Yesterday my church was full of people...

As the pastor of a small church (in a huge building), I wish my church was full more often, it bothers me from time to time that my eight years here haven't resulted in full pews on Sunday morning.  We've added a number of great new people and families since my arrival, but I've also officiated at more funerals than I can count.  Yesterday my church was full of people.  We hosted a Christmas food voucher distribution run by Community Support Services (formerly OEO, under the Venango County Human Services Department) and the Venango County United Way.  Seven CSS workers distributed 450 vouchers beginning at 10 AM, we had people waiting to get into the church when our office manager Cheryl arrived at 7.  By 10 AM, there were nearly 200 people waiting in Miller Auditorium.  Rather than spend my morning in my office reading or writing, I gladly spent the bulk of yesterday interacting with my neighbors, many of whom I have now conversed with each of the last several years while they waited for a voucher.
Before my tenure as the shepherd of this flock reaches its termination, Lord willing many years from now, I certainly do hope that our worship service on Sunday morning fills our sanctuary to capacity (about 200+); maybe we will be blessed in this way, maybe not.  I don't know what the future holds for this congregation, nor what the results will be of the seeds we've endeavored to sow, but I do know that yesterday my church was full of people, and for the pastor of a small congregation, that warms my heart.

Sermon Video: The Messiah foretold - Genesis 3:15

In what direction does history flow?  Is it cyclical, like many in the East believe (Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism) and many of the ancients believed (Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism), or is it linear, proceeding from a definite starting point and heading toward a defined goal?  From the beginning, Judaism (and later Christianity) has viewed history as linear, with a starting point being the creation of the universe by God, and a final goal, the reconciliation of that same creation to the will and love of its Creator.  Contrary to the views of many, evil has not always existed, for it has no independent existence of its own, but rather is only a marring and a mockery of that which God has created.  Evil is rebellion against the will of God, and as such, it has no long-term prospects, for God will certainly bring all things once more under his dominion.  This much is made clear to Adam and Eve, in the garden where God placed them to act as stewards of his work of ordering the chaos.  When Adam and Eve chose to follow the path of Lucifer (now Satan) who had rejected obedience to God's will in favor of an illusory independence, God reasserted his sovereignty by declaring that one day a descendant of the woman would crush forever the rebellion led by Satan (although at great cost to himself).  In the end, there will be no more death, suffering, pain, or indeed, evil.  History is moving forward to its glorious goal, the hinge of which is the arrival of the promised Messiah, a promise made by God from the very beginning.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Sermon Video: Sing to the LORD - Psalm 98

Why do we sing in Church?  What is it about singing that connects so well to worship?  If you've not thought about these questions, perhaps you should, because as the writer of Psalm 98 makes clear, the people of God need to sing to the LORD.  Why?  Because God has done marvelous things.  In particular, God has made his salvation, his willingness to rescue humanity, known to us.  That effort began with Israel, but it spread to all nations.  The end result?  The people of God can sing (!) while standing before the judge of all the earth.  Amazingly, we will not stand before our righteous and holy judge with fear, but with gratitude and joy.  Why do we sing in Church?  Because our hearts are full of joy, for God has done wondrous things among us.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Where Mayor Pete Buttigieg's interpretation of Scripture goes awry.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine's Alex Morris, presidential candidate, and mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg made a variety of comments from his own viewpoint regarding Christianity, faith, and morality.  (The Generous Gospel of Mayor Pete)  Whether one likes Mayor Buttigieg as a candidate or not, there is great import in understanding the way in which he views Scripture as it impacts his interpretation of the Word of God throughout.  From this point forward, I'll interact with the quotations from the article, the portions in italics are from Mayor Pete.

"Well, I think for a lot of us — certainly for me — any encounter with Scripture includes some process of sorting out what connects you with the God versus what simply tells you about the morals of the times when it was written, right? For example, the proposition that you should execute your sister by stoning if she commits adultery. I don’t believe that that was right once upon a time, and then the New Testament came and it was gone. I believe it was always wrong, but it was considered right once, and that found its way into Scripture."

Before delving into the nature of Scripture itself, this first quote contains a dangerous false dichotomy.  What connects us with God is NOT an either/or with the morality contained in Scripture.  What connects us with God is precisely the moral code contained within Scripture.  For it is by measuring our own lives against this standard that we see how woefully short we are apart from God's grace.  The moral code of the Mosaic Law, for example, is not what saves us, for we all would fail to uphold it (Paul's argument in Romans 3), but that code sets a foundation for our encounter with God.  When we, as finite flawed human beings, compare ourselves to the holiness and righteousness of our Creator, we will invariably fall short.  These are not just history lessons about ancient morality, for our amusement if nothing more, they are an indictment again human rebellion, a charge against human self-reliance that will draw those who take it seriously to repentance by assuring even the best among us that we cannot possibly stand before a Holy God without fear and trembling because of our failures to, "be Holy as I am Holy."  

Colossians 2:12-14 English Standard Version (ESV)

12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

The Law is not useless, to be set aside as a quaint reminder of our ancestors viewpoints, it is the legal charge against us that Christ has answered on our behalf.  Let us not dismiss as unnecessary the moral code which propelled Jesus to the Cross on our behalf.

What is Scripture?  How did it come to be, and what does it reflect, God, man, or both?  I myself have recently completed a discourse on the topic that you can watch here: What Every Christian Should Know About: The Bible  The viewpoint that is being put forward by Mayor Buttigieg is a common one, the idea that Scripture is a human creation that perhaps can lead us toward God, but certainly not a divine creation, as evidenced by the term Word of God.  The theological question in focus here is inspiration.  Did the authors of Scripture, nearly all Middle-Eastern Jewish men over a span of about 1,500 years, impart to us their cultural viewpoint or that of God? {Another false dichotomy, it assumes God cannot impart his Holy Word through a time-bound cultural viewpoint without it losing its timeless authority}  If inspiration is viewed simply akin to the talent of an exceptional artist, something rare but purely human, we would expect the Scriptures to be nothing more than a reflection of the culture in which they were written, including its flaws (from our point of view).  If, on the other hand, inspiration entails a communication from God, it will transcend the morality of the men who wrote it and instead reflect the character and nature of God.  That is not to say that God didn't utilize the cultural framework of the authors, including, for example, their cosmology (geocentric with the heavens beyond the firmament), or their understanding of human biology, for how else would a message from the divine be comprehensible to its original audience if it wasn't communicated to them within their own cultural framework?  In the same fashion, God worked with the limitations of his people, offering further fullness of his revelation as time went on (for example: stating clearly the marriage ideal in the beginning of Genesis but not rejecting the Patriarchs despite their tendency toward polygamy, and proclaiming monotheism despite Ancient Israel's ongoing flirtation with polytheism and idolatry).  These efforts of cultural condescension are evidence of the grace of God, not a comprise with the unchanging nature of God's righteousness and holiness.  Thus, while cultural factors are certainly readily apparent throughout the Scriptures, they do not equate with God saying, "Let us do evil that good may result"? (Romans 3:8).  The Scriptures do NOT advocate immorality.  Which brings me to Mayor Buttigieg's apparent understanding of the Mosaic Law.  Unless I'm misunderstanding his point, he believes that the Mosaic Law contains within it a number of evil commands and requirements that the people of the time (Ancient Israel) believed, erroneously, to be moral, when in fact they were always immoral, and thus did NOT reflect the nature/purpose of God.  Are there examples of God's people behaving immorally in Scripture?  Absolutely, the previously mentioned polygamy of the patriarchs is one example, the adultery of David is another, but in such cases the Scriptures are not commending the behavior (and in David's case he is explicitly condemned by God's prophet) only dealing with the flaws of God's messangers.  However, when Scripture declares, "thus says the LORD", and is clear that the viewpoint being represented is that of God, we cannot allow ourselves as a Church to open the Pandora's Box of saying, 'Well, that was just the Israelites (or Early Church), it wasn't God.'  If that door is opened, any and all things which an individual or a culture objects to can be tossed aside, even when Scripture is quoting God (including quoting Jesus in the Gospels) it can be easily dismissed as a human invention not a divine command.  We certainly do need to acknowledge the cultural element of Scripture, we certainly do need to view it as an ancient document written by people with that frame of mind, because if we don't we risk forcing modern interpretations onto the text (Eisegesis instead of proper Exegesis), but we cannot let a proper understanding of the divine/human nature of the text itself convince us to take the step advocated by Mayor Pete of treating the text as a primarily human product that we can sit in judgment over.

And to me that’s not so much cherry-picking as just being serious, because of course there’s so many things in Scripture that are inconsistent internally, and you’ve got to decide what sense to make of it. Jesus speaks so often in hyperbole and parable, in mysterious code, that in my experience, there’s simply no way that a literal understanding of Scripture can fit into the Bible that I find in my hands.

I think this helps explains where Mayor Pete's thinking went astray.  The issues of inspiration addressed above should not be intermixed with the issues of interpretation given here.  The Bible isn't to be taken "literally", no large body of speech or writing can possibly be taken "literally".  The reason is very simple, speech (and hence writing) is full of things like metaphors and hyperbole.  Our tendency to use such figurative language is one of the things that makes translation work difficult, because our idioms and figures of speech are culturally learned and often don't translate well, or at all, into a different language.  However, and this is very important, just because I agree (as do all Christians, even those who insist that they take the Bible 'literally' are not doing so in the poetic/figurative/metaphorical sections) that the Bible cannot be taken 'literally' does NOT mean that I am willing to jettison the need to take the teaching of the Bible authoritatively and seriously.  

I would be interested in learning what Mayor Pete's is talking about when he says, "there's so many things in Scripture that are inconsistent internally".  An inconsistent interpretive framework, especially one built upon faulty premises and techniques, will certainly yield a view of Scripture that is internally inconsistent.  The very existence of interpretive inconsistencies is a strong indication of a poor hermeneutic.  If you believe that the Scriptures are not the Word of God, but rather something much less, a collection of the words of men, one would expect to find inconsistencies, one would expect contradictions and incompatibilities.  The Scriptures themselves, though, are not to blame if people interpret them wrongly, to put the blame on the source material for failures of proper interpretation is egregious.  Because the interpretation that Mayor Peter, and many like-minded people, have arrived at does contain inconsistencies, the solution they have chosen is to arbitrarily declare the portions they agree with to be more important than the portions with which they disagree.  He doesn't think this is 'cherry-picking', but the end result is the same.

Now, I actually think that if you look at an issue like choice, there’s so many parts of the Bible that associate the beginning of life with breath that there’s plenty of scriptural basis to reach different conclusions about that. But only if you believe that the government must legislate these metaphysical questions does the debate about choice have to be about the government deciding where life begins.

Is is possible for Christians to be so skeptical of their own government that they fear the power of the government to be an arbiter or a question as important as when life begins.  That is not what is happening here.  Only a selective reading of Scripture could lend one to conclude that the Bible's stance on the beginning of life is a person's first breath.  We must contend with the whole counsel of God, not just the parts that conform with our desired result.   Below are just two examples that the Bible's viewpoint of life begins far earlier than birth.

Psalm 139:13-14 New International Version (NIV)

13 For you created my inmost being;

    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

    your works are wonderful,

    I know that full well.

Jeremiah 1:5 English Standard Version (ESV)

5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

and before you were born I consecrated you;

I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Sermon Video: The LORD dwells in Zion - Joel 3

The finale of the message of the prophet Joel is upon God's ongoing concern for the people and land of Israel.  "In those days", in other words, during the End Times, God will administer his justice upon those who have chosen to mistreat the descendants of Abraham, a strong warning against the evil of Anti-Semitism.  At that time, Jesus will also reign from Jerusalem, as God once more dwells within the Holy City.

To watch the video, click on the link below: