Holy Father, Thank You that Your labor in our hearts has transformed the horrid rejection of Jesus into a source of eternal salvation. We are moved by the rejection Jesus must have experienced in both His life and His death. We long that He no longer be the rejected stranger, but the honored guest in our lives.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Amen.
There are few things that can make us feel more separated in the human race like bearing our pain alone. A large part of our crushing grief is that no one knows, no one understands, and no one cares that we are close to the end of the road of wanting to go on. Pain is like that. The physical pain with which we can no longer cope. The emotional pain of losing a soul mate. The pain of the shame and guilt we are unwilling for anyone to discover. Every pain plots to segregate us into a private world where we perish alone.
Here is the good news of grace: You are not alone. Even in your pain. Jesus has come to the cross not just to die for you, but to die with you. Every rejection, every grief, every sorrow, just like the ones that have sought to ravage and devour life from you, Jesus’ pain of His own death is the guarantee, not that you will never have to suffer again, but that you will never have to suffer alone. No matter how deep the hurt, you are never beyond the boundaries of the understanding and compassion of Jesus.
In sharing the fellowship meal this Sunday, we will remember that in every way Jesus has joined us in our pain and promised that He can see us through it.
Most of us woke up to the news that Billy Graham passed away this morning at age 99. By noon very few people in the world will not know of his passing. There are people in South Korea, the Olympic Venue, who will receive the news and immediately connect with the moment when they first heard the story of Jesus. Dr. Graham preached there. In Australia, Eastern Europe, the UK, so much of this planet owes the hearing of the Good News to Dr. Graham. Most people will be able to connect to the importance of his life. However, a legend will be able to connect to his significance from a very personal level. Without hyperbole it can be said that millions of people still living found their life-changing faith in Jesus because they heard God’s call in the voice of Billy Graham. Hundreds of thousands will celebrate today in memory of a “good and faithful servant” of God. I will be one of them.
One of the most serious ethical questions with which we have to deal has to do with how we treat one another. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, introduces Cain’s self-justification for killing his brother. At the most local and personal level we must work our way through that same complex question in the direction of God’s lovely relational intention for us. There is nothing about our faith-birthed understanding of God that does not have to seep through the church walls onto the streets, playgrounds, work spaces and homes in which we live. Faith, fully grown, inevitably bears its fruit in its ethic. God seems to be every bit as concerned about how we relate to one another as how we relate to Him.
This Sunday we will continue to talk about what we believe about God by looking at the tragic story of Cain and Abel. With this story as a back drop we can move our thoughts and our hearts to a place where we can plan for the kind of garden/community in which we want to live.
Sunday’s Talk: At What Point do I Get to Slug My Brother?
The first two chapters of Genesis are the epoch stories of creation. The affirmation of the stories is that God created everything that exists. All things look to the heart of God to find the causality of their existence. Everything in heaven and everything on earth owes its existence to the diffusion of God’s goodness that results in life itself. As women and men, we were created in God’s likeness. That likeness is the capacity to know, choose, relate and love as He does. As we live out of that likeness we extend the life and goodness of God.
God placed man and woman in a garden. God’s habitat for us brimmed with provision. It was a garden that would not only sustain our physical existence but would sustain our relationship with Him. God’s own expression when he saw all that He had made was that it was VERY GOOD.
Up to this point the story of Genesis can make sense as something that took place in the past. We live in the continuation of that story. But in the third chapter we must make a transition. We must decide whether the story is just about the past or whether this is a story in which I find myself in the thick of the plot. As a story of Adam’s rebellion against God the Genesis account is true. However, as an account of every person’s rebellion against God the story is TRUER that true. This is the story of every man and woman. It is the story of every single one of us. Yes, it is the story of Adam and Eve. But it is your and my story too.
Sunday, we are going to talk together about what went wrong in the garden.
The epic story of creation as recorded in Genesis 1 and 2 is as important in talking about God as the garden was to the earliest pioneer/homesteader. Life would have perished without the garden and discussion about God would be weak and malnourished without this text.
It is important, however, in at least one other way. This story is not only a story about beliefs that can nourish the soul and sustain the vigorous life that God breathed into us, but it is a story about relationships that are a part of the sustenance. Our soulishness is not only fed by what we believe but how we behave. It is common sense for us to know that there are behaviors that damage and destroy life and there are behaviors that feed life.
We might call what we believe about God our theology. Our theology is expressed when we talk about God. On the other side we can call the way we behave our ethic. The profound implications of what we think about God and how we behave in our relationship to God, others, and the sustaining garden we were given are inseparable. They cannot be divorced. What we believe about God yields behaviors in our lives as certain as a tomato plant tended to will produce tomatoes.
No culture, ancient, Greek Roman, Mesopotamian, American, or Christian can thrive without a vital, living, faithful belief in God. It bears the fruit by which we are sustained.
We are using a pencil to write down what we in Ledbetter can believe about God. And we are doing it as though it is as important as living life together in a garden.
This Sunday we will take in another big gulp of the creation story. We will be reading Genesis, chapter 2. This chapter is an additional account of the creation of man and woman. In the first chapter man is created in the “image of God”. In the second chapter God breathes into our nostrils the breath of life.
The order of creation in chapter 1 and chapter 2 is quite different. It could be that the story, as told in chapter 1, is telling us about the relationship humans have to all the other things that God created. Man and woman were to work in, and care for, the garden as though it was a gift from God. The word subdue has more the meaning of manage than to exploit.
Chapter 2 has a different purpose. This account of the creation of human life is to tell us what our relationship to one another is to be like. Among all the animals there was no suitable partner found for Adam. So, Eve was created from a rib taken from his side. She was flesh of his kind. Therefore, the relational model between Adam and Eve is to reflect a difference than the one describing man’s relationship to the earth and to the beasts of the field. Could it be that this relationship is one in which we consider the “other” as being created in the image of God as we ourselves are?
Once we come to terms with what we believe we cannot ignore the questions, “What in the world does this implicate? What does it say about the way I behave and the decisions I make?” This is the real job of talking about God.
This past Sunday we started on a long, perhaps even permanent, process of finding words that express our faith. People of faith have been doing the same thing for centuries. No sooner had Jesus returned to His Father than his friends started talking and writing about what they believed about Jesus. Groups of the faithful followers would get together and talk endlessly and write copiously about the faith Jesus had awakened in them.
Some of those documents are still with us after hundreds of years. You may know one of those statements as the Apostles Creed. It was spoken of as early as the fourth century, but many believed its origins were with the twelve friends of Jesus who first followed him. You may have said the Nicene Creed each week in your church. It was written in 325 AD in Nicaea, Turkey, by a group of faith people who had met to talk about what they believed. People have been meeting, talking and writing about their faith ever since.
In talking about our faith at Soul Café we are simply continuing that ceaseless tradition.
No doubt our statement will not supplant the Apostles or the Nicene statements. However, the words we use about our faith may have some differences that could be seen as advantages. Not because our words are better, or more precise, or more correct but because they will be our words. They will be our Ledbetteran dialect. They will be in the metaphors that have meaning to us.
Secondly, our words of faith will not be words that come from the top down telling us what we MUST believe. They will be words that come from the bottom up about what we have come to believe through struggle and doubt, the birth of new calves and the planting of gardens, hard knocks and beautiful sunsets as seen from our front porches. They will be words used in humility. Like a creed without dogma. Like a statement of faith that opens a door for people to come in rather than a test of correctness to keep them out. Here is the reality: We don’t know almost everything. A good statement of our faith should remember that.
Here will be a big difference that will perfectly picture the kind of people you are. It will be a faith expression connected to a real world. An expression that will connect us not just to God but to our work, to our play, to our family, to our neighbors and ultimately to our world. We will have no time to talk about abstract theological ideas that cannot shake hands with a neighbor and make a deal that is as good as your “word”. Our talk about our Heavenly Father must connect us to our earthly neighbors and to our earthly habitat. Words of faith that do not make that connection soon turn moldy green with rancid smell. All God talk must become talk about how we treat and behave toward one another.
There is no telling what this process will produce. It will be messy because we are a mess. It will be incomplete because we are incomplete. So, we will make certain to write our words with a number 2 pencil on the pages of a Big Chief tablet to facilitate the inevitable changes we will want to make following our next illness or loss. After the birth our next kiddo or after our next fishing trip. After all the things that give opportunity for our faith to grow and mature.
No one will be asked to sign this document. I wouldn’t even sign a document that I had written. This is just an attempt to find common ground from which we can take our next step toward God and toward our neighbor.
We started this past Sunday with the most elemental beginning. God IS. That’s it. It’s not all. It’s just where we can begin. Let’s get together Sunday to talk about what difference that makes.
Soul Cafe Church 