Storms of Doubt (Sermon: John 20:19-31)

Posted on April 25, 2022 by salooper57
Viewing Time:28 minutes (approx.)

A hopeful sermon to share with doubters, deconstructors, and those who care about them.

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20 Years Later: Peter and John Reminisce About Jesus’s Resurrection

Posted on April 24, 2022 by salooper57
Skit lasts approximately 24 minutes.

Enjoy this skit that takes us back to that first Easter Sunday!

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Four Ways that Reading the Bible Helps

Posted on April 23, 2022 by salooper57

I have a picture of baseball great Mickey Mantle. It had been my brother’s, but he died at age 14. After my parents passed away, the picture came into my possession. Mickey Mantle pictures are a dime a dozen, but this one was valued at hundreds of dollars many years ago. The reason? Mickey wrote a note on the picture, signed it, and had it sent to my brother.

The Bible is valuable for a similar reason. It came from God. St. Peter argued that Scripture “never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Likewise, St. Paul wrote that “All Scripture is God-breathed.”

Over the centuries, millions of people have found the Bible to be a remarkably helpful guide for living a good life. It opens up new paths, ones that society has forgotten or never known, that lead to a fulfilling life now and forever.

Some people think of Bible reading as a religious duty, as if heaven is a kind of grad school and Bible reading is a requirement for admission. But Bible reading is not a requirement for getting into heaven any more than map reading is a requirement for going places one has never been before. In fact, not reading the map will almost certainly lead you into places you’ve never been (and wish you hadn’t gone). But like map reading, Bible reading can save you a lot of trouble.

Just exactly how does reading the Bible help a person? If it is not an admission requirement, what is it – an emotional-pick-me-up? A rule-book? Is it a spiritual grace-infuser?

St. Paul mentions four ways the Scriptures provide help. First, he claims that the Bible is useful for teaching – but don’t think of that in terms of lectures and pop quizzes. Think rather of the kind of instruction an apprentice receives to become an electrician. He is going to be wiring 220 volts soon, and so he really wants to know how this works.

The Bible teaches us about important things: loving, forgiving, trusting God, praying, using financial resources, dealing with anxiety, and much more. Teaching is about learning to do such things in a way that works. Teaching gives us the right way.

The apostle also says that the Bible is useful for rebuking. The Bible lets us know when we are doing things the wrong way. But who wants to hear they’re doing something wrong? The electrician’s apprentice certainly does. Getting it wrong can get him flattened. Likewise, when the followers of Jesus, whose actions are going to make a difference for eternity, are getting it wrong, they want to know it.

We often don’t know when we are wrong. The Bible mercifully tells us. Like the electrician who shouts at his apprentice, “Don’t touch that!” the Bible says things like, “Don’t judge!” “Don’t worry!” “Stop trying to impress people by your religious practices!” It’s not saying those things to hurt us but to save us from harm.

The Bible is also useful, the Apostle Paul says, for correcting us. It not only warns us when we are doing something wrong; it tells us how to do it right. The Bible is the story of the God who makes right what has gone wrong, the God who straightens out what is crooked. The word Paul chose, often translated “correcting,” means “to make straight.”

None of the biblical writers wore rose-colored glasses. The Bible honestly portrays the failures of even God’s best people. But it also shows us how those people got their lives straightened out. It shows us how to correct what has gone wrong in our own lives.

After teaching, rebuking, and correcting, the Bible also offers training. Training involves the development of habits, such as prayer, assuming the best of others, and giving, that free us to focus on the important things. Gretchen Rubin calls habits “the invisible architecture of daily life” and adds, “Our habits are our destiny … changing our habits allows us to alter that destiny.”

The Bible helps people train in habits that can alter their destiny.

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The Birth of the Messiah (Biblical Theology Class #14)

Posted on April 17, 2022 by salooper57
Viewing Time: 47:20.

In this class, we look at the biblical birth narratives and at the major Old Testament prophecies that speak of the Messiah’s birth.

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“What Does This Mean?” The Gift of the Spirit (Wide Angle: Acts 2)

Posted on April 17, 2022 by salooper57

(Reading time: approximately 3 minutes.)

In Acts 2, St. Luke tells us that the sound of a mighty wind came from heaven and filled the house where Jesus followers were staying. What looked like “tongues of fire” separated and rested on each person. They began to speak in other tongues.

Luke relates these details so that we will understand that the life-giving, sin-consuming God has come among his people. Verse 4: “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”

It seems they were speaking foreign languages, without having learned them. They were speaking in the native tongues of the festivalgoers who had arrived for Passover from various countries around the Mediterranean. And what were they talking about? They were (verse 11): “declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” When the Holy Spirit enables a person to speak (or as the original language has it, “as the Spirit gave them to speak out”), that person speaks out about God, his wonders, and the wonders of his salvation.

People from far-flung lands heard these Spirit-filled men and women speaking out in their own languages. Here we need to think wide-angle: because of evil, God had once divided the people of the world and confused their languages (Genesis 11:1-9). But now God was undoing the evil, as he promised Adam and Eve, and as he promised Abraham. Pentecost is a sign that the blessing through Abraham to the nations of the earth has begun!

God’s intention – as we have seen repeatedly – has always been to bless all the peoples of the earth (Genesis 12:1-3), and the coming of the Spirit was necessary to that end. The coming of the Spirit had already empowered these first Christians to begin the task of witnessing to Christ even to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). It was happening just as Jesus said it would.

Whenever Jesus’ followers are filled with the Holy Spirit, people start asking questions. We see it here (verse 12): “Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?” We see the same kind of thing again in chapter 4. “They began to question Peter and John, ‘By what power or what name did you do this?’” (Acts 4:7 PAR). In his first letter Peter says, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15). Paul writes, “Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders. Make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone” (Col. 4:5-6). Again and again, when Christ’s followers are filled with Christ’s Spirit, people ask questions. If no one is asking, something may be amiss.

In Acts 2 the question is “What does this mean?”, and to that question Peter gave a two-part answer. The first part is wide-angle, ultimate answer stuff (verse 16): “This is what was spoken by the prophet Joel, ‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days. . .” Now skip down to verse 21, “And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’” (Acts 2:16-21; cf. Joel 2:28-32).

This was what God promised long ago. His salvation was breaking into human history. It was the sign that the last days have begun.

Along with the wide-angle cause, Peter also gave a more focused, immediate cause, starting in verse 22. All this is happening, he says, because God’s messiah Jesus has come. “You, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.” But God foreknew what would happen and made it part of his plan. He raised him to life, verse 32, and exalted him to his right hand, the place of authority over heaven and earth. And from heaven he has taken the next step in God’s rescue plan. He has, verse 32, poured out the Spirit.

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Celebrating Hope at Easter

Posted on April 16, 2022 by salooper57

(Reading time: approximately 4 minutes.)

The first time I heard the quote (attributed to Dr. Johnson), “Men live in hope, die in despair,” I was not in English class but in the Student Union. I was playing ping-pong with my college roommate and friend George Ashok Kumar “Taupu” Das. He taught me how to play and, looking back, I am amazed at his patience. In our first games, he beat me 21-3 or 21-4 and, even then, I only scored points when he was not paying attention.

After months of playing almost daily, I had become competitive. He was still beating me every game, but by this time the score was 21-10, then 21-14, then 21-18. Clearly, he was paying attention.

It was during one of these contests – sometimes tied, sometimes the lead changing by a point or two – that the finish line came in sight for me. I could taste victory. The game was nearly over – just a couple of more points – and I would finally win. But Taupu buckled down, shut me down, and handed me yet another defeat.

I must have said something about how I almost had him or how I would get him next time. And that’s when our other great friend, our resident genius John Erdel, who was sitting there, idly watching the game, gave me a deadpan look and said: “Men live in hope, die in despair.”

That is a dismal view of life and a demoralizing view of death. Anyone who truly believed this could not possibly live in hope – could only live in despair and die in despair. But the resurrection of Jesus means that people can live in hope and die in hope. The death and resurrection of Jesus is both the biggest thing that has ever happened in the world and the biggest thing that has ever happened to individuals, whether they know it or not. The resurrection is proof that hope will not abandon us in the end.

The Christian story is not, as it is sometimes mistakenly presented, that we will fly off to heaven after we die to live eternally as disembodied spirits. That is Plato, not Jesus. Our story is that God has come to earth in Jesus and is, even at this moment, working out his plan for us and for the world.

It is from that story, which is our story, that transforming hope comes—hope that can change the way we think, the way we feel, and the things we do. What happened to and through Jesus then can change us now, can change us for the better.

The Christian hope is far greater than the belief that people can somehow survive death. The resurrection gives us reason to believe that we will be – that nothing can stop us from being – fulfilled, completed, perfected. St. Paul put it this way: “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power…” He goes on: “…we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.”

The resurrection of Jesus is the promise that the long and tortuous project known as humanity will one day be finished and will be good. It will be very good. Life will finally make sense, God’s wisdom will be acknowledged, and humanity will be a source of joy to its creator and to itself. This – nothing less, and certainly far more – is what awaits the people of God.

But the resurrection offers more than the hope that humanity will achieve fulfillment, as wonderful as that is. It promises that all things in heaven and on earth will be made right, made good, made glorious. The resurrection means that God’s plan is unstoppable, that heaven will right every earthly wrong.

There is simply no hope so extravagant, so bold, as this. No utopian dream, Shangri-La or Xanadu, can compare to the richness of the Christian hope, which is founded on the resurrection of Christ. This is what Christians celebrate at Easter.

(First published by Gannett.)

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Behold You King (Palm Sunday 2022)

Posted on April 11, 2022 by salooper57
Viewing Time: Approximately 25 minutes

Today, we remember and celebrate what has come to be known as “The Triumphal Entry,” Jesus’s highly symbolic entrance into Jerusalem just days before he was betrayed and executed. We know the broad outlines of the story. Jesus rode into Jerusalem amid the cheers of a welcoming crowd. Five days later, hostile crowds shouted for his execution. Those fickle people turned against Jesus and had him crucified.

That is not the entire story. In fact, it is not even the same story (though it bears a resemblance to it). For us to understand what is going on as Jesus rides into Jerusalem, it is helpful to realize who the different groups are that were involved and how they looked at what was happening…

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Daniel 7 (Biblical Theology Class #13)

Posted on April 10, 2022 by salooper57
Daniel 7

Some people stop reading the Book of Daniel after the first 6 chapters. They love the stories, but the weird prophecies that start in chapter 7 seem impenetrable. Other people race over the first 6 chapters in order to delve into the prophecies – the beast with 10 horns, the little horn that displaces the others, and so on. But Daniel tells one story throughout: God is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords over the entire world; nothing can stop his kingdom from being set up. 

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Death: Its Denial and Defeat

Posted on April 9, 2022 by salooper57

In 2013, Google launched “Calico,” a company headed by Arthur Levinson, whose goal is “to solve death.” The biotech company hopes to use technology to combat aging and, in Time Magazine’s words, “defeat death itself.”

Google is not the only tech company trying to defeat death. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, has invested in Alto Labs, which believes technology can unravel the mystery of cellular rejuvenation and thus make death irrelevant.

Elon Musk is working on robotic body parts that run on artificial intelligence. He expects that humans may one day be capable of reproducing themselves indefinitely.

In 2016, Stanford Med student Jesse Karmazin founded Ambrosia, a company that sold blood plasma from young donors for $8,000 per liter to wealthy people with the idea it would restore health. “I’m not … saying this will provide immortality,” Karmazin admitted, “but I think it comes pretty close.”

Barbara Ehrenreich sees this attempt on the part of Silicon Valley to deny death as wrongheaded. She writes: “If you are one of the richest and smartest people in the world, death is an insult. Why would you let that happen to you? You’re too special to die.” Such people, Ehrenreich believes, are living in denial.

One would think that Christians, with their belief in resurrection, would have no need to deny death, but the philosopher Simon Critchley says it is not so. Noting that 85 percent of Americans say they believe in heaven, Critchley has written: “…the deeper truth is that such religious belief, complete with a heavenly afterlife, brings believers little solace in the face of death.”

According to Critchley, “the only priesthood in which people really believe is the medical profession and the purpose of their sacramental drugs and technology is to support longevity, the sole unquestioned good of contemporary Western life.” Critchley believes that many Christians are “leading desperate atheist lives bounded by a desire for longevity and a terror of annihilation.”

One Sunday, a few years into my first pastorate, I spoke from the pulpit on preparing for death. After the meeting, an elderly member asked me why someone my age – I was 30 at the time – was thinking about getting ready for death. I told her that I believed it took a lifetime to die well. I still do.

The 19th century literary figure W. R. Matthews wrote, “One day we shall break camp for the last time in this world and face the final adventure of death. May we then have so passed the days of our pilgrimage, with the Lord of adventurers by our side, that we may reach, in the end, our eternal home.”

I’m not quite sure what Matthews meant, though I love his line, “the Lord of adventurers.” I do, however, agree that the way we pass our days now can prepare us for the day we pass the threshold of death. Now is the time we learn to face death and think honestly about it.

No one is a better model for us on how to think about death than Jesus. He clearly thought about it – the New Testament records him using words related to death and dying 86 times – but he was never morbid about it. He viewed death differently than most people.

For one thing, he did not see death as terminal. He said of his good friend’s illness: “This illness will not end in death.” Jesus did not see any illness ending in death because he did not see death as an end.

He thought and spoke of death as an opportunity to glorify God. Death, from Jesus’s perspective, glorifies God because God raises the dead. Further, he knew that people can glorify God by the way they live as they face death. Confidence in God and love for people always honors God, but especially in the face of death.

Nevertheless, Jesus, like a Silicon Valley CEO, viewed death as an enemy. Death made him angry, as the Gospel of John points out. Jesus’s goal, unlike that of the Silicon Valley CEOs, was not to endlessly evade death but to abolish it. He willingly laid down his life so that he could defeat death from the inside. The resurrection is proof that he succeeded.

(First published by Gannett.)

For more information on how Jesus thought of death, click here.

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The Coming of the Spirit: An Essential Part of Salvation (Wide Angle)

Posted on April 7, 2022 by salooper57

(Reading time: 4-5 minutes)

Today we’ll use our wide-angle lens to focus on the strange events that took place on the Jewish Feast of Pentecost during the same year that Jesus was crucified and resurrected.  The word Pentecost is a Greek word that means fiftieth.  In the Bible it is used to refer to the Jewish Feast of Weeks, which was held exactly fifty days after the beginning of Passover.  It was a harvest festival, a time when tens of thousands of people came to the capitol city to celebrate, spend time with family, and express thanksgiving.

Among Christians, Pentecost is not a harvest festival of thanksgiving, but a celebration of one of the principal events in the history of salvation: the giving of the Holy Spirit.  God’s plan always – from the very beginning – included this.  If you stop with the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus you stop too soon.  The coming of the Holy Spirit is an integral part of salvation.

Now as we take this wide-angle view of things, it is important to remember that salvation refers to something bigger than the forgiveness of sins.  Salvation is not just about getting into heaven when we die; it’s not even primarily about that.  In fact, salvation is not merely “our salvation,” as if we were the main characters. It is “God’s salvation,” for he is the chief actor in all of this.  As the multitudes in heaven say, “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb” (Revelation7:10).

The death of Jesus is the high point in the revelation of God’s salvation, but it is not the end point. We must not separate Passover from Pentecost, the Son from the Spirit, or the death of the Savior from the birth of the church.  What God has joined together, let man not put asunder.

We are tipped off to the importance of Pentecost by Luke’s wording in verse 1.  The NIV translates, “When the day of Pentecost came . . .” but Luke is using a formula that he employs elsewhere to denote significance.  The Greek is something like, “The Day of Pentecost being fulfilled…” It is Luke’s way of telling us to pay special attention (Luke 9:51).

On that date “they were all together in one place.”  Jesus had told his followers to wait for the Father’s Promise, and we have already seen that while they waited, they prayed.  There were 120 of them mentioned in chapter 1, verse 15, and in this verse Luke tells us they were all together.

“They were all together” renders a Greek construction that might be translated “they were all the same.” The implication is that they were not simply together in one place, but that they were in the same place with the same heart.  And that is fitting, because the blessing of the Spirit of God is generally reserved for those who are in unity (cf. Romans 15:5-6; Ephesians 4:2-3; Galatians 5:25-26).

So here were the friends of Jesus, waiting obediently and expectantly for the promise of the Father.  They were expectant, but they didn’t know what to expect.  Jesus told them that they would be baptized – immersed – in or by the Spirit (Acts 1:4-5). Some of them probably remembered John the Baptist’s promise that the Messiah would baptize them in the Holy Spirit and fire (Matthew 3:11). What would that be like?  They were expectant, but no one knew just what to expect.

And then it happened.  Verse 2: “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.”  That was the first evidence that something extraordinary was taking place. 

The disciples no doubt recalled Ezekiel’s Old Testament vision. He saw a valley full of bones – of skeletons.  Then God asked him if the bones could live again, to which he wisely replied, “You are the only one who knows, Lord.” Let me give you what happened next in the prophet’s own words: “Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet – a vast army” (Ezekeil 37:9).

Now in both Hebrew and Greek there is only one word for breath, wind and spirit.  So, the Ezekiel passage could conceivably be translated, “Come from the four spirits, O Spirit, and spirit into these slain, that they may live.”  Here in Acts 2 the wind of the Spirit blows and breathes a new kind of life – God’s kind – into humans.  They heard the noise of a strong wind.  Then, verse 3, “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.” In the Scriptures, fire is a recurring symbol of God’s presence, and the disciples knew this well.

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