Saturday, May 16, 2009

Faith and Doubts (May 17, 2009)

Faith and Doubt M5 2009 05 17

Title: How Can We Believe in Christ When Christianity Has Created So Much Oppression in the World?

Text: Micah 6:8, Matthew 5:43-45, James 2:1-17

Big Idea: Injustice has been done in “the name of Christ,” but not in the true Spirit of Christ.

Just over 2 ½ weeks ago Pope Benedict expressed remorse to Canadian First Nations Chief, Phil Fontaine, for the suffering that thousands of aboriginal Canadians experienced in residential schools at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope expressed his sorrow for the anguish that members of his church caused aboriginal children. There are many people who point to the abuse perpetrated by the Christian Church against aboriginal people in Canada, and ask, “How can I believe in Christianity when it has been responsible for so much injustice?”

Others point back to the Crusades where for two centuries Christians tried to violently expel Muslims from the Holy Land. Pope Innocent III in 1215 actually taught people that if they went to fight in the Crusades they could earn their salvation, the forgiveness of their sins.

I went to seminary just north of Boston, in a community not far from Salem. Salem is the town that is famous for the witch trials at the end of the 1600s. During the Salem witch trials, Christians were involved in seeing that some 20 twenty people--presumed to be witches--were executed.

A lot of evil has been done by people who profess to be Christians.

Perhaps you’ve been hurt in some way by a Christian. Perhaps you’ve been unfairly judged, excluded, or used in some way.

I am deeply sorry for that and I can imagine how Christ grieves when evil is done in his name.

I believe it is wholly appropriate for those of us who are Christians to apologize for the pain that has been inflicted by Christians.

Donald Miller in his book, Blue Like Jazz, talks about studying at a secular, liberal college in Portland.

Every year the college has a big party weekend where everyone gets drunk or high. Donald Miller and some of his Christian friends decided to set up a confessional booth in the midst of this bash. But rather than having the drunken college students confess their sins, Donald and a friend dressed in Monk Habits and confessed their personal failures and failure of Christianity over the years…

As a Japanese person, I have apologized for other Asians for the evil perpetrated by the Japanese prior to World War II, and I have also apologized as a Christian for the evil done in the name of Christ.

I would like to take a moment to lead those of us here who consider ourselves Christians in prayer of confession:

Merciful Father,


We confess to you and to others,
that we Christians have sinned against you--and people who are made in your image
by the things we have done,
and by things we have not done.


We have not loved you with our whole heart

and we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

We have often failed to act in way that is consistent with the Spirit of Christ.
By wandering from your ways, we have grieved you and hurt others


Forgive us and free us from our sins and empower by your Spirit to do justice--even when it is costly to do so—to love mercy, and to walk humbly before you our God. Amen.

Violence, oppression, done in the name of Christianity, is wrong and inexcusable… and must be addressed, and at times redressed…

Sins done in the name of Christ can’t be triumphantly overlooked.

But, a question I want to raise as part of this series on faith and doubt is whether these sins invalidate the way of Christ?

They would if these acts of violence and oppression truly represented the way of Christ.

There are many things that have been done in the name of Christ that cannot be attributed to Christ.

In a world where about a third of the human race professes to be a Christian, there are many people who are “Christians,” but who are Christians only in name and do not practice what Christianity believes.

There are atheists who claim to be Christians. The famous atheist, the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, told the BBC “I am a cultural Christian.” He loves to sing Christmas carols at Christmas, and he’s begun a movement called “Atheists for Jesus.” There are many people who describe themselves as Christian who don’t practice it, and some like Dawkins who don’t even believe in God. A great deal of violence and evil have been done by people who describe themselves as Christians in name, but clearly did not practice the way of Christ and in some cases did not even believe in the way of Christ.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are also Christian fanatics. Christian fanatics tend to over-emphasize and distort certain parts of scripture and can become hyper-judgmental with people they regard as evil: whether they are liberals, gay, evolutionists, members of other religions, or people with no religion at all.

But people who are simply nominally Christian or culturally Christian on the one hand, or so-called Christian fanatics on the other hand, are in both cases not practicing the true spirit of Christ. (This is why some people have bumper stickers saying, “Jesus save me from your followers.”)

Those who have truly followed the way of Christ and have been filled with His Spirit become people of genuine love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

Now, we all know people who have no connection with Christ, who seem kinder and gentler than certain Christians we know. Some people are born with the temperament of a Golden Retriever and others with the temperament of a Pitt Bull (or they have become like a Pitt Bull because a broken family environment). If the Pitt Bull receives the spirit of Christ, he or she will become more loving than he or she would otherwise be, but perhaps not as loving as the person who was born a Golden Retriever, but does not know Christ. But, if the Golden Retriever had a relationship with Christ… he or she would become even kinder.

Jesus said, “The mark of a person who truly follows me is not a cross around their neck or tattooed to their ankle (as I have), but rather love, humility, forgiveness of others.”

One of my history professors, Dr. Mark Noll, has pointed out that “one of the little-noted contributions of Christianity is gift of humility.”

Many have criticized the church for being power hungry, but as historian John Sommerville points out, “There have been many cultures where the drive for power is considered good.”

He says, “The pre-Christian northern European tribes like the Anglo-Saxons had societies based on the concept of honour. In these honour-based societies earning respect from others was considered paramount.” Sommerville points out how Christianity changed those honour-based societies where pride was valued over humility and revenge was valued over mercy.

In these older honored-based cultures if someone disrespected you by throwing a drink in your face—it is far more important in the culture to challenge the person to a duel and to kill that person rather than to forgive. In modern culture, this honor-based code is seen in urban gangs, where a youth may kill someone because so and so “disrespected them.”

Sommerville points out that it is ironic that the very people who criticize the violent injustices of the Christian church actually do so from a perspective that has itself been shaped by the principles of the Christian gospel which value love over honor and mercy over vengeance.

Tim Keller says, “The answer then to the fair and devastating criticism of the record of the Christian church’s oppression is not to abandon the Christian faith, because that would leave us with neither the standards nor the resources to make the correction. Instead we should move toward a fuller and deeper grasp of what true Christianity is.”

(It is interesting that the person who played the key role in the abolition of the Salem witch trials was a Christian. A Puritan leader, named Increase Mather, spoke up forcefully against what was happening, and that was the beginning of the end. It was a Christian voice that silenced the madness within so called “Christianity.”)

As Christians we need to go back to source texts like Micah 6:8:

8 He has shown all you people what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

We must go back to the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says,

43 "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

We must go back to texts like James 2 where we are called specifically to not favor the rich over the poor, but to love the poor in action:

In James 2:14-17 we read:

14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if people claim to have faith but have no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

Even those who are against the Christian faith often have an intuitive understanding of people who are truly following Christ and those who are not.

My grandfather was a corporate CEO--very proud, intimidating, and hostile toward Christianity. But I remember how he talked glowingly about one of the engineers in his company whom he really admired for the quality of his work and his outstanding integrity. My grandfather, who generally hated Christians, said with a gleam in his eye, “He is a true Christian.”

Professing Christians have perpetrated a lot inexcusable violence and injustice, but we also see signs of hope from people who were truly connected to Christ.

Let me give a few examples of people in history who expressed true spirit of Jesus.

A few weeks ago I quoted The Emperor Julian who in the first century wrote to a pagan priest friend asking him why was it that this Christian group was adding to its numbers so quickly when it had no money and no political power. The pagan priest said, with some contempt… “Hebrews helped Hebrews, Greeks helped Greeks, Romans helped Romans, but Christians helped everyone.”

In the second century, Christianity in Egypt spread. Why? According to Bishop Samuel of Cairo, the church provided mothers who were nursing in the public squares often under pagan statues while other women went up and down the streets to collect the unwanted, abandoned babies and raised them.

Jumping ahead to the nineteenth century, Lord Shaftesbury (VII) a Christian member of the British Parliament advocated labour laws for children. In his day, children as young as four years of age were working from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. (16 hours days). Lord Shaftesbury made proposals that resulted in the work day being limited to 8 hours for children and laws that widened the mine shaft which meant that men rather than children would be working in them.

William Wilberforce was a British Member of Parliament and in the 18th century was considered a rising star and a future Prime Minister of England. But he was troubled over the injustice of the British slave trade. As a young politician he wrote in his journal, knowing full well that walking on to the floor of the British Parliament and introducing a bill to abolish slavery would cost him the prime ministership of England: “My Christian conscience will not allow me to remain silent on this issue.” The next day Wilberforce began speaking out against the slave trade, knowing that it would cost him the opportunity to become Prime Minister. He fought against the slave trade for 50 years. When he was on his deathbed, the news reached him that the bill for abolition of the slave trade would be passed—that slavery would in fact be abolished in the British Empire.

Rodney Stark notes how historians have been desperately trying to figure out why Wilberforce and those who were working to abolish slavery were willing to sacrifice so much to end slavery. He says [quoting another historian] that the history of the abolition of slavery is puzzling because most historians believe that all political behavior is based on self-interest. Despite the fact that hundreds of scholars of the last 50 years have looked for ways to explain it, no one has succeeded in showing that those who campaigned for the end of the slave trade stood to gain in any tangible way or that these measures were other than economically costly to the country.

Followers of Christ have gone to people and places where others have refused to go.

A young woman named Cathy Ito from our community some years ago decided to go to the Sudan to serve as medical missionary with a leprosy mission called The Leprosy Mission International.

This mission which serves people with leprosy in 50 countries has been in existence for 130 years. It was founded by a man from Ireland named Wellesley Bailey. As a young man in the 1800s, he wanted to make a fortune and set sail for New Zealand. When he was unable to sail off the coast of Kent, England because of fog, he attended a church service instead and that night by his bed committed his life to Christ. He joined a Christian mission and went to Punjab, India as teacher. In India he met lepers for the first time and shuddered, but felt Christ calling him to bring love and the hope of the Christ to these suffering people and founded The Leprosy Mission International.

Christ leads to serve people who have been shunned by others.

Joseph D’Souza, who some of you heard at Missions Fest this past January, was an agnostic university student in India. Joseph had a Christian friend who gave him a New Testament and talked to him about the Jesus. Joseph became a follower of Jesus.

Joseph was a privileged Brahman, i.e., from the top of the social caste India, but he met and fell in love with a Christian woman named Maria from the “untouchable” class, the Dalits—someone who because of her social class he was not supposed to associate with at all.

She warned him, “Ok, if you want to marry me come and see what my life is like--you grew up in an upper class area, you’re an urban kid, you don’t know what this all about.”

He went and what he saw her neighborhood and it shook him up. He had never seen how the 250,000 Dalits in his country lived: no roads, no schools, no running water, no sanitation--utter poverty. He had not seen how their boys and girls were being sold as slaves and trafficked into the sex trade.

They got married, believing in Christ social class barriers fall away. Now they areworking together to help provide schools and education for the Dalits children, health care Dalits, economic development, and speaking before powerful legislatures of world of on behalf of the Dalits…

This week, I met with Mike Yankoski, a 26 year old Regent student.

When Mike was a teenager, he began asking questions about the meaning of life and why he was here on earth.

He asked his parents, but his dad as an atheist and his mother as an agnostic were not able to provide satisfying answers. He had some Christian friends in high school who introduced him to Jesus Christ.

In 2003, while a college student in Santa Barbara, California, Mike and his friend Sam voluntarily became homeless in order to experience what life is like for the poor and to be able to better love them. For five months, they traveled through six different cities with bare essentials and two acoustic guitars. Singing worship songs while panhandling, Mike and Sam got to know homeless people… They were on the streets 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, sleeping alongside of convicted felons, drug dealers, and typical homeless.

I asked Mike, “Why did you do this?” (He knew God had said we are to love our neighbours as ourselves.) “ I wanted to know how I could better love the homeless and to see if my faith in God was real outside of my comfortable existence.”

A couple of weeks ago a small group led by Randy and Hannah Hamm from Tenth visited orphanages in China led by Internation China Concern.

One of the members, David Gotts, was on a short term Christian mission as young man and during a visit to Nanning, China when a mother placed a very sick baby girl in his hands and asked David to take care of her. David rushed her to the hospital, but she ended up dying. Out of experience, David felt God calling to establish orphanages for China’s abandoned and disabled children.

So there are signs of hope.

If you have been hurt by Christians—pray that you would meet some true followers of Christ and see where that leads you…

If you are a followers of Christ, remember that you may be the only “Bible” that some people will ever read. How you live may determine whether people follow Christ or not.

When I am in communities in the deep south where I am the only the Japanese person, the only Asian, I am conscious of wanting not wanting to harm the reputation of the Japanese and Asians in general, by being hostile or rude.

But, if we belong to Christ, we have a much higher call—to let our light so shine before people that they may see our good works and glorify God.
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Saturday, May 09, 2009

Faith and Doubts M4 (May 10, 09)

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Faith and Doubt M4 2009 05 10

Hold off on the slide until I announce it…

Title: Would a Loving God Send Someone to Hell?

Text: Luke 16:19-31

Do NOT use the PowerPoint title slide today—I’ll introduce the title at the end of my intro.

Big Idea: Hell is one’s freely chosen destination apart from God.

(intro paragraph for morning services only) Today is Mother’s Day. Some mothers have been candid with me, “If there’s one thing I hate about Mother’s Day it is the traditional Mother’s Day sermon.” “What do you hate about the Mother’s Day sermon?” “The message from Proverbs 31 about the ideal wife and mother.” And it’s worse if the one who’s giving it is a man… We’re going to go in a different direction today.

I remember Tony Campolo, the popular sociologist and pastor, who recalled doing an internship at a church when he was a young man. It was Mother’s Day and he was called upon to read the scripture. He was supposed to read from 2 Timothy Chapter 1 where Paul says, “I thank God and I am reminded of your sincere faith which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and I am persuaded now lives in you also.” But instead of reading the verses from 2 Timothy, Tony Campolo accidentally read from I Timothy where Paul says, “We know that the law is made for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and the sinful, for those who kill their fathers or mothers.” Tony was thinking, “Boy, this is Mother’s Day, but the pastor is really going to sock it to them.”

This morning, as we continue our series on faith and doubt, we are going to look at a question which many of us have likely thought about, and which, at least at first glance, may seem way too intense for Mother’s Day.

Now what I am about to say is not a mistake—though you may think so…

The question is and here comes the speed bump: “Could we believe in a God who would actually send people to hell?

Before we explore this question, let us look at some of the things the scriptures teach us about the character of God.

The scriptures teach that while God transcends gender, God is like an ideal mother and father.

In the book of Isaiah we find pictures of God as being a mother unable to forget her child (Ch. 49) and a mother who comforts her child (Ch. 66).

In the Gospel of Mathew we read about how Jesus looks out over Jerusalem with sadness and cries out, “How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you are not willing.”

The scriptures also, of course, portray God as an ideal father.

When we pray to God, Jesus instructed us to pray, “Our Father… our Abba, or our Daddy…”

In Luke 15 we have a beautiful picture of God, as a father who sacrifices his dignity by doing something that no self-respecting Jewish man over 25 years of age would do. He sees his estranged, rebellious son in the distance, and he picks up edge of his flowing robe and runs after him, in the original language the word can be translated “race” after him, so that his legs show, which in his culture would have been painfully humiliating.

Some of you have had pain in your heart because your father has not pursued you; and in Luke 15 we have a picture of God who pursues you.

God is a being who transcends gender, but the scriptures portray God as an ideal mother and an ideal father.

Part of what constitutes the character of an ideal mother or father would include the qualities of discipline and justice. In Hebrews 12 we read, “God disciplines those he loves and chastens everyone he accepts as son or daughter.” The writer of Hebrews says we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it; and so will God who is our heavenly father. The writer of the book of Hebrews says, “No discipline seems pleasant at the time but later on produces a harvest of love, righteousness and peace by those who have been trained by it.”

In Psalm 89: 14 we read that righteousness and justice are the foundation of God’s throne. Part of what we would expect and want in a God who is an ideal mother and father is not only love, but also discipline and justice.

When I was a young boy four or five years old living in London, England, I remember how I got into a fight with my older and younger sisters—boy against the girls. I remember running upstairs grabbing a hold of my older sister’s chest of drawers which had a large mirror attached to it. I pushed it over and the mirror ended up shattering. I remember that I was disciplined for that by not being allowed to eat dessert for a long time—a month I think.

As a teenager I remember well when I had been caught shoplifting, my parents sat me down, and my dad explained to me how I had hurt them and brought shame on our family by doing what I did. I also remember clearly how he struck me a couple of times, and I remember how I was punished in a way that would have created the most difficult time for me as kid who loved to go out—I was grounded for several months. I was taken by my dad on a field trip to the BC Provincial prison in New Westminster (at the time)… I recall looking through the bars and seeing the bullet holes in the wall. Dad said, “I just want you to see your future home.”

If my parents had not disciplined and punished me for breaking my sister’s mirror, for shoplifting, they would have been, in that respect, less than complete parents.

We expect a good referee to call a penalty when a player has violated the rules and created a situation that has given his or her team an unfair advantage. If a member of the Chicago Black Hawks skated in Roberto Luongo’s goal crease and then turned around and high-sticked him by breaking his stick over Luongo’s face mask, we would be outraged if the referee saw it and didn’t call a penalty.

I recently saw the movie Changeling. In the movie Changeling, Angelina Jolie plays a mother whose 10-year-old boy Walter is abducted by a man named Gordon Northcott—the movie is based on a true story. There are about 20 boys that Northcott abducts. Near the end of the movie Northcott is caught; the evidence against him is overwhelming; he is declared guilty by the jury; and he is sentenced. If the judge had not sentenced Gordon Northcott in some way, people would have said the judge miscarried justice.

Those of us who live in the West and who have never really been directly exposed to large scale brutality and violence can tend to get upset with the idea that God is just, and that he might actually one day exercise judgment against people.

But if you have faced horrible violence, because you have lived in the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq, Darfur, then, unlike us, you tend to want to believe in a God who judges.

Miroslav Volf, the Croatian theologian who teaches at Yale, has seen great violence in his homeland; and he finds that he needs to believe in a God who not only loves, but also judges.

He writes in his insightful great book, Exclusion and Embrace (and I have quoted this passage before) He says, “If you have seen your home burned down and your relatives killed and raped, then the only way that you will be prevented from picking up the sword and judgment yourself, is to believe in a God who will exercise divine justice.”

Volf says his thesis that belief in a God who will exercise divine judgment will keep a person from picking up the sword of vengeance will be unpopular with many in the West …. [but] only in the quiet seclusion the suburbs can you believe that non-violence is the result of a belief that God will never judge. In a sun-scorched land, soaked in blood of the innocent, that idea will invariably die…

So part of the character of God as an ideal Mother and Father is that God is a figure of extraordinary love, but God is also as an ideal mother and father--a person of justice, who will bring judgment. We don’t know exactly how God will exact judgment in the world to come, but as Abraham points out in Genesis, we know “the judge of all the world will always do what is right.” (Genesis 18:25)

Now we may say that exacting discipline and punishment against injustice is one thing, but a loving God would never, ever send anyone to hell. That’s quite another thing. The Bible teaches that we human beings have an eternal destiny. Some will experience that eternal destiny with great joy, fulfillment, and beauty with God. Others will experience their eternal destiny without God—an existence where joy is absent, a place where there is regret, and no beauty. Rachel Barkey describes hell as a place where you hear no laughter of children and where it never rains.

Some people don’t believe in hell because they have in their mind a distorted image of what hell actually is. Perhaps they picture Dante’s inferno--hell as a place where there are literal flames. And they imagine these pitiable creatures that are tossed into the fire--because their bad deeds outweigh their good deeds--and they are crying out to God saying, “Have mercy on me,” but God says, “It is too late. You’ve had your chance, now you will suffer.”

But the language of hell fire, I believe, agreeing with most commentators, is metaphorical.

What then is hell?

The Bible teaches the essence of sin is a choice to build our life on something or someone other than God.

We tend to think of sin perhaps as breaking some kind of moral code… whether it is murder or oppressing a minority group or marring the environment… these of course are all manifestations of sin.

But the heart of the biblical definition of sin is well captured by Soren Kierkegaard in his book, Sickness Unto Death. In that book Kierkegaard defines sin as building our life on something other than God—putting our identity in some thing or some one: our family, education, our career, our money, our appearance, pleasure. Sin is making a good thing, our ultimate thing.

Since God is the source of all joy and love and peace and wisdom and beauty, if we were to lose his presence completely that would be hell.

Hell is simply a soul that has been built on something other than God that goes on forever and ever.

In Luke 16, Jesus gives us a parable about a poor man named Lazarus and a rich man, who goes unnamed. Lazarus is a poor man who begs at the gate of a cruel rich man. Both die. Lazarus goes to heaven while the rich man goes to hell. There he looks and sees Lazarus in heaven on the bosom of the great father of faith, Abraham: So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire…’

Commentators have noted that Lazarus in the parable has a personal name, but the rich man is only called “the rich man.” Lazarus has a name, an identity. The rich has no name and no identify. This suggests that since the rich man built his identity on wealth, rather than on God, in the life to come once he has lost his wealth, he has also lost any sense of himself.

Given the culture that the rich man lived in, it is almost impossible that he would have been an atheist. He would have almost certainly believed in the existence of God and may have kept many of God’s laws, but he built his life on something other than God—money--and when he lost his money in his life after death—he lost himself.

If we are eternal creatures, and build our lives on something other than God… whether it’s money (prop), education, career, looks, power, some human relationship, approval, comfort… when those things are gone… in the life to come… we will find ourselves going on forever, but surfing on a sea of nothingness.

Tim Keller, one of my teachers, has said, “Hell is no less than a freely chosen identity, based on something else besides God, going on forever.”

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity says Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy or eighty years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever.

If we are building our lives on say our selfish desires—a kind of life which leads to bitterness, envy, and anxiety--then the gradual increase of selfishness in eighty years may not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, as Lewis says, if Christianity is true, Hell is precisely the correct technical term for what it would be.

C.S. Lewis’s powerful fictional work, The Great Divorce, is about a dream in which the narrator suddenly, and inexplicably, finds himself in a grim and joyless city (the "grey town", which represents hell).

He eventually finds a bus for those who desire to go on an excursion to the foothills of heaven.

He enters the bus and talks with his fellow ghost-like passengers as they travel. When they get to the outskirts of heaven, shining figures of men and women whom they have known on earth, come from heaven to meet them, and try to persuade them to repent, turn to God and enter heaven, but almost all of them refuse. The people in the bus from hell in Lewis’s parable would prefer to have their “freedom,” as they define it, rather than God. They live with the delusion that if that they glorify God, they would somehow lose power and freedom, but in a tragic irony, their choice ruins them.

In The Great Divorce the narrator asks the guide about some peevish ghost-like woman in Hell (not sure if she’s still a human being in any meaningful sense, asks): "Is she a grumbler or now (reduced to) only a grumble?”

The guide says, “Hell begins with a grumbling mood, and you yourself are still distinct from it: perhaps criticizing it. And you in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. But, you can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no 'you' left to criticize the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.”

NT Wright says, “It is possible for human beings to continue down this road so that they refuse all whisperings of good news, all glimmers of true light, all promptings to turn and go the other way. So that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that were once human, but now are not; creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all.”

Lewis says, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'THY will be done.' All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice, there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek, find. To those who knock, it is opened."(The Great Divorce)

C.S. Lewis says, “Hell is the greatest monument to human freedom.” People, who persistently refuse God’s overtures, will find themselves living out what they most deeply wanted—a life free from God.

Lewis says, "In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of Hell is itself a question: 'What are you asking God to do?' To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary (on the cross). To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what he does." (The Problem of Pain, Ch. 8)

There are some of us who believe that if we follow God, we will somehow lose our true self; that we will lose our freedom; that we will miss out on pleasure and joy.

But the exact opposite is true.

The Psalmist says (Psalm 115) says, “We become like what we worship.”

If we worship money we will become like money: soul-less, lifeless, inanimate.

If we worship God, we will become like God, who is the perfect mother and the perfect father…

In the Great Divorce we read about how people on the bus from hell meet people from heaven…

We see a scene a procession with boys and girls singing and musicians playing…

and after them there was a lady in whose honour all this was being done.

There was this dazzling woman… of astonishing beauty...

‘Is it?... is it? (was she featured in People as one of 50 most beautiful people in the world?)’ I whispered to my guide.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on Earth was Sarah Smith (ordinary name, ordinary person in many ways) and she lived at Golders Green.’

‘She seems to be... well, a person of particular importance?’

‘Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.’

‘And who are these people who are dancing and throwing flowers before and who are all these young men and women on each side?’

‘They are her sons and daughters.’

‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’

‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’

‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’

‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.’

“And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into all creation.”

As we love God as Sarah did, and out of that love people--we don’t become God, but we become like God.

The things that are best in us flourish and we experience great joy and delight in God in this life and in the life to come.

Which path will you choose?

A path built on God that leads to joy, fulfillment and beauty or

on something other than God that goes on forever and ever on a grey sea of nothingness?

The choice is yours.

Let us build our lives not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

Let’s pray:

Perhaps you’re here and you’re not sure whether you’re really building your life on God or something else. Maybe like the rich man in Jesus’ parable, you believe in God, you’re a pretty good person, but you’re building your life on something or someone other than God.

If that’s you and you’d like to commit to building your life on the foundation of God, please pray with me.

(As someone has said, if you can still hear God, you’re not in hell yet).

God, you are like a loving father and mother…

I don’t understand it all, but from today forward with your help I want to build my life on you.

Please forgive me for building my life on __________.

I believe Jesus died for my sins and rose again so that I could be forgiven and experience a new beginning with you.

God, I want to build my life on you and experience eternity with you.

Thank you for making it so.

(invitation to stand or raise hand).

Sunday, May 03, 2009

Faith &Doubt (May 3,2009)

Faith and Doubt M3 2009 05 03

Title: If God Is Good, Why Is There Suffering?

Text: 1 Peter 1: 1-12

Big Idea: A redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.

Jack Welch, former chief executive at General Electric, grew up as a devoted Irish-Catholic. He was an altar boy, and later, as a young adult, he would travel more than an hour to attend mass.

His faith commitment changed, however, when his mother died of a heart attack. He said, "I felt cheated, angry, and mad at God for taking my mother away."

People can stop believing in God when they experience some kind of great loss. The loss of a parent, the loss of a partner through a break up, the loss of job, the loss of their health or when they witness the devastation or an earthquake or Swine Flu brings.

For many people, the biggest obstacle to faith in God is the suffering they see in the world. Philosophers have argued that the presence of suffering and evil in the world makes it impossible to believe in a God who is both all-powerful and good. The argument goes that if God is all-powerful he would be able to remove suffering, and if God were good he would want to remove suffering. But since there is suffering in the world, then God must either be all-powerful, but not good, or good and not all-powerful.

This argument, on the surface, seems to pose a great problem for a person who wants to believe in a God who is both all-powerful and good. But the argument rests on the presupposition that because we human beings cannot imagine a good reason as to why God might allow suffering or evil, therefore, there must not be any good reason for suffering and evil.

The scriptures do not definitively answer the question “how could a good and all-powerful God allow suffering.”

But the scriptures show us how God can redeem suffering and that a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.

The Apostle Peter is writing to followers of Christ who are experiencing suffering, possibly under Emperor Nero, who according to the historian Tacitus burned Christians alive as torches to light his gardens at night and who, of course, is infamous for feeding Christians to wild animals in the coliseum as entertainment.

These people are no strangers to suffering.

If you have your Bibles, please turn to 1 Peter 1: 3-12:

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, 11 trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. 12 It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.

In verse 6 Peter says, “6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

Peter is saying that through suffering we can rejoice because through suffering our faith is refined like gold in a fire. In the economy of God, in ways that no human being can fully understand, God is able to take suffering, and bring a greater good out of suffering. The Scriptures teach us that a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.

God could, of course, have created a world where human beings were compelled to make only good choices (and therefore a world without evil and suffering).

But as some philosophers have pointed out, if that were the case, we would not really be making choices--we wouldn’t have freedom. As C. S. Lewis has pointed out in his classic book, The Problem of Pain, God could have created us so that it would be impossible for us to reject him. But he created us so that we could either freely love him, or reject him. If God forced us to love him, then we would lose our freedom and lose the value of a love that is freely given.

And God has given us the freedom, to do good, but also evil. If God created us with only the capacity to do good, then our freedom would be lost and so would the value of a good, freely done, be lost, as well.

If you are a parent, or if you become a parent one day, or responsible for a child, you will have some anxiety that your kid is going to screw up one day. You may have moments of anxiety because you are afraid that your child is going to be skipping out of class, smoking pot, getting into fights, making out with someone he or she hardly knows. We have the technology emerging through GPS where it will be soon very easy to track geographically wherever someone is through their cell phone. We have the cam technology that can enable us to monitor people 24 hours a day. But, if you had a child, if you had the option to do so, would you choose to use GPS technology and cam technology to constantly monitor your child? And if you could install a little chip into your child’s butt with the potential of transmitting an electric shock, so that every time he or she was tempted to do something wrong--to smoke pot, to cheat on an exam, would you use the chip in your child’s butt to register an electric shock?

You might be tempted to do so, but most of us, I am guessing, would choose not to have a Joey-cam, or a Joella-cam, because we intuitively know that if we forced someone to always do the right thing, not only would that person lose their freedom, which is a precious gift, but that person would also lose the capacity to experience the development of character that comes when a person freely chooses to do the good.

So it is with God, again in a mysterious way that we do not fully understand, God has given has given us the freedom to do good and evil, because, on the whole, this creates the greatest good, even though it also creates the possibility of evil and suffering in the world in small and large ways.

I am certainly not capable of explaining how a particular good is worked out in a particular life in a particular circumstance, but I can see how it is possible that a greater good is produced from a world where we have freedom, and even the freedom to do wrong and cause suffering.

Peter says in verses 6-7 that we rejoice in our suffering because now for a little while, we may suffer all kinds of trials, but these trials have come so that our faith-- of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire--may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

So Peter argues that God can and will use suffering in us to refine us and to redeem us and that a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.

Suffering Peter says, has the potential (though this potential is not always realized) to create a space where we are refined like gold in the fire, and made better human beings.

Gerald Sittser, in his exquisite book, A Grace Disguised, describes how in an instant tragic car accident, he lost 3 generations of his family—his mother, his wife and his young daughter. And Gerald Sittser, who continued to believe in God through his great suffering and loss, says that he learned through his loss that tragedy can increase the soul’s capacity for darkness and light, for pleasure, as well as pain, for hope, as well as dejection. He says the soul is elastic like a balloon—it can grow larger through suffering

Loss can enlarge our capacity for anger, depression, despair and anguish, all natural and legitimate emotions whenever we experience loss. But once enlarged, the soul is also capable of experiencing greater joy, strength, peace and love.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, a philosopher who teaches at Yale, lost his adult son in a tragic

mountain climbing accident. In his book, The Lament for a Son, he wrote, “The value of suffering is the valley of soul-making.” Obviously, loss can make us less; but loss can also make us more.”

In 2 Cor. 4:17 Paul says, “For our light and momentary suffering will produce in us an eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all.”

When we suffer, and perhaps like Gerald Sittser and Nicholas Wolterstorff, you or your loved ones have suffered great loss, we typically don’t know, at least in the short run, why we have been allowed to experience this great suffering or loss, but we know that God can redeem suffering and that in the economy of God, a redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all.

Peter also points out that God redeems our suffering in the world to come. Peter says that, through Christ, God has given us a new birth: 3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you.

What Peter and the Scriptures teach us that one day, in part because of our suffering, we will receive an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. What Peter and the Scriptures teach us is that, if we belong to God, our suffering is never ultimately in vain.

The Scriptures do not teach that one day we will lose our individuality and become completely nothing, melding into the nothingness of the universe, but that one day we will return to a new Earth—a new Earth that is renewed and perfected.

Tim Keller says future life will not just be a consolation for the life we have never had, but a restoration of the things that we have always longed for.

This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired, but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.

Earlier in this series, I talked about how I had lost my wallet at a Vancouver Canucks game. If you have ever lost your wallet, you know the angst you can feel in the hours and the days that follow. Then when this young man returned it, I felt far more joy in my wallet (especially because it contained ID cards) than before I lost the wallet. I was very grateful.

As a young boy, I remember my mother dying… then I woke up and I realized it was just a dream. I was so happy to see her, and so relieved--even though she got quite mad at me that day!

Since getting married, I have had a dream from time to time that my wife Sakiko has died. I am very, very sad and I wake up. I realize it was just a dream and I am so happy and grateful to see that she is alive.

In the movie Changeling which is based on a true story, in the late 1920s about 20 young boys are kidnapped and killed. David Clay—one of the boys assumed to have been killed by this kidnapper--about 7 years after being abuducted comes back to his parents. He says, I was afraid to come back earlier because I thought I might be threatened or my parents might be harmed. His parents are overcome with emotion and joy when they see him.

When we have lost something (or even just thought we lost something in a dream) and then get it back, we cherish what and appreciate it in far deeper way.

Because of the resurrection, because Jesus arose from the dead, it means that all of our losses will be restored and that the joy in experiencing what we have lost will be amplified for us because of the loss.

In the climax of The Lord of the Rings Sam discovers that his friend Gandalf was not dead, as he thought for a while. He cries out, “I thought you dead, but then I thought I was dead myself!” He said, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” And the answer, according to Christ, is, yes, everything sad is going to come untrue, and will be greater for once having been broken and lost.

Dostoyevsky put it like this in the Brothers Karamazoz: “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a painful mirage, like a despicable fabrication of an infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, and that in the world’s finale at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive, but to justify all that has happened.”

As Augustine said: 'In my deepest wound I will see your glory and it will dazzle me!'

Julian of Norwich in her immortal words said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

The Christian faith does not answer the why of a particular suffering, but it tells us suffering will redeemed… and that a redeemed suffering is better no suffering at all…

The Christian faith’s answer to suffering is not an abstract answer, but a person.

When we look into the face of Jesus Christ, the one thing we cannot say is that God doesn’t love us.

In the face of Jesus Christ, see that God as a human being in Jesus voluntarily experienced the greatest depth of pain.

I have gone into a number of Buddhist temples in Japan and other Asian countries and have looked at the statues of Buddha, some of them large and very impressive. His legs are crossed, his arms are folded, his eyes are closed with a soft smile around his mouth, and a remote look on his face-- detached from sufferings of the world.

But in Christ we have a picture of God, who became a human being, allowed himself to be nailed to a cross, suffered on the cross, bearing in his body our sins and our shame, so that we could be forgiven of our sin and set free from it.

He of course experienced the great physical pain of being crucified, but also the immense emotional pain of being separated from God his Father. It’s painful when we break up with our partner, it’s painful when you lose a parent or spouse or child… but no loss was as great as Jesus losing the infinite love of God that he had enjoyed from all eternity. That is why he cried from the cross, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”

He also knew the spiritual pain of bearing the sin and shame of the world upon himself.

Jesus knows the physical pain of being whipped and nailed to the cross, searing emotional pain of losing something infinitely precious, the spiritual pain of bearing the sin and shame of the world upon himself.

Jesus is present to us in our physical pain, in our heart break, in the pain of our shame, and in all our losses.

He knows suffering first hand and is present with every person who has suffered whether in an Auschwitz concentration camp, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the genocide in Sudan, or right here in Vancouver.

Jesus doesn’t so much give us the answer to the why of our suffering, but he sits with us and weeps with us in our pain.

On the night he was betrayed, he showed how us how much he loved us.

He took bread…