Saturday, December 22, 2012

Jowin Lau's Funeral Homily

December 15, 2012

Jowin Lau's Funeral Homily
​Earlier this month I received an email from my friend Sarah Tsang, who has known Jowin and Joeis since they were young children. My friend Sarah has clear memories of Jowin, and his twin sister Joeis, as five year-olds attending Sunday school and the Awana clubs at their church, dressed by their mom in matching outfits. Sarah, like many of us here, was devastated by Jowin's tragic death on the Lion's Gate bridge. There is nothing quite as painful as losing a loved one, especially when they are so young - Jowin was just 21 years old.
For a time, Jowin, like many of us in our teenage years - and I went down this path myself, in my adolescence – hung out with the wrong crowd, experimented with things he thought would lift him up, but ended up just bringing him down. But over the last year or two, he had begun to experience an amazing turn-around. Largely motivated by the turmoil, the struggles, the anger, and the depression that he had felt in some of his teenage years, Jowin wanted to study psychology, and become a counsellor who could help other teenagers through that often dark, difficult passage of their lives.
Just at a time when Jowin had discovered his life purpose, and was starting to hit stride as a young man, his life seemed prematurely snuffed out. And we grieve the loss of this thoughtful, generous, sacrificial, smart son, brother, friend, and I know that for some of us - especially those of us of Asian ancestry - it is difficult to really grieve and mourn and wail. There is something in our cultural heritage that causes us to hold in our feelings, and to hold back our displays of emotion.
But at times like this, we need to grieve, mourn, and wail. And some of us here carry a particularly heavy burden. We feel regret, at not having spent more time with Jowin, for not having done more for him. Some of us experience not only grief, but also regret, shame, and guilt. Those are the last things that Jowin would want you to experience. Jowin wants you to live without that burden - to become free. If he had lived to become a psychologist he would help you to acknowledge those feelings, but he would want to lead you to a place of freedom.
Jowin and Joeis' parents, Raymond and Peo, asked me as their minister to bring a word from scripture - from God – for this time as this. And while the pages of scripture contain much wisdom, they don't tell us why someone like Jowin, who was poised to enter the prime of his life, had his life tragically taken at such a young age.
But the scriptures do tell us that Jowin's death, on the Lion's Gate bridge, was not his end - that Jowin is alive, and in fact more alive than he has ever been before and in a better place.
In the gospel of John, chapter 14, Jesus is with some of His closest students on the night that He is betrayed by Judas, and the night before He ends up being nailed to a Roman cross. They realize that there is an assassination plot on Jesus' life, and that as those closely associated with Him, that their lives are also in grave danger. And so as Jesus gathers in an upper room with His students, sharing a meal, He notices that there is fear in the eyes of His friends. And so He offers these words:
"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. 2 My Father’s house has plenty of room; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4 You know the way to the place where I am going." 5 Thomas said to him, "Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?" 6 Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:1-6)
And the scriptures teach that the Father’s house or heaven is a real place, a better place, and that Heaven is precisely where Jowin is right now.
And based on what people have experienced, who have been clinically dead, and have gone to Heaven, and then have been seemingly resuscitated, people prefer to be there than here. And so as much as we would do anything to bring Jowin back, as much as we grieve his loss, he would want us to know that he is in a better place.
Earlier this year I read the experience of a man named Don Piper. Don was driving on his way home from a conference and was crossing a small two-way bridge and an oncoming semi-truck suddenly swerved into his lane and drove right over his Ford Escort, crushing him and his little car. The medical personnel arrived, ran a series tests on him and confirmed that he had died instantly. Because he was clearly already dead the emergency workers did not make any attempt to move his body out of his crushed car.
90 minutes after the car accident a pastor named Richard who was driving along the road, stopped and asked the medical person personnel and police, “What had happened.” They explained how Don had his car run over by this semi truck and was instantly declared dead. Richard felt compelled by the Holy Spirit to pray for the man who had died. With the permission of the police and medical personnel, he walked over to the crushed car, lifted up the tarp, he began to pray for him. For some reason he felt led to sing the old hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” As he began to sing, to his utter shock Don, the man in the car, began singing with him. His life, ninety minutes after being clinically declared dead, returned to life.
In this book called 90 Minutes in Heaven, Don describes what it was like to actually go to heaven and to meet his friend Mike from high school who had led him to Jesus Christ…a popular athlete who had died at 19. He also describes movingly the beautiful music of heaven, the thousands of voices and countless different kinds of music, yet somehow all coalescing into a mesmerizingly beautiful, coherent, and sublime melody. He talked about the beautiful colours of heaven and how he felt more alive and more joy and happiness than he had never known on earth.
If heaven is real and Jowin is there, while his death has hurt us, death hasn’t hurt him It’s simply become a passageway to greater place.
There was a pastor named Don Barnhouse who served in Pennsylvania.
He was married with young children.
His wife died when they were young.
One day not long after his wife when Don was driving down a freeway in Pennsylvania with his young son and daughter. The sun was descending.
There was a huge semi-truck coming toward them in the oncoming lane. As the truck passed them the shadow of the truck swept over their little car.
Donald turned to his kids and said, “What would you rather have hit you, the truck or the shadow of the truck?” His kids said, “Well, of course, the shadow, because the shadow can’t hurt us!”
And Donald explained to them that 2000 years on the cross Jesus allowed the “truck of death” to run over him so that only its shadow would run over us. He explained how on the cross Jesus bore our sins on the cross so we could be forgiven and experience the life of God, but also in a life to come in heaven. He explained he bore the brunt of death on the cross so that only its shadow would run over us.
This past week, someone in our community that I know well, shared with me that her 25 year-old niece was killed in a tragic car accident. She was driving her car on windy road on a rainy, foggy night at high speed and she swerved off the road. She wasn't wearing her seatbelt. She went right through her front windshield, and died. And my friend was telling me that, a few days after her tragic death, she was grieving, mourning the loss of her beloved niece, and out of the blue she had this clear vision of her niece flying through the windshield and landing right into the arms of Jesus.

And on the night of November 28, when Jowin's car was in a terrible accident, he flew right into the arms of Jesus. And if Jowin could speak to us today, I know that he would say: "I'm in a better place."
His parents, Raymond and Peo, also told me that Jowin would not want his death to be in vain - that he would want something good to come out of it. I've been meditating on Psalm 90, where it says in verses 9-10 (and I'm just going to excerpt part of it): All our days pass quickly, then we fly away. We are like the new grass of the morning. In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered. And the Psalmist says, in verse 12: Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Our endless days are numbered. And whether they pass away at 21, or 81, they are just a mist - it is here for a moment, and then gone. And in light of the brevity of our life, the Psalmist urges us to number our days, and to gain the wisdom that comes from the perspective that our lives on Earth will be over soon. And Jowin would challenge us to prayerfully reflect on the purpose, the meaning, and the potential legacy of our own lives. Why are we here? Who are we becoming? What difference are we making?

And the second thing that Jowin would want to say to us, if he were here, would be to prepare for our death. According to Jowin's psychologist, who was meeting with him one-on-one, the day before Jowin died, Jowin recommitted his life to God. As a young boy, Jowin believed. During his teenage years, he fell away from conscious relationship with God, but on the day before he died, in the presence of his counsellor - who happened to be a Christian - Jowin reoffered his life to God.
And if you offer your life into God's hands, you'll find that He carries you throughout this lifetime, giving you a greater peace, joy, sense of meaning and purpose than you would otherwise have. And on the day that you die, you'll find yourself cast from this life to the next, with God's everlasting arms beneath you.
Let's pray.



4

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Grace and Justice





City Series M-8
November 25, 2012
Speaker: Ken Shigematsu
Title: Grace & Justice
Texts: Deuteronomy 10:16-19, 15:1-11, 24:19-22; Matt 25:31-46

BIG IDEA: In response to God’s grace we are called to generously give and work for justice in the world.

When someone is introducing you what do you want said about you? Or, if you are introducing yourself say in 140 characters or less as in Twitter bio, what will you say about yourself? In my little intro I’m a pastor of Tenth Church in Vancouver and I am husband to Sakiko and father to Joey.

How we introduce ourselves tells others what we do, what we value, who we are in relationship with. When God introduces himself in the Scriptures, he calls himself a “The Father to the fatherless and the defender of widows” (Psalm 68:5).

One of the most important things God does in the world is to take up the cause of the poor and powerless. And, as we noted in one of the earlier messages in this series, this particular bio for God is remarkable. In the ancient world, as we’ve seen, the gods were capricious, cruel, self-serving, and favored the rights of the rich and powerful and gave virtually no rights to the poor. Whereas the living God regards all people, even slaves, as human and sacred. The bias that the Living God has, not in favor of the powerful, but the powerless, as historian Thomas Cahill points out, is unique not only in ancient law but in the whole history of law. God certainly loves both the rich and the poor, and in the Bible, while there are texts that call for justice for members of the well-to-do classes, his calls to extend justice to the poor outnumber those passages by about a hundred to one. And this emphasis has led some, like Latin American theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, to speak of God’s “preferential option for the poor.”

When a person reflects the compassion, generosity and justice of God they are called righteous.

Take Job for example:

The character Job in the Bible was described as righteous.

In Job 29:12-17, Job says:
12 For I assisted the poor in their need
and the orphans who required help.
13 I helped those without hope, and they blessed me.
And I caused the widows’ hearts to sing for joy.
14 Everything I did was honest.
Righteousness covered me like a robe,
and I wore justice like a turban.
15 I served as eyes for the blind
and feet for the lame.
16 I was a father to the poor
and assisted strangers who needed help.
17 I broke the jaws of godless oppressors
and plucked their victims from their teeth.
Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke, who taught for many years at Regent College here in Vancouver, points out that the righteous persons like Job in Scripture are willing to disadvantage themselves for the sake of the community. The wicked, conversely, according to Waltke, are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves.

In this final sermon in the Deuteronomy series we’re going to look at several texts in Deuteronomy that show us how we can become a person who is just and part of what it looks like to live this way (2x).

So first, how do we become a person of greater justice?

It's true that because of the sin virus that has affected us all so like the gods of the ancient world we can be selfish and self-serving.

But we are also made in the image of the Living God who is compassionate and just.

As human beings who are made in God's image each of us has at the very least a dormant seed of compassion and justice (use prop).

And as we are drawn into a relationship with the Living God, and experience his redeeming grace, the seed of compassion and justice within us is watered and the shoot of God’s love and mercy begins to grow out from us (use prop).

And Moses understands this is so as he preaches on the banks of the Jordan River and he calls his people – who are first made in God's image and then were redeemed by God's grace as they were delivered out of Egypt that land where they were slaves -- to become who compassionate and just.


In Deuteronomy 10:16-19:
16 Therefore, change your hearts and stop being stubborn.
17 “For the Lord your God is the God of gods and Lord of lords. He is the great God, the mighty and awesome God, who shows no partiality and cannot be bribed. 18 He ensures that orphans and widows receive justice. He shows love to the foreigners living among you and gives them food and clothing. 19 So you, too, must show love to foreigners, for you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt (Deut. 10:16-19).
Pray
Moses reminds the people of God that they had been slaves in Egypt, poor, and oppressed. And if they had been poor and oppressed people in Egypt, and then experienced God’s grace, God’s pure gift, as he sprung them free from their land of slavery, they in turn were to respond by showing God’s mercy and justice to the poor by loving the orphan, the widow, and the poor immigrant in your midst.

And all of us here are made in God’s image—so the seed of compassion and justice is at the very least dormant within us—and many of us have experienced the grace of God in a way that is even deeper than for the ancient children of Israel at the time of Moses. Many of us here have experienced God’s redemption, not physically but from a far more pervasive spiritual slavery to sin and a self-centered way of life, and we've been brought into a friendship with the Living God.

And if this has been our experience, we can express our gratitude to God by living lives of generosity, compassion, and justice.

But what specifically does it look like to live with generosity, compassion, and justice?

In Deuteronomy, Chapter 24:19-22:
19 “When you are harvesting your crops and forget to bring in a bundle of grain from your field, don’t go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigners, orphans, and widows. Then the Lord your God will bless you in all you do. 20 When you beat the olives from your olive trees, don’t go over the boughs twice. Leave the remaining olives for the foreigners, orphans, and widows. 21 When you gather the grapes in your vineyard, don’t glean the vines after they are picked. Leave the remaining grapes for the foreigners, orphans, and widows. 22 Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt. That is why I am giving you this command.
Doesn’t this passage reveal God’s heart of generosity? It’s clear in this passage that God doesn’t want the farmer to take the entire harvest for himself and his family, but to leave some of the harvest on the ground for the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow. In God’s view, the poor had a right to some of the farmer’s produce. Now most of us are not farmers, so what is the application here for us? It means that if we are God’s children and recognize how gracious God has been to us, and we want to walk in His ways as people who are righteous, then again to quote Bruce Waltke, as righteous people we will be willing to disadvantage ourselves for the sake of the community. The wicked, according to Waltke, are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves. But the righteous, are willing to disadvantage themselves for the sake of the community.

So what does it look like to become like God and to be willing to disadvantage ourselves on behalf of someone else? What this means is that we take a more generous posture of life.
A couple of examples from life, and then one from a business owner, and one from how it applies to life in the larger world:
First, there is something I do a weekly basis that reminds me of the passage in Deuteronomy 24 that calls us to leave something for others when harvesting. It’s such a small thing, and I feel a little sheepish talking about it. Each week it’s my job to take out the garbage and recycling. It’s a very small thing I do, but it reminds me of this passage We always put bottles and cartons in the recycling blue box that we could cash in. But we always, actually it’s almost always my wife who rinses any of the bottles that we’ve used, because we know that they are going to be picked up by someone in the back alley. And if I bump into someone in the back alley as they are pushing their shopping cart and picking up bottles and cans that they can cash in for a small refund, I always thank them for helping us recycle.
And here’s something else we do that’s more substantial for us, but again not all that heroic. It was just something that my wife and I are completely on the same page. We want to honor God’s call to tithe, to set aside, the first tenth of our income on a regular basis for God’s work to our local church, but we also want to offer substantially more to God’s work with poor, particularly God in the developing world. We’ve had the privilege of directing money to help support a school for orphan children in the Sudan or a center that helps children and women recover from the trauma of being trafficked into the sex trade.
A couple of years ago our new accountant said, “You’ve given away money to charities to the point where it’s not a benefit to you financially. From a financial perspective, I would advise you defer some of charitable giving to future years.” We talked it over and said, “We appreciate your advice. We can’t foresee the future. We’re hoping, aiming to continue to give at that rate.”
It’s not done out of a sense of guilt or obligation. We know that God loves us as we are, but out of gratitude as we are able we want to give and to live more generously.
As I was discussing this sermon with my colleague Jade this week, he hesitated for a moment and said, “I have a personal story.” Jade said, “my dad is a frugal guy – is very careful with his money. My dad was a high school teacher—he earned a modest salary. When we were growing up, we would go out for dinner. I remember we always ordered the small portions of things. And his thriftiness at times bothered me. But as I grew older, I saw that he was very careful about spending money on himself. When we'd be in a store and we would say you should buy this shirt it would look good on you, he'd say maybe but I have a shirt. He was very careful about spending money on himself, so he could be generous toward others. He’d get a gleam in his eye because he had an opportunity to give to an impoverished single mother at church. He was quietly able help a number of refugees who used affectionately to refer to as his “boat boys” while getting established in Canada. And after they were able to establish themselves, every year at Christmas for about 12 years they would show up at the Holownia’s door with Christmas gifts as a way to say thank you.
Mr. Holownia is person who is willing to disadvantage himself and, in a relative sense, his immediate family for the sake of other families. Biblically, he’s a righteous person.
Second, if we are business owners, or in some kind of management position, the gleaning laws in Deuteronomy 24 show us that God doesn’t want us to squeeze every cent of profit we can out of people.
While profit is obviously is a necessary part of business, we can also advocate for practices that don’t try to charge the highest possible price to customers and pay the lowest possible wages to people.
Don, a friend and a follower of Christ, owns a series of car dealerships in North Carolina. He’s a friend of my mentor Leighton Ford who also lives in North Carolina. As I’ve shared before, through a self-study of his business, he discovered that men were getting better deals than women, and that Caucasian males were receiving the best buys on cars while black women were getting the worst deals. He realized that black women, many of whom were on lower incomes, were in effect subsidizing the car purchases of the relatively wealthy Caucasians males: by paying more than the market value for their cars, these minority women were enabling others to get away with paying less than the market value.

Don, a business leader who follows Jesus, knew his company was violating God’s call to act justly. Appealing to the consciences of his employees, he made the case for stopping discrimination against car customers and for fixing a fair market “price is price” sales policy on cars. Don said, “As a Christian, I believe we have to be willing to sacrifice some of our financial profits [for the sake of justice].” His employees, even those who were not religious, agreed.

He’s disadvantaging his business to advantage the community.

This week in response to last week’s message a person shared this story with me.

Bob Moore owned a thriving whole foods company. It was growing by 20 or 30% each year and company was generating millions of dollars in revenue.
(show slide)



​ Bob Moore

When he reached his retirement years, he thought about the possibility of selling the company. He had many offers. He could've become instantly rich.

But then he thought about how his 200-300 employees have given so much of themselves to the company. He thought how generous Jesus Christ had been to him. He decided to split the company into shares and over a couple of years give the company a way to its employees.

The employees were just blown away.

One employee who doesn’t believe in God wrote this, “Now as an agnostic – I do not share the same religious viewpoints, but I find Mr. Moore’s example inspiring. Seeing a real life example of what I envision non-hypocritical Christianity to look like is quite humbling and Mr. Moore’s ability to lead by example is wonderful to watch.”

Bob Moore is disadvantaging himself for the sake of the community. He’s an example of right living.


In our personal life and in our work life, as we looked at during last Sunday’s sermon and, third, wherever we can on we call global scale; we work to forward God’s vision for a world of greater mercy and justice. We see God’s heart for the poor, not only in the gleaning passages but throughout the book of Deuteronomy and the Bible.

For example, in Deuteronomy 15:4-5 we read:
4 “There should be no poor among you, for the Lord your God will greatly bless you in the land he is giving you as a special possession. 5 You will receive this blessing if you are careful to obey all the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today.
And then in Deuteronomy 15:1-2 we read:
“At the end of every seventh year you must cancel the debts of everyone who owes you money. 2 This is how it must be done. Everyone must cancel the loans they have made to their fellow Israelites. They must not demand payment from their neighbors or relatives, for the Lord’s time of release has arrived.
Any Israelite who fell into debt had to be forgiven those debts every seventh year. Creditors could no longer demand payment and they even had to return the pledges of collateral taken for the debt itself. The whole purpose of this law Tim Keller, a pastor and former teacher who has taught me much about justice, observes, was to remove one of the key factors causing poverty—long-term, burdensome debt. Every seventh year was called a Sabbath year in which debts and slaves were freed (Deuteronomy 15:1-18). But every seventh Sabbath year, that is every forty-ninth year, was declared a year of jubilee. In this year not only were debts forgiven, but the land was to go back to the original families as it was distributed in the Promised Land after the Israelites entered.

Bible scholar Craig Blomberg says, “This is the ultimate realization of private property. On average, each person or family had at least a once in a lifetime chance to start afresh, no matter how irresponsibly they had handled their finances or how far into debt they had fallen.”

Global debt – it’s a massive problem in our own world. When Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his accomplishments after his post Presidency years fighting poverty and disease, he spoke about what he regarded as the most pressing problem in the world:
Interestingly he didn’t speak about terrorism, or religious extremism, or climate change—as significant as these are.

Here’s what Carter said:

At the beginning of this new millennium I was asked to discuss, here in Oslo, the greatest challenge that the world faces. Among all the possible choices, I decided that the most serious and universal problem is the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on earth. Citizens of the ten wealthiest countries are now seventy-five times richer than those who live in the ten poorest ones, and the separation is increasing every year, not only between nations but also within them. The results of this disparity are root causes of most of the world’s unresolved problems, including starvation, illiteracy, environmental degradation, violent conflict, and unnecessary illnesses that range from Guinea worm to HIV/AIDS.

Of all the problems facing our planet, Carter chose to speak of “the growing chasm between the richest and the poorest people on earth” as the root cause of many of the other problems in our world including, starvation, illiteracy, environmental degradation.

N.T. Wright is one of the most respected theologians in our world today and he similarly says:

As far as I can see, the major task that faces us in our generation, corresponding to the issue of slavery two centuries ago, is that of the massive economic imbalance of the world, whose major symptom is the ridiculous and unpayable Third World debt. I have spoken about this many times over the last few years, and I have a sense that some of us, like old Wilberforce on the subject of slavery are actually called to bore the pants off people by going on and on about it until eventually the point is taken and the world is changed… I… want to record my conviction that this is the number one moral issue of our day. Sex matters enormously, but global justice matters far, far more. The present system of global debt is the real immoral scandal, the dirty little secret – or rather the dirty enormous secret – of glitzy, glossy Western capitalism. Whatever it takes, we must change this situation or stand condemned by subsequent history alongside those who supported slavery two centuries ago and those who supported the Nazis seventy years ago.

When people object to N.T. Wright by saying that while the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, that wealth is not finite, and that canceling debt and giving “handouts” literally strip the poor of their human dignity and vocation to work, all this will encourage the poor toward a sinful envy of the rich, slothful escapism.

Wright says:

“I want to take such commentators to refugee camps, to villages where children die every day, to towns where most adults have already died of AIDS, and show them people who haven’t got the energy to be envious, who aren’t slothful because they are using all the energy they’ve got to wait in line for water and to care for each other, who know perfectly well that they don’t need handouts so much as justice” (p. 218).

When you look at Carter and Wright’s passion for decreasing the gap between the rich and the poor of the world, and as we contribute in some way to this cause, we are reflecting the heart of God as we see it in Deuteronomy -- to care for the foreigner, the poor, the widow, the alien, the orphan, a heart that loves to see spiritual debt (sin) and financial debts forgiven.

When people, companies and nations disadvantage themselves in some way for the sake of the greater global community, it will be seen as a righteous act in God's sight.

When you listen to a message like this, perhaps you feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the need, even if we’re involved in some work of justice, particularly so, it can feel like a drop in the ocean.

And so I want to close with this application and invitation in giving or leading businesses. Some time ago I had coffee with Mike Yankoski. He has spoken here a couple of times (as you may recall he voluntarily spent five months living as a homeless person to get a sense as to what that experience is like). “Do you have any advice for me as I speak on issues of social justice to young adults? Seems like your church has a lot of them.” And I can’t remember what I actually said—nothing note worthy, but then I asked Mike “Do you have any advice for me when I speak on these topics?”

And he said “Yes. Because the needs are so vast in the world, I encourage people to focus on one issue. For Danae and me our passion is to help provide clean water.”

As you may recall when Mike spoke here, Mike shared about how he and Danae had the opportunity to partner with several organizations drilling wells and providing clean water in Uganda. One afternoon as they walked past a family’s hut they noticed ten graves, one for an adult and nine for children. All of them had died because they didn’t have safe drinking water. A week later, they were walking toward a neighboring village and suddenly the hot afternoon silence was pierced by cries of joy, whooping, and singing. From a cluster of nearby huts several women came running at them later and they were singing and dancing, and they had no idea what the women were singing, but they were singing, “Praise God, for clean water has come.” Singing because they were so happy they are no longer sick, their children would no longer die from diarrhea. For Mike and Danae it is unclean water; for you it might be trafficking.

A number of us here have been involved with the anti-sex trafficking movement, others with refugees, others with hunger, others with education, others with HIV/AIDS, others with racial, gender, or economic inequality, others care for the earth. Pray, expose yourself to some needs in the world, discern how God has gifted you and channel your response in expressing God’s compassionate, generous, and just heart for one cause in the world.

And our ultimate motivation, as we have seen in Deuteronomy and in Jesus Christ, to disadvantage our self to serve the poor and those in need, isn’t guilt or obligation, but gratitude for all that Christ has done for us who, being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
by becoming obedient to death
even death on a cross so we experience the joy of God’s life now and forever
Philippians 2:7- 8

In the early part of the 19th century, a young Scottish preacher named Robert Murray McChenyne preached a sermon on the text: “It is more blessed to give than receive” and he said, and I close with these words:

Now, dear Christians, some of you pray night and day to be branches of the true Vine, you pray to be made all over in the image of Christ. If so, you must be like him in giving…”Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor”…Objection 1. “My money is my own.” Answer: Christ might have said, “My blood is my own, my life is my own”…then where should we have been? Objection 2. “The poor are undeserving.” Answer: “Christ might have said, “They are wicked rebels…shall I lay down my life for these? I will give to the good angels.” But no, he left the ninety-nine, and came after the lost. He gave his blood for the undeserving. Objection 3. “The poor may abuse it.” Answer: Christ might have said the same; yea, with far greater truth. Christ knew that thousands would trample his blood under their feet; that most would despise it; that many would make it an excuse for sinning more; yet he gave his own blood. Oh, my dear Christians! If you would be like Christ, give much, give often, give freely, to the vile and poor, the thankless and the undeserving. Christ is glorious and happy and so will you be. It is not your money I want, but your happiness. Remember his own word, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Invite Christ who gave it all for you to cleanse and make you new and make the world through you a more just place—and you’ll know from experience the words of Jesus:
“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”


10

Monday, December 03, 2012

Remade to Reconcile

City Series M-2 Speaker: Ken Shigematsu Title: Remade to Reconcile Text: 2 Corinthians 5:11-21 August 26, 2012 BIG IDEA: When we are reconciled to God, we become an instrument of God’s reconciliation in the world. INTRODUCTION: One of the great gifts of the Olympic Games is that it brings together people from so many cultures, social backgrounds, and countries. And it’s great to see athletes, who may not share a common language, congratulating each other after a victory or consoling someone else after a defeat. One of the reasons we are impressed with this kind of cross-cultural interaction is because we don’t see it very often. Sociologist tells us that for most of us our friends look like us, earn about the same amount of money, and have similar backgrounds to us. And while we may have a few acquaintances that are richer than we are or poorer than we are, most of our real friends are just like us. But this can change when enter into a friendship with Jesus Christ. At our newcomers’ dinner, Connections, I tell the story about how on one Sunday a group of people spontaneously decided to go out for lunch after the worship service. In the group was a man from India, who had been raised as in the Brahman priest sect. He was from a very traditional background. He had come to Vancouver and through the ministry of Tenth had given his life to Christ. There was someone gay in the group, who was more liberal in his sensibilities. There was an artist in the group, an engineer, I believe, and an accountant. (I wasn’t actually at the lunch). Apparently during the lunch someone looked around at the table and said, “Look at us, there’s no way we would be having lunch together if it wasn’t because of our common connection to Christ.” And when we meet Jesus Christ personally, we discover that God remakes us so that we experience not only a new relationship with God, but we find we are in closer relationships to people who are different from us – people who might otherwise be distant from or even enemies. In short, when we are in a relationship with Jesus Christ, we find ourselves reconciled to God and to people. But as we are reconciled to people – we find ourselves drawn closer to people different from ourselves – we will find that others in turn are drawn closer to God. In 2 Corinthians, Chapter 5, verse 18, we read that God, who reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ, has also given us the ministry of reconciliation. Today, we're going to explore what this looks like. Today, as we conclude this series from Corinthians on the Gospel in the City, or how we live out the way of Jesus in the city, we are going to look at what it means to serve to have a ministry of reconciliation in the world. If you have your Bibles you please turn to 2 Corinthians 5: 11-21: 2 Corinthians 5:14-21 (TNIV) 14 For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. 16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin[a] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. PRAY As we will see in this text, our ministry of reconciliation, our work of building bridges to other people, and then helping others cross a bridge to God, begins with our first being reconciled to God. As we are reconciled to God, we find ourselves more likely to draw closer to people who are different from us in some way. As this happens, with the help of God, we’ll see people drawn closer to God. But, what’s the first step in our becoming an instrument of God’s reconciliation in the world? How do we become people who reach out to people who may be very different from ourselves--and in some cases even with those whom we would naturally be distant from and even our enemies? How do we become people who “share the presence” of God through our lives so that others are reconciled to God? The first step is our being reconciled to God--when we enter a relationship with God. Edwin Friedman, the author of the classic Generation to Generation, writes about each of us is involved in a series of emotional triangles. In relationships, there is often an unseen third person who affects that relationship. A young boy seems angry is bullying his classmates. It’s later revealed that his father become beats him when he's drunk. A woman appears to be increasingly distant from her husband. This emotional estrangement coincides with an affair that she has begun. More positively: A high school student is able to calmly resist peer pressure to use drugs at a party – even though it's costing him some popularity. It’s later shown that he has a great relationship with his father. A newly-married woman has a surprisingly good relationship with her mother-in-law. Later it comes out that the newlywed has a really healthy relationship with her own mother. None of our relationships exist in a vacuum. Each of them is affected by some unseen person in the relationship. And, when God becomes a central part of our lives, all of our other relationships are shaped. When God is part of our life, all our other relationships are changed. One of the signs that we have really come to know God, according to Romans 5, is that we have this sense of God’s love streaming into our hearts. And as this love from this unseen “third person” streams into and wells up within us, we become more loving people. When we know how much we are loved by our Maker, we cannot help but overflow with love for others. In fact, the mark of a person who is in a genuine relationship with God is not a cross around their neck. It’s not a fish. It’s not even a set of doctrinal beliefs, as important as what we believe is. But THE mark of a person in a genuine relationship with God is love. Jesus said, “By this all people will know you are my disciples if you love one another.” And when we are reconciled with God, when God is the unseen person that affects every other relationship we have. (T) Of course, the reason God affects every other relationship is because when God is in our life we become new people. In 2 Corinthians 5:17 we read that if we are in a relationship with Christ, we are made new. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! And when God comes into our lives we become new, and one consequence of being made new is we see people differently. What we see is shaped by who we are. Two people on plane can react very differently to a crying toddler in the row in front of them. One can be annoyed by the child and its mother or father. The other can be moved to compassion for the child and want to help. What we see is shaped by who we are. In verse 16 Paul writes that, as a result of being reconciled to God, we become new. We regard no one from a worldly point of view. In the opening message of this series, Lee Kosa talked about how when we are brought into a relationship with God it changes the ways that we see people. If we are not in a relationship with the living God, we see Christ, this historic figure, hanging on a cross, and we feel sorry for him, for his suffering. Or we assume, like most of the people of his day assumed at the time he was being nailed to the cross, that he was being executed for some heinous crime he must have committed. In much the same way that we would assume if we saw someone sentenced to an electric chair. But when we are drawn into a relationship with God we see Christ differently. We no longer see his death as an ignominious defeat, or as retribution for a crime he committed. We understand that, in a mysterious way, the Christ on the cross was bearing in his body the punishment for our sins so that we could experience the forgiveness of our sins and be reconciled to God… And when we are in a love relationship with God, we are changed and become new people. We see Christ differently and we see people differently (vs. 16): “we no longer regard people from a worldly point of view,” because what we see is always the result of who we are. We human beings tend to judge people on their appearance, what they do, how much money they have. When we are drawn to God and made new, we see people differently because what we see is always the result of who we are. And this isn't merely a theoretical point. I know this to be true of my own experience. As I shared before, as a young teenager the most important goal in my life was to be part of the popular, cool, tough crowd at school. I worked really hard to gain admission to this group and made it – though just barely. And I remember as a group we looked down on almost everyone else – including a group of soccer players who were also some of the more preppy students on campus. At the time, I was taking martial arts. I remember walking down the hallway and seeing one of the kids who was part of the soccer group sitting by his locker eating an apple. I wanted to impress my friends on the accuracy of my kicks, so as we were walking by I decided that I would kick the kid’s apple out of his hand. So I jog up and I am attempting to kick the apple out of his hand, but I missed the apple and instead catch his chin and drive his back into the locker. It isn't so much hurt him physically, but it did humiliate him. I just walked on pretending that I was intending to kick him in the head. About a year or two, later I committed my life to Christ. Christ began to change in the way that I viewed people. And I remember thinking that the kid Mark who I kicked in the head wasn't just some preppy loser, but someone who was made in the image of God. So when I was in grade 11 and grade 12, I was attending a different school, but remember looking up his address, knocking on his door and he answered. I said,” You probably remember me. I kicked you in the head. I have come to your house to apologize.” He said, “Oh….Sure, but I'm curious why are you apologizing now?” I said, “This may sound strange, but I have met Jesus Christ and this powerfully changed my life in the way I see people.” He said, “It's interesting. You probably don't know this but my dad is a pastor and I’m a believer too.” Being in a relationship with Christ totally changed the way I saw Mark and helped me see him as being a person made in the image of God and as a fellow brother from a different mother. While I have been changed quite a lot by Christ – it's been ages since I've kicked anyone in the head. I find I can slip into old patterns of relating to people. I can find that I have more energy to start to talk to someone, socially engage a stranger at a coffee shop or at the gym or at park, if they're attractive or seem interesting. And I catch myself saying this: Christ has loved so freely without reference to what I could do for him. Everyone is being made in the image of God. The other day in a public setting (and, no, it wasn’t Tenth). I'm deliberately making the setting vague... I recognized someone I have met only once or twice as they were serving me. And this person was amazed in the sense that because she is not classically attractive in a worldly kind of way a lot people probably don’t remember her. I thought I want to become the new kind of person—new because of Christ—that cares in small ways for people, people my old self would ignore or despise. Being in a relationship with Christ, not only changes how we view a particular individual, but as many people in the community or nation really embrace Christ, it changes the way they see people from other nations, other races, other cultures. I am originally from Japan. Part of the reason why the Japanese up until World War II subjugated other Asians to cruelty, slavery—including sexual slavery, and murder--was because they saw themselves as descendants of the gods, and therefore superior to other peoples. They had a false sense of purity. In our own country, part of the reason that immigrants from Europe stole land, enslaved, raped and murdered many First Nations Peoples was because they saw the natives as savages. Historically, south of border racism and slavery against blacks was “justified” because people thought that black people did not possess a soul. How does Jesus impact this? Miroslav Volf explains… that when Jesus came he not only remade things, but he also renamed things. 2X. Jesus renamed things--that others had called unclean, out of a false sense of purity, and called them clean….2X When we are made new in Christ, we will lose our false sense of purity, our false sense of superiority. We will name things clean that once we once deemed unclean because of our false sense of purity. When we are remade, in Christ not only will we rename things, but like Jesus, we will also reach out to people who are different from us--different from us culturally, economically, religiously. Our power for ministry, our motivation for reconciliation, flows from a love relationship with Jesus that transforms our vision… Paul said in his letter to the church in Philippi (Philippians 2); “If any of you have any encouragement from being united with Christ (any of you have any of this?), if any comfort from his love (any of you have any of this?), common sharing the Spirit (any of you have any of this?)… Our attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to used to his own selfish advantage, but became one who serves others…” We will be drawn to them and then they may be drawn closer to God. This summer I read the amazing story, the true story, of Louie Zamperini: the book by Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken. Keep the book jacket up through the highlighted section: Louie Zamperini as a boy was living in Southern California and somewhat like me had been a juvenile delinquent. He got into fights, broke into homes and stole things and once jumped a train to Mexico just for the fun of it. His older brother Pete was concerned about Louie, so he got him involved in the track and field team to channel Louie’s defiance into something productive. (Keep the photo up over the yellow). Louie began running and discovered this was his gift. He ending up breaking a bunch of high school track records and at only 19 ended up running in the Berlin Olympics. Many people predicted he would become the first human being to break the four-minute mile. With World War II breaking out, Louie enlisted in the United States Air Force and became a bombardier. While flying on out on the Pacific less than 1000 miles west of Hawaii, his defective plane crashed and he found himself on a small life raft with sharks swirling around him. After 47 days at sea, his rafted floated into the Marshall Islands and he was immediately captured by the Japanese Navy. Zamperini became a prisoner of war and he experienced brutality at the hands of the Japanese guards that would make the hair on your neck stand on end, or move you to tears, or great anger. They were starved and beaten mercilessly with fists, kicks, and baseball bats and in the case of one particularly brutal prison guard by a belt buckle on the head again and again, until they would fall unconscious. Amazingly Louie survived the POW camp where many had died. After the war he returned to North America where he met married a woman named Cynthia. But because Louie was experiencing severe post traumatic stress disorder, he started drinking and became an alcoholic, got into fights on the streets and in bars, and experienced nightmares where he was being beaten by particularly a brutal guard, fighting for his life. Because of the injuries he sustained in the POW camp, he could no longer run. His singular ambition was to make enough money to go back to Japan to find the prison guard that had tormented him most and kill him. As you can imagine, it was very difficult for Cynthia to live with Louie and said she was making plans to divorce him. But she was invited by an acquaintance in their new apartment building to attend a Christian service being held in a circus tent in LA. The speaker was a young, relatively unknown preacher at the time, named Billy Graham. And as a result of that service Cynthia was awakened to a relationship with God. Louie was appalled. Cynthia and their apartment neighbors invited Louie to go, but he adamantly refused. They kept inviting him. One day Cynthia told the little lie that tipped the balance. She said the Billy Graham's sermons were filled with reflections on science. She knew that her husband was interested in science, so he reluctantly agreed to go. That night as Mr. Graham was making an invitation for people to meet Christ, Louie was spooked and ran out of the tent angry. But he returned with his wife on another night and felt as though God was speaking to him at the end of that meeting to offer his life to God. When they returned to their apartment, Louie went straight to his cache of liquor. It was the time of the night when the urge to drink usually took hold of him, but for the first time in years, he had no desire to drink. He carried the bottles to the kitchen sink, opened them and poured the contents into the drain. Then he hurried through the apartment, gathering packs of cigarettes, a secret stash of pornographic magazines. He heaved it all down the trash chute. In the morning he awoke feeling cleansed. For the first time in five years, the brutal prison guards had not come to him in his dreams and they would never return. Louie felt a profound peace. He was not the worthless, broken, forsaken man that the guard had driven him to become. In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away. That morning, he believed. He was a new creation. Softly he wept. (Paraphrased from Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand). He lost all desire to gain revenge against his Japanese captor and instead felt compassion for him. Prior to the winter Olympic Games in Nagano in 1998 Zamperini was invited to carry the torch past Naoetsu, the notorious prisoner of war camp where he had been starving and unmercifully beaten to an inch from death. He said, “Yes.” And he wanted to offer forgiveness to the prison guard that had treated him with the most cruelty. He had met the other guards on a previous trip to a prison in Tokyo where they were being held that time. When he entered the prison, he threw his arms around each of them and offered forgiveness. They were stunned. Louie shared with them how Christ had changed his life. Several days before going to Nagano, he thought how he wanted to meet and offer forgiveness to the guard who treated him the worst and who had not been at the prison because he had been in hiding. Louie learned that the guard was alive and now living in Tokyo. He sat for several hours in silence and then clicked on his computer and wrote: To Matsuhiro [sic] Watanabe, ​As a result of my prisoner of war experience under your unwarranted and unreasonable punishment, my post-war life became a nightmare. It was not so much due to the pain and suffering as it was the tension of stress and humiliation that caused me to hate with a vengeance. ​Under your discipline, my rights, not only as a prisoner of war but also as a human being, were stripped from me. It was a struggle to maintain enough dignity and hope to live until the war’s end. ​The post-war nightmares caused my life to crumble, but thanks to a confrontation with God through the evangelist Billy Graham, I committed my life to Christ. Love replaced the hate I had for you. Christ said, “Forgive your enemies and pray for them.” ​As you probably know, I returned to Japan in 1952 [sic] and was graciously allowed to address all the Japanese war criminals at Sugamo Prison…I asked them about you, and was told that you probably had committed Hara Kiri, (suicide) which I was sad to hear. At that moment, like the others, I also forgave you and now would hope that you would also become a Christian. Louie Zamperini The former guard almost spat the invitation and refused to meet Louie, but someone offered to deliver the letter. Whether he read it or not, no one knows. Though our experience may not be as dramatic as Louie’s--when we are in Christ we are made new and we will see people and even our enemies differently, we will move toward them. As we do, in some cases they will be drawn to Christ. You may have never been beaten like Louie or have kicked in someone in the head, but are you being called to offer forgiveness, or being called close to some who you would naturally be distant from, or even an enemy? Take time to pray: 1

Choose Blessing

Deuteronomy Series M-4 Deuteronomy Series M-5, October 21, 2012 Speaker: Ken Shigematsu Title: Choose Blessing Text: Deuteronomy 11; 13:1-18; 28: 1-68, 30:15-20 BIG IDEA: Not following God’s way leads to death; following God leads to life. INTRODUCTION: Each morning I feed our 6 month old golden retriever puppy Sasha and then I grab the leash from the garage and we head out the door of our backyard to the boulevard beside our house. She's very excited because she knows we’re going to go to the park and sometimes she’ll want to bolt out across the street on her own. I’ll say, “Stop.” And she’ll look back at me and at the street wondering whether to run out onto the street or obey me. There's a similar dynamic with our four-year-old son Joey (he’s not a dog, he’s a human being). Sometimes we’ll open the front door, he'll want to run onto the street and I'll say stop and he’ll look back wondering whether to obey me or us to keep running. In both cases, there’s a part of Sasha and Joey that feels like if they obey me and they don't run out onto the street, there are going to miss out in some way. And so it can in our relationship with God. Many of us feel that if we obey God in certain areas, we’re going to miss out on life in some way. I care for Sasha and Joey, I don't want them to miss out on anything good in their lives. But God cares infinitely more for you and me, than I care for our puppy and our son. God doesn't want us to miss out on anything good in life. And all that he calls us to – whether it feels like it or not at the time – is an expression of his love for us. Moses understands this well. So as he preaches to children of Israel on the banks of the Jordan River as they prepare to enter the Promised Land, he calls them to trust and obey God – so that they will experience fullness of God's blessing and life. In Deuteronomy 11: 26-28 Moses preaches: Deuteronomy 11:26-28 (TNIV): 26 See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse— 27 the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; 28 the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known. Then similarly in Deuteronomy 30 Moses says: 19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life… PRAY: In these passages Moses is exhorting his people to trust and obey God so that they would experience the fullness of God’s blessing and life rather than experience a life that is cursed. In Deuteronomy 27 and 28, Moses specifically names the blessings that would flow if people chose to obey God and curses that would follow if people chose to disobey God. As you read through Deuteronomy, if the pattern where lists of the blessings are given for obedience and lists of curses for disobedience seems strange to you, this pattern would not have seemed strange at all to the ancient children of Israel. Whenever a king in the Ancient Near East would establish a covenant with his people, the king would list a series of blessings and curses, and by the way in the ancient world the list of curses was always considerably longer than the list of blessings – and this is also true in the book of Deuteronomy. Now if you were simply skimming the book of Deuteronomy and you saw the headlines “Blessings for Obedience” and “Curses for Disobedience” you might falsely assume that a person before God is on a kind of neutral plot of land before God; that is, if they obey God they will be blessed – if they disobey God they will be cursed. But it’s not quite that simple. First of all, the headlines in the TNIV (Today’s New International Version) were not in the original Hebrew text. They have been added by a recent editor to help outline the book. While these added headlines are often helpful, these particular headlines blessings and curses can be a little misleading because they can cause a person to believe that experiencing God’s blessings or curses is matter of simple arithmetic – either you do good and you’re blessed or you do evil and you’re cursed. That’s not the case. In Deuteronomy, we have the pattern of grace 1) First, God delivers his people out of slavery in Egypt where they been slaves for 400 years—that’s obviously grace. 2) And second, we see the grace of God in action as he gives his people the law. Yes, God’s law is itself an expression of God’s grace. How so? The law of God—and particularly the Ten Commandments—is an expression of God’s character. And since we were made in the image of God, when we honor God’s law, we honour the way God designed us. In Romans 1 we read that the law of God is written across our heart. It's imprinted on our very nature, and when we honor that law we honor the way we were designed and we flourish. We flourish in our relationship with God and each other. This is why Jesus said to the rich young ruler when he asked ‘What should I do to gain eternal life?’ Jesus said keep the commandments – it wasn’t that the rich young ruler could earn his way to eternal life, but in keeping the commandments he would find a pathway that would enable him to live in synch from the source of life – God. God didn’t give us his law so that he could punish us if we didn’t keep it. He didn’t give us his law so we could somehow earn our way into his favor. No, God gave us his law as an expression of his love for us so that we flourish in our relationship with God and each other. The order is important. God didn’t give his people the Ten Commandments in Egypt where they were slaves and say, “If you keep these laws, or if you keep them ninety percent of the time, then I will be indebted to you – I’ll owe you a favor and I’ll set you free from your slavery in Egypt.” No, God first set his people free from Egypt where they had been slaves – that’s grace. And then on Mount Sinai he gives them the Ten Commandments so they might experience a richer relationship with him and more harmonious relationships with each other. That also is grace. 3) And third, we see the grace of God as he leads his people into the Promised Land, a rich, fertile and abundant land-- a land flowing with "milk and honey.” So God had blessed his people by delivering them from Egypt, giving them the law which reflected their nature, and leading them into the Promised Land. Moses says to them (in Deuteronomy 11, 27, 28 and 30), “Now God already brought you into a place of blessing, and now in trust obey God so you experience the fullness of God’s blessing—on the path to life, joy, and wellness. And so it is with us, when God draws us into a relationship with himself, we are not on a neutral plot of land—where if obey we’re blessed and if we disobey we’re cursed—he’s already blessed us by delivering us from a spiritual place where we had been slaves to sin; he’s given us his law which if honored will enable us to flourish in our relationships with God and each other, and spiritually he's brought us into a promised land where we can thrive. He calls us to trust and obey him not because so that we to earn his blessings, no, he’s already longs to bless us. Rather God calls us to obey so that we can more fully enjoy God’s gifts to us as we live in ways that are consistent with the way He designed us. ​Some time ago we had some friends over for dinner and one of them brought our son Joe a remote control truck, a gift (bring it as a prop). But there were instructions that went with the gift that said things like “put the battery in the truck,” and other instructions like “don’t submerge the truck or the remote control in water.” The instructions were not included so that Joe could somehow “earn” the truck if he obeyed all the instructions. No, the truck was a gift, and the instructions were there to show him how to most fully enjoy the gift. And so it is with God and his law – God’s grace comes first. We saw that when he delivered his people out of Egypt, as he led people into the Promised Land, but then God gives his people the law so that they can most fully enjoy the gift of relationship with him and with one another most fully. This isn’t merely true in theory; it’s true in our life experience. Some time ago I was the Boston area having lunch with Dr.Joe Viola who teaches at Harvard Medical School. He said, “When you live in a way that is consistent with the Christian faith, (and he is a committed Christian), you don’t abuse your body through drugs or abusing alcohol, you’ll be happier and you’ll have healthier relationships, and you’ll tend to be healthier, and even if you get sick (as people do) you’ll tend to have more support and a sense of meaning even in your suffering.” Now obviously there are exceptions—life is not a simple mathematical equation--we know that people who do seem to abuse their bodies and seem to do okay, and others who have lead a life of real integrity who suffer from illnesses-- but generally speaking, what Dr. Viola was saying was that if you live in a way that is consistent with the Christian faith that is with your design, you are going to be happier and tend to flourish. Some of have heard me talk about the village of Roseto, Pennsylvania, a close-knit community of Italian immigrants who stop to chat in Italian on the street, take time to visit one another, and even cook for one another in their backyards. Research on this community demonstrates that people have a greater sense of happiness and overall well- being, as in Roseto, because of the strong sense of community here. Similarly, when we trust and obey, we tend to experience more of the fullness of life. It’s out of his love for us God says, “Trust and obey me and choose life.” And the opposite is also true when God through Moses us warns “disobey me; turn away from me – and your life will be cursed.” In Moses’ time, God’s people were sorely tempted to chase the idols of their day—and their idols were not that different from ours—material wealth, money, and sex and pleasure. Chasing agricultural wealth and the silver and gold that would come from that was certainly a temptation for people in Moses’ day. And in their day the “god” of fertility and agricultural prosperity was Baal. Baal was considered lord of the rain, lord of fertility, and lord of the crops. In Deuteronomy 11:16, God’s people are warned that if they succumb to the temptation to pay homage to Baal and the other gods, who seemed to control agricultural success, their prayers would have no affect – that they would find themselves coming up empty. And as we see in verses 16, 17, and 18 and although the gods of Baal had the reputation of being able to send rain and cause the crops to grow – those gods were nonetheless powerless to deliver. And so it is when we chase down the idol of money. When we serve it, when we put too we become selfishly ambitious in our careers will find ourselves empty. I was talking to another medical doctor who practices here in Vancouver. He’s very respected in his field, not a Christian, but a spiritual person, and he was telling me that there are so many people here in the city he sees who are financially very well off, corporative executives and the like, who are struggling with depression and struggling with the sense of meaningless in life. They have all the money they could ever need, and all the toys that money can buy, and yet there is emptiness there. Robert Bellah, the highly esteemed sociologist at UC Berkeley, has said – what many of us have observed – our material possession has not brought us happiness and meaning. Another idol then and now, of course, was sex and pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself; and in Deuteronomy 27 and 28 Moses lists the curses for people who are engaged in sexual promiscuity. And the symptoms he describes in Chapter 28: 28, as some commentators note, very closely describes syphilis. We know that when people in our time turn to sex outside of God’s will or pleasure as a means to fill the void in their own heart, they ultimately come up empty. A popular belief among doctors and social scientists and others has been that many teens begin drug use and sexual activity to deal with depression. However, a study published in the Journal of Preventive Medicine reverses those beliefs. Health policy researcher Denise Dion-Hallfors comments: "Findings from the study show depression came after substance use and sexual activity, not the other way around." The data was gathered from a survey of 13,491 adolescents. A large group of these teens, about 25 percent, were called "abstainers." They had never had sex, smoked, drank alcohol, or taken drugs. Only 4 percent of these teens experienced depression. The study also reported that girls among the 75 percent who had taken drugs and experimented with sex were 2–3 times more likely to experience depression than abstaining girls. Boys who engaged in binge drinking were 4.5 times more likely to experience depression than boys in the abstaining group. Boys smoking marijuana were more than 3 times more likely to be depressed than those who abstained. God doesn't say don't chase idols or god-substitutes because he wants to wreck our life, he tells us not to chase the idols because he knows that they'll never deliver, he says serve me because he knows that he's the only one that can satisfy the deepest longings of our heart. He says trust and obey me, not because he's a tyrant, but because he knows that only we experience true blessing and find out the path to life. One of the wisest Christ followers of his generation, E. Stanley Jones in his book The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person , says, and I paraphrasing: “The law of God is written within the structure of our being. We are built to obey the laws of the Kingdom. If we obey those laws written within us we are fulfilled; if we go against those laws we are frustrated and, if we persist we are broken… God doesn’t have to punish you if you break his laws written in you. …You don’t have to punish the eye for having sand in it, nor the hand for putting it fire, nor the soul for having sin in it. Sin and its punishment are one and the same thing.” A modern woman wrote to a newspaper: “They say to have an affair with another woman’s husband is heaven. I can tell you it is 10% heaven and 90% hell.” In the movie Moonstruck when Lonnie (Nicholas Cage) says to Loretta (Cher) before they consummate their affair: We are here to ruin ourselves, and to break our hearts. Dorothy Sayers says, “We never really break the law of God, we just break our self over it.” A boy was seen crying disconsolately. Someone asked, “What’s the matter.” He replied: “I’ve been playing hooky all day, and I just found out this is Saturday.” When we go against the way of God, we play hooky against our own best interests. We play hooky against ourselves. E. Stanley Jones says, “The kingdom of God is our homeland. If our body could express, it would say: ‘Please, oh please be Christian. I work well that way. If you try to work me some other way I work my own ruin.’ Every cell of your body dances with glee when you enter the Kingdom. You don’t have to manufacture ways to be happy; you just are happy when you obey the Kingdom. You don’t try to have a good time - you just have it.” This week while I was out Keats Island, I heard the story of a teenager who attended a Christian camp as someone who was not a believer. He was reading the Bible and the words just jumped out at him and he sensed God came into him. He couldn't stop smiling all week. He tried to stop smiling because it wasn’t cool to smile so much as teenager, but he couldn't help but smile. He didn't know anything about the Bible, but something deep inside him knew… and his soul was dancing with glee. Robert Murray Mccheyne said God doesn’t so much want your holiness so much as he wants your happiness, but the only way you will be happy is by being holy, through obedience, by honoring the way God made you… When we choose the narrow path of which Jesus spoke, it may be hard in some ways—there may be time of suffering—but, as was true of Jesus, there is resurrection, joy, and eternal life now and forever on this path. CS Lewis said, Every time we make a choice we are slowly turning either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To choose to trust and obey God is to become the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. So God says to through Moses in Deuteronomy 30: 19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you: life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life… Prayer: All of us here in some way have wandered from the path of God…we’ve all been comprised. And as a result we are all under, to one degree or another, the curse. But here is some great news: 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.”[a] 14 He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit” (Galatians 3:13-14). In this passage we read that Christ became the curse for us in order to fulfill the blessings promised to Abraham. He took on the curse for our disobeying God’s law, so that we could experience spiritual blessings—a life with God that fills us full, and relationships with others that flourish. Forgiveness. Choose life. 1

Sexual Integrity

Deuteronomy Series M-6 Oct 28, 2012 Speaker: Ken Shigematsu Title: Sexual Integrity Text: Deuteronomy 5:18; 22:22 & Matthew 5:27-32 BIG IDEA: When we are sexual faithful we reflect the image of a God who is faithful. INTRODUCTION: Chris Yuan: We live in a time when it’s easier than ever before to have an affair. Unlike ancient times, in the modern workplace, men and women have the opportunity to work side-by-side on projects that are stressful and exhilarating and that can bond people in powerful ways. Working relationships and friendships can slowly turn into affairs and it’s is myth that only bad people and bad marriages have affairs. People in good marriages, are also having affairs. Sometimes things can start very innocently but then move into a place of dangerous emotional or physical intimacy that can threaten your or someone else’s marriage. Of course, the Internet has made it easier for online “friendships” to turn into affairs and there are even websites designed to facilitate extramarital affairs. Have you heard about the personals websites designed to facilitate extramarital affairs? They give you immediate access to thousands of men and women willing to kick their vows to the curb for a no-strings-attached sexual encounter. Some of these sites have had astounding success. One began a few years ago—and in just one month—about 700,000 men and women used the site to have an affair, and since then, site membership grew to millions of people. It sees its largest traffic just after Father's Day (when men feel most unappreciated) and Valentine's Day (when women feel most unappreciated). The CEO of one these sites, Noel Biderman, shrugs off any criticism, saying, "We're just a platform. No website or 30-second ad is going to convince anyone to cheat. He went on to insist "humans aren't meant to be monogamous." But when asked, “How would you feel if your wife used the site?” He said, "I would be devastated." It’s easier than ever before to have an affair, but the results are as devastating as they have always been. God in his love for us wants us to avoid experiencing the devastation that comes from adultery. And as we see in Deuteronomy, God over and over says that he calls us to trust and obey his commandments, as we saw last week, not so that we miss out or so that our life will be wrecked in some way but so that we might experience life to the full. In his sermon on the banks of the Jordan River to the people of God who are preparing to the enter the Promised Land, Moses in Deuteronomy, Chapter 5, verse 18 says “And you shall not commit adultery.” PRAY. In this message, we explore how when we are sexually faithfulness we mirror the image of God and then we will look at how we can become people who are sexually faithful. First, let’s look how when we are sexual faithful we mirrors God. As we saw last Sunday, the laws of God and in particular the Ten Commandments which includes the commandment “you shall not commit adultery” are not merely some abstract set of moral imperatives. The Ten Commandments reflect the very nature of God and because we were made in God’s image, when we live in ways that are consistent with the Ten Commandments – we honor our design and we flourish. So in what way do we reflect the image of God when we are sexually faithful, that is when we are true to God’s call to be sexually pure—chaste as a single person or loyal as married person? When we are sexually faithful we reflect God's faithfulness. In Genesis 15 we see how God made his covenant with Abraham, the forefather of the children of Israel. God asked Abraham to bring three animals and two birds, and, according to the rituals of that time, Abraham slaughters them. He cuts each of them in half and lays out the pieces in two rows. According to ancient tradition, after the carcasses were laid out the two covenant partners were to walk through the bloody passageway as a sign of their commitment. As they walked through between the carcasses they was saying, ‘Let me be like these slaughtered animals if I ever break the terms of this covenant.’ But in Genesis 15 as God is making his covenant with Abraham, Abraham falls into a deep sleep and only God symbolized by the torch of blazing fire passed between the pieces, and God is saying unilaterally to Abraham, ‘If I break the terms of my covenant with you, may I be like these dead animals.’ And this is amazing because the gods of the ancient world were self-serving, capricious, and arbitrary. And when a god or a king was creating a covenant with an ordinary person, only the ordinary person, the person of lower status, would be required to walk between the dead carcasses and subject themselves to being cursed if they broke the covenant. But here in this story, it’s the higher ranking party, i.e., God himself, who walks between the dead pieces of the animals. And God, in walking through the two rows of the cut up animals (use props), is saying “I will be faithful to my end of the covenant, even if my people are disobedient, commit adultery, are greedy, cruel, vain, proud, selfish – I am going to make an unconditional covenant with Abraham and his offspring.” In this picture, we see God’s breathtaking faithfulness, something that is radically in contrast with the gods of the Ancient Near East. And even though God’s people flagrantly disregarded their part of the covenant, 2000 years later God would keep his word and take the bloody curse—his people deserved—upon himself on a cross just outside Jerusalem as He allowed himself to be cut, and his blood spilled for us so that we might be forgiven and reconciled to God. God has been faithful to us, and when we are faithful to God sexually and in other ways we reflect the image of God who is faithful. So when we are faithful sexually, we are mirroring a God who is faithful. When we are sexually faithful, we are also mirroring a God who loves the well-being of families and communities. Now if you read ahead to Deuteronomy 22:22 you will see that if a person committed adultery, they were liable to the death penalty. In ancient Mesopotamia, according to the Code of Hammurabi, an adulterous couple was to face the death penalty. And so while this penalty for adultery sounds extremely harsh to our ears, this was the way adultery was punished in the ancient world. But we may ask, ‘Why such a harsh penalty for what many consider to be a private sin?’ Remember that Israel at this time is a theocracy ruled by God. It’s not a pluralist democracy like Canada today. And adultery, as Old Testament scholar Chris Wright points out, was an attack on the stability of the household, and, therefore, a threat to the nation’s relationship with God. People knew that adultery would have disastrous social effects on a person’s family. And as the family was undermined by sexual unfaithfulness, that in turn would destabilize people’s relationship with God. And when you are living in a theocracy where the highest goods are to love God, and to love your neighbor as yourself, anything that undermines one’s relationship with God or unravels the fabric of family life was considered a national threat and would require a severe penalty. If you are an ambassador for your country and you commit treason, or if you make an attempt on the life of a police officer, or say our Prime Minister – there are severe penalties for these kinds of crimes because they are seen as acts that will destabilize our society. And in a theocracy like ancient Israel, adultery, which would undermine a family and their relationship with God, was considered a national threat. Now let me be clear, we live in a pluralist democracy, not a theocracy like ancient Israel, and I’m not advocating that we should institute the death penalty for adultery. But one thing hasn’t changed across the last 4,000 years, and that is how adultery really does undermine our marriages, family, and the fabric of our society. John Edwards south of the border ran for his party's presidential nomination 4 years ago. Sn the book Resilience, his wife, Elizabeth, wrote about how her husband's adultery affected her. When she and John were first married, she had directly asked him to be faithful. Her fear of having an unfaithful husband was formed by seeing what her mother had experienced. Her mother suspected that her husband had been unfaithful, and though she never confronted him about it, she lived with a nagging, painful uncertainty for many years. Elizabeth learned about this as a teenager when reading her mother's journal, which she found one day in their home. Seeing how even the suspicion of unfaithfulness had tormented her mother's heart stamped Elizabeth's own heart. Even so, she had great confidence in John's love for her. She had not been suspicious of him. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, John stood by her during her treatment. In 2006, Elizabeth encouraged him to travel without her when necessary to pursue his political dreams. At this time Elizabeth did not know that soon after beginning the campaign her husband had begun an ongoing adulterous relationship with another woman. Then, on December 30, 2006, almost a year after beginning the ongoing affair, John admitted to his wife of 28 years that he had been unfaithful on one occasion. Elizabeth wrote: After I cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up. And the next day John and I spoke. He wasn't coy, but it turned out he wasn't forthright either… So much has happened that it is sometimes hard for me to gather my feelings from that moment. I felt that the ground underneath me had been pulled away. I wanted him to drop out of the race, protect our family… I spent months learning to live with [what I assumed was] a single incidence of infidelity. And I would like to say that a single incidence is easy to overcome, but it is not. I am who I am. I am imperfect in a million ways, but I always thought I was the kind of woman, the kind of wife to whom a husband would be faithful. I had asked for fidelity, begged for it, really, when we married. I never need flowers or jewelry; I don't care about vacations or a nice car. But I need you to be faithful. Leave me, if you must, but be faithful to me if you are with me. Elizabeth Edwards was devastated by her husband’s unfaithfulness. And affairs end up being terribly destructive. God loves faithfulness because he is faithful and when we are faithful we reflect God’s image. And God loves sexual faithfulness it protects people and families he loves. So when are we are sexually faithful, we honor God. A great example of this comes from the life of Joseph. Joseph was the great-grandson of Abraham and Sarah who was betrayed by his brothers, and sold as a slave to the Egyptians. Joseph was a diligent and able slave of a high ranking government official named Potiphar. Joseph was a person of deep insight, and had a gift for leadership. He was also very handsome. His master’s wife took notice of him and she tried to seduce him. One day she grabbed him and said come to bed with me. Joseph responded in a remarkable way. He said, ‘Your husband has entrusted everything he owns to my care except you, because you are his wife.’ He doesn’t just say sleeping with her would wrong her husband, but rather says, ‘How could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God.’ So Joseph’s faithfulness sexually sprung from of his desire to be faithful to God. When we are sexually faithful—true to what he has called us to—we honor God, ourselves, and other families. Let me make several observations which I hope will be helpful to apply this in our modern context. (This point comes before #1 in the sermon outline). Practice faithfulness in small things (keep each title for several seconds) Faithfulness is a spiritual muscle that can be developed with use. Jesus in Luke 16:10, said “If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones.” While in the context he wasn't specifically talking about sexual faithfulness, the principle still applies. If we are faithful and relatively small things: if when we agree to do something – we follow through, if we are part of a small group we attend –even when it's inconvenient – we attend. If agreed to serve—we show up. Obviously there are situations where we need to adjust for the sake of others, but part of the way become faithful is by exercising faithfulness. We can be faithful in small things sexually by not flirting or fantasizing or risky situations. Take radical action Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, commenting on this passage says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5: 27-28). In the Greek Jesus is saying anyone who looks at a woman or a man in order to lust – the Greek word is epethumeo which means to over desire someone sexually, has already committed adultery with that person in their heart. Attraction in itself is a good thing. When Adam first saw Eve in the garden he sings ‘Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.’ In the Hebrew he is reciting poetry, he is astonished at her beauty, revels in her splendor. To be sexually alive and attracted is natural and good. But when we begin to look at someone in order to desire them sexually, we begin to over desire them – meaning that if we could we would take them sexually then we have crossed a line. And Jesus says to deal radically with it. That is gouge out your eye, cut your hand off. He is using hyperbole here, but he is saying is if you’re struggling with lust, which is the first step to actual physical adultery or to sex outside of God’s will, deal radically with it. This for all of us may mean that we are judicious about the kind of movies we see, about the images on the internet or magazines that we expose ourselves to and for some it mean getting rid of your TV or a home computer as friends of mine have done. Practice Transparency with Your Spouse (or if you are single with a trusted, appropriate friend) Research by Dr. Shirley Glass in her book Not “Just Friends” shows that part of the reason why an actual affair can hold such power over a person, whether it’s an emotional affair or a physical affair, is because of its secrecy that typically surrounds such relationships (It’s a book that more 400 pages—I will be tweeting from the book this week: @KenShigematsu (Edlyn, can you get logo and my name to line up so they are parallel of roughly equal size?—please also make available for the end of my announcement re: Lee). She and others point out that when you are able to confess the emotional or physical affair with your partner, much of the mystique evaporates from the relationship and you are freer to disentangle yourself from it. And the same dynamic holds true in other related areas – part of the reason why people who are struggling with lust through pornography is because there is often secrecy that shrouds these activities. But if we are able to trust our partner if we have one, or a trusted friend, and ask them to hold us accountable, then we can experience real freedom. In James 5:16 we read, Therefore confess your sins [and temptations] to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. As a guy, as is probably true of some of you, it doesn’t require that much courage for me to jump out of an airplane with a parachute on my back, or to rappel down a 100 foot cliff or to engage in contact sports as I did when I was younger. But it can be terrifying for me to open up my heart and be completely transparent, but it’s something across the years that I have sought to cultivate with my wife and some trusted friends. And sometimes it’s easier to be transparent with a complete stranger on an airplane or a relative stranger like the person who cuts our hair, but if we want to protect our marriages, o we will to cultivate transparency with our marriage partner or future partner, or with a close friend who is not a potential alternate to our spouse…. Cultivate Friendships with people who will Encourage Sexual Faithfulness Third, we need to have good social support systems to encourage us to be sexually faithful. That’s why small groups, mentoring relationships with people who know Christ, peer friendships with those who know Christ, where you can talk frankly about the temptations you are facing is so important. In Hebrews 10:24-25 we read: And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching. Al Peterson tells a story of a woman who was at lunch with eleven other people – this mom’s group had been studying French together while their kids were in pre-school. One woman asked the group, “How many of you have been faithful to your husband’s throughout your marriage?” Only one woman at the table raised her hand. That evening the woman told her husband the story and she added that she herself was not the one who raised her hand. “But I’ve been faithful” she assured him. “Then why didn’t you raise your hand?” She replied. “I was ashamed.” If we want to protect our marriages, we don’t want the people in our life encouraging us to be unfaithful. When I’ve had opportunities to cross the line sexually that I know would dishonor God – both that person and myself. And there have been times that I have confided those temptations with people that am close to, but who don’t share the values of God on this matter – and they’ve said, “You idiot – you should have gone for it!” Facing temptation, if we want to protect our marriages and honor God, we should confide in people who share God’s values and who are friends of our marriage and someone with enough backbone and to speak the hard truth to us. Talk About Sexual Integrity with Your Children (and members of your faith family). And if you have children one day, teach your children about godly sexuality. Deuteronomy 6:6-7 was given to members of all the families and households in ancient Israel: ‘These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.’ The commandment here refers primarily to the Ten Commandments, which includes one about sexuality which we have spoken about today, as well as coveting somebody else’s spouse. God wants us to talk about sexuality in the context of our family (and close friends). It’s more than just having one talk about the “facts of life” and getting it over with. God wants us to have an ongoing conversation with our kids about their bodies, the physical and hormonal changes they will face, dating, and marriage. You can go through a good book from a Christian perspective that is targeted at kids at appropriate age levels to talk with them about matters of sexuality. (On matters as powerful as sexuality it is not enough to hear one sermon on sex like this, we must talk about this stuff and how we apply with our kids and close, trusted friends). And perhaps most powerfully—regardless of our past—from here forward to model what healthy faithful sexuality looks like through our own lives. One of my grandfathers was a very powerful CEO who hobnobbed with the rich and famous, had multiple mistresses, and there are a lot of people who would look at his sexual conquests and would think “He’s a stud” “He’s a cool guy” “He has an enviable lifestyle.” And then by contrast I look at my own parents who have been married for more than 50 years. They have remained true to one another and their love is deeper and stronger now than it was 50 years ago. Although there is certain attractiveness to both kinds of lifestyles, there is a far greater beauty in the latter--in the example of a faithful love because that reflects the God in whose image we were made. My parents us given us five children so many gifts, but one the important priceless gifts they’ve given us is the gift of their growing faithful love toward. If you are married or get married one day, regardless of your past, you give that gift to people around from here forward. Finally, I want to say something about grace. In an audience this size there is no doubt that many people here have experienced some kind of sexual compromised in some way. At the end of John 8, Jesus a woman caught in the act of adultery is dragged to Jesus by the Pharisees and teachers the law says “The law of Moses tells us to stone such a person.” Jesus bends down and begins to write something on the ground – we don't know what he writes – but he may well be writing down the Ten Commandments… He looks up and says, “He who is without sin let him cast the first stone.” One by one the people drop their stones and walk away.” The woman is trembling and Jesus, says no one has condemned you and neither do I. Go and leave your life of sin. He forgives her and the reasons he can say to us “I forgive you” – the reason he can say don't stone her and don’t stone us–is because he would soon allow himself to be stoned, to be cut on cross so that she and we would never have to be stoned, cut, cursed and condemned. And when we realize how deeply were loved by Jesus and receive the forgiveness and new beginning he offers and invite him as the ultimate faithful one to live his life to us, we can like him—like God – faithful and true. Pray: Ezekiel 36 4 “‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land.(AS) 25 I will sprinkle(AT) clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse(AU) you from all your impurities(AV)and from all your idols.(AW) 26 I will give you a new heart(AX) and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone(AY) and give you a heart of flesh.(AZ) 27 And I will put my Spirit(BA) in you and move you to follow my decrees(BB) and be careful to keep my laws.(BC)

Just Work

City Series M-7 November 18, 2012 Speaker: Ken Shigematsu Title: Just Work Text: Deuteronomy Deut. 26:8-16, 24:14, 25:13-16; Matthew 20-1:16 BIG IDEA: God’s people are called to work with integrity. INTRODUCTION: Last weekend I was flying to Boston and I was seated beside a couple of older women who are sisters – and because I was sniffling the older woman seated beside me reached into her purse and grabbed a Kleenex and said, “Blow your nose.” We got talking and when she discovered that I was a Christian minister, she looked in shock at her sister and said, “Oh, my God, I just told the minister to blow his nose.” There are some people who think that a Christian minister is in some special, rarefied vocation. But the word minister simply refers to someone who serves God in whatever vocation they find themselves in. Historically, people who serve in government here in Canada as Minister of Finance or Minister of Minister of International Trade have been called ministers because they are seen as serving in the church or government or some other sphere. Several months ago, I asked someone in our community who works in the corporate world if you ever thought about becoming a pastor. He said, “I feel like I’m called to be pastor in my company.” Last week, I met with him and he shared that at his company (a famous one which you have all heard of) they brought in a professional public speaking coach to train the managers on how to speak more effectively in public. As part of the exercise, they were all asked to speak about something they were passionate about for 2 minutes. Everyone talked about how passionate they were about the company. But when this person’s turn came around, he spoke about how passionate he was about Jesus Christ and this church. In a conversation that I was having with him this last week, he shared how he wanted to help change the culture in his company so that it was less cutthroat and more humane. Each of us who belongs to Jesus Christ or is being drawn into a relationship God is called to serve as a minister in our workplace. And Moses living about 3500 years ago understood this. So Moses, who is now an old man and is standing on the banks of the Jordan River, preaches a series of sermons to prepare the Children of Israel, his people, the people of God, for their life in the promised land of Canaan. He has told them that they have been blessed with the wisdom of God’s word and a sense that God is close to them, particularly when they pray—blessed not just for their self-flourishing or their personal fulfillment, but endowed with God’s wisdom and presence so that they would be a blessing to the nations, a light to the world. And one of the ways that they would become a light to the world is by reflecting God's character in their work. In Deuteronomy 26:16-17 16 The Lord your God commands you this day to follow these decrees and laws; carefully observe them with all your heart and with all your soul 17 You have declared this day that the Lord is your God and that you will walk in obedience to him… In this sermon we are going to be looking at a few texts from Deuteronomy—one on giving, one on compassion management, and a 3rd one using honest scales---that show us how we reflect the character of God through our work. This is a relevant question for us if we are like most people who spend most of the waking hours of our life engaged in some kind of work, either school, home, or the company. In Deuteronomy 26:6-17 we read when the children of Israel, the people of God, were suffering as slaves in Egypt they cried out to God. Then in verse 8 we read 8 So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. 9 He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; 10 and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, Lord, have given me.” Place the basket before the Lord your God and bow down before him. 11 Then you and the Levites and the foreigners residing among you shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household. 12 When you have finished setting aside a tenth of all your produce in the third year, the year of the tithe, you shall give it to the Levite, the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that they may eat in your towns and be satisfied. Moses is saying to his people, “God has been incredibly generous to us – he has led us out of Egypt that land where we were slaves He brought us into this promised land flowing with milk and honey.” Earlier in Deuteronomy 8 he says that God has given them the very capacity to produce wealth, so “now (vs. 10) bring the firstfruits of your harvest to him,” and (vs. 12) “set aside a 10th of all of your produce and give it to the Levite i.e. to those who oversee God’s work and the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow – that is to the poor.” One of the most tangible ways we reflect God's generous character to us is by offering the firstfruits of our income to God and the poor. One of the people who has inspired me most in my Christian faith through his example is the nineteenth century missionary from England to China--Hudson Taylor. When he was a young person, poor, barely making ends meet as a medical student, he learned to trust God enough to tithe, but he was so poor he found it difficult to actually give the first tenth of his income to God as a low paid medical assistant. He was sharing how he had worked this out with a friend of his. Hudson said, “When I calculated the cost of my apartment rent, and food, and other fixed necessary expenses, I didn’t have ten percent leftover to give to God.” And his friend said, “So what did you do?” Hudson said, “Well I just found cheaper accommodations, lived more simply and was able to give.” Hudson learned to give the first tenth of his income and then more, and learned to live on the rest, even when he was very poor. Honoring God with the firstfruits of our income not only enables to reflect God's generosity back to him and the poor, but it also helps us trust God. As we'll see, we are called to reflect God in our work and the way we do that is by trusting him. One of the ways that we honor our Lord in our work is by reflecting his generosity and trusting him enough to give generously to him and the poor. Another way we honor God through our work, according to Deuteronomy, is by reflecting God’s integrity and compassion. Moses anticipated the day in which his people would no longer be a tribe of wandering nomads, but prosperous people in the Promised Land. They would be sufficiently wealthy to hire people who were poorer and in need. And this is what he says in Deut 24:14-15: 14 Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is an Israelite or is a foreigner residing in one of your towns. 15 Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it. Otherwise they may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin. It’s really clear in this and in other texts in Deuteronomy that God is especially concerned about the poor and needy and that the conditions they work in should be fair and never exploitative. Our translation says, “Do not take advantage of the poor and needy who work for you.” But this translation is too weak. In the Hebrew asaq means to oppress by robbery or fraud. And Moses is very practical here when he calls his people to pay their workers promptly. This law is for the benefit of people who were hired as day laborers. People who were hired for short-term jobs were often paid a daily wage. And in their world, daily pay was essential for daily food. And so any delay in payment meant that a worker and his family would go hungry. Moses says if an employer fails to pay his workers, it’s a sin against God. As theologian Christopher Wright points out, unjust pay and inhumane working conditions are not just social problems, they are sins against God. And this is why the prophets in the Old Testament like Isaiah and Jeremiah invoked the judgment of God against those who fail to pay their workers properly. Conversely, we see here in the later part of Deuteronomy 24:13 that when a creditor deals humanely with a debtor—when he gives his cloak back which served as collateral for the debt at the end of the day—because it’s his only cloak and only blanket—it will be regarded as a righteous act in the eyes of God. Jesus, in Matthew 20, told a story about a vineyard owner who generously paid a day’s wage for an hour’s work presumably because he recognized the need a man had to feed his family no matter how long a man had worked. When we are in a position to do so, we honor God in our work as we offer or advocate for fair pay. I happen to be reading the book Onward by Howard Schultz, which is a book about how Starbucks struggled to survive during the economic crash during 2008. How it sought to move onward without losing its soul (I will be tweeting inspiring quotes from the book this coming Edlyn please use twitter image you created @KenShigematsu). As I happen to be reading from this book now I’m going to draw some illustrations from it. I don’t want it to sound like a commercial for a company – I don’t even drink coffee myself – but I found this story to be informative and inspiring. When I was 7 years old, I came home from school one winter day and saw my father sprawled on a couch with a cast from his hip to his ankle. My dad was an uneducated war veteran, and while he was very proud, he never really found his spot in the world. He held a series of really rough blue-collar jobs to support our family, never making more than $20, 000 a year. He’d been a truck driver, a factory worker, and even a cab driver for a while, but his current job was the worst. He drove a truck picking up and delivering cloth diapers. That week Dad had fallen on a sheet of ice and broken his hip and his ankle, and for a blue-collar worker in 1960 there was no worker’s compensation. No health-care coverage. No severance. My dad was simply sent home after his accident and dismissed by the company. I never imagined I would one day be in a position to run a company a different way. But I did believe, even then, that everyone deserved more respect than my parents had received. By the time my father passed away in 1988 from lung cancer, he had no savings or pension. Just as tragic, in my mind, was that he never found fulfillment or meaning in his work. As a business leader, I wanted to build the kind of company that my dad never got a chance to work for (Schultz, 2011, p. 15). Howard would go on to create the company Starbucks. And largely out of a desire to build the kind of company his father never had a chance to work for, he was also no doubt partly inspired by the values of his heritage as a Jewish person, which of course has been shaped by the book of Deuteronomy. Howard Schultz, in the early years of the business when they were losing money, established two partner benefits which at the time were unique: full health care benefits and equity in the form of stock options for every employee. This was an anomaly. No company had ever extended these two benefits to part-time workers who worked at least 20 hours a week. To the best of Schultz’s knowledge they were the only private company, and later the only public company, to do so. And that is very significant as the company began in Seattle, in a country that doesn’t have our generous Medicare system. And whether we are in management or lower on the totem pole in a company, one of the ways that we are to reflect the character of God and shine his light in our company is to create better working conditions for poor people, and in particular those who are poor and vulnerable. Again and again God says in Deuteronomy and throughout the Scriptures to the people of Israel, “Show compassion for the poor and the vulnerable, the widow and the alien, because I showed you compassion when you were aliens and slaves in Egypt.” And by the way, you don’t have to be a CEO to bring about change in your workplace. Like my friend I spoke about, he’s not a CEO-- he’s a manager who’s trying to make his work less cutthroat and more humane. You don’t even have to be a manager; you can be a front line worker to foster change. The Discovery Channel aired "Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich," a documentary on films found in archives after German’s reunification. The Nazis had a public relations problem: they wanted to exterminate weaker members of society, but Lutheran Germany had a history of compassion toward the old, infirm, and the mentally ill. In order to change public perception, the Nazis hired some of Germany's best filmmakers. The film showed patients at Hadamar, a facility for the mentally disturbed. Lights aimed at unnatural angles made the patients look ominous, their faces angular and deeply shadowed, their eyes wild. The film shifts to a bureaucrat displaying budget graphs. “It takes 100,000 Deutschmarks to keep one of these defectives alive,” he explains—“money badly needed by the Fatherland. We should follow the example of nature and allow the weak to die….” "Selling Murder" ended with a surprising twist. Despite their slick films and other attempts to sway public opinion, the Nazis failed to exterminate the physically and mentally disabled. However, Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals they murdered virtually without protest; the disabled, they had to let live. Why? The change in Nazi policy traces back to one brave woman, a Christian nurse who worked at Hadamar. When the facility was converted into a gas chamber, she could not keep silent. She documented the facts and reported them to her bishop, who released them to the public. The resulting outcry from the church forced the Nazis to back down. Her courage can serve as a prophetic model for Christians today. That one nurse changed Nazi policy. She was living under a totalitarian dictatorship, not in a liberal democracy like Canada. In a day before Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, it was far more difficult to build a platform – and yet she did. And her courage and advocacy as a follower of Jesus honored God. We may not be called upon to act in a setting as dramatically evil as Nazi Germany, but we are called to reflect God and make our workplaces more just and compassionate places. Whether it’s about paying fair wages, making the workplace less cut throat, or speaking out against it, as is true of tithing, it’s a matter of trusting God. As may be true of tithing, we may seem like we can't afford to pay fair wages, to make the workplace less cutthroat, to risk the pushback that comes from being a whistleblower, but the invitation is to say I’m putting my trust in God in my work, more than in my work itself. Finally in Deuteronomy 25:13 we hear Moses speak of business with justice and financial integrity. 13 Do not have two differing weights in your bag—one heavy, one light. 14 Do not have two differing measures in your house—one large, one small. 15 You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. The two different sets of weights, one heavy, one light, were of course used for the self-serving purpose of obtaining more than the standard measure when purchasing, but giving less when selling-- so you can manipulate a transaction so you would always buy low and sell high. God says in verse 15 that a commitment to honesty in business will bring a blessing in the land we are living in. On the other hand, if we are dishonest in our business dealings we are doing something that, according to verse 16, God detests. In fact, we can translate the word “an abomination.” To be engaged in dishonest business practices is an abomination to God. We think of idolatry as some aberrant sexual perversions or child sacrifice being an abomination to God. But when we engage in dishonest business, particularly in ways that oppress the poor and the vulnerable, it is an abomination to God. The Prophet Amos recognized this and so he says in Amos, Chapter 8:4-8: 4 Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the poor(H) of the land,(I) 5 saying, “When will the New Moon(J) be over that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath be ended that we may market(K) wheat?”(L)— skimping on the measure, boosting the price and cheating(M) with dishonest scales,(N) 6 buying the poor(O) with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, selling even the sweepings with the wheat.(P) 7 The Lord has sworn by himself, the Pride of Jacob:(Q) “I will never forget(R) anything they have done.(S) 8 “Will not the land tremble(T) for this, and all who live in it mourn? God calls us as his people—and the wider world—to engage in fair trade. Let me cite again from the book Onward as I happen to be reading from it. In 2008 Starbucks as a company was struggling to survive, at a time when their stock price had fallen so low that they feared that they might experience a hostile takeover from another company. Howard Schultz, the CEO, organized a leadership convention for nearly 10,000 Starbucks partners (that’s kind of inside jargon of theirs for those who work for them). Near the end of the convention Schultz introduced a surprise guest – Bono – the lead singer for U2, a committed Christian, and a global activist. So up came Bono in a black t-shirt and his signature red-tinted sunglasses. I’m paraphrasing here. “These are interesting times,” Bono began. Howard has brought me to talk to you in interesting, strange, unsettling times. For Starbucks. For North America. Times of crisis. Times of chaos. Times of opportunity….The sight of your stores closing – well, a sign of the time. Historically, though, it is times like these, times of disruption, where we seem to discover our greatness. Bono spoke not just about Starbucks and the economy in North America but also, more importantly, about his travels to Africa, a continent where 4,000 lives were being lost every day to preventable, treatable diseases, and where 12 million children had been orphaned because of HIV. It had sparked in Bono a rage that ultimately drove him to create [PRODUCT] RED. Then he spoke about the absolute necessity of companies to do well by doing good. Some people say,“Come on, markets are not about morals, they are about profits.” I say that is old thinking. That’s a false choice. The great companies will be the ones that find a way to have and hold on to their values while chasing their profits, and brand value will converge to create a new business model that unites commerce and compassion. The heart and the wallet….The great companies of this century will be sharp to success and at the same time sensitive to the idea that you can’t measure the true success of a company on a spreadsheet. And then Schultz, before his partners, during a time of great economic uncertainty, affirmed that the company’s commitment to doing business in a manner that was good for people as well as the earth. And he publically committed to these goals: • By vowing to ethically source 100% of their coffee by the year 2015, which at the time was nearly 50% more than what they were currently procuring. • They also committed to doubling their annual purchase of Fair Trade Certified coffee to 40 million pounds. There is sometimes a price to pay for doing good – but it is possible to do good and to do well at the same time. Bono rightly says it’s possible to combine commerce and compassion, the heart and the wallet. And again, if we are not a CEO or in Management, if we are a rank and file worker or a consumer, we can still push companies toward social change. Walmart has been regarded by many as the poster child of corporate ruthlessness, a retailer whose business model is undercutting all of its competitors. Partly because of pressure from consumers, Walmart has resolved to change its way of doing business for the sake of the future of the planet. The company has required its suppliers to reduce packaging to protect the environment and is trying to boost sales of energy-efficient light bulbs by giving them more shelf space and better placement in stores. At time of the article I read, the company was experiencing pressure from consumers to ensure fair treatment for the people in developing countries who work for its vendors. As is true of tithing, paying fair wages, some people will say [to themselves] I can’t afford to do business in a way that is green and that’s ecology sensitive. Again, it’s a matter of trusting God. As a people of God we are called to reflect the generosity, integrity, and justice of God in our work. We are called to put our trust in God in our work life. We’re to make the Living God and his Son Jesus the center of our lives. When that happens we will become a light in our workplace. As Parker Palmer says, “Every leader,” and I might add every person, “casts a mixture of light and darkness.” Again, whether we are an executive, part of the management, front line worker, a student – we cast a mixture of light and shadow. And the hope is to cast more light than shadow. And the way we can do that in our workplaces is by inviting Christ, the light of the world, to indwell us, to cleanse us and draw us and shine through us. And that’s what my friend has done—he’s trying to make his workplace less cutthroat and more humane. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. She or he who follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of light itself.” And as Tony Campolo reminded us a few Sundays ago, Jesus is always with us, but is he in us? If he is in us, then the light of the world illuminates our life, and that is why Jesus said to those who followed him, “You are the light of the world.” Do you want to become a person who reflects more of God’s generosity, integrity, and justice? No matter where you are – at business, school, or home – create a place that is more whole and compassionate—a place that is filled with light and honors God. Then invite the light of the world to enter your life and shine through you as you work. And as John says, “The Light will shine in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.” PRAY 9