In both matters, two women were minding their own business but were deemed suspicious because they are black.
In America.
In 2018.
As to the first situation, I will be turning 65 later this year. I identify with the woman and so, find the treatment to which she was subjected deeply disturbing.
As to the second matter: Personally, when I was a student at Ohio State who commuted daily from my home on the west side of Columbus to campus, I often dozed off in the student union between classes. Nobody ever filed a complaint about me. Of course, among the other reasons why this was probably the case is that I am white.
The Yale case is disturbing in that the truly guilty party, the student who called the police, clearly acted out of racial fear. Another term for racial fear would be racism. This sin exists among us and within us to an extent that we white folks find hard to admit. But cases like these two are rooted in racism and no amount of denial can change that fact.
Racism is a sin and its existence has a continuing horrible effect in America on those who are its victims, as well as a devastating eternal impact on those who act upon it, refusing to repent or change. When we yield to racism, when we excuse it, we put our immortal souls at risk.
We must all change. This fatal disease of racism must be exorcised from each of us.
This is especially urgent for those of us who claim to be disciples of Jesus Christ. We follow a Savior, God-enfleshed, Jesus, who saves us from sin and death, not because of our virtue, but in spite of our sin. We are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone. And, all my neighbors, whatever the tones of their skin, are, like me, made in the image of God. So, those of us who trust in Christ are particularly called to turn from the sin of racism and to call our sisters and brothers in Christ to do the same.
God tells us: “... if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7:14)
I don’t know about you, but I pray for healing in this land. And I know it starts with me repenting, trusting in Christ, and then, in the power of the Holy Spirit, loving all my neighbors, fighting for justice for each.
If our consciences regularly bother us, chances are we have a good relationship with God and live in daily repentance and renewal. A conscience held captive to God's Word is like a spiritual GPS by which God turns us back to Him and to the life God gives to those surrendered to Jesus Christ.
"Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting" (Psalm 139:23-24).
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]
2 Timothy 1:1-14 (NRSV)
This morning, I want to share with you a dream for our community which God has been inciting me to pray for and work for.
Sharing it with you frightens me a little. Not even preachers want to be seen as religious kooks.
But, in our second lesson for today, Paul says: “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” So, here’s the dream: Starting with the people of Saint Matthew, all of us praying in repentance and belief in Jesus, I dream that God will bring every person in Logan and Hocking County into a vibrant, life-changing, relationship with Jesus Christ.
I don’t know how far-fetched that dream may be. I don’t know how long it might take for it to come to pass. But I dream of a time when every woman, man, girl, and boy in Saint Matthew and in our community will be totally surrendered to Jesus Christ.
This dream goes way beyond a vision of packing church buildings with bodies. It looks to a time when all of us who call Hocking County home take hold of the life with God offered only through the crucified and risen Jesus. This dream takes seriously a promise that God gave to His Old Testament people, one that belongs to all who today dare to follow God-in-the-Flesh, Jesus Christ. You can find it in 2 Chronicles 7:14. Please read that passage from our pew Bibles with me now:
“If My people who are called by My Name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”(NKJV)
Isn’t it time we experienced those blessings in our community?
Isn’t it time we threw off the palls of spiritual lukewarmness, of going along to get along, of prayerlessness, of purposelessness, of being nice rather than being Christian, and instead, embraced the spirit of power, love, and self-discipline that God wants to give to every person for whom Jesus Christ died and rose?
Isn’t it time we invited Christ to transform our lives, businesses, schools, sports, marriages, and homes?
Second Chronicles 7:14 is a blank check which God desperately wants churches like Saint Matthew and individual Christians like you and me to cash.
God wants to transform our lives. He wants us to experience God’s presence, love, and power even in the challenges and tragedies that come to us in this imperfect world. He wants the same thing for all our neighbors and friends and family members.
It was to encourage the young pastor Timothy be a prayerful, repentant agent of God’s transforming power that Paul wrote 2 Timothy, the Bible letter from which today’s second lesson comes.
When Paul wrote it, he was imprisoned for the crime of claiming that Jesus was the King of the world. This notion didn’t set well in an empire where the Roman emperor was seen as both the king and as a god.
In spite of his imprisonment, Paul tells Timothy to never be ashamed to share the Christian message. Jesus offers what no one and nothing else can offer: New and everlasting life with God.
Folks: Never be ashamed of that message! Never water it down! Never mix it in with the prevailing religious attitudes of the culture or with whatever the police of political correctness may, at any given time, be pushing!
Stand firm in confessing what Jesus taught, that He is the way and the truth and the life and that no one comes to God the Father but through Him!
Money won’t give life.
Drugs won’t give life.
Buddha won’t give life.
Allah won't give life.
Nor will science, or psychology, or warfare, or nationalism, or a nice house, or religion.
Many of these things may have their places. But only one God can save us: the God made known to the world in Jesus. Stand firm in the truth of Jesus, Paul says, because Jesus has not given us a spirit of cowardice, but a spirit of power and love and self-discipline!
In a world in which the devil orchestrates a confusing array of little gods meant to pull us away from Jesus, it can be hard to hold onto Jesus and the gifts only He can give. In 1996, Marissa Cunningham, a native of Panama, was a law student at Rutgers University. She had just been through a divorce and was raising her daughter alone. Her future was threatened by her seeming inability to find a summer internship that would allow her to graduate. More than that, Marissa Cunningham felt empty, oppressed by a deep gloom. At times, she considered suicide.
One day, while walking down a street in Brooklyn, she saw a sign on a storefront: BOTANICA. Marissa knew that Botanica was a kind of fortune telling based on a form of Caribbean witchcraft called Santeria.
Desperate, this brilliant young woman entered the building and arranged an appointment with the curandero, a witch doctor. She saw him several days later. He told Marissa all sorts of things about her past, all of it true.
(This shouldn’t surprise us, by the way. The devil cannot know our futures, because the devil is not God. But as an unseen spiritual being who observes us and wants to take control of us, the devil does know all about our past. Those under the devil’s power, like the witch doctor are able to use our current circumstances to leverage us away from faith in God. This is exactly what the devil tried to do to Jesus during Jesus’ wilderness temptations, you’ll remember.)
Marissa was understandably impressed by the witch doctor’s knowledge. So, she agreed to come back two days later…with $90. The witch doctor would then sacrifice a chicken for her and bury it at a cemetery. That, he said, would get rid of all Marissa’s problems. As crazy as it sounded, Marissa was willing to try anything.
Yet, she wondered if she was doing the right thing. She decided to stop by the office of a church the next day. She asked to see a pastor. None of the pastors on staff were in. But, a staff member who had grown up in Haiti and knew about Santeria—Isn’t it funny how God puts coincidences together like that sometimes?—spoke with Marissa. She invited Marissa to a Bible study happening that night.
Marissa was wary. She had grown up in a church and didn’t think that Christianity had anything to offer. She went to the study anyway, arriving late, forced to sit in the only chair left, next to a character who Marissa, the social climber, would ordinarily have avoided. During a break, Marissa and this man, John, struck up a conversation. John showed empathy for Marissa and then pointed her to a passage in Ephesians 6. It said, “For our struggle [and that includes all the struggles you and I might have brought with us this very morning. Our struggle] is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil…”
John told Marissa that the blood of a chicken couldn’t help her through her darkness. Only Jesus, Who shed His blood on the cross and rose to reclaim life for sinful human beings, could give her the day-in-, day-out hope she craved.
After that, Marissa skipped her appointment with the witch doctor and embraced Christ as her God. The things that caused Marissa to be afraid didn’t suddenly go away, of course. But Jesus took her fears off of her back and took them onto Himself, setting her free to live. “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” That’s what Marissa experienced in Jesus!
Folks, we are surrounded by Marissas, people without hope, imprisoned by sin, by addictions, by depression, by loneliness. We live among people searching for better lives.
And sometimes, we are Marissas ourselves.
All of us in our community and in Saint Matthew need to know two truths. First, we need to know the truth about sin, as revealed in the Ten Commandments:
that God alone is God and that God’s Name is holy*;
that life is precious, including the lives of our parents, children, spouses, and neighbors and we must honor God’s gift of life**;
that sexual intimacy is a gift from God to be opened only by those engaged in a marriage of a woman and a man***;
that we are to honor the property of others****;
that we are to help our neighbors keep their good names*****.
The first truth tells us that we don’t deserve eternity with God. The second truth though, tells us that God gives as a free gift the very thing we don’t deserve and can never earn.
God lifts all who receive His forgiveness and who trust in Christ into a never-ending relationship with the God Who made us and loves us.
Only the Church—that’s you and me--is entrusted with seeing that the world hears, knows, and experiences these two transforming truths.
They aren't easy to share, which is why most Christians never get around to telling their spiritually-disconnected friends about Jesus. It seems that we’re more afraid of having the world dislike us than we are of not honoring the God Who created us and went to a cross for us.
But Paul says that we must not be ashamed. We must not be afraid to experience others’ displeasure with God’s truth. God is looking for Christians who are willing to be disliked—even hated—for their faith in Christ, so that all have a chance to know and experience God’s love.
My daily prayer is that God will fill the entire Saint Matthew family with God’s “spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline,” so that we can do what Jesus has charged us to do.
Paul tells us today that God has entrusted a great treasure to us—the treasure of God’s truth, the truth of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ. May we open that treasure for ourselves and for our neighbors so that the dream of a Logan and Hocking County made new by Jesus Christ can start to happen.
God says: “If My people who are called by My Name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
Starting today. Starting this moment, let’s all dare to pray that God’s forgiveness and healing will come to us personally, to Saint Matthew, and to our community.
And may we be bold in telling the truest story the world has ever known, the story of Jesus, our crucified and risen King!
*These are among the concerns of the First through Third Commandments. **These are concerns associated with the Fourth, Fifth, and Tenth Commandments. ***This is the concern of the Sixth Commandment. ****This is a concern of the Seventh and Ninth Commandments. *****This is a concern of the Eighth Commandment. For a great discussion of the Ten Commandments and meaning of each, see Martin Luther's Small Catechism, one translation of which can be found here.
Revival, new life with God, is something that can happen to people who have long warmed church pews, but have lost sight of Jesus, once their "first love."
Revival also happens to those who have never known or trusted in Christ, who come to worship and trust Him as their only God and Savior.
The word revival literally means, of course, to be made alive again. Revival is what happened to the Prodigal Son in Jesus' famous parable. The younger son in Jesus' story, you'll remember, took the inheritance the father had always planned on giving to him and decided to misuse his freedom as license for sin. Things didn't go well. Mindful that life with his father--representative of God--had given him both the freedom and the power to be his best self, the son set out for home, his only goal to ask for his father's forgiveness and seek employment with him as a hired-hand. He felt worthy of nothing more than this.
But when the father sees his son, he welcomes him happily and throws a party for him. The father's other son--representative for us today of good religious pew-warmers whose relationship with God is lukewarm, at best--becomes angry with his father for forgiving the younger son. He even refuses to join the welcome home party for the younger son. The father begs him to join in, explaining, "...we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found."
Elsewhere, the New Testament says that "...if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new!" (2 Corinthians 5:17)
General revival, such as was experienced in the United States during the Great Awakenings in the 18th and 19th centuries, begins with individuals and churches confessing their sins in more than pro forma ways to God--and in some cases, to each other. Confession of this kind authentically owns its need of the power for living free from the sin and the death we can't get free of on our own. Revived people relish the Biblical promise: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus our Lord!" (Romans 8:1).
Humility and honesty before God, a willingness to trust God more than we trust the sins we love to commit, can ignite a contagious general revival in which hundreds and thousands of people turn in faith to Christ and find their lives, their churches' lives, and the lives of those they touch in the community and world with the Good News of new life that comes only through faith in Christ.
This is how revival has always come. In Old Testament times, God told Solomon, king of God's people, Israel, "If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land" (2 Chronicles 7:14).
Our land--where only 17% of those identifying themselves as Christians bother to worship on any given week--and our whole world, need the healing, the revival, that Christ can bring.
This can happen. Someone once said that if you want to know how revival begins, get down on your knees, draw a circle around where you're kneeling, then confess your sins and ask God to help you trust in Christ alone. God will then begin revival within that circle.
In a real sense, revival begins when we're dissatisfied with the way things are. I call this holy discontent.
When we have holy discontent, we're not pleased by our own lack of love for God and others and we long to live differently. We want to be more like that person we're always trying to prove we are to others. When we have holy discontent, we hunger for--we are desperate for--God. When we have holy discontent, we will be incapable of trusting God, but we want to. We're like the man who said to Jesus, "I believe; help my unbelief." And just as Jesus answered that man's prayers, in spite of his feeble, weak faith, Jesus will answer the prayers of all who are willing to trust in Him, even if their trust is weak or next-to-nonexistent.
God doesn't sit in heaven waiting for us to become good enough before He hears our prayers. "The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love," the Bible tells us repeatedly. God knows the intentions of our hearts and understands how hard it is for us to trust in Him. But His promise, again found in several Biblical passages, is that all who call on His Name will be saved. All of this is why David wrote back in Old Testament times: "As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him. For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust." God will never turn a deaf ear to anyone who genuinely wants to want Him, who genuinely wants to trust, wants to turn from sin. Blessedly, if we give God an inch, God will take a mile. That's a great thought to my mind!
It's foisted on you by the Holy Spirit calling you to the daily habit of personal repentance and renewal.
When we experience holy discontent, a good thing to do is to go through the Ten Commandments and Martin Luther's explanation of them (or any other great Christian teacher's explanations of the Commandments), to hit our knees, to repent for our violations of each commandment, and to experience the forgiveness that can come to those who pray in Jesus' Name.
The joy that comes to people who are reconciled with God through Christ causes them to want to share that revival that comes from God with others. They're like Peter and John, early followers of Jesus who were ordered by religious authorities to stop telling others about Jesus' life, death, and resurrection and the good news of new life given by all who turn to Christ. In the face of the threats, they said, “Whether it is right in God’s sight to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; 20for we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard" (Acts 4:20).
Having personally experienced the forgiveness and new life they knew that the crucified and risen Jesus wanted to give to all people, Peter and John felt an overpowering need to share Christ with others. "This Jesus," they told the religious leaders who threatened them, "is 'the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.' There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:11-12).
Once revival starts to happen inside of you, it's bound to show up outside of you, and nothing and no one can stop it...not even you yourself. "If you're happy and you know it, then your face will surely show it..." as the Sunday School song puts it.
But it's this precise insight that ought to rouse our holy discontent...and our concern. As Tom Phillips writes in his 1995 book, Revival Signs: Join the Spiritual Awakening:
People today want to know about Christ more than Christians want to tell them about Him.
This sad state of affairs is even worse today than it was when Phillips wrote those words fifteen years ago.
A Florida pastor gains national prominence not because he and his flock are sharing the good news of Jesus, or because they are repenting and experiencing the revival the Holy Spirit sends to people who humble themselves and repent in Jesus' Name. Their prominence comes from touting a plan to burn the Koran, an act irrelevant to their mission as a church and hardly expressive of the gentleness and reverence with which we Christians are told to share our faith. Meanwhile, the world is desperate for the revival only Jesus can bring!
A denomination, which has shrunk by over a million members and 1000 congregations in the past twenty years, my own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), becomes more involved with lobbying the government in Washington and the acceptance of heresies designed to court the favor of the world while ignoring the will of God, than it is with sharing Jesus. (Of course, it can't credibly share Jesus anyway, so long as it remains rebellious against Jesus and against God's revealed will in God's Word.) Meanwhile, the world remains desperate for the revival only Jesus can bring!
But we shouldn't give in to hopelessness! There's no good reason to do so. After all, in Christ, we know that God is bigger than all that daunts us or threatens to rob us of the joy Christ came to give to us. We need to pay attention to our discontent and bring it to God.
Discontent among Christians can lead us to repentance and to renewal, which in turn can lead us to share our faith in Christ with others. Jesus' plan all along has been to use people desperate for Him and so desperate in their love for others that they will obey His great commission--to make disciples of all nations, to lovingly woo others into a relationship with Christ.
The person who lets God into their lives through worship and fellowship with Christ's Church, personal confession, regular Bible reading, grateful reception of Holy Communion--Christ's body and blood--each time it's offered, and intercessory prayer for others, can experience revival.
It will happen first in themselves.
And then, through the Holy Spirit, they'll follow Scripture's direction to "always be prepared to make [a defense of their faith in Christ] to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you." And they will be able to do it "with gentleness and reverence" (1 Peter 3:15-16).
In his phenomenal little book, The Church God Blesses, Pastor Jim Cymbala writes:
Every revival in church history has been started by pastors and believers who became deeply dissatisfied with the moral and spiritual climate around them. They knew from Scripture that God has something better for his people. All the great missionary movements have been spawned by men and women who became desperate to see God's kingdom extended to new regions and to those who had not yet heard about Jesus. In fact, every time people really pray, they are believing that God by his divine power can change what is into something better.
Do you feel discontent with yourself, your family, your church, your community, our world?
Turn to God. Trust in the God Who makes this promise to those who want Him:
Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; 7let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. 8For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. 9For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. 10For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, 11so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:6-10)
Confess.
Trust.
Pray.
Get to know God better through God's Word, the Bible.
Share the good news of new life through Jesus.
Revival can happen. Every Christian should want it to happen.
Are you content with the way things are or do you long for the better--and everlasting life--God wants to bring to all people? God can answer the prayer that many of us sing on Pentecost Sunday, when we ask the life-giving breath of God to make life new, to revive us, through Jesus Christ:
Spirit, Spirit of gentleness
Blow thro' the wilderness
calling and free.
Spirit, Spirit of restlessness
stir me from placidness
Wind, wind on the sea
We dare not be placid! There's a dying world that needs new life. God is looking for people who will daily surrender to Christ and ask God for nothing more than the privilege of sharing the new life that comes from Christ with others.
Revival can start within us and take in all the world. May our prayerful surrender to Jesus Christ be the start of a new great awakening!
