Life and dust and promise

Before I retired from full-time pastoral ministry, I had a particular dread every Ash Wednesday that lay people did not share. It arose from the fact that I imposed ashes upon everyone’s foreheads, but in years past I also placed ashes on the foreheads of my wife and children and said to them, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” I really would rather not have said that to my own blood.

Ash Wednesday is the one day of the Christian year that is supposed to fill us with dread. Dread that God is just, dread that God will judge, dread that we might be judged in justice rather than in love. If wearing ashes on our foreheads should do anything for us, it should confront us with the fact that for all of us, there is an end coming one day. Before the most holy God, all the things we value will be as ashes. 

The American dream is that we can have it all. Therefore, we often seem not to understand that Christian discipleship is a zero-sum game: if we are to grow in discipleship, we must shrink in something else. If we are to add holiness to our lives, we must give up ungodliness. In his book I Surrender, Patrick Morley writes that the church’s main misconception is “that we can add Christ to our lives, but not subtract sin.” We think we can change what we believe without changing what we do. We want revival without reformation, we want rebirth without repentance. 

To repent means more than to regret. Originally a nautical term, it meant to change course, to go in a new direction. Repentance means to change, to be different. That’s the real reason why people are supposed to “give up something” for Lent. How often do we give up something trivial, like desserts or going to movies? It’s no repentance to give up something that we can easily do without and then, once Lent is over, resume. It’s no repentance to pretend we are turning away from actions instead of sins. Repentance is to pull out our deepest sins by the roots, and that will hurt! 

Fasting for Lent means to repent, not merely to do without food for part or all of a day. Fasting means to be focused on repentance so intently that we give up the ungodliness that pervades our lives. It is to be a holy man or holy woman for forty days. We express that turn toward holiness by symbolically wearing ashes to signify our awareness of our mortality, and to turn to ashes the parts of our lives, the parts of our character, that separate us from fullness of grace. 

Yet there is a danger in Lent as well as opportunity. Repentance is necessary, but repentance does not save us. We are saved by what God has done in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Repentance springs from understanding that we have no hope apart from Christ. The danger in Lent is that we will emphasize repentance of our sins to the exclusion of their cure. Our works are part of our faith, but we are justified before God by our works in faith not because of what we do but because of what God has already done. From the ashes of repentance, in grace, God can build anew. 

Peter Perry, a pastor in Texas, told of the time his neighbor’s house burned to the ground. “The trees all around were scorched,” he wrote. “The grass was brown."

A few blackened timbers stood near the back of the house, and the remains of the cast iron plumbing system rose out of the ashes. The day after the fire, as I walked to school with a friend, we saw the woman who had lived there, standing in the midst of what had once been her home, weeping and wondering aloud what would become of her and her family. As she gazed at the ruins of her life, she despaired. But her husband was comforting her. “We can rebuild,” he said. And they did. One year later, a beautiful new home graced that lot. And the home they built was built around the old home’s massive, stone fireplace. But I wonder . . . Did the woman and her husband and their children sit around that fireplace on winter nights, look at the dancing flames on the logs they were burning, and remember the ashes?

We do remember the ashes of our past, do we not? Old hurts, ancient wrongs. Writer Hazel Farris told of her childhood’s fiery temper. 

One day, after an argument had sent one of my playmates home in tears, my father told me that for each thoughtless, mean thing I did he would drive a nail into our gatepost. Each time I did a kindness or a good deed, one nail would be withdrawn. Months passed. Each time I entered our gate, I was reminded of the reasons for those ever‑increasing nails, until finally, getting them out became a challenge. At last the long‑awaited day arrived – only one more nail! As my father withdrew it I danced around proudly exclaiming, ‘See, Daddy, the nails are all gone.’ Father gazed intently at the post as he thoughtfully replied, ‘Yes, the nails are gone—but the scars remain.’

Scars do remain, and we wear them. We’ve made them, too. Sometimes we count our scars and relive the hurt and anger and pain of each one. Sometimes we love to inflame the passions of righteous indignation. But God does not do that. God forgives our sins and God forgets those sins. God does not carry grudges. In our repentance and humility before God, we can see that God’s ways are not our ways. God forgives, God forgets. Our sins were nailed to a cross on Calvary. In Christ’s triumph over the powers of sin and death, our sins have become like ashes, blown away in the wind. 

So, the call to repent must not be ignored. We must respond to God’s initiative. “If there are a thousand steps between us and God,” said Max Lucado, “God will take all but one. God will leave the final one for us. The choice is ours.” 

We are dust and to dust we shall return. The urgency of Lent is that we turn to God now, for later may never come. Dr. George Sweeting told of a visit to Niagara Falls. 

It was spring, and ice was rushing down the river,” he wrote. “As I viewed the large blocks of ice flowing toward the falls, I could see dead fish embedded in the ice. Gulls by the score were riding the ice down the river, feeding on the fish. As they neared the falls, their wings would go out, and they would escape from the falls.

I watched one gull which seemed to delay and wondered when it would leave. It was engrossed in the carcass of a fish, and when it finally came to the brink of the falls, out went its powerful wings. The bird flapped and flapped and even lifted the ice out of the water, and I thought it would escape. But it had delayed too long so that its claws had frozen into the ice. The weight of the ice was too great, and the gull plunged into the abyss.

The moment to turn back to God is this moment.

When we receive the ashes on our foreheads, there first stroke usually is a vertical one with the ashes on our forehead. Think of it as an “I.” The “I” is the egoistic part of each one of us that is the sinful self, the rebellious self, the self that wants to walk alone instead of with God. But right after the “I” we receive a horizontal line, and the “I” will be crossed out. Crossed out. As Bass Mitchell explained,  “The ashes made in the form of a cross remind us of the cross of Christ by which our sins and the sins of the whole world are canceled out!” 

Ash Wednesday reminds us that we come from a world of death and sin, but that we do not have to stay there. “We are dust, and to dust we shall return. Let us repent and believe in the Gospel!”

Bridging the Gap Between Scientism and Classical Theism

I know you have been anxiously awaiting when you can read my M.Div. thesis. Well, good news! Academia.edu has used AI to turn it into a podcast! And their page also used AI to create 12 slides of its points. They are below.

My thesis, or as Vanderbilt called it, Senior Project, is entitled, "The Disjunction Between Scientific Materialism and Classical Theism: A Process Solution." Before getting to the podcast and slides, here is an intro to the subjects concerned.

What is classical theism?  In classical theism, God "is believed to have created the entire universe, to rule over it, and to intend to bring it to its fulfillment or realization, to "save it." Classical theism draws on "intuitions and assumptions of Greek philosophy as much as biblical images," says Tyron Inbody. 

Catholic Scholasticism developed Aristotelian formulations of God "as absolute, changeless, eternal being or actuality." This idea of impassive immutability remained in the Reformation, though the Reformers emphasized God's sovereignty as unchallenged, absolute power, wholly righteous and gracious. God was understood to have "absolute priority and decisiveness" in divine election. 

Always known as powerful in the Jewish and Christian traditions, God was now understood as absolutely omnipotent, able to do anything God chose. "The concept of God's omnipotence is located at the center of classical theism," wrote Inbody, and so is at the heart of theodicy problems. (Theodicy is the theology of the problem of human suffering and evil.)

What is Scientism? Scientism is faith in science. Scientism is faith in science. As the dominant world view of our day, it is considered self validating. Scientism makes two major claims, neither of which, however, are  provable using the scientific method:

    (1) only science reveals the Real and only science can discover truth; 

    (2) scientific knowledge of reality is exhaustive, not inherently limited, is holistic and sees reality as  reality really is.

The challenge of the new, scientific ways of understanding the world resulted in theological liberalism, which attempted to ensure Christian faith in a world dominated by the increasing power of science. However, "Attempts to render God and the modern world view compatible have been unsuccessful," observed David R. Griffin in God and Religion in the Postmodern World. This has led either to religious pantheism or insulation, which define the disjunction between scientific materialism and theism.

And so, here is the podcast. Slides are below: 

Why do we love our chains?

Imagine a fellow who has been in state prison for 25 years. Then he receives a pardon from the governor. The warden and a couple of guards come to his cell, open the door and tell him he's free to go. Good news! So the former prisoner runs out of the cell, but after only a few months he discovers that his newfound freedom is harder to handle than he imagined it would be. He has to make decisions he never had to make before. He has to work for a living, decide where to live, what to eat and what to wear. He has to pay taxes and maintain a car. He has to set his own agenda for each day. Life outside the joint is complex and confusing. Being free actually overwhelms him. Finally, he commits another crime so he will be returned to prison, where the routines are familiar, the stresses are known, and in his mind life is easier even though he has no freedom. 

Believe it or not, this kind of thing actually happens once in a while. 

Spiritual imprisonment is one way of understanding how the Apostle Paul came to understand the human condition apart from Christ. He used the metaphor of slavery to describe it. Slavery was found all over the ancient world and then as in modern times, slavery was a form of imprisonment. Paul taught that our prison doors are opened by Jesus, but we have to get up and walk out and make sure we don’t go back. 

Galatians 5:1, 13-14:

1 For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. 13 For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 14 For the whole law is brought to fulfillment in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

What Paul says is: we have already been pardoned by Christ, but we must not go back to spiritual prison once we have claimed the liberty Christ has already given us. Our freedom in Christ has a purpose and unless we live out that purpose, merely being pardoned does not make us free. 

We are pardoned first of all from imprisonment by every kind of spiritual bondage already in the world. Paul handily provides an incomplete list just a few verses later that he calls works – note the plural – works of the flesh: 

“… fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” 

The plural, works, is important to note because these are sins or sinful habits that we get to pick and choose. I’ll never fall into drunkenness because alcohol holds no attraction to me. But I have to plead guilty to at least some of the others, especially that category, “things like these.” 

Works of the flesh are chains that bind us in spiritual slavery, they are the bars that hold us in spiritual prison. The tragedy is that we forged the chains ourselves and we installed the bars by our own choices. That is the real issue: apart from spiritual liberation, we do not make the right choices because we cannot. 

“By contrast,” Paul continues, “the fruit” – note the singular – “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.”

We do not get to pick and choose which of these we want and which we do not. The Christian character is a whole package. Unlike the works of the flesh, the fruit of the Spirit is sharply defined. It is these nine things and that’s all. There’s no “things like these” because love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control encompass everything we need to be free in Christ. They are inter-related and inter-dependent. We grow in holiness in all of them or backslide in all of them. 

The paradox of Christian discipleship is that while spiritual freedom is gained for us by Christ, we can only realize it by serving Christ’s friends through love. Just following rules won’t do it. In fact, Paul said the whole Law is brought to fulfillment in the single commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Christian freedom is the will and ability to love others as Christ loves them: as perfectly as is humanly possible. 

But our freedom in Christ is not freedom to do just anything. Paul never would have agreed that, say, adultery is immoral for Jews but permitted for Christians since we are not bound by Jewish Law. Being released from legalism does not give us a license to do just anything we want. Obtaining a driver’s license might bring new freedom, but it certainly gives its bearer much more responsibility, not less. True freedom always brings responsibility. 

Such it is with Christian freedom. We haven’t been granted freedom by Christ in order to stay enmeshed in habits of sin. Our responsibilities are greater now than before! Indeed, in our baptism we have “crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” We are to live by the Spirit of God and be guided by the Spirit. 

Jesus requires his followers to leave their past shortcomings, failures and sins in the past. No wistful looking back! I don’t claim it is easy. But our freedom to give Christly love brings responsibility to live as perfectly as possible, trusting that Christ’s power is strongest in our weakest places. We strive to become more and more conformed to Christ’s character in love. Martin Luther wrote that Christ makes Christians lords and masters over sin and death, so from deep thankfulness to Christ we become servants to one another in love. We are not compelled to do right from duty but delighted to do right in joy. So, said Luther, we are first to love God wholly and then we can do what we want, trusting that by the Spirit’s guidance we won’t go too far astray. 

Here’s the rub, though: Freedom truly lived means making choices. But Americans today prize personal autonomy so much that, in the words of David Hart in Atheist Delusions, our culture has become "a fertile void in which all things are [claimed] possible, from which arises no impediment" to our desires – and therefore we "may decide for ourselves what is right or wrong.” 

Which is to say that modern Americans as a whole no longer believe that there are objective criteria by which to judge our choices because there can be no higher good than being able to make a choice in the first place. All judgment, whether divine or human, infringes on choosing – and being able to choose solely on one’s own has come to take "an almost mystical supremacy over all other concerns." 

This would be merely silly if it was not so literally lethal. True human freedom is emancipation "from whatever constrains us from living a life of rational virtue" and that leads to our intellectual and spiritual flourishing. Freedom is the ability to overcome "our willful surrender to momentary impulses, our own foolish or wicked choices. … We are free not merely because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well.”

To choose poorly is to enslave ourselves to the impermanent, the irrational and eventually the destructive. Simply choosing, unconnected from divine guidance and godly standards, is to choose ultimately to reject freedom, to stay enslaved to what Paul called the body of death and finally to choose to perish rather than attain everlasting life. 

And that is one thing from which Christ has freed us – the dictatorship of personal autonomy unshaped by godliness or divine virtue. In contrast, wrote John Wesley, we should live as people who are washed and sanctified, “as well as justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.’  

You are really changed [Wesley continued]; you are not only accounted as righteous but actually made righteous. The inward power of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made you really, actually free from the power of sin and death. This is liberty, true gospel liberty, experienced by every believer: Not freedom from the law of God, or the works of God, but from the law of sin and the works of the devil. See that you stand fast in this real, not imaginary liberty, wherewith Christ has made you free. And take heed not to be entangled again in the yoke of that vile bondage to sin, from which you are now clean escaped.

For freedom Christ has set us free: free to love, free to live in joy and peace and patience. Free to be generous in all we have, free to be gentle with even those who offend us, free to control ourselves to live in ways to please God. 

Free at last!

Free at last!

Thank God Almighty,

We’re free at last!

Pentecost advocacy

Pentecost was a Jewish celebration long before it was a Christian one. It was one of the designation of the Feast of Weeks, which came after Passover. In Jesus’ day, Pentecost was a time to renew the covenant God made with Noah. This festival day seems to be the reason the disciples gathered together in one place. They were good Jews and wanted to observe the holy day.

Jesus had ascended to heaven, leaving his disciples behind. He had told them that God would give them a great gift after he departed. Jesus had indicated it would be the Holy Spirit. Sometimes we hear that the Holy Spirit was not among human beings until the day of Pentecost, but that’s not the case. The spirit of God moved over the surface of the waters, says Genesis. Ezekiel and Isaiah both spoke of the Spirit, as did the Psalmist. Of course, Peter spoke of the Holy Spirit when he quoted the book of Joel in his sermon in our passage.

So the disciples were waiting for something to happen, but they didn’t know exactly what or when. The Scriptures don’t tell us what they were actually doing just before the Spirit hit them. Of course, what matters is not what they were doing before, but what they did after. 

Jesus had promised his disciples that he would send the Holy Spirit. One instance was in the passage from the Gospel of John: 

15:26 “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. 27 You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning. 

16:4b “I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. 5 But now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ 6 But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts.

7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. 8 And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment:

9 about sin, because they do not believe in me;

10 about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer;

11 about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.

 12 “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. 14 He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15 All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

Right off the bat Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit is the Advocate. An advocate is someone who takes the side of another. There are two senses of advocacy. One is friendship or alliance. 

I remember reading a short story written about a hundred years ago of two brothers, rivals as brothers often are, whose mother’s birthday was coming up. Each saved money to buy her a special present.

Their family was of the working poor. Mom was a maid, and her sons saw her every day leave home carrying her broom, her mop and bucket, and cleaning rags. They knew she worked very hard for them.

The older brother determined to save enough money to buy his mother a small comb with a silver handle – an astonishing luxury for a woman whose husband had not been able even to afford to buy her a diamond for her ring. The older brother hauled coal, swept stables and ran errands for people for a nickel each until he had enough to buy the comb. He bought it, hid it under his bed, and counted the days until his mother would receive it. He imagined the thrill he would get as he thought of how she would react to such a splendiferous present. Her could hardly sleep at night. 

Truth be told, though, one big reason he wanted to give her the silver comb was that he knew his younger brother could not possibly attain so grand a present. He relished a looming sense of superiority over little brother. 

The big day finally came. After supper, their father, a stock clerk in a store, brought out a modest cake with a single candle. They sang, “Happy Birthday” and mom cut a piece for each of them, making the boys’ pieces the largest. Father left and returned with a small, wrapped package, presented it to his wife and wished her happy birthday. She unwrapped the package to reveal a lace shawl. She held it up in awe. She had never had anything like it before. 

 Big brother turned to little brother. “You go first,” he said. Little brother disappeared out the back and returned carrying – a new mop and bucket. “Happy birthday, Mom!” he exclaimed happily. 

And mom . . . mom just sat back and her eyes filled with tears. But they were not tears of happiness, as older brother quickly noticed. Mom was silent for a moment and then sobbed, “A bucket! It’s my birthday. I scrub on my knees and wring out a mop all day long, and for my birthday I get a mop and bucket!”

Little brother began to cry, too. Then dad said, “Dear, I know what you must be thinking. But please take a look at this bucket. It has wheels, so you won’t have to carry a heavy bucket full of water from one room to another anymore.”

Mother looked up, suddenly interested. “Oh, my,” she said, “that’s good!”

Dad continued, “It has a lever-driven mop squeezer. You won’t have to take the mop to a house’s sink and wring it with your hands anymore. It will wring the mop for you when you press this lever. No more bending over.”

Mom clapped her hands and laughed aloud. “This is so wonderful! I’m sorry I didn’t understand at first!” She took her younger son into her arms and hugged him. “Thank you!” she said.

Father affixed a certain gaze on the older brother. Dad knew about the silver comb. “Son,” said the father, “what is your present for your mother?”

The older brother felt the comb in his pocket. What a treasure it was, and yet something stayed his hand. It was a grand present and fine, but what would Mother think of the bucket when she held the silver comb? Would she remember again how hard she worked for so little, and push her younger son and his bucket aside to embrace a gift to make her feel like a queen, if only a little? How diminished would his little brother feel, again? 

“Well,” demanded his father, “what are you giving your mother?”

The older brother said softly, “Half the bucket.”

An advocate is someone who supports you, who props you up, who endorses your honest efforts to do well. I would guess that the younger brother had a different relationship with his older brother from that day on. They were rivals no more, but companions and friends.

 One of the most influential religious philosophers of the twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead, wrote, “Religion is the transition from God the void to God the enemy, and from God the enemy to God the companion.” Some people don’t much think of God at all; to them God is a term without a real referent. God is a void. Others resist the work and will of God in their lives; they scoff at God, perhaps, but really see God as someone opposing them.  

But God is really our companion. In fact, I think one of the chief things Jesus did was prove that God is not our enemy and certainly not a void. God is our friend. Yet Jesus said, “. . . if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”

Unlike Jesus, who could only be in one place at a time, the Holy Spirit is everywhere at once. The Holy Spirit is the enduring companionship of God in our lives. Hence, Paul wrote,

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

This kind of relationship is intimate and personal. A little word study indicates how close the Spirit is. The Hebrew word for the Spirit of God is ruah, which means breath, or wind. In the beginning, says Genesis, when God created the heavens and the earth, the Spirit (or breath) of God moved across the waters of creation. The New Testament word for Spirit means wind or breath, also. In John 20, Jesus breathed upon his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” which they certainly did on Pentecost. Two unrelated languages used the same concept to name the Spirit of God. Coincidence? I think not. 

Breathing is one of the most intimate acts. When a baby is born, the sound of its cries and breathing is the first thing the moms and dads wait for. 9-1-1 operators hear frantic calls that “my child” or my wife or my husband isn’t breathing. Medical care is high-tech, with machines to monitor brain waves and heartbeats, but it is the cessation of breathing that marks the passing. 

So considering how the Scriptures describe the Holy Spirit, I would say that the Spirit is as close as our next breath, in a very literal sense. All this is to say the advocacy of the Holy Spirit is up close and personal and allied with us, not opposed to us. 

Yet this advocacy and companionship is for a purpose. If on the one hand the Spirit comforts us and intercedes for us, on the other the Spirit also kicks us in the tail to live out our calling as disciples. Consider the famous account of the Day of Pentecost in Acts. 

 The future apostles and other disciples were all together in one place when “there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind.” Wind, Spirit, I am sure you picked that up. But did you get it: violent wind! Something is up. There is turmoil coming! Then tongues as of fire rested on each of them, then they heard each other speaking is many different languages. 

It must have been quite a scene because passersby scoffed that they were all drunk with new wine. Peter, emboldened by the Holy Spirit, preached that the last days had come. And so they had. We live in them still. 

What the Spirit did that day was jerk Jesus’ disciples into the future, to bring it about by continuing the work of Christ in the present life of the world. When the Holy Spirit hit them, it hit them all together, at the same time, and it blew them right out of their meeting room into the hostile, mean streets of Jerusalem and the world.

They were transformed into group of folks given something ultimate to do, to tell the entire world about Life. And they were given the ability and power to do it, the power of the Holy Spirit.

Pentecost is thus called the birthday of the Church. The great days of the Church are not only in the past. What happened on Pentecost can happen again – here and now – when we are willing to be picked up, possessed of God and be used as God’s instruments, when we are willing to set aside the pleasures and profits of the secular world so we can be instruments of God’s love and witnesses to Christ’s salvation.

On Sundays when we are together in one place, God comes into our lives to renew our redemption and our redemptive purpose, to heal our wounds and sustain us in our community of faith. God sends us to carry each other’s burdens, to meet one another’s difficulties. God calls us to live above mundane things and rise above despair and anxiety. God calls us to God’s self, to seek God’s face in our hearts and the hearts of others. So we meet together. 

May the Holy Spirit rest on us and send us out of the church as witnesses into the streets where we live and work. 

The Right People for the Wrong Crowd

Luke 15 begins:

1 Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.  2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” 

When you read the gospels, you discover that wherever Jesus was, there were usually a lot of the riffraff of society right there with him. One of the remarkable things about Jesus is that he accepted and even sought the company of people considered socially undesirable. In fact, Jesus once even invited himself to dinner at a hated tax collector’s house. 

Then, as now, the influential and powerful people didn’t like the wrong crowd and they didn’t like the way Jesus hung out with the wrong crowd. They thought there was a character defect in a man who would welcome sinners and eat with them. 

Usually we set up the Pharisees as the bad guys of the gospels. After all, Jesus criticized them frequently. But I will tell you: the closer my children got to high school the more I became like the Pharisees. I examined their friends closely. I wanted to know who they spent their time with and what they did together. I remember my own parents wanting to know these things and warning me not to keep bad company.

None of us would ever say to our children, “Go downtown and hang out with the drug pushers and shoplifters.” And if our kids did so, we’d certainly think they had gone terribly wrong. We are socially a lot more like the Pharisees than Jesus. We try to keep the wrong crowd at arm’s length or out of sight. 

The Pharisees wanted to avoid the wrong crowd. That’s not inherently a bad thing. The Pharisees believed that the separation of good and bad was necessary for the well being of the community. We believe that, too. It's why we have jails, after all.

But the Pharisees went too far. In their eyes, the people Jesus welcomed were beyond the margins of proper society and were to be scorned and rejected. And Jesus even ate meals with them! The Pharisees objected strenuously. So, Jesus told them parables about three lost things: a sheep, a coin, and a father who had two sons. He started this way:

4 “Which one of you, if he has a hundred sheep and loses one of them, would not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go look for the one that is lost until he finds it? 5 Then when he has found it, he places it on his shoulders, rejoicing. 6 Returning home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, telling them, ‘Rejoice with me, because I have found my sheep that was lost.’ 7 I tell you, in the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need to repent.”

A shepherd has a hundred sheep counts only ninety-nine. So, he leaves the ninety-nine to find the lost sheep. He brings it home and calls his friends to rejoice with him. "Just so," Jesus concludes, "there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety nine righteous persons who need no repentance."

Then he told of a woman who lost a coin and tore her house upside down to find it. When she did, she threw a block party to celebrate. “Just so,” Jesus said, “I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” 

This is a play in three acts, and the third act Jesus told was a story of a young man who demanded of his father his share of his inheritance now. Dad gave it to him, and the young man moved far away. But he went broke and wound up slopping hogs for a living, which for a first-century Jew would be as far down the ladder as you could get. He remembered that even his father’s hired men lived better than that. So, he set off for home to ask for a job as a ranch hand. 

But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. 21 Then the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ 22 But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly, bring out the best robe and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 Get the fatted calf and kill it and let us eat and celebrate; 24 for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!’ And they began to celebrate. 

But the elder son refused to join the party. The father went to him, but the elder son said, 

"Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours came back, who has wasted your property on prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ 31 Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’” 

When we hear these stories, we imagine that we are the lost sheep or the wayward child. Sometimes we feel lost even now since we can still move away from God. We are comforted by the image of a God who keeps looking for us no matter how far we stray. All the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. When you are on the receiving end of the God who seeks you out, these parables are good news. 

But we should hear these parables with a cautious ear. Something strange is going on. “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until you find it?” 

Now, our usual reaction to Jesus’ question is a sort of warm, mushy feeling as we envision a kindly shepherd searching high and low and gently bearing the lost lamb back on his broad shoulders. But that’s simply ridiculous! Which of you, having a hundred one-dollar bills in a crowded park, and losing one of them, would leave the other ninety nine on the park bench and go after the one that is lost until you find it? No one!

No shepherd would leave the flock to be easy prey for wolves for the sake of one lost sheep. A shepherd’s livelihood can survive the loss of one sheep, but not the loss of the many which would be killed if he abandoned the flock. It seems silly for the woman to throw a big party for finding her coin. Surely the party cost far more than the value of the coin. 

These parables make no obvious sense. There is no moral lesson for the lost. The sheep and the coin are found not because of anything they do but because someone is determined to find them. A lost sheep doesn’t know it is lost. It’s quite likely to wander away again. The coin is just an inanimate object. The son returns home to a place of honor, which reveals deep rifts within the family. What’s going on here?

Maybe the central point about these stories is not the lost sheep or coin or the wayward son. Maybe the stories tell us practically nothing about the lost ones, but an awful lot about ourselves. Jesus speaks of repentance in the first two stories but not the third. The wayward son is never said to repent, though he does have a carefully rehearsed, syrupy, and probably insincere speech. He starts to give it to his father, but his father interrupts it and tells his servants to prepare a banquet. 

Why does Jesus talk about repentance in the first two parables but not the third? No repentance is even possible for a coin or a sheep. And yet Jesus said at the end of each that all heaven rejoices when a sinner repents. So: who’s the sinner and what’s the repentance? 

For Jews of Jesus’ day “repentance” meant, “a fundamental change.” Who else could that be true of other than the shepherd and the woman? Whatever they had planned for the day got discarded because they lost count of what was valuable to them. So, they made a fundamental change to make the count include everything. Maybe that is what heaven celebrates: those who make a fundamental change about what counts. 

The older son, angered by the mercy of his father and the inclusion of his admittedly dishonorable younger brother, scorns the celebration. After all, the younger brother’s return is not characterized as repentance at all; it might be nothing more than a quest for free meals. The older son followed all the rules, did everything right. He neither asked for nor received dad’s favor. Now he feels cheated. And the father botched being a father because he didn’t remember, apparently, how to count to two sons, not just one. He never tried to find his wayward son, he just waved goodbye and good luck. Unlike the stories of shepherd or the woman, there was no fundamental change by anyone in the third parable. There is no one to admire in this parable. 

Nothing comes together for that highly dysfunctional family even at the end. We do not learn whether the rifts between the father and his sons, or between the brothers, will heal. The only redeeming fact of this story is that the banquet is well justified, because there was one who “was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” 

[All] The parables end with a party. Jesus doesn’t invite us to be rescued by God, but to join God in recovering the things God treasures. The parables reject the idea that there are certain conditions the lost must meet before they are eligible to be found, or that there are certain qualities they must exhibit before we will seek them out [New Interpreter's Bible]. 

Here is a true story: One winter when I was about twelve years old, two orphaned brothers walked from their temporary foster home to my neighborhood to ride their homemade sled down the steep hill near my house. My neighborhood group was at the hill riding our store bought Flyers. The two orphans’ sled had wooden runners and it tore the snow up. Frankly, we didn’t want to play with them. They were a rough pair, kind of crude and brash and obviously poor. They were the “wrong crowd” for us middle-class kids. I dropped several hints for them to go tear up some other hill with their lousy sled. Lunch time came, so I went home. While my mother was fixing me a sandwich, there was a knock on the front window next to the door. There stood the younger orphan boy, peering inside my house. My mother opened the door. “Can I have a sandwich?” the boy asked.

My mother brought him inside and took his wet outer clothes and put them into the dryer. She sat him at our dining room table and gave him my sandwich. “I’ll make you another one,” she told me. She heated some chicken soup—which she had not offered me—and set it before him. I wasn’t very happy about all this. I didn’t want to come to the table where that beggar sat. I retreated to the kitchen. My mother followed. I told her, “You gave him my sandwich! You didn’t heat any soup for me, but you did for him!”

My mother said, “Don’t be a stick in the mud! Come have lunch.”

Jesus said, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you…. . For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.”

Jesus invites us to become shepherds who seek the lost because they are precious to God and are worth being found. Restoration and wholeness become possible when we treat others according to how they are valued by God, not according to what the world says they are worth. The canyons that separate us—good from bad, worthy from unworthy, lost from found—are bridged by a searching love which embraces us all and invites us all to celebrate. 

Jesus asked the Pharisees to join the search and host the party. He wanted them to think about who counts and who’s counting them. He urged them not to write the wrong crowd off, but to be the right people for the wrong crowd. He challenged them to care deeply about all the people they had given up on and to be willing to take risks to find them. We cannot classify people according to what we think they are worth. The value of a single sheep or a lost coin or a wayward child cannot be computed according to conventional market standards. 

We know who the wrong crowd is, but we also need to know, thanks be to God, that we are the right people for the wrong crowd. 

Jesus was raised from the dead. So what?

The apostle Paul had founded the church in Corinth, Greece, and discovered after he left that over time some problems had arisen in the church. One of these problems was a profound misunderstanding of the meaning of resurrection.

Paul explained to the Corinthians at the beginning of the letter that teaching Christ was raised from the dead would seem like foolishness to people who thought themselves well educated and full of wisdom, but that for those being saved it is the power of God.

But here’s the problem: the Corinthians did not understand resurrection conceptually. They seemed to think that the whole point of Christian faith was the resurrection of Jesus and only Jesus. They had made Jesus’ resurrection the stopping point of their faith. Paul knew that Jesus’ resurrection is beginning point, not the ending point, of Christian faith.

Jesus's tomb was empty. So what?

So Paul ends his letter to answer the “So what?” of Jesus’ resurrection, to correct the misunderstanding that Easter, by itself, is all that Christian faith is about. There were a lot of other issues Paul covered in the letter, this one was central. Here is what Paul wrote:

1 Cor. 15:12-20

12It is proclaimed that Christ has been raised from the dead, so how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ was not raised, either. 14And if Christ was not raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15Moreover, we are liars about God, for we have staked our reputations that God raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if all the dead are not raised. 16For if all the dead are not raised, then neither has Christ been raised. 17And if Christ has not been raised, your faith does you no good because you’re still in your sins. 18That means that those who died believing in Christ are gone forever. 19If Christ matters only for this life, we are more pitiful than anyone else. 20But Christ really has been raised from the dead; he was the first to be raised of all the dead.

Let’s remember that the concept of resurrection from death was alien to the pagan world, where stories of a mythical or divine figure dying and living again would not even appear for at least 150 years after Jesus lived. That the Corinthian Christians did not quite grasp the concept is understandable.

But what about us? For most of my life I was taught and believed that the Christian faith stands or falls based on the resurrection of Jesus. And in fact it does – as Paul emphasizes, if Christ has not been raised then we Christians are pathetic people because what we profess to believe would be false and we are still unredeemed of our sins and we just lie to each other at funerals because even “those who died believing in Christ are gone forever.”

Yet that is just the beginning point of what “resurrection” means. So, Paul teaches what the resurrection of Jesus means in the grander scheme of things. Jesus’s resurrection is the guarantee of a promise.

The resurrection that matters most of all, says Paul, is the general resurrection, yet to come, of all the dead. In this letter and in others, Paul is very clear that just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so will all of us. And that resurrection is really what is at the center of Christian faith.

The people in Corinth made a basic mistake: they did indeed profess that Christ was raised, but they dismissed the whole notion that all the dead would be raised. Paul explains that you can’t have one without the other. "How can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?" Paul asked. "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ was not raised, either."

Paul was trying to explain that resurrection of the dead is a general category into which the resurrection of Jesus was a specific example. The Corinthians accepted the specific example but rejected the category.

It would be like saying, "I know that every October 31 kids go trick or treating, but there is no such thing as Halloween."

Or, "I have a basset hound, but there is no such thing in general as dogs."

Or "I watch the Daytona 500, but there is no such thing as NASCAR racing."

You can’t have the one without the other.

That Christ was raised was a real event, Paul wants to make that clear. But if Jesus’ resurrection is ripped away from its context of the general resurrection of all the dead, then Paul knows we are professing Christ for "this life only," and that’s just pitiful. Divorced from the resurrection of all the dead, the meaning and power of Jesus’ resurrection is lost, Paul says. Simply affirming Jesus’ resurrection cannot bring us to God, anyway. As Paul’s co-apostle James wrote, even the demons know that Jesus was raised.

Paul concludes this passage this way:

1.    Jesus really has been raised from the dead. He does not linger on that point because the Corinthians already believed it. But he restates it to set the grounds for what that means, which is:

2.    Jesus was the first to be raised of all the dead.

In the resurrection of Christ, Paul says, the general resurrection of the dead has already begun. That’s why the Corinthians were so profoundly in error about what Christ’s resurrection meant and why they were at risk of still being lost in their sins.

The fundamental promise of God is that he will bring human beings into reconciliation with himself and preserve the redeemed to live with him forever. The dead will be raised to a new life as the way God accomplishes this when, as the Scriptures put it, "Christ puts all things under his feet."

The book of Hebrews says, "And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that comes judgment ..." (v. 9.7). Which is to say that each of us dies and that afterward we are the judged by a wholly righteous God for how we lived this physical life and what we did. The passages emphasizing this point are so numerous that I hardly feel compelled to point them out. Start with Matthew 25, for example.

But how do we know that any of this is true? The whole idea of even a single dead person living again is so preposterous on the face of it that it begs credulity to proclaim it. Can we grasp scaling that up to every person who has ever lived? Paul could, and later he explained that it is not the physical body of the dead that is raised, but the spiritual body. This body of flesh and blood is like a seed. And just as seeds planted in the ground disappear as the plant grows, so does this physical body disappear but the resurrected body appears later of a different kind.

This body perishes, says Paul, but the raised body cannot.

This body is ordinary and unimpressive, but the resurrected body is glorious.

This body is weak, but the resurrected body shows the power of God.

This body is physical, but the resurrected body is spiritual.

But again, how do we know that we will be raised from the dead? We know because God has already raised Jesus from the dead. Jesus’ resurrection is how God has proved he will keep his promise to raise everyone the dead at the end of the age. In fact, Paul sees Jesus’ resurrection as the actual inaugural event of the general resurrection.

Now, I must be careful here because the near-universal belief among us Methodists – and American Christians generally – is that when Christians die, their souls are liberated from the physical body and fly immediately to heaven. This is actual doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, with a pit stop in purgatory along the way to work off unremitted sins.

But that is only one understanding. In Jesus’ day most Jews believed that the dead awaited the resurrection in a state of neither heaven nor hell, but basically are just “warehoused” until the general resurrection. And this is the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church. I think there is good reason from Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels that he affirmed this idea.

Another understanding is found in Lutheran and some other protestant teaching called “soul sleep” that the souls or spirits of the dead await the resurrection of the dead in a sort of spiritual deep coma. It was only after Luther’s movement succeeded that the RCC made its teaching dogma, about 450 years ago.

And another understanding is that the Bible does not teach the idea of life after death in which a disembodied soul floats out of the body into heaven or survives at all. This says that we do not exist as souls contained in bodies, but we exist as bodies of unified flesh and soul. The death of the body is therefore the destruction of the person altogether. Paul explains elsewhere that death is the most powerful enemy of God, so powerful, in fact, that it is the last enemy of God to be destroyed. So, the Bible does not promise us "life after death," it instead promises that we will live again after we die. After all, if we simply go straight to Heaven when we die, what is the point of the resurrection of the dead?

There is a story of a man leaving a bar after having a rousing time there. He decided to take a shortcut home at midnight by walking through a cemetery. He didn’t see an opened grave and plunged into it. The impact stunned him just enough to enable his whiskey-laden mind and body to go straight asleep.

At daylight he awoke, seeing the blue sky above and the walls of earth all around him. With a sudden fright, he leaped to his feet, stuck his head up and saw hundreds of tombstones and graves all about him. “How about that?” he exclaimed. “Here it is Judgment Day and I’m the first one up!”

That’s what Paul means: Jesus was the first one up. That’s why Paul calls Jesus "the first fruits of those who have died." Your resurrection and mine into eternal life have already begun. Jesus has showed the way. As Hebrews 12 puts it, Jesus is the pioneer of our faith.

Jesus’ resurrection, simply as an historical event, would be a mere curiosity unless it signified something greater than one day in the life of some women who went to a graveyard. The power of Jesus’ resurrection is about what it means for us now.

·        It means that the promises of God are true, that what God says and what God delivers are the one and the same.

·        It means that when God says we will be called to account for how we live out lives, we better take that to heart.

·        It means that when Jesus said and the apostles proclaimed that in him is the remission of our sins, then it is so.

·        It means that we can trust someone who died for us and whose promises of a more abundant life now can be realized now.

·        It means we really can live in love with God and one another. We really can live in peace, filled with joy, in habits of kindness and gentleness and self-control.

The resurrection of Jesus proves that destruction of the physical body is no impediment to God’s saving power, and so our own resurrection is a sure promise of God, also. Hence, we can say with certainty, as Paul later wrote, "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Romans 14:8). 

The only thing of eternal significance

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.

3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do

not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant

5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;

6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.

7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.

9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;

10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.

12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

 

Ah, love! Moonlit nights and soft violins! Autumn walks in the park with your one and only. The first time he took your hand, or the first time she didn’t pull her hand away. Your first kiss! Love makes poets of lovers. Samuel Rogers wrote an ode to his sweetheart Jacqueline:

“She was good as she was fair, “None – none on earth above her!

“As pure in thought as angels are:

“To know her was to love her.”

Shakespeare observed that lovers can be oblivious to the obvious. In The Merchant of Venice he wrote,

“But love is blind, and lovers cannot see

“The pretty follies that themselves commit” (Act ii. Sc. 6.)

The praises of love are found in literature reaching back into far antiquity. Socrates philosophized about it, Virgil wrote about it, Jesus commanded it.

Watching soap operas or listening to pop music reveals that as a culture we are very confused about love. It’s easy to get the idea that modern Americans think that love is sex. We are very careful about to whom we say, “I love you.” Grownups can say it to their children innocently, and to parents, but cousins are probably off limits. Even in a church we make sure that when we tell each other of our love, it won’t be taken the wrong way.

Obviously, Paul isn’t talking about sex or romance in this passage. He’s not talking even about the profound thankfulness parents have when they consider their children, although that is probably pretty close.

We are called to love one another as Christ loved us. The love we are to have for one another and neighbor is a holy love that displays us in the image of God. God’s love for humanity is not based on the fact that we are lovable because, let’s face it, often we aren’t. God’s love springs from the nature of God’s own being; that’s just how God is. As disciples of Christ, we are commanded to love that way. We are to love one another and neighbor as an act of the will, not because the object of love can benefit us in some way.

There was a small boy who asked his mother, “How old is God?” His mother answered, “Well, no one can say, but he must be at least billions and billions of years old.”

“Wow,” the boy replied, “I wonder whether God ever gets tired of being God!” That stumped Mom until she remembered that the Bible says, “God is love.” So she answered, “No, God never gets tired because God is love and love never gets tired.”

Love, wrote Paul, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

Let me propose that godly love is the predisposition to desire the best for another, and to act accordingly. Thus, God’s will and God’s love can’t be pulled apart. The love of God for creation is found in God’s creative acts to lure each event toward its best possible outcome. I would say that God cannot will anything apart from his love, nor can he love anything apart from his will.

The supremely best thing for humanity is that we exist for all time in the presence of the one God who brought us into being. It is the best possible outcome for human life and has nothing to do with our own character; it has everything to do with God’s character. If that is God’s will – the Scriptures are explicit that it is – then it must be possible for God to bring it about. (If not, then God is merely a dreamer rather than true deity.) God so loved the world that he gave his only son that we might have eternal life. God’s desire for the best for us and God’s actions to bring it about are indistinguishable. God gave God’s own self to reconcile us with him. God’s love and God’s will are the one and the same.

A teacher examined the school enrollment forms of two brothers one day. The first brother had written his birth date as May 10, 1986. The second brother had written his birth date as May 22, 1986. “That’s impossible!” the teacher declared. “No, it’s not,” said one of the brothers, “because one of us is adopted.” “Which one?” asked the teacher. “We don’t know,” said the other brother. “Mom and Dad have never told us. They said it doesn’t matter.”

That’s how God’s love is. Paul wrote in Romans, “. . . we are God's children [and] heirs of God and co‑heirs with Christ,” (Rom 8:16‑17) and in Ephesians that we are “to be adopted as [God’s] children through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his delight and will” (Eph. 1:5). And it just doesn’t get any better than that for you and me!

We are not God and what comes naturally to God doesn’t come so easily for us. We continually ask, “What’s in it for us?” or “Does the other person deserve it?” We are finite and limited while God isn’t. And so we have to realize that the best we can do for another is also going to be finite and limited. We will rarely know what is truly best for another. We will often fail to act on what we do know. Sometimes the simple perversities of the human spirit will overcome even the strongest predisposition to give of ourselves. Even so, the fact that we cannot do everything must never hinder us from doing something. Love in the name of Christ is a verb, not a noun.

One month a woman in my congregation named Maxine had foot surgery and was fairly immobile for some time afterward. I took her communion one first Sunday. Maxine and her husband and I shared the Lord’s table together in her upstairs room. I visited for awhile and it was just a wonderful time. We joked and laughed and talked about the church and what her recovery would be like, and we prayed together before I left.

As I pulled out onto Murfreesboro Road to head for the nursing homes I had a sort of epiphany. It suddenly struck me what keeps me doing this pastor thing. I answered God’s call out of fear – I was afraid to say no to God. I began the ministry from duty – I had made a promise and had to keep it. But soon after I left Maxine that day, I had a revelation that I am staying in this vocation from neither fear nor duty. I suddenly understood what my job description is: It is to fall in love every day with Christ’s friends in Christ’s name. That’s it.

My only real job as pastor is to fall in love with God’s people every day. And that’s why I do what I do – because love never tires and every day someone needs whatever of Christ’s love I can share. Being in love in Christ’s name is the best thing about being his disciple; in fact, I guess it’s the only thing about it that matters.

Years ago, every Thanksgiving my family and I joined my brother, Will, and his wife at my parents’ home for dinner, altogether nine gathered around the table. My older brother and his family live in Delaware, too far to come for such a short time. Will and I had a running joke one of us always told Dad whenever we gathered with him and Mother for such celebrations, whether Thanksgiving or birthdays or something else. Sometime during Thanksgiving dinner either Will or I said to Dad, “Of course, you know that all your children who truly love you came home for Thanksgiving.” And Dad responded, “Oh, sure, I know that.” We all laughed because we know it isn’t true.

But at such times, if you looked closely, you could see fleeting sorrow flicker across Dad’s face, and a wisp of wistfulness in his eyes. For the breath of one sentence, Dad’s heart was in Delaware because while the table was crowded, it was not full. Not everyone was there who belongs there.

That moment lingered with me when I read something author Bob Benson wrote in Come Share the Being. He and his wife had three children, and he told of how they grew up and went away to college and then got married and made their own homes. They were proud of their children, he wrote, but after their youngest son moved away, “our minds were filled with memories from tricycles to commencements [and] deep down inside we just ached with loneliness and pain.

“And I was thinking about God,” Benson wrote. “He sure has plenty of children – plenty of artists, plenty of singers, and carpenters and candlestick makers, and preachers, plenty of everybody . . . except you, and all of them together can never take your place. And there will always be an empty spot in his heart and a vacant chair at his table when you’re not home.

“And if once in awhile it seems he’s crowding you a bit, try to forgive him. It may be one of those nights when he misses you so much, he can hardly stand it.”

At the end, says Revelation, there is a family reunion. All God’s children are there, seated at the banquet table.

“And yet,” writes David Lowes Watson, in this day “our joy remains guarded . . . for the homecoming celebration has not yet begun in earnest. There are still empty places at the table. There are sinners who still need to come to their senses. There are millions of God’s family still without enough to eat. There are countless of God’s little ones who are still being sinned against with all the demonic ingenuity” of the human race. “We must help invite them home. We must help Christ dry their tears and heal their wounds” – everyone. Should there be even one empty place at the table, even one person whom we have neglected to invite to the banquet as our brother or sister in Christ, “then God’s cry of anguish will rend the cosmos, and the heavenly feast will be eaten in terrible, terrible silence.”

I think the love we are called to have is a love that gives Christ away and invites people to God’s table, to prepare the reunion of God’s children, to leave no vacancies at the heavenly banquet.

Do we dare to say to each other, “I love you”?

I love you.