit, it makes me feel a bit more exposed.\u00a0 And for a time, maybe that\u2019s a good thing.
This sermon is going to feel a bit like that as well, as I choose to share that lately I\u2019ve felt a bit more in the dark than I have in a while.\u00a0 I share that because I expect that the darkness I\u2019m about to describe is not so foreign to the rest of you from time to time.
Let me tell you what I mean.
There is a heaviness or darkness that threatens our world at the moment.
We have barely begun to grasp the magnitude of the disaster in Japan and we live with a sense of bated breath as we wonder how extensive the nuclear part of this disaster may turn out to be.
We have yet to know how the violent human struggle in Libya will continue to unfold. The United Nations\u2019 resolution to establish a \u201cno fly zone\u201d above Libya and\u00a0 the United Nations\u2019 authorization to \u201cuse all necessary measures\u201d to protect civilians against Gadhafi\u2019s forces will inevitably lead to continued violence, even if Gadhafi\u2019s progress to wipe out the rebels in Bengazi has been halted. My suspicions when I wrote this were borne out over night.\u00a0 Allied fighting in Libya has begun.
These are only the most gripping of the world\u2019s troubles at the moment.\u00a0 I don\u2019t need to name the rest, as we are only too aware of them.
This is the external darkness that has weighed on my mind and heart lately.\u00a0 The other type of darkness is internal.\u00a0 And what I think I\u2019m talking about is not depression and not quite a dark night of the soul (both of those would be much more prolonged and much more terrible to experience, I imagine) but rather a darkness that is a struggle between belief and doubt \u2013 where doubt has been threatening to tip the scale in its favour.\u00a0
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And so in this frame of mind I or we (if you ever share this experience) encounter the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus.\u00a0 This is \u201cthe\u201d Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, who came to Jesus at night.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know and can\u2019t know what was going on inside the mind of Nicodemus.\u00a0 In this story, he begins his conversation with a first-person plural and a statement.\u00a0 Either he represents more people than just himself with this use of \u201cwe\u201d (plausible) or he wants to keep a safe distance between his own deepest needs and what attracts him to Jesus (also possible).\u00a0 \u201cRabbi,\u201d he says, \u201cwe know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.\u201d\u00a0
Nicodemus finds
safety in numbers, the \u201cwe,\u201d
safety in stating a truism, \u201cwe know that you are a teacher come from God,\u201d
and safety in evidence, \u201cfor no one could do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.\u201d\u00a0
Let\u2019s add to this list \u201cthe safety of the night\u201d and this begins as a pretty safe encounter.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Nicodemus has been painted in so many ways, but let\u2019s give him the benefit of the doubt here and see him as a genuine lover of God, who knows the presence of God when he experiences it as he does when he meets Jesus.\u00a0 In this encounter, he genuinely, albeit cautiously wants to know more. And Jesus obliges Nicodemus by inviting him to a deeper level of belief<\/strong>.\u00a0 At the end of an image packed theological discussion \u2013 where Jesus has all kinds of fun playing with words that have dual meanings, like
born from above or being born anew,
Spirit and wind or wind and spirit
or the paradox of being lifted up \u2013 which could mean being exalted as in crowned King or humiliated as on the cross.
\u00a0At the end of this fascinating discussion, Jesus says to Nicodemus, \u201cso the son of Man must be lifted up that whoever believes<\/strong> in him may have eternal life.\u201d
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Belief.\u00a0 In all my years of studying the gospels, I had never noticed before how often the word \u201cbelieve\u201d is used in the gospel of John.\u00a0 Maybe some of you have, but I had not.\u00a0 At a time when the darkness of the events of the world and the recent darkness of a long, cold and not very sunny winter and an internal darkness has been nagging me \u2013 when I looked at this text and then looked at it within its context, the only word I could see was the word believe.\u00a0 I started at the beginning of John and read all the way to chapter 10 before I ran out of time and then I did a quick word check online in order to corroborate my dawning insight with the facts.
The gospel of Matthew uses the word \u2018believe\u2019 and its variants 7 times,
\u00a0The gospel of Mark uses the word \u2018believe\u2019 15 times,
The gospel of Luke uses the word \u2018believe\u2019 9 times,
And the gospel of John uses the word or variations of it \u2013 84 times in 20 chapters.\u00a0 It is only absent in chapters 15 and 18.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
So in light of the struggle or the questions in the darkness (whether it is a safe darkness or an oppressive darkness) what does \u201cbelieve\u201d have to do with it?
And for goodness sake why is belief so difficult sometimes?
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Belief in Jesus the Galilean as the Messiah, the anointed King or Saviour of the world, obviously wasn\u2019t easy for the initial recipients of this gospel or the admonition to believe simply wouldn\u2019t be so prevalent.\u00a0 John\u2019s gospel grows out of a minority community of persecuted followers of Jesus who claimed that Jesus the tortured and crucified rebel? had been raised, is alive, and is Son of God and Saviour.\u00a0 Well frankly, many Jews and Gentiles must have viewed this concept in its initial testimony as foolishness.\u00a0 The apostle Paul reminds us of the apparent foolishness of the gospel. Therefore the gospel of John is both Good news and a defense of the hope that is within them.\u00a0 The desire to defend such a foolish notion makes the emphasis on and the importance of a persistent call for belief clearer.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In our time, the trouble with belief may be similar.\u00a0 Christian faith continues to move to a less prominent position in our Western society, as I\u2019ve mentioned before, and though this is not a new place for Mennonite Christians, it becomes more and more important (if it ever stopped being important) to account for the hope that is within us.\u00a0 Be that as it may, I think our struggle with the concept of belief is also linked to something else.
Since the time of the Enlightenment until now we have been schooled in a process of knowing that requires reason, rational thought, logic and careful thinking (all different words for saying the same thing, I suppose).\u00a0 And in some ways, or I should say in many ways, this has been helpful and important.\u00a0 Here at TUMC we\u2019ve just concluded a recent Sunday school series on Science and its relationship to Christianity.\u00a0 Although I wasn\u2019t able to be present for all of these discussions, I have no doubt that Ernie very capably led us through them.\u00a0\u00a0 We had discussions on Darwin, Galileo and Climate Change.\u00a0 Science has been and continues to be an important way to know and understand the world.\u00a0 But scientists are among the first to say that they can\u2019t know everything. And the way Science is understood and carried out keeps evolving.\u00a0 But I think that where human beings got into trouble during and after The Enlightenment was shifting our faith in God a little too strongly in the direction of faith in Reason.\u00a0 The Enlightenment era continued to inf
\nluence the education I received as a child in school in the 1970\u2019s and 80\u2019s and 90\u2019s and \u2026.., In those years we were taught primarily \u2013 that all we can know is what can be presented to us with verifiable or quantifiable proof.\u00a0\u00a0 Hence belief in something one can\u2019t prove, like the ways of the wind and the Spirit, becomes foolishness? How do we account for these? In what other ways do we know?\u00a0 What is it that is born anew or born from above?<\/p>\n
\u00a0all of them,
all of \u2018you\u2019
all of us.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
And we know that the world needs saving \u2013its fairly quantifiable and verifiable.\u00a0 Human beings created in the divine image have been trying to save the world.\u00a0 We have been blessed with God-given gifts such as knowledge and power to manipulate our world in remarkable ways.\u00a0 And we use and have used these gifts to build pyramids, skyscrapers, airplanes, rockets, nuclear power and the Internet. We have instruments that help us to determine the thickness of polar ice and we have dreamed of and implemented organizations that build peace not war. Human beings are capable of phenomenal things.\u00a0 I can imagine that just as a parent is proud of a child who learns to walk and speak and ride a bike, so God is proud of our abilities, gifts and talents that have allowed us to dream and imagine and implement so many amazing things.\u00a0 But what we have not always applied to our abilities is wisdom, the kind of wisdom that can only come from God, and we live out our choices, our choices that are born out of tests and temptations in a world where the forces of darkness and evil seek to overwhelm.\u00a0 That\u2019s why so many of our choices (not all, but many) have led to death and destruction \u2013 hence the darkness that is always present.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Do we have permission to believe?\u00a0 Not in a doctrine, or a rational or a logical argument, but do we have permission to believe in a Son, in God\u2019s incarnate really birthed presence in the world? A human\/divine person who both knows the world and loves a world that is literally heaving and full of people and creatures that are hurting?\u00a0 God loves this world and became a human being in this world to save this world so that everyone who believes might not perish but have eternal life.
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You might ask as I do, if God and God\u2019s raised Son are doing the loving and the saving and the birthing \u2013 what do we get to do?
First we have permission to believe.\u00a0
Second we can practice believing.\u00a0
Third because it\u2019s not easy we can practice believing just a little bit more.
After that, as Maureen reminded us with the children\u2019s story today, we can act out our prayers with our hands.
And God longs to reckon it unto the world as Righteousness.\u00a0 Amen.
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