The Sixth Sign of Renewal

The Sixth Sign of Renewal

Nehemiah 8:1-10

By Everett Wilson, Pastor

Most of our attention is focused on local matters—our congregation, our neighborhood, our school, our family, our business. We think in the short-term, because local deadlines are more urgent and more dependent on us as individuals and families than big, long-range issues that we cannot do much about.

That's the way life is organized; these are the rows we are given to hoe, and they can get weedy very fast if we neglect them. On the other hand, things may improve just as quickly as they go bad; but that makes for another problem, as when your tomatoes ripen more quickly than you can pick or process them.

In small-scale operations we get used to quick outcomes, whether for good or for bad. A local church revival, for a more applicable example this morning, develops and dissipates more rapidly than a national one.

In Bible times, both disaster and recovery took longer than they do now, partly because communication, travel, and technology were much slower and more cumbersome, and partly because the Old Testament people thought of themselves as one people with a common destiny. They were first a tribe, then a nation; not first a congregation, then a denomination. The disasters were bigger and harder to undo. When things went bad, everything went bad, and on a large scale. When Nebuchadnezzar came to Jerusalem, he did not close a synagogue, or slaughter a village. He conquered the whole nation, destroyed its capital city of Jerusalem, and leveled the Temple of God. That was over a hundred years before the events recorded in the book of Nehemiah. It took that long after the disaster wrought by Nebuchadnezzar to bring the people to the moment when they gathered at the Water Gate to hear the reading of the Law. They had not come very far in a hundred years.

· the Temple had been rebuilt, but it was a homely and cheap imitation of the one it replaced.

· They had just finished rebuilding the city, but there was no King on the throne and no real army to defend the land.

They would not have even got this far without the cooperation and consent of the Persian emperors. After Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah, the second book of Kings says Jerusalem was like a cup that had been rinsed out and turned over to drain. Now, so much later, the cup is barely half full. In the meantime, Persia has conquered Babylon, so Jerusalem is now part of the Persian Empire. The world had changed big time in that century.

There were signs of renewal, however. While the glory of Solomon had not returned to Jerusalem, the city was at least functioning again as a Jewish community. Things weren't as great as they had been 400 years before, but neither were they nearly as bad as they had been a hundred years before. The people of Israel were still greatly humbled, but they were also newly hopeful. Here are signs of renewal in the book of Nehemiah.

1. The prayer of Nehemiah in chapter one: They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great power and your strong hand. O, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name.

2. The commitment of Nehemiah in chapter 2, when he asks the Persian king for permission—and provisions— to rebuild Jerusalem.

3. The rebuilding of the wall by the men of the city, "for the people had a mind to work."

4. The return of thousands of people to Judah, to take up their lives in their homeland once more.

5. The gifts of the people toward the common work.

Renewal is the work of God, but the signs of it show in the response of the people. These five signs have their parallels in modern church renewal too:

· Earnest prayer;

· bold decision;

· a building (or other) project requiring high energy and sacrifice;

· the gathering of the people;

· their generous giving to the common cause.

These are so exciting and encouraging that people may easily believe that renewal has occurred if these five signs are present. They may believe it if only one or two are present. But a sixth sign must be evident if the renewal is to last: commitment to the Word of God. So, after building the wall, after moving into their homes and settling down, and after establishing some sense of permanence in the land, They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel.

They did not want just to look new; they wanted to be new. They had the law of the Lord written on a scroll, but they needed it written on their hearts. They needed God to rule their nation and their lives. That is why they stood there for hours while the law was read: and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. What does "all" mean? Both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. Who besides men and women? Apparently, every child old enough to understand. This was a universal sign, with everybody participating. Ezra and his colleagues did more than read the law. They taught it. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

The reading of the law is the sixth sign of renewal; it does not replace the other signs. If they had not built the wall and done the other things named, the importance of the law of God would not have commanded their minds. On the other hand, without the law of God there would have been no renewal at all, just a few achievements left to stand on their own merits. They would not stand for very long, because without the word of God people revert to their old habits and opinions. Without the word of God truly taught, anything can happen, and often does.

Even worse, nothing may happen—that is, nothing of substance or of lasting value. Apart from the word of God, what is it? Nothing but human achievement, human wisdom, human religion.

We still have the Law of the Lord today, but we have more; we have the Gospel. We have what St. Paul called the whole counsel of God. On that day by the water gate in Jerusalem they read the law because the law is what they had. Today we have the word of God from first to last, from the creation of the world, through the cross of Christ, to the final judgment at the end of the world. The lasting renewal of the church takes place in the light of this word and according to its truth.

Unless the sixth sign of renewal is evident, the other five other signs may get lost in directionless prayer, undisciplined emotion, sheer busyness, and in large numbers of people who are excited but uninformed.

As with so many passages of the Bible, this one furnishes us with a checklist if we want to mark it off. When we are dissatisfied with ourselves, or at how things are working in our family, job, church, and so on, we can always do this reality check:

· Have I given this to God in prayer in such a way that I am open to his answer?

· Have I put myself out in any way, or risked anything? Am I willing to? How much?

· Have I committed my labor to the cause?

· Have I committed my physical presence to it?

· And finally, am I committed to the word of God, that I will hear it, and believe it, and obey it, in this particular situation?

When a church is recovering from a slow time and a passive mood, these are signs of renewal. They are signs of life in a church that has been renewed.

` This has been a message about the sixth sign—people hearing, knowing, and obeying the word of God. Renewal is the work of God. The signs of renewal are the evidence that the work of God is doing some good! AMEN.

The Sign of Creation

The Sign of Creation

John 2:1—11

By Everett Wilson, Pastor

This may be the only wedding story in the world that doesn't mention the bride. The gospel writer couldn't have gotten a job with local newspapers. When I was young, even the smallest of small town papers contained elaborate descriptions of the weddings, so detailed that you felt you had been there. The paper always gave more attention to the ceremony than to the reception, because the reception in those days was usually limited to punch, cake, printed napkins, and if you were really upscale little slabs of ice cream. If there were a wedding dance with free booze, there was probably more news, but not anything the reporter dared to write about.

Of course John wasn't looking for a job in the local newspaper, or even for the bride's scrapbook—in any case, he wrote his story at least thirty years too late for that. Besides, he didn't care about what the bride looked like like, but only about what Jesus did. He wrote it for people like you and me, who need desperately to see the glory of Jesus revealed today. This was the first of the signs by which Jesus revealed himself, and in one respect it was the biggest. It was the sign of creation. In order to turn water into wine, he had to give life to the water. Yes, wine is mainly water, as are all liquids; but you don't make wine by mixing water with something else, like KoolAid. Wine is fruit juice that becomes wine; it ferments without spoiling. That means it is a product of life, not directly of creation. No one could give life to the water but the Creator himself, the Lord of life. The first of the signs was not only first in time but first in precedence.

We return to the first words of Genesis: in the beginning God created. Without the creation, there would have been no beginning. There is continuing debate whether creation is ongoing. We do not need to enter that debate because the Bible does not address it. Whether it is ongoing or not, it still had to begin. In the account following, comparatively few acts of God throughout the biblical history may be called creative. They usually consist of God intervening and somehow manipulating what he has already created. Healings are like that. The parting of the Red Sea is like that. People earnestly attempt to explain these away as odd coincidences and so on.

But once in a great while God intervenes with an act of creation. This is one of them. When Jesus turned the water into wine, he was announcing his presence as the Creator of the universe.

We talk about the wedding only because it was the setting for this sign. In the events of a small-town wedding the Creator acts—and very few people knew what had happened. The mother of Jesus knew, the servants who drew the water knew, Jesus knew, his disciples knew; but the bridegroom didn't, nor the guests, nor the banquet master.

Because the banquet master had not been told where the new wine came from, he accused the bridegroom of withholding his best wine until the guests had already had enough of the cheap stuff. That was no way to honor your guests! You were supposed to give your guests the best you had; only when they weren't sober enough to tell the difference anyway, but still wanted to keep drinking, that you broke out the cheap stuff. If you did it the other way around, the cheap wine first, you were saying that your guest were not worth your good wine. So the words of the banquet master, "You have saved the best till now" is a polite way of calling the bridegroom a cheapskate.

But "the best till now" has another meaning to John and to us. John is a master at seeing a meaning deeper than the original speaker intended.

To us, "You have saved the best till now" is not a reference to the bridegroom's hospitality, but to the timing of God. It is God himself who has saved the best till now. The wine out of the water jars, the sign of the presence of the Creator in their midst, signals the very best thing that has ever happened to the world: God has sent his son to us. The first sign, water into wine, is the sign of creation. To repeat: Wine does not come directly from water; it comes through the life of the vine. Jesus turned the water in the jars into living water. This is not manipulation. This is creation.

Most of the people didnt know what had happened, but the people who needed to know at that time knew it. To the servants it was probably a puzzle, but not to the disciples or to the mother of Jesus. The mother of Jesus had every reason to believe it beforehand, because she ordered the servants to obey Jesus; and the disciples had to begin learning it if they were going to become the apostles of the Lord.

But even the people who didn't know were blessed. They drank the wine. And the bridegroom, with all that excellent wine left over, probably made a profit on his own wedding (in those days the bridegroom, not the bride's father, footed the bill).

But if that were as far as the blessing went, the wedding was nothing special. The guests had no special story to tell, except that their hangover was worse than they expected because they had drunk too much, or that they could kid the bridegroom that they had outsmarted him by drinking all his cheap wine and forcing him to break out his good stuff after all.

But what they thought and said is just guesswork. What is not guesswork is that you can be in the presence of great blessings, you can be participating in something that is literally out of this world, and not even know it. "How was the wedding at Cana?" a friend asks a guest. "Okay, I guess," is the answer.

Would we have responded differently had we been there? Maybe, maybe not. We do know this, however: the same One who changed water into wine has met with his church every week at least since Pentecost. Everytime we say , Let us pray, we are engaging his attention. Every time we sing his praise, we acknowledge his presence. Every time his message is truly preached, the word we speak is his. How was it, ask people who were absent. Sometimes we have a hint of what is going on, but sometimes we may say, "Okay, I guess."

The reason why is that creation is a moment in time. Even those who drank the wine and recognized how good it was were not transported directly and permanently into heaven. They had had a flagon or two of excellent wine, so good that you can imagine one guest saying to another, "I know you've had enough, but youve got to try this!"

The moment passes. They have to leave the party, just as we have to leave the church. Tomorrow is another day, without miracles of any kind.

So what good was the wine? It was a foretaste, a sample. If the memory of that wine stayed with them, they knew that there was something remarkable and wonderful in the world that was vastly different from and better than their everyday experience. They didnt know all about it, but they knew that they had tasted it, and that it was the best.

Believers have this foretaste of heaven. One of the most popular of all hymns reminds us of that:

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine;

0 what a foretaste of glory divine!

A believer is one who knows the touch of God—somehow, somewhere, maybe beyond reach and memory. For some of us it is fleeting, like the remembered taste of something delicious. Sometimes people waste their time and opportunities by staying at the miracle site and expecting the miracle to continue. Maybe the foretaste will become permanent if we change our style of worship, or if I pray harder, or work harder. If I prove that I deserve it, maybe I'll never have to leave the wedding feast!

Miracles do not continue. They're called miracles partly because they are interruptions, not precedents. But doesn't make them less real. The miracle happened, and the wine was real!

The Lord who is in the midst of his church is the Creator, though he is not always creating. When an act of creation occurs, it is always in God’s time, as God’s act, and for God’s reason—a total surprise and act of grace, like the wine at the wedding. When it comes it will be just as real, and just as fleeting, as it was that day. When and if it happens in our presence, we will see what is always true—that the church lives in the presence of Jesus, the Creator. Amen.

Living Faith

Living Faith

Acts 8:14-17

By Everett Wilson, Pastor

Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus). Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.

Peter and John went to Samaria to check on a report that Samaria had accepted the word of God. That would be mysterious to the Apostles because Jews like themselves, as a whole, did not like Samaritans much and would make cheap jokes at their expense—the ancient equivalent of the modern ethnic putdown.

The Samaritans gave them ammunition for this abuse, because the Samaritans refused among other things to accept the Temple in Jerusalem as the center of worship for the living God. Do you remember the Samaritan woman saying to Jesus, ²⁰Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem’? Jesus answered her exactly as she probably expected a Jewish male to answer. ‘Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²²You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.

“Salvation is from the Jews”? How close-minded can you get?

So Peter and John step into a rat’s nest of bigotry, on both sides, when they go to Samaria to find out what is going on. They find a bunch of Samaritans who think they are Christians but are not. They have come just half way. They have accepted the Word of God but they have not received the Spirit of God.

You have probably heard the saying, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” It means that no one will blame you for your ignorance, but there is an exception when the thing you don’t know is the very thing you are supposed to know. When you are driving a car and don’t know how to stop it but you think you do, "what you don't know” can hurt you plenty. Somebody improved the saying with this: It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s all the things you know that ain’t so.

The Samaritans thought they knew they were Christians, but they were not because they had not received the Holy Spirit. A Baptist preacher I knew forty years ago put it this way—they were professing but not possessing Christians. They accepted the Word of God without receiving the Spirit of God—something like acquiring a new car, but not the keys.

To make the situation more complicated for Peter and John, Jesus had included Samaria in his great commission, which were the last words he said to them before he ascended to heaven: But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’ Samaria was to be one of their stops on the way to the ends of the earth. I can imagine John saying to Peter, “I guess we had better check this out,” and Peter answering with a deep sigh, “I guess so.”

So they come to Samaria and sure enough, they discover that the Samaritans had got it wrong. They had missed the point again. Whatever accepting the word of God meant to them, it apparently didn't include an accurate understanding: for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.

We don’t know why they were going by an incomplete gospel, but we know that it was incomplete. We cannot understand or apply the Word of God without the Spirit of God.

Peter and John, however, did not allow whatever prejudices they may have had to alter their commitment to the Great Commission. They were to go to Samaria, so go they did. They did not criticize what they found there. They did not say, “What do you expect of Samaritans?” Instead of criticizing the people, they correct the problem. They pray for the Holy Spirit to come. They lay their hands on the Samaritans, the Spirit comes, and they receive him and awaken to a living faith.

Without the Word of God, we remain in the dark; without the Spirit of God, we are dead in sin.

Light and Life

Living faith requires both the Word of God and the Spirit of God. Often seekers appear to want one more than another. Some want the Word of God as a mental hammer with which to beat their enemies; others want the Spirit of God as a tool to manipulate emotions, both theirs and others.’ I suspect there are a few who want to misuse both the Word and the Spirit, both the light and the life.

A Spiritless word is not the Word of God. A wordless, uninformed spirit is not the Spirit of God. The biblical model of living faith may be simply stated: In a living faith we live by the Word of God as we are filled and directed by the Spirit of God. That is the biblical model of living faith. In it we discern and do the will of God. A Lutheran layman named Robert Longman, on his webpage Spirithome, offered a description of spiritual discernment that I found biblical, sensible, and therefore useful. Here it is. Spiritual discernment:

· is governed by love, for if it is not, it's worthless (1 Cor 13:1-3);

· centers us onto Jesus the Christ and Lord (1 Cor 12:3), and His good news;

· directs us to Scripture, not away from it (Isaiah 8:19, 20);

· builds up the church and its members (Ephesians 4:11-12), giving it power, wisdom, character, boldness, and unity.

· helps create in us a love of righteousness, a heightened sense of sin, and a turning away from known evil.

Good Enough

The other day in conversation I remarked to someone, maybe one of you, that we say something is “good enough” when we suspect that it isn’t. We know when something is good, so we don’t have to say that it is good enough. We don’t have to justify it. It justifies itself by being what it is.

The Samaritans who thought they were Christians because they had accepted the Word of God—though they had not received the Spirit of God—probably thought in terms of good enough.

I was just fourteen years old, and under the conviction of the Holy Spirit, when I tried to make a deal with God. I would do my best, and that would have to be good enough for God. I didn’t grasp the fact that God did not want to improve me. He wanted to change me. I was not to resolve which changes I was willing to make, but to accept the changes that he wanted to make. . The only way for the prayer, Not my will but yours, can be answered is by God doing his will in us, and us consenting to it. Without that we are in a no-man’s land of trying to do for ourselves what is impossible for us to do for ourselves. The change is the work of God. You may call it new birth, you may call it the baptism of the Holy Spirit; but it is the work of God, not your own. That is what those Samaritans learned when they received the Holy Spirit and discovered a living faith. Amen.

New Column

I have begun a new column, every other Saturday, at www.partialobserver.com. It is entitled "Simple Things."

Christianity, Islam, Terrorism

[The following is a reflection I wrote many months ago, after a sermon with which someone took serious exception.]
What is so painful today, of course, is that some Muslims are making war against us and claiming divine justification. As Americans, we do not fight holy wars. We are a secular and free nation; to quote Bernard Shaw's professional soldier in Arms and the Man, "We fight when we have to and are very glad to get out of it when we don't have to." When one side believes it is on the side of God, obviously the other side is going to reject that out of hand. Who wants to fight against God? Naturally we think the other side is grievously mistaken. I say as much in the sermon. It is not hatred to believe that someone else is mistaken.

Remember that the United States is a free nation. Perhaps our freedom is sometimes taken as wishy-washiness in the Islamic world, that we are betraying our "Americanness" when some of us are as fixed and certain in our faith as the most serious Muslim. Faithful Muslims disagree with us; I suspect that these disagreements are daily asserted in Kuwait where, I understand, no Christian is free to refute them.

So I did in my pulpit what is commonly done by Imams in Mosques from the other side; I was clarifying to Christians that the gospel is not a hodge-podge of opinions from which you can choose your version. If it is true, that which contradicts it cannot be true. The point of my message was that serious Christians are as profoundly certain of their faith as Muslims are of theirs. That which is at the heart of the Christian Gospel, first and foremost the unambiguous declaration of the New Testament that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, is not an opinion that Christians may reject and remain Christians.