Working with Dirty Hands

Here is the sermon I preached today: God in the Gaps: Working with Dirty Hands. It's kinda cliché to say that legalistic Christians tend to get Pharisaical. What I didn't realize until I did all the research for this sermon is how close Pharisees were to Protestants: worship is supposed to be 24/7, not just an hour on the Sabbath; priesthood of all believers; etc.

In regard to holiness, some of the questions raised during the sermon were:

How holy do you have to be before God can use you?

What does purity look like when God is using you? (What if holiness, being set aside for God's use, led you to having to do some messy stuff? What if your hands got dirty?)

The Pharisees were so well-intentioned! Too bad they came off sounding like legalistic Christians, but what does that suggest about our legalism?

1 Corinthians 7: To Separate, or Not to Separate--That is the Question!

1 Cor. 7:1-16

For a number of weeks, we have been looking at sanctification, the process of becoming holy, or set aside for God. Sanctification includes: separation from sin, dedication to God, and filling by the Holy Spirit. On some level, we understand that holiness involves separation, but is our sense of separation biblical?

Which verses in 1 Cor 7:1-16 talk about aspects of separation? (Other words than “separation” may be used.)


Which verses talk about aspects of what seems to be the opposite of separation?


At church we tend to promote the idea that separation from all worldly influences is the godly way. However, under what circumstances is one counseled not to separate from the world? Under what circumstances is one counseled to join (or remain joined) in what might seem like a not-entirely-holy arrangement?


v12 sounds like Paul is giving a personal opinion. (How does that fit with how we think Scripture got written?) Can we dismiss what Paul says here about separation/non-separation because it’s Paul’s opinion, or are there good, biblical reasons to remain in not-entirely-holy arrangements and still feel like we are being holy (i.e. used by God)?

Based on what you think you have learned, now read 1 Cor. 7:17-24. Is Paul still only talking about marriage here, or is he trying to apply what he has already said to a more general rule for living?

What do you think Paul would say about how most Christians live separately from the world?


What have you learned from this study, and what will you do differently based on this study?

Read the rest of the chapter, 1 Cor. 7:25-40. How do these verses help your understanding of what you have read earlier?

A Word on Wheat vs Tares

Last Sunday I preached on the parable of the wheat and the tares. In terms of sanctification, there is a lesson here about perfection as we understand it, and as God understands it. LIke the servants in the parable, we want to excise evil everywhere: in the world, in the church, in ourselves. God seems to be more tolerant of sin than we are! There is a lesson to be learned here in terms of what we should expect from ourselves, and what grace and forbearance should look like: in brief, I am counseling against both asceticism and despair.

OK?

Shall We Dance?

(No doubt this blog entry would be considered heretical by some in my church today and by many a mere generation ago when dancing was considered a grave sin by the church leadership.)

Consider the relationship of the Father and the Son in John 14:8-24. Specifically consider the interrelationship between the Father and the Son:

Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. 11Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. (John 14:0-11)

The theological term for this interrelationship is perichoresis. Wikipedia describes this as "the mutual inter-penetration and indwelling within the threefold nature of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit." The word comes from two Greek words, "peri" (around) and "chorea" (dance)--literally, "to dance around."

Hey, I don't just make this stuff up! Consider the following poems:

Perichoresis, or, I am Lord of the Dance
(from http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/archive/index.php/t-27144.html)

Peri - around
Chorea - dance, cf Choreography
Perichorea - To dance around...

Perichoresis is the Divine Dance. The Divine Dance of the persons of the Trinity.

In the beginning was the Dance, and the Dance was in God, and the Dance was God...

An eternal Dance; the three persons of the Godhead dancing eternally, in an embrace of love, mutually giving and receiving. Always dancing.

In the beginning God created a Dancing partner...

The world was created in its own dance, and invited to join the Dance. But the lead dancers said No! and started their own dance. The hands of God are extended to restore the Dance, and inviting us to Dance: The Son, and the Spirit, the two hands of God. The Dance for us has a beginning, and an end, and they are not the same. The beginning starts with anticipation, expectation, and desire; the end concludes with satisfaction, completion, and rest - until the next Dance.

We look upon the Dance of God, as he ever circles about us. We try to understand. We so often fail. The Dance goes on, and the part we have in the Dance goes on, though we are not Dancing, only dancing, yet that dancing seems to be incorprated despite our best efforts. We look, and the Dance seems to change, to reverse, to go back on itself - it repented the Lord that... - and then the Dance goes on, seeking it's goal, never seeking return to the starting point - I the Lord change not. This is the nature of Dance: round and round you go, sometimes to and sometimes fro, but the Dance goes on.

And us? Some of us sit as wallflowers. We won't dance under any circumstances. Some of us are dancing around our handbags in our own dance, while the Dance wheels about us. We dance on our own. But dances are communal, not individual, everyone knows that. Dances are free, though structured: God's Line Dancing.

Will you join the Dance? God's two hands, The Son and Spirit, await you, pull you, invite you, to take you into the Dance, to wheel you about, make you dizzy at times, exhilerated at times, exhausted at times, fearful at times. But it is The Dance.

I am the Lord of the Dance said he...

How does this poem enlightenn you and inform your understanding of Creation and the Fall?

How does this poem affect your understanding of John 14:15: "If you love me, you will obey what I command."?

Perichoresis
(Copyright © 2004 by Andrew Stephen Damick)

O elegant and gentle Leader of the dance,
we do not know the meaning of each step
nor how to rightly turn this way or hold this pose.
Each spinning step or angled movement's twist
does sometimes give us vertigo here where we stand;
this mystery of how the rhythm's pulse
and how the music's lilt are tuned to only You
has caught us up, and we are overwhelmed.

O grace-filled, grace-bestowing Leader of the dance,
please teach me how to twirl and how to move;
please teach me how the song pervades each dancer's form,
these dancers who have learned to dance with You
throughout the ages of the song, the holy song
You sang in ages past to Abraham,
to Isaac and to Jacob and his Hebrew seed:
Now sing to me and give me, too, this life.

O Leader of the dance, this perfect partnership
of Leader and of led, of God and man,
this Incarnation's holy dance we see in You,
You now invite us to accompany.
This awesome dance, a truly cosmic synergy,
the interpenetration of us men
with Deity -- with Trinity! -- the universe
beholds and stands amazed and bows its head.

O holy Leader of this cosmic circling dance,
the union of both man and God is here
and imaged in the holy mystery of life
conjoined, a woman and a man conjoined.
He takes Your role as gentle leader, she as Church,
she follows him, and he must die for her;
their dance together joins the dance eternal now,
and in that human dance we see our God.

O Holy Trinity, Your dance eternal now
descends on us and consecrates our own,
the revelation here as Body and as Blood;
herein we taste the God become a man,
and men become as gods as David prophesied.
The Trinitarian rhythm has become
our own, to guide our dance, to grasp our hands and lead
us in the dance of stillness perfectly.

How does this poem enlighten you and inform your understanding of submission?

How does this poem affect your understanding of John 14:20: "On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you."?

Once upon a time, my wife, Kathy, thought it would be fun to sign us up for ballroom dancing class. On the surface, it seemed like a good idea--I can think of few things that sound more exciting, more senuous, than doing the tango with Kathy.

The classes were an unmitigated disaster. While I am not the most coordinated person in the world, I don't have two left feet. Nevertheless, Kathy and I fought the whole time, because Kathy refused to follow my lead. Now I am not so macho that I need to be in charge all the time, but the dances are designed for one person to lead and the other to follow. When I tried to lead, and Kathy resisted, tugging me in other directions. "No," she said, "I don't want to lead. You are the man--you lead, just do it the right way!" (We ended up soon after that dropping the class, and doing the tango with Kathy remains one of my unfulfilled fantasies.)

Sanctification, according to A.B. Simpson, is about obedience. Obedience is a hard concept for many of us to accept, but I ask you to look at submission and obedience as dancing with God and learning to follow God's lead, even when (especially when!) you question whether he is "doing it the right way!"

Kathy and I watch "Dancing with the Stars" from time to time, and she has commented that the female celebrities dancing with the male professional dancers have an easier time than the male female professionals have with the male celebrities. "Those female stars just have to let the male professionals lead them, but the female professionals have to trust the male celebrities to get it right!" she says. In your dance with God, I trust you to realize that God is "the professional" and you can trust in him to get it right.

Filled Up or Filled Out?

Ephesians 5:15-20

Two common symbols for the Spirit are wine (or water) and wind. You can fill a cup with wine (or water), and we can fill a balloon with air. Which better describes to you what it means to be filled with the Spirit?

The liquid in the cup is a picture of the Spirit permeating every aspect of our being (sanctifying us in spirit, soul, and body, 1 Thess. 5:22-23). On the other hand, the balloon gives us a picture of growth in the Spirit--becoming capable of more. As far as which symbol I like more, read on.

If you had two cups—one large and one small—or two balloons—one large and one small—would you consider the larger container to be more filled? Does it make sense to describe a Christian as being more filled with the Spirit?

Obviously, the smaller cup should not ask, "Why didn't God make me a bigger cup so I could be more filled?" For the smaller cup, the filling is what counts, not the volume. For the balloons, volume is an aspect of being filled--can I blow a little more air into this balloon without popping it?

The NT never talks about being more filled with the Spirit, but just being filled. How often do we as Christians err by seeking after more filling instead of simply seeking after the one doing the filling?

What common misconceptions do you think Christians have about being filled with the Spirit? Based on tonight’s lesson, what would you want to say to counter these misconceptions?

The verses tonight speak about a filling by the Spirit that seeks to edify others: v19 "Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord." I think well-intentioned Christians stumble by viewing the filling of the Spirit as something that edifies them when in fact the filling of the Spirit is for the edification of others. "Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, 'If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.'" (John 7:37b-38) That overflow is for the work of God's kingdom in the world, not the kingdom within the individual.

What will you do with what you have learned tonight?

I wonder if the whole metaphor of filling a cup or a balloon is too simple. I think the filling by the Spirit of Christ is transformational; it would be as if the Spirit filled our cups with water and then turned the water into wine. Part of the filling is the sweetness, the change of heart and perspective, that comes through life in the Spirit. Paul Eluard wrote, "There is another world, and it is in this one." Nothing in this world may have changed, our circumstances are still the same, but everything by the Spirit has changed: that is the kingdom being born.

Progressive Sanctification: Trending Upwards

Philippians 1:

3 I thank my God every time I remember you.
4 In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy
5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the 1st day until now,
6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
7 It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart; for whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God's grace with me.
8 God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.
9 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight,
10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ,
11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.

Does partnership in the gospel require maturity before beginning to work for the gospel? Think of a time where a parent took you along to "help." What made the time significant—your help, or something else?

Who starts and complete the good work in us? What is our part to play?

What is necessary for love to grow? Can it happen in a vacuum?

A.B. Simpson says, "Seek the blesser, not the blessing." I say what we usually think of as holiness is the fruit of being sanctified [i.e. set apart] for Christ. How do you do these ideas coming through in these verses?

What will you do with what you have learned tonight?

The Crisis: Filing for Bankruptcy

Romans 7:15-25

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

Write or draw about a time in your life when you felt this way.

Do you think it’s possible for a Christian to ever feel this kind of anxiety? Remember this is Paul writing. Is he talking about his pre-Christian life; the moment of his conversion; a moment subsequent to his conversion; or a process we repeat often as we grow spiritually? (Good Christians can agree to disagree about these verses!)

Since Jesus calls us to pick up our cross daily, we must be open to the idea that each day may bring a fresh challenge to how we understand what it means to follow Jesus. The Alliance talks about a crisis experience—in the process of becoming sanctified, there is a moment, at conversion or later, in which one realizes the inability of real life apart from Christ. We have been writing checks our spirit cannot cash, and we need a bailout. Who will rescue us? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

The crisis is the moment we commit to separating from sin and dedicating ourselves to Jesus for everything. Crisis leads to surrender, and surrender leads to obedience. A.B. Simpson says, "This act of dedication should be made once for all, and then recognized as done and as including every subsequent act that we may ever renew as we receive more light in detail respecting His will concerning us. It is possible for us, once for all and not knowing perhaps one-thousandth part of all that it means, to give ourselves to God ..." (Wholly Sanctified, p31). God makes your vow good!

Point to Ponder: I have two candles on the altar: one has a single wick, and other--a fatter candle--has multiple wicks, hence multiple flames when it is lit. If holiness denotes dedication to God's service and the place where God is at work, then which is holier: the one-wick candle, or the multiple-wick candle? They're equally holy, since they are both dedicated to God's service. We tend to discount the early crisis moments in our lives, thinking, "I didn't really understand what I was doing!" However, God understood you committed all that you knew of at that time. Later, when you discovered more to your spiritual growth, you didn't become more holy; rather you were simply obedient to continue to give you life over. (You thought you were a one-wick candle; when you found out you had yet another wick, you asked God to light & use that one as well!) OK?

A Word on Perfection

One of the most common problems that I've encountered in ordination and consecration papers is referring to Matthew 5:48 ("Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.") and concluding that Jesus is calling us to be holy as God is holy (which admittedly is what the OT says in Leviticus 11:44-45; 19:2; 20:26).

However, this conclusion takes the verse out of its immediate context (another common problem in the papers I've read). The immediate context is Matthew 5:43-48 ("love your enemies ...").

While I believe that the whole Sermon on the Mount exhorts the hearer to a higher moral standard, we commonly misunderstand what the NT says about perfection. Teleios, the word translated in Matt. 5:48 as "perfect", is frequently translated elsewhere in the NT as "whole", "complete" or "mature." We beat ourselves up when we are less than perfect, when I believe that God wants us to be mature! (The difference is this: neither children nor adults are perfect, but adults go back and try to rectify their mistakes; children don't!) If we translate Matt. 5:48 as "mature" instead of "perfect", I assert that what Jesus is saying in Matt 5:43-48 is something like, "You have heard it said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy,' but I say to you, 'Grow up! Love your enemy and pray for those that persecute you. Even a child can love those who love him first."

I preached a sermon on exactly this two years ago: "The Gospel of Baseball: We Did Everything Right but Win" in which I said our idea of perfection is like the Red Sox going 162-0. (God's idea of perfection--i.e. maturity--is something more like the Red Sox going 108-54. A team that does that is playing smart baseball. Such a team will still stumble, but they will adjust, correct, and get back on track.)

The Three Key Steps towards Sanctification

Sanctification doesn't just happen. It is an intentional process in which God's Spirit and our bodies, minds, and spirits work together to change how we live as individuals and as communities.

Romans 8:12-13
Therefore, brothers, we have an obligation—but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it. For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live ...

Pick one word or phrase from v12-13 and meditate on it for at least 5 minutes. What do you discover?

Romans 8:14-15
... because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, "Abba, Father."

Pick one word or phrase from v14-15 and meditate on it for at least 5 minutes. What do you discover?

Romans 8:16-17
The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

Pick one word or phrase from v16-17 and meditate on it for at least 5 minutes. What do you discover?

Questions:

The Alliance doctrine of sanctification says that we need separation from sin, dedication to Christ as our source, filling by Christ and identifcation with Christ. How do you see this played out in the above verses?

Over the ages theologians (e.g. Athanasius & Bonhoeffer) have said God became man that man might become God. The suggestion is that the perfect man paves the way for righteous living. More than simply being a moral exemplar, Christ's obedience allows him to be sanctified (John 17:19) by God, and in turn be our source for sanctification as well. What do you think?

Some eastern churches (e.g. the Orthodox Church) speak of theosis (or divinization) as the process of transformation by which humans are conformed to God's direction and energized by God. This transformation is a 3-step process: purification, illumination, and sainthood. How does this compare (and how is it different from) the Alliance 3-step process of separation from sin, dedication to Christ, and filling by the Spirit of Christ?

What will you do with what you have learned tonight?