sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 06/01/2014
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Looking to connect with God not long after my mom’s death, wrestling with identity questions. The spit had hit the fan in my life, feeling alone, disconnected, unsure of myself. Running at Riverside Park in Manhattan, evening descending, 18000 songs on random shuffle. A nudge to pay attention, that maybe the Spirit had something to whisper to me through the music. Next song comes on, a showtune. One of Ronni’s songs in my collection. No way God can speak through a broadway showtune (obviously!), so my fingers search for the skip button on my headphones, hoping to get to a U2 song, or maybe a worship song, something God might be present in. I pause, a nudge in my heart; let it play. So I do.
When you're a Jet,
You're a Jet all the way
From your first cigarette
To your last dyin' day.
When you're a Jet,
If the spit hits the fan,
You got brothers around,
You're a family man!
You're never alone,
You're never disconnected!
You're home with your own:
When company's expected,
You're well protected!
Then you are set
With a capital J,
Which you'll never forget
Till they cart you away.
When you're a Jet,
You stay a Jet!
As I listen to the lyrics, it’s like God is in my headphones, speaking to me. And then I realize the name of the musical: West Side Story. I’m on the Upper West Side, the actual setting for the musical. Tears start to fall down my cheeks and blend in with the rain that’s started lightly falling.
Alive // Life After Easter is about Jesus alive, present everywhere now after the resurrection through his Holy Spirit. What does that mean for us human beings who live on the bright side of the empty tomb? Well, among other things, it means that the most important reality in our world, whether we are religious or not, is that the Spirit of the Living God is near, available, close, desiring to speak to us, to lead us, to teach us, to change our relationships with one another and with a God who has seemed distant and inaccessible. A Spirit who is a defense counselor, not an accuser or condemner. Love, alive and active in every corner of the world, inviting us to wake up to his presence and activity, and to join him in nudging everyone around us to wakefulness as well.
Last week we looked at how Jesus nudged some friends awake after his resurrection, in a passage in Luke 24. Jesus calls us to join with him in being a nudger. People who are awakening each other to the presence of the God who is already here. A nudge here. A nudge there. Our only agenda to bless, to serve, to cooperate with God in announcing and demonstrating and embodying the good news of the God of grace and peace.
A quick review of nudging...
The first goal of nudging is seeing. Awareness. This is what separates it from the goals behind sales tactics and shoving. The misguided seller and the shover are content with action divorced from sight (examples...). Not the nudger.
Nudges begin by coming near and joining with.
Nudges involve paying attention to the nudge-ee, asking questions, noticing, probing or more, listening.
Nudges are non-anxious and proceed at a graceful pace.
What we’ll concentrate on today is this: Nudging counts on God being at work everywhere through the Holy Spirit. All the time. In life after Easter, nowhere is off-limits for the Holy Spirit. It's a question for us of noticing. Of recognizing. Of having eyes to see him, no matter where he's present.
Let’s try an exercise.
For some of us, some of the time, in some situations and relationships and places, our problem is that we're not expecting God to be present... And because we aren't looking for him, or even because we're pretty sure he wouldn't be there, we miss what Jesus wants to nudge us into awareness of: God is alive and blowing like wind throughout the earth. It’s what almost caused me to miss him in the Broadway song.
It’s what happened to Jesus’ disciples on Easter morning, too.
9When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. 10It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. 11But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.
Luke 24v9-11
Their words seemed to them like nonsense... more literally, their words appeared, or were shining, in their presence as nonsense. What we have here is a failure of sight, isn’t it? How can they not see these true words as true?
Two reasons. 1, in their minds, women aren’t reliable witnesses. This is a blindness that permeates their culture. And 2, dead people in tombs stay dead people in tombs. This is just an assumption about the way the world works based on their experiences. Which of course is a blindness rooted in the smallness of their worldview.
How often do we miss opportunities to find the Holy Spirit alive and kicking in our world because it seems like non-sense to us? Because we’ve got the wrong assumptions?
I remember a time, growing up, when I thought the Holy Spirit was only present in “Christian” things. Christian music, Christian books, Christian movies, Christian places, Christian people. And even then, some “Christian” people were suspect.
Perhaps you’ve written off the possibility of God being alive and present in your extended family. Or your workplace. Or your school. Or at your gym. Or at Prom. Or at some party this weekend. Or some “godless” activity or passion you have. Or in some painful situation.
Because dead people stay dead in tombs, right?
And maybe your blindness to the Holy Spirit’s activity and presence goes even deeper than that, like mine did. Not only did I think God wasn’t present in “non-Christian” things, I thought those things were somehow hostile to his presence. That they were somehow able to keep him out. As if the creation could exile the creator, or even want to.
Let’s cut the disciples, and ourselves, a little slack, though. Not on the discrediting women front, so much, that bit is foolish through and through. But on the basic idea that there are certain places we can expect to find God and certain places we can’t. Because before the resurrection, God was uniquely present on planet earth in a particular place in the Temple that Israel had built for him, under his instructions. A place called the Holy of Holies, where the ark of the covenant was kept, with two angels on top of it.
In Exodus 25, we read about God saying this to Moses:
22There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of the covenant law, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites.
So maybe we can be forgiven for not expecting to encounter the living God everywhere. Strike that, surely we can be forgiven. However, there were signs even then (one of which we’ll get to in a bit), and it’s especially true now, that God isn’t confined to the Holy of Holies. And he never was. He’s everywhere.
Perhaps you remember in Mark’s account of Jesus’ death, that when he breathed his last, releasing his Spirit (get it, spirit/breath, the same thing; Jesus’ spirit, the Holy Spirit), the veil of the temple, the huge curtain that separates the Holy of Holies from the outside world, was torn in two from top to bottom. The presence of God in other words, busting out into the wide, wide world. And a Roman centurion, one of the ones who oversaw Jesus’ crucifixion, the last person on earth you’d expect to have the Holy Spirit, sees who Jesus is for the first time. “Surely this man was the Son of God!” How did he see that if not for the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who makes the blind see?
Here in Luke’s gospel, do you remember what the women found when they went to the tomb?
2They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them.
These two men are like the angels on the ark of the covenant, and the tomb is like the Holy of Holies, except of course it’s empty now. Because God is out, Jesus is alive, walking about in the garden, his Spirit soon to be everywhere.\
Did we think God can be stuck in a box? Did we think God was only present in "godly" places and among "godly" people? Did we think we could only find him by looking for him where we last put him?
God has shaken off the chains of death and now he's roaming the earth, his Spirit blowing like the wind. Nowhere is off limits to the resurrected Jesus, nowhere is off limits to his Holy Spirit.
In the beginning, God blessed everything. The earth - it's good, God says. The oceans, the land, the animals, the sky, the rivers, the plants. It's good. It's blessed. It's his, he can go where he wants, and he wants it all because it's good.
And then, in making us, the soil itself has been infused with Spirit, the breath of God.
Sure, the well-ordered and God-inhabited creation has been disrupted by sin. But God has never left the building. Or maybe better said, God has left the building - and now he's everywhere, arriving with peace, the truest kind of peace that restores good order and is marked by his nearness and favoring presence.
Listen to what happens when the big payoff finally comes, when all the blindness gives way to seeing.
36Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace] be with you."
That kind of peace is only possible when the Spirit of God is present. Peace be with you. You, image bearer of God, peace be with you.
Nothing made in the image of God or blessed by God is godless. The word "godless" in the scriptures never means "devoid of God. It always means lacking reverence for God, or polluted, corrupted, profaned. But never, ever "empty of God."
Consider a man named Ezekiel. A priest who is the son of a priest. A good priest whose whole life and experience of God is wrapped up in the temple, the place where God dwells. And the temple is destroyed. And the children of God are exiled to the land where Ishtar is god. And his wife is dead. And Ezekiel is dragged through the gates of Ishtar into Babylon. And one day, by a river in Babylon, he has a fantastical, wild vision, with multi-faced creatures and spinning wheels with eyes, and he realizes, God is here. In Babylon. And he falls face down in worship. Right there in the land presumably belonging to Ishtar. Only it doesn't. Nothing belongs to Ishtar. Because, as the people of Israel sing in psalm 24, the earth is the Lord's and all it contains. The world, and those who dwell in it.
Consider the disciples in a boat out on the water, sans Jesus. And they see a figure out on the water. The water that is filled with terrors. They know, they absolutely know, that when someone shows up out on the water, not in a boat, it's a ghost. Something evil and undead. Only this isn't a ghost. It's Jesus. Courage. No fear. I am. God loves to be outside of our safe boats. Walking on the water all around us. Saying, Courage. No fear. It's me. Awaken each other to me.
The resurrected Jesus is everywhere through his Spirit unleashed on planet earth. Are we looking everywhere for him, with expectation?
We can’t be very effective nudgers until we are. Because nudging is awakening each other to the presence of the God who is already there. God is already there. Wherever there is.
Where have you stopped looking for him, expecting him?
Practical Suggestions:
1. Turn and Burn.
Repent of any false assumptions you've held along the lines of "dead people stay dead in tombs."
Do it this way: write down the name of a person or place or situation that you've written off as "godless" or as an unlikely candidates for God's presence and activity. Especially a place you go often or a person you would love to be part of them experiencing the fullness of God's blessing.
Get a candle that you like the smell of, and put that paper under the candle. Every time you light the candle or smell it's scent, allow it to remind you that the light of the world is shining there, or on that person, that the wind of the Spirit is blowing there, or on that person. Pray: Jesus, Nudge me awake to your presence, so I can be a nudger.
2. Change your Identity.
Resolve to stop thinking of yourself as someone who "brings" Jesus to a place or a person. For one, that's a lot of pressure... And 2, Jesus already beat you wherever you think you're bringing him, so you're wasting your time.
Instead, receive a new identity as a member of the New Creation Road Show. Like the Antiques Road Show, only you're helping people identify the hidden signs of new creation already present in their lives. Put NCRS on a wristband if you like, or stick it on your review mirror. If someone asks what it stands for, suggest: "No one Can Really Say." If they laugh and ask again, take it as a sign of new creation at work, and tell them what it really stands for. If they look at you like you're weird and move on to another subject, maybe the time for a nudge is still a little down the road.
Note, when we talk about new creation, we’re talking about the idea that what God is up to on this side of Easter is making a new creation, repairing, restoring, redeeming, renewing everything damaged by sin, by our lack of trust in him, by our going our own misguided way in so many ways. (For those who like putting pieces together in the bible, connecting the dots, the linen gravecloths in the tomb are probably representative of the linen garments that the high priest would leave behind when he exited the Holy of Holies the last time on the day of Atonement, as he represented God coming into the earth and cleansing his creation.) The Holy Spirit is the breath of God breathed into the new creation soil to bring it to life. So step one is allowing him to fill your lungs, to fill you and animate and energize your life. I’ll be here, up front, to pray for anyone who wants that, or more of that, in their spiritual lungs and lives.
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