One kid tells a joke

Rachel Claire (5): I’m not laughing. That was funny, but if I laugh I’ll laugh my head right off. So I’m not going to laugh.

I like watching Firefly on Netflix. I like the show, but mainly I always wondered what it would be like for Han Solo to have more adventures. Now we know what that would be like. Firefly instead of Millennium falcon is all.

One of my kids tells a joke.

Rachel Claire: I’m not going to laugh. That was funny, but I’m not going to laugh. It was so funny that if I laugh I’ll laugh my head off. So I’m not laughing.

Hospitality Part 1: The Order of Magnitude

As the Pastor I have to think both in terms of the church as made up of individuals trying to find and follow the Lord Jesus- But also as a whole. Sometimes I have to talk about us as a whole- as a church.

Every Leader has to cast vision.

Part of preparing for vision is values.

We will only rejoice in the same ideas if we care about the same things.

I know that there are three values that make the difference between a godly church and a gimmicky church. The difference between a community that wants to be the church a community that wants a growing exciting church.

Those three values are Hospitality, Community, and Sacrifice.

These values assume that we are already a Gospel focused and Bible focused church.

But what is the difference between an orthodox church that is spiritually declining and a prevailing church that is consistently growing?

Hospitality means to love strangers.  A hospitable community is a truly open community.

Community means being a real family together in deep, loving and trust bearing relationships.

Sacrifice means you are committed to not living for Jesus as a consumer. Following Jesus is going to kill you. The world can only be changed by people who care more about God and the world than about themselves. Conversion converts the focus of our attention off ourselves and onto the Gospel- which then points our attention to God and to our neighbor.

So this week I decided to preach about Hospitality. And I admit that this was with the purpose of making us a better church. I want to be part of a church that really is an open community. I want to be a church where people won’t just be friendly but will be a friend.

I want this to be a place where we rehabilitate the word ‘friendship’ to what Jesus said to his disciples when before his death he called them not his servants, but his friends.

Then I started writing the sermon. And I received a very rude awakening.

By Wed I realized that I was tampering with something much more dangerous that I intended.

Like any shallow preacher I had lined up all the little bible verses that talk about hospitality.

Leviticus 19:18 “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.

^NIV 1 Peter 4:9 Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.

^NIV Romans 12:13 Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.

Hospitality is one of the clear markers of exemplary faith.

^NIV 1 Timothy 3:2 Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach

^NIV Titus 1:8 Rather he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined.

^NIV 1 Timothy 5:10 and is well known for her good deeds, such as bringing up children, showing hospitality, washing the feet of the saints, helping those in trouble and devoting herself to all kinds of good deeds

But in studying the concept it became clear that Hospitality didn’t mean being welcoming to people you know.

It doesn’t mean being a good entertainer.

Hospitality means ‘loving the stranger and foreigner”

The is the literal meaning of the Latin word.

The word Paul Uses:

filo, xenoj

The Word is literally built on the words “love” and “Foreigner”

That led me back to the Torah and how God commanded his people to treat people outside the Jewish people.

What do we find: A series of commands to treat the people as they wish to be treated themselves.

They are commanded to treat the stranger like a neighbor.

The neighbor command is well known:

Leviticus 19:18 “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.

But little know in Jesus day or our is this one (a few verses later):

Leviticus 19:32-34 “‘Rise in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly and revere your God. I am the LORD.  ³³ “‘When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him.  ³⁴ The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.

This led me back to the Gospels and Jesus.

I already knew where this was going, I knew my greatest fear was about to be realized.

I knew I was about to find out that I was going to die.

I knew Jesus was about to reach out and take hold of one of my dearest idols and ask me to let go of it.

I knew I was going about to have one of those moments where Jesus was going to ask me to die so that I could live.

Story:

I had almost finished what I’ll say next week, and I was furiously turning to these new passages knowing my prep time was running out and my phone rang.

It was John Gladstone.

I didn’t have margin for John Gladstone on Thursday.

John is a missionary in India. He is in his middle 60’s and goes back to the George Verwer days of Operation Mobilization.

Like a normal Indian, a conversation with John usually takes a minimum of 45 minutes.

I didn’t have 45 minutes.

But I had just finished writing: In order for us to love people on the margins of our lives we have to have margin in our lives.

When you’re a pastor and you just wrote that line, and you don’t take that phone call you’re about to loose your heart.

So I answered the phone.

We talked for awhile about my kids, and his nephew who is studying theology. We talked about the fund raising we need to do to complete the new girls home and I could hear he was anxious about completing that work.

And then very unexpectedly the conversation turned. He said that he had felt a burden to go to Orissa to help the Christians there. He told me that his nephew Cyril had met a brother from Orissa studying in the seminary, and his story had moved John deeply and he wanted to go see how he could be of help to these people.

In order to understand this you need to know what is going on in Orissa.

In August 2008 an 85 year old Hindu teacher, five of his disciples and a journalist were brutally murdered with AK-47s and Machetes in Orissa. He had dedicated his life “uplifting the tribals of Orissa” and was murdered horribly in the presence of 130 orphans.

Early reports suspected the murders were committed by Christian converts from Hinduism, and a major Hindu teacher spoke about the killings soon after to hundreds gathered to hear his pastoral response to the event.

He took the opportunity to demonize Christians, call them devils, and told them that this behavior should be expected from Christians since their holy book says in Luke 19:27 says “But those enemies of mine that don’t want me to rule over them- bring them here and kill them in front of me.”

You have to understand that, though Hinduism is normally an easy going religion, Hinduism cannot be separated for Indian culture and an attack on a Hindu leader seems like an attack on everything India stands for- it is an attack on the faith of their father and the mother nation.

The response was immediate and violent. Since Christian conversion was seen as the enemy, mobs of people went our looking for Christian missionaries, churches and Indian people that had converted to Jesus from Hinduism.

Although the Indian Maoist rebels took credit for the murders, many Indian Hindus see both Maoism and Christianity as Western and have lumped the two together since both seek to ‘convert’ people to something and away from Hinduism.[1]

(World Vision was being called a Terrorist organization)

They burned churches, Orphanages, and killed Christians that either would not reconvert or didn’t get an opportunity. There were reports of rapes and terrible misused and many beatings and injuries. By December The Australian had reported more than 100 dead and more than 10,000 displaced into camps, many more (perhaps 50,000) hiding in jungles. Then reports came in of water sources in the camps being targeted.

We started getting reports for this in central India when I was there around November, and we began to send support to the region to feed and house the children displaced into the Jungles. One man asked for the funds to feed 25 children he had found alone and gathered out of the jungle near his home in Orissa.

Since that time, things have become more secret. Knowing that camera phones could put pictures of the violence all over the internet, the Hindu extremists have become much more careful about their persecutions, but we are hearing that they continue and have made people’s return to their homes or rebuilding very difficult.

Now put yourself in my shoes.

I’m writing a clever sermon hoping to persuade you and me that we need to free up some time in our schedule to be a real friend to people who visit our church

And I get a call from a 60+ year old missionary, already working among the poorest orphans in the world, who wants to get himself killed for Jesus in a place he’s never been because he “heard about it” form someone.

And so I want back to look at What Jesus said about the command to “love your neighbor” since I knew it said that we were supposed to love the Alien and stranger the same way.

And What I found was exactly what I feared:

We want to limit the scope of love and Jesus wants to unreasonably expand it.

Ever time it comes up, Jesus pushes it to an unbearable level

Luke 10:25-37- Parable of the Good Samaritan

Summary of the whole revelation- Love God and love your neighbor as yourself

Debate: How big is the ‘neighbor’ thing?

Jesus “Whomever you have an opportunity to be a neighbor to.”

Impossible.

We live in a global world. We have access to everyone.

This is insane

But Jesus was interpreting God’s revelation right.

“Love you neighbor as yourself” is the Great Summary or James: “Royal Law” because of the dynamic of “As yourself” not the scope “your neighbor”

It gets worse:

Matthew 5:43-48- “Love your neighbor, and hate your enemy.”

Popular slogan (not in the rabbinical literature)

Similar to: “God helps those who help themselves”

(66% of Evangelicals- thought it was in Bible)

Use the word “neighbor” as an excuse to limit the scope of the command.

Jesus Doesn’t back down- he attacks the exact thing we want to be excused from- Loving the true stranger and foreigner.

Matthew 5:38-48 ⁸ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’  ³⁹ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.  ⁴⁰ And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.  ⁴¹ If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.  ⁴² Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.  ⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  ⁴⁴ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,  ⁴⁵ that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.  ⁴⁶ If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?  ⁴⁷ And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?  ⁴⁸ Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

That’s impossible.

I could never do that.

I could say I’ll do it.

I can tell you I’m doing it.

But can I really do that?

We can’t afford to lie to ourselves here.

Can you do that?

Is that the kind of Christianity you believe in?

That’s not the kind of Christianity I’m living.

That is not the kind of heart that is beating in this chest.

This is not the kind of thing we can do out of self righteousness.

Not the kind of thing we can do out of duty.

This can only be done out of JOY.

You would have to be so happy about something that has nothing to do with your comfort- that thoughts of your own wellbeing bore you.

And then I saw it.

I saw that none of these passages were threats.

They were not-not threats.

But their logic was not threatening.

Luke 10

“But he wanted to justify himself”

“Go and do likewise”

Matthew 5

Matthew 5:44-45 ⁴⁴ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,  ⁴⁵ that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Even all the OT passages:

Exodus 22:21-22 Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.  ²² “Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan.

Exodus 23:9 “Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt.

Leviticus 19:34 ³⁴ The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.

Deuteronomy 10:19-21 ¹⁹ And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.  ²⁰ Fear the LORD your God and serve him. Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name.  ²¹ He is your praise; he is your God, who performed for you those great and awesome wonders you saw with your own eyes.

All of these point to us just doing what God did for us.

It is a call to memory.

Don’t you remember the state you were in when God saved you?

Someone else is in that state.

Were you in a Crisis?

Romans 5:6 ⁶ You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.

Is someone your enemy?

Romans 5:10 ⁰ For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

Is someone unlovely because they are evil of dying out if need?

Ephesians 2:1-5 As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,  ² in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.  ³ All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.  ⁴ But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy,  ⁵ made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgression and sin.

My worst fear was that I would loose the idol of my controlled and insulated and well scheduled life.

I found out that my fears were not fearful enough.

What I found out was that I don’t know who I am.

I’ve forgotten what I am.

And because I have forgotten that I was…

Really Dead

Really in Crisis

Really God’s enemy

Really a spiritual foreigner to God’s true country

Because I have forgotten these things I think this land is mine. And I’m put out by the command “Give them room and let them live among you.”

It’s because I’ve forgotten that the most important things to me are my house and my leisure and my stomach.

---

[1] I would not be surprised if the Maoists were praying upon the Christian converts that have rejected Hinduism and are among the most oppressed classes among the Hindu Castes. This violence seems to be coming form a fairly complex confluence of religious, ideological, tribal, social and historical factors.

Here is an interview with Obama on his faith when he was running for the Senate. I think he is pretty frank here and that this gives people a pretty good sense of where he stood then, and pretty much where he stands now.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman/2008/11/obamas-interview-with-cathleen.html

I spent the last week telling teenagers that the way they have been told to be happy is a crap pile of a dead end.  I think this is perhaps the Great Deception of technological modernity. That is that you can be happy by being good at getting and managing outcomes using the right knowledge and technology and by achieving the right things in the right ways. The fact is that we have more factual knowledge in the form of data and science than ever, we have more resources than ever and more technology than ever, and we’re not particularly happy here in the west- at any age.

The first night I talked about God and his relationship to our happiness. I explained one important point form Luke 15 and the story of the lost son. I asked this question: who in the story of the prodigal son really knows how to party? Who really knows how to have a good time? The more obvious answer is the younger

prodigal brother. It’s true he parties, but is he the best at it? Is he really the most fun? Is his ability to be happy impressive at all? You may be impressed, but I’m not. Who can’t take a half million bucks and stay pretty hyped up on hookers and coke for four or five months. There is nothing even interesting about that. IT’s not original. It’s not creative. It doesn’t require skill. The only thing we admire about people that waste all that money in such ways is really their ability to gain the money in the first place. And in this story, the prodigal son didn’t make the money. Generations of faithful family members did- all he did was waste it.

The answer, however, is of course not the older brother either. The answer is the Father. He is a man that knows how to throw a party. The bad son gets home and there is a party going on with food and wine and dancing in a bout 20 minutes. Think about it, the other son seems to be the last to know. The guy doesn’t even get home form work and the thing is in full swing. And this man is just as unrepentant about his joy as he is about his compassion. And not only does he say, “I’m going to be happy dang it.” He actually argues that he is morally constrained to be happy- “we had to celebrate”- he means that in the moral sense; that it would have been wrong not to.

My point to these students was simply that God is inviting them to the life of maximal happiness. In the father’s house there isn’t only peace and safety- there is joy and pleasure and happiness, and there is no boredom. And more than that, Jesus included the older brother in this story for a very important reason. He wanted to make very sure we knew what we were not being invited to. We are not being invited to be like the older brother- mean, unforgiving, hypocritical, self-righteous and falsely religious. I know that is many people’s worst fear in coming to God. They are afraid they are being invited to that stilted, boring, ugly kind of moralistic religion. Jesus went out of his way to show that this kind of thinking is either ignorant or a cop-out. God is inviting us to a life of maximal joy, and not to a life of boredom, hypocrisy and self-righteousness.

This good promise is at the heart of the change we must make in seeking happiness as we should. God is inviting us to be happy- and he is doing it by inviting us out of both religion and irreligion. He is inviting us to himself, the real happy one, the real party maker, the one who knows how to have a good time without being a parasite on some good thing.

The picture I gave them for this is the classic teenage drinking party. I thought they were worth going to then. But the main object of these gatherings for me was two fold: 1. Perhaps one of the cute brunettes I have a crush on will get drunk enough to make out with me. 2. One of my friends might need watching over before it’s done.

That said, these were about the dumbest gatherings on earth. They were parties, but what were we celebrating? Were we celebrating that alcohol intoxicates? That intoxicated teenagers tend to touch each other when inebriated? This gets at the heart of the modern fallacy about happiness. People want to be happy- so they celebrate. But they do it without doing the hard work of doing something worth celebrating.

Three years ago I was in London with some friends for one night. We went out to a pub together and had a few Guinnesses with some fish and chips. We laughed, danced, told jokes, and had a great time. And one of the reasons we were happy celebrating was that we had something to celebrate. The reasons we were in London is that we were returning to the USA from the slums in Mumbai. Mumbai has 14 million people in their slums. We were there working with a children’s home and helping them save the lives of young girls and boys that would otherwise be devoured by the poverty and oppression in the slums of that city. Try drinking your beer after you help save the lives of 70 young girls. Or after your long lost son or brother finally comes home. That’s the difference between the Father and the Son in that story- the father knows the difference between having a party and having something to celebrate. He knows the difference between happiness and frivolity. There is an inescapable relationship between happiness and truth- and the more that relationship is understood and embraced, the happier are the people that live in that proverbial household led by the greatest treasure of all- a wise, good and happy father.

This is great and the main character is a friend. This is how I feel about almost every political ad I see.

I’ll be taking off this week for a couple days of vacation and some off site teaching you’ll hear about in the video.

This is the letter from The Screwtape Letters that framed my mind to get in a fight with my wife. My failings aside, it is never-the-less one of the genius passages of the book; and most necessary for us to understand in our age.

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I had noticed, of course, that the humans were having a lull in their European
war—what they naïvely call “The War”!—and am not surprised that there is a
corresponding lull in the patient’s anxieties. Do we want to encourage this, or
to keep him worried? Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable
states of mind. Our choice between them raises important questions.
The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I
believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to
that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at
which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have
an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a
whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore
have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being
concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union
with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of
conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving
thanks for the present pleasure.
Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With
this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in
the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the
past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity.
.It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes
all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the
Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making
them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is,
of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal
part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all
lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those
schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or
Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of
temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to
the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin
(which alone interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just the part of the
process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without losing the
sin; it is the part contributed by the Enemy, and therefore experienced in a
Present. The sin, which is our contribution, looked forward.
To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too—just so much as is
necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be
their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty;
though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is
in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the
Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man
who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation),
washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns
at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over
him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an
imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the
present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the
other—dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he
will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the
rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere
fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered
them in the Present.
It follows then, in general, and other things being equal, that it is better for
your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn’t much matter which)
about this war than for him to be living in the present. But the phrase “living
in the present” is ambiguous. It may describe a process which is really just as
much concerned with the Future as anxiety itself. Your man may be untroubled
about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he
has persuaded himself that the Future is, going to be agreeable. As long as that
is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good,
because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience,
for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that
horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to
meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and
there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his
state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once. Here again, our
Philological Arm has done good work; try the word “complacency” on him. But, of
course, it is most likely that he is “living in the Present” for none of these
reasons but simply because his health is good and he is enjoying his work. The
phenomenon would then be merely natural. All the same, I should break it up if I
were you. No natural phenomenon is really in our favour. And anyway, why should
the creature be happy?
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE
XVI