title: He Will Come to Judge the Living and the Dead

themes: judgment apostles-creed second-coming wesleyan-grace letter-versus-spirit serving-the-least holiness

text:
**Scripture:** Matthew 25:31-46; Psalm 94:1-7; Luke 1:51-52; Deuteronomy 6:4-5; Leviticus 19:18; Romans 3:10-12; Romans 3:23; Matthew 7:1-2; James 2:13; John 21:15-17; Hebrews 13:16
**Series:** 2022

> Part of a series on the Apostles' Creed, this Advent sermon unpacks 'He will come to judge the living and the dead.' Opening with a wordplay on anesthesia as the absence of judgment, the preacher holds together salvation by grace with the reality of judgment by laying out the four Wesleyan graces (prevenient, justifying, sanctifying) and redefining sin as acting against God's will rather than violating discrete rule-lists. Drawing on Psalm 94, Mary's Magnificat, the Shema and Leviticus, he argues that Christ's judgment will look like Matthew 25's sheep and goats, not Paul's sin lists, condemning the church's idolatrous focus on dress and origins over feeding the hungry. The call is to leave judgment to Christ, hold one another accountable in love, and stay awake this Advent by feeding Christ's sheep in concrete ways.'

**Illustrations:** anesthesia-judgment-etymology, get-out-of-jail-free-card, holy-spirit-not-a-vampire, salvation-card-in-wallet

---

# December 18
## He will come to judge the living and the dead
Lord, avenging God—
   avenging God, show yourself!
Rise up, judge of the earth!
    Pay back the arrogant exactly what they deserve!
- Psalm 94:1-2

I've had general anesthesia twice in my life. The first time was when I had my wisdom teeth removed and the second time was when I had a tumor removed from my ankle. I don't remember falling asleep.

I didn't have great judgment. Aesthesia or aesthetics means means judgment and Greek and anesthesia means an absence of judgment, lack of judgment. Anesthesia is the procedure that takes away our judgment. So we can't tell that something hurts or it doesn't hurt. That's the great trick of it.
So aesthetics is the like the study of the beautiful: what you like and you don't like. It's one thing to judge whether a painting is beautiful. Another thing to judge whether you feel the pain from a surgeon cutting up your body and another thing to judge the eternal soul of other people.
All these fall under the language of judgment and in the apostles creed. After Christ ascends and sits by the heavenly Father, we proclaim that he will come again to judge the living and the dead.

## Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on the apostles creed, that historic doctrinal statement of the faith. We are going to look at how the creed encapsulate scripture and offers it to us in a way that shows us what has been revealed from God about who God is, how the world is, why we are in need, how Jesus saves us, and what we should do about it.

Today,  he will come to judge the living and the dead.

Judgment is not something that people seek a lot. Unless they have a grievance and they're very litigious, then you're looking for a judgment. I don't know of a single situation where the word judgmental has a positive connotation. It is a pejorative word.
We claim, as the Creed says, that Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead. We also claim that we're saved by grace, not by works. How do we hold these together? Judgment is a major part of the Bible. The coming of Christ in judgment is a major theme of Advent. As Richard red earlier.

Lord, avenging God—
   avenging God, show yourself!
Rise up, judge of the earth!
    Pay back the arrogant exactly what they deserve!
- Psalm 94:1-7

Mary also calls on the judgment of Lord in Luke 1

He has shown strength with his arm.
    He has scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.
    He has pulled the powerful down from their thrones
        and lifted up the lowly.

The injustice of our world is not eternal. Judgment is the Lord’s, though, not ours. It doesn’t matter whether we are on anethesthesia or not.  The pain and misery caused by people on this earth will be judged, but not by us. A good judge who sees the hearts and understands us.

The second meaning of advent, the coming again of Jesus, is to conclude this judgment. It has been presented in many different ways over the years. Some have elaborate systems of how it is going to happen with predictions of the end times, et cetera.

I think that many of these are a misreading of scripture, ignoring when Jesus says, you will not know the time or the hour. In the mean time, we need to stay awake for judgment. And yet, if we're already saved, what do we have to worry about?

Sometimes the Christian faith is presented as this kind of hellish get out of jail free card. So you say the sinner’s prayer and suddenly you're no longer going to hell. You're in the clear. Good job by you. But this is not a biblical account of salvation.

You can pick and choose scriptures to get to this kind of view, but salvation is a lot more holistic than just the avoidance of hell. Salvation is a life healed and sanctified, ready to spend eternity with the God who is love.

In order to bridge the gap between salvation and judgment, we need a better understanding of grace. There are four different types of grace or different ways we talk about grace. The first is prevenient grace: the grace that comes before. The grace that is present before we are aware of God. The Holy Spirit isn't just waiting around for us to say some words and then it will enter us. The Holy Spirit is not like a vampire that has to be welcomed into our house.
The Holy Spirit is already there. If we at all call for God, it's already and only because of God's prior presence and movement in us.
There aren’t spirits dancing around waiting for us to say the magic words so that they can enter and start working on us. The Holy Spirit is already working on us.
Next, there's justifying grace, the grace that takes away our sins, that makes us upright. The grace that takes us from being curved inward towards ourselves to standing upright and being able to see as God sees and love as God loves. This is the grace of the conversion experience, the grace of the mountain top, but God isn't through with us.
Our life doesn't end upon conversion. Upon accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior. No. If that's was all there was, gosh, this would be a mediocre faith.
The next grace is sanctifying grace which changes us continually to become who we were created to be. It is the most amazing thing. We are cleansed by grace so that the not loves of our life are no longer present.
Through grace, Christ chooses us and then offers us a chance to respond. How we how we respond is where the stakes come in. It is also where the judgment comes in and this is where we can talk about sin.

Sin is missing the mark of a God has offered for us. But there are a number of ways of conceptualizing and thinking about sin. If we did a poll of sins five sins that everybody thought of, there might be a lot of overlap. There probably is gonna be a number of people who have slightly different definitions of sin, but I bet there'd be a lot of overlap.
The way sin is often taught in churches though is different from how it's offered in scripture. What's often taught is a set of rules to either follow or not follow. It's kind of extrapolated from the 10 commandments. Do this, don't do that. The 10 commandments aren't really a super important thing to Jesus. They aren't separate from the rest of the law for him.
To Jesus, it's all the law, or the way or path to follow God of which not one letter is to be removed. It is, instead, summed up with two verses from the Torah. The first, the Shema from Deuteronomy. “listen! Our God is the Lord! Only the Lord! Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your being, and all your strength.” And the second from Leviticus, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Later Christians made sin lists of sorts but Jesus does not. Sin is acting against the will of God. In our hearts or in our lives. It doesn’t replace the Law but goes deeper. Adultery to Jesus is not just the discreet act of unfaithfulness but the lust in our hearts. Murder is not just the act of killing but hatred in our hearts. The sabbath, as well, is for God and for the things of God and so is not for refraining for loving solely for explicit rule following.

The Christ of judgment is not about looking at a set of discrete rules and seeing whether or not we followed them. And thanks be to God it isn't because if it were, we would all fall short. This is why Paul quotes the psalm when he says no one is holy. No, not one. No one does good. No, not one. There is no pure position on which to stand. This doesn’t relativize sin. Sin is a greater problem than any list of sins could ever address. I think we should speak of sin and holiness and seek holiness and righteousness, fully hold each other accountable to sin as a community, lift up and speak, but we should also hold it under the guidance of what Jesus actually commands of us to do in the best approximation of judgment. Christ's judgment is not going to take place as one of the sin lists in Paul or in Peter. It will be like Matthew 25,

“Now when the Son of Man comes in his majesty and all his angels are with him, he will sit on his majestic throne. All the nations will be gathered in front of him. He will separate them from each other, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right side. But the goats he will put on his left.

This is it. This is judgment. Are you ready for this judgment?

“Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who will receive good things from my Father. Inherit the kingdom that was prepared for you before the world began. I was hungry and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothes to wear. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.’ “Then those who are righteous will reply to him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you a drink? When did we see you as a stranger and welcome you, or naked and give you clothes to wear? When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ “Then the king will reply to them, ‘I assure you that when you have done it for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you have done it for me.’

The story doesn't end there. It oftentimes does when preaching. It's the more comfortable ending. It's not comfortable talking about the goats, but Jesus talks about the goats. Jesus talks about uncomfortable things and then there's the goats. They're not entering his presence of God. And they ask why.
It's like because I was hungry and you did not feed me. I was thirsty and you did not give me a drink. I was naked and you did not close me. I was homeless and you did not house me. When you do not do it unto the least of these, you do not do it to me.

When we are so focused on sin as discrete moral actions, we are creating an idol. We are lifting up an idol because we are from totally following God’s will and giving ourselves a false grace instead of the true grave that only comes from the Father. We are idolators and my friends, the church has been guilty of idolatry over and over again. When the church is more concerned about what people wear than whether the hungry are fed, we are being idolatrous. When we are more concerned about where people come from than about who Is naked and hurting, we are being idolatrous and we are opening ourselves up for judgment. There are stakes involved here. As James says, “There will be no mercy in judgment for anyone who hasn’t shown mercy.” I think we are all guilty of sin and all in need of repentance.

This doesn’t mean anything goes or it doesn’t matter what you do. By no means. Sin is inescapable apart from grace. As Paul says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” There is not a pure position from which any of us are equipped to cast judgment on others. This is why Jesus says, “judge not lest ye be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you receive.”
Realizing that there are stakes involved in how we respond to God's call on our life. The judgment of Jesus Christ is not about looking at a card in our wallet to say whether or not we've said a prayer or we've done a thing. We need not fear judgment, but we should not take it lightly as if our own actions are meaningless.  Is your faith in your own judgment or in God’s? Are you seeking to satisfy yourself or God?

Do you love me? Jesus says to his disciples before he dies? Yes Lord, of course we love you,. “Then feed my sheep.”

 In this season of advent, as we prepare for the first coming and the second one, may we stay awake and seek ways of feeding Christ’s sheep here and now. We wait by faith, by believing more in God than in ourselves and our own judgment. By loving more our neighbors near and far in concrete ways. By committing ourselves. By sharing good news of Christ’s love in the face of the darkness of this world. By giving of ourselves and our resources. By praying when it is not convenient.

May the church be a place that sacrificially offers ourselves to others. As Hebrews says, “Don’t forget to do good and to share what you have because God is please with these kinds of sacrifices.”[^1]
May we leave judgment for Christ and then may we hold each other accountable for love beyond what is comfortable, which we can only do through grace. When we see each other erring, may we hold each other accountable. May we receive holy rebuke and strive further to follow God.

It's not about earning salvation. It's about responding and living into the salvation offered this day, afresh and anew, to each of us. Repent. Your life can turn around. God is coming to be with us.

Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, we await your coming with hopeful anticipation. Help us to be a people who believe more in you than in ourselves or what the world tells us to do. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[^1]: Hebrews 13:16


site: sermons

title: Heavenly Battles

author: Wilson Pruitt

church: bee-creek-umc

themes: spiritual-warfare loving-enemies power-in-weakness christus-victor incarnation anti-dualism interpreting-revelation

scripture: Revelation 12:1-10

text:
**Scripture:** Revelation 12:1-10
**Series:** 2022

> Part of a series on Revelation, this sermon preaches Revelation 12:1-10 (the woman, the dragon, and war in heaven) as a recapitulation of the incarnation transposed onto a cosmic scale, arguing the chapter is illustration rather than future chronology. Pruitt contrasts worldly notions of power-as-muscle (South Park's Jesus vs. Satan, ancient war heroes, the honor-cycle that fueled WWI) with the gospel's power revealed in weakness, the Lamb who was slain. Drawing on Hauerwas and Milton's Paradise Lost, he insists the heavenly battle is no fair fight and rejects dualism: evil devolves into nothingness. The practical call is to admit we do have enemies (often the people who merely irritate or wound us) and to love and pray for them, enacted in a guided meditation, because Christ is victorious.

**Illustrations:** south-park-jesus-vs-satan, dwayne-the-rock-johnson, judas-maccabaeus-david-war-heroes, rome-honor-in-battle, world-war-one-honor-cycle, hauerwas-no-enemies-quote, milton-paradise-lost, screen-every-time-phone-call, enemy-prayer-meditation, holy-spirit-not-the-force

---

# February 20
## Heavenly Battles

Then a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant, and she cried out because she was in labor, in pain from giving birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: it was a great fiery red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven royal crowns on his heads. His tail swept down a third of heaven’s stars and threw them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth so that when she gave birth, he might devour her child. She gave birth to a son, a male child who is non to rule all the nations with an iron rod. Her child was snatched up to God and his throne. Then the woman fled into the desert, where God has prepared a place for her. There she will be taken care of for one thousand two hundred sixty days.

Then there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they did not prevail, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. So the great dragon was thrown down. The old snake, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world, was thrown down to the earth; and his angels were thrown down with him. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say,

“Now the salvation and power and kingdom of our God,
        and the authority of his Christ have come.\
The accuser of our brothers and sisters,
        who accuses them day and night before our God,
        has been thrown down.”
			Revelation 12:1-10

When I was in high school, there was a cartoon that came out that was basically targeted specifically for boys in high school. It is still on today. Ostensibly, the show is about 4 elementary school kids in Colorado who get into a lot of profane mischief. Not many scenes can be shown on Sunday morning. The show that I am talking about is South Park.

This a show that does not shy away from religious themes and actually engages faith rather than dismissing it out of hand, as most shows on television do.

In one episode, there is a wrestling match that is going to happen with the following intro: Jesus vs. Satan, live on Pay Per View!

They have a throw down wrestling match between Jesus and Satan. Jesus is this pale, pasty guy with a beard and long hair and acts kind of like a hippy and Satan is this gigantic red beast that makes Dwayne the Rock Johnson seem small and it looks like this red Devil is going to pummel and destroy Jesus.

In the actual show, Satan throws the fight because he is betting against himself. But it is interesting because it portrays power and violence in this very worldly way. It is hard for us to escape the idea that the powerful are the ones with the most muscles and the most money and the most weapons. This is very different from how the Bible works.

The power that is revealed in the Gospels is found in weakness. What is fascinating is that the images throughout scripture of, for instance, Michael, the archangel, the image of Jesus, the image of anyone in the New Testament is not an image of overflowing muscles and firepower. There is not a Samson in the New Testament. Nobody ever complements Jesus or Peter for not skipping leg day.

And it is not like victory in battle was not seen as highly desirable in a leader. Judas Maccabaeus, the leader of the Jewish revolt against the Seleucids Greeks, would have been a hero bandied about in Jesus’ day. David, another War hero. Some theories have it that the reason why Rome kept on conquering was not a thirst for blood but a hunger for the honor of victory in battle. In the ancient world, absent a war, men couldn’t prove their strength. Conflicts in the ancient world often took place every 20 to 40 years because men needed a place to prove their worth and would use any excuse for it. There are many in the church who are veterans with close friends and family in active service, but ancient warmongering was nothing like the service our veterans have offered.

Unfortunately, this thinking wasn’t only in the ancient world. We honestly see it with World War I. It had been 44 years since Germany had defeated France in humiliating fashion but the old Franco-Prussian war heroes were gone and the next generation felt like they had something to prove. That conflict, in 1870, was fueled by the humiliation Prussia had received 60 years before when Napoleon defeated the proud nation.
On the French side, in 1914, there was a whole generation that was ready to prove themselves against Germany. Russia, who had been humiliated by the Japanese 10 years earlier, was also ready to prove something. Austria, whose leader had been ruling since 1850, was falling apart and was scared of future Russian and Slavic build up and so pushed forward with an impossible ultimatum on Serbia that could never have been met.

They all had something to prove and war was the place to prove it.

### Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing today in our series on the book of revelation. Revelation is about our identity. What is the source of our identity? What kind of story do we think we are in? What do we think we need in our lives? What do we value in our lives.

Conflict is very different in the New Testament and the Old Testament, like I said earlier. Jesus is not a war hero. Peter and the other disciples are not soldiers but fisherman and tax-collectors, not the most masculine of professions.

If you read Numbers or Judges or Joshua, it is filled with war. 1 & 2 Samuel and Kings and Chronicles are filled with war. For a long time, some people have read the Bible and thought that the God of the Old Testament was different from the God of the New Testament. This is a very old heresy called Marcionism. It is a deep misreading of the Bible. There is conflict in the New Testament, it is just conflict of a different kind.
There is an enemy. There is a challenge. Human existence does not lack for enemies. Cosmic reality does not lack for enemies. As Stanley Hauerwas says, though, “Cosmic struggle sounds like a video game that middle class children play. Most of us do not go to church because we seek a safe haven from our enemies. We go to church to be assured that we have no enemies.”

Who would hate us? Who is our enemy? It is easier, when we are being told by Jesus to pray for our enemies, to imagine that we don’t have any enemies. We may think, “I don’t want to be contentious. Who do I need to pray for? Everybody likes me. Uggh. It is so hard being me because I don’t have any enemies.”

Or, there is the temptation, because of the divisiveness of our politics, to take personal offense at other peoples idea. How dare they think that. They are enemies of common sense and society. If they post this or say that, I’m never talking to them again. When Jesus talks about love your enemies, he isn’t speaking about groups or races but individuals with whom we have no reconciliation. Jesus is speaking to the reality of conflict.

What we see in the Book of Revelation, with this powerful imagery, is that there is a conflict going on that is not minor. There are consequences for this conflict.

Any story you read or watch has conflict for in conflict identity is either changed or revealed. Conflict does not need to be physically violent but it is most often thought of as violence.

What is the source of our identity. How can it be made known and understood? And the source of our identity is found in the central words of communion.

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

We have in Revelation 12 a recapitulation of the incarnation. We have the announcement to Mary, we have the birth, we have the life of Jesus. It all takes place here.

I think Revelation 12 is one of the more powerful arguments against reading the book of revelation as this consistent future chronology because it is really hard not see this chapter as something that already happened. It takes the incarnation, the birth of Jesus, and transposes it onto a cosmic scale.

We still have this narrative on top of narrative on top of narrative. We have the woman crying out and 7 diadems, there is a great red dragon sweeping the stars from the sky. And they flee into the wilderness just like Mary, Joseph, and Jesus flee through the wilderness to Egypt. And a war breaks out in the heavenly’s and Michael appears with his angels. Not with his soldiers, with his angels, with his messengers.

These powerful images also allude to scripture. We have the dragon which alludes to the serpent found in Exodus 7 and Deuteronomy 32. There are allusions to the dragon in Job 7 and the one who devours the vulnerable in Jeremiah 51. We see Michael as a prince of the heavens in Daniel 10. As an archangel, as a leader of the angels in Jude, verse 9. I’ve already mentioned the woman. I read her as Mary but there are four historic ways of interpreting her.

There is Mary. Then, some read her as the people of God, another is as the Jewish community, another as the Church community. We have layer upon layer of images. You cannot extricate these images from the context coherently. They are not placed here in a one-to-one linear relationship with some future timeline. They are illustrations of the power of God. To see them as illustrations instead of chronological predictions does not lesson their power or the power of God. It only lessons the power of false teachers who think they have it all figured out. Teachers who do not heed the words of Jesus: you shall not know the time nor the hour.

The climax of existence, the battle of life over death. Even though we know the end, there is still drama. A spoiler of all existence has been revealed in the Book of Revelation. We know who has the victory. We know who wins. Life wins over death.

John Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost, lays this all out in beautiful, complicated poetry. It starts by describing Satan in ways that are similar to how he looks in South Park. He is powerful and strong. The devils are mighty. At first glance, it looks like the reader should sympathize with the plight of the devil. It is why some libertarians have misread Paradise Lost and seen the devil as the protagonist. The devil claims that he seeks freedom and that he is oppressed by God. But the poem slowly deconstructs evil and satanic forms of power and shows how they devolve into nothingness. The devils squabble and selfishly tear themselves apart. When Jesus finally confronts the devil in Book 6, Milton writes,
half his strength he did not put forth.

The heavenly battle is not a fair fight. The devil and Jesus are not on equal footing. The powers of wickedness and the power of God is not on equal footing.

God does not seek balance in the world between Good and evil. The Holy Spirit is not the force in star wars. Dualism is an easy trap to fall in. There are a number dualistic religions. Christianity is not one of them. Balance is only found with light. Darkness, wickedness, evil, the devil, they all suck up light and life. The ambition cannot be contained or sustained. It does not stand on equal footing with the God who is the light of the world.

The book of revelation is not about the end of days but how brokenness, tragedy, disease,  these will all come to an end and we can begin to experience that end here today. We experience it at this table. We experience it with the concrete practice of loving our enemies.

We love our enemies because Christ is victorious. We wish the best for our enemies because Christ is victorious. Again, we may think that we do not have enemies but that is only because we are deceiving ourself. In this world, when we have relations with people, our enemies may not be people who want to destroy us or kill us. They may just be people who wish us ill. People who irritate us. People whom we don’t want to spend time with. For each of us, there is someone in our life whom we are going to call screen every time. Which means if this person calls and you see their name, you do not answer the phone.

For each of us, there are people who have done something to our detriment. That is our enemy.

I want us to take a little time to go through a meditation exercise.

Close your eyes and take a deep breath.

I want you to think about someone you love in your life. Don’t tell anyone. I want you to think about someone you love and I want you to pray for the best for them.

Now I want you to think about someone whom you barely know….

Someone you don’t like, someone who irritates you…

Then I want you to think about someone you never want to see again in your life…

Christ is victorious. All is possible. Even hardened hearts can be softened by the power of God. We pray for our enemies. We pray for those who despise us not because we are so awesome but because Christ is victorious. And those despisers in our life will not win. We lift them up to God because God has won the victory. Christ has won the victory.

We do not come here as people without enemies. There is conflict in this world. There is brokenness in this world. There is conflict in each of our lives, we cannot deny it. But our hope is not in the brokenness. Our hope is not in charismatic leaders with bulging muscles, our hope is not in heroic victory, in willing ourselves forward, in overworking ourselves.

Our hope is found in the lamb who was slain who sits upon the throne and offers life to us.

Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, your love and your life were offered for us. We did not take them or earn them but in our unworthiness you gave yourself for us. Help us not seek glory in this world but seek your way of love and peace. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

method: authored, not translated

license_apparatus: CC BY-NC 4.0


title: How to Build a Car (Justin Martyr on Early Christian Sunday Worship)

themes: lords-day-worship holy-communion early-church-community care-for-the-poor resurrection christian-community

text:
**Series:** 2022

> This note is not an original sermon manuscript but a transcribed primary-source passage from Justin Martyr's First Apology (c. 155 AD), housed in a sermon folder titled 'How to Build a Car.' It describes the order of early Christian Sunday worship: the common assembly of city and country members, reading from the apostles' memoirs and the prophets, the president's exhortation to imitate virtue, communal prayer, the Eucharist of bread, wine, and water (carried by deacons to the absent), a freewill collection used to care for orphans, widows, the sick, the imprisoned, and travelers, and the rationale that Sunday is both the day of creation's light and Christ's resurrection. It functions as illustrative source material on worship and the gathered church.

**Illustrations:** justin-martyr-sunday-worship

---

On Sunday we have a common assembly of all our members, whether they live in the city or the outlying districts. The recollections of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as there is time. When the reader has finished, the president of the assembly speaks to us; he urges everyone to imitate the examples of virtue we have heard in the readings. Then we all stand up together and pray.

On the conclusion of our prayer, bread and wine and water are brought forward. The president offers prayers and gives thanks to the best of his ability, and the people give assent by saying, “Amen.” The eucharist is distributed, everyone present communicates, and the deacons take it to those who are absent.

The wealthy, if they wish, may make a contribution, and they themselves decide the amount. The collection is placed in the custody of the president, who uses it to help the orphans and widows and all who for any reason are in distress, whether because they are sick, in prison, or away from home. In a word, he takes care of all who are in need.

We hold our common assembly on Sunday because it is the first day of the week, the day on which God put darkness and chaos to flight and created the world, and because on that same day our savior Jesus Christ rose from the dead. For he was crucified on Friday and on Sunday he appeared to his apostles and disciples and taught them the things that we have passed on for your consideration.

Justin Martyr


title: How We Are Saved

themes: atonement sacrificial-love salvation christus-victor repentance jesus-over-theory

text:
**Scripture:** Hebrews 10:4-10; Hebrews 10:12-14; Hebrews 2:14; Romans 5:8; 2 Corinthians 5:15; Matthew 4:18-20
**Series:** 2022

> Fourth in a Lenten 'Rescue' series on salvation, preached on Hebrews 10:4-10, exploring how Jesus saves us. Pruitt defines sacrifice as giving up something genuinely good and uses the 2018 Thai cave rescue (via the documentary The Rescue) as an extended metaphor for costly, complicated, self-sacrificial rescue. He surveys Old Testament salvation models (Noah, Passover, Joshua) where others bear the cost, then turns to Jesus and atonement (At-One-Ment), walking through three scriptural theories: Christus Victor/ransom, Abelard's Moral Influence, and Anselm's satisfaction theory developed into Penal Substitution. He affirms the value of contemplating these models but insists that theories don't save us, Jesus does, faith is radical because nothing lies beneath Christ. The cross is given to give us life, not meaning. He closes with Jesus' call to lay down our nets and repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.

**Illustrations:** thai-cave-rescue-the-rescue, throwaway-couch-not-a-sacrifice, rehearsal-of-concept-roc, noah-ark-salvation-model, passover-exodus-model, joshua-conquest-model, atonement-at-one-ment, trojan-horse-christus-victor, worship-the-series-not-jesus, radical-roots-etymology, lay-down-your-nets

---

# March 27
## How we are saved

because it’s impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Therefore, when he comes into the world he says, You didn’t want a sacrifice or an offering, but you prepared a body for me; you weren’t pleased with entirely burned offerings or a sin offering. So then I said, “Look, I’ve come to do your will, God. This has been written about me in the scroll.” He says above, You didn’t want and you weren’t pleased with a sacrifice or an offering or with entirely burned offerings or a purification offering, which are offered because the Law requires them. Then he said, Look, I’ve come to do your will. He puts an end to the first to establish the second. We have been made holy by God’s will through the offering of Jesus Christ’s body once for all. Hebrews 10:4-10

The word sacrifice has become much more metaphorical today than it used to be. People talk about all the sacrifices they make, but I don’t see a lot of lamb’s blood on doors or turtle doves exchanging hands. Judaism was not the only religion that had sacrifices in the ancient world, but it is one of the few that survived the elimination of animal sacrifices. In the ancient practice, as specified in the Bible, people would take a goat, a turtledove, a lamb, and take them to the temple to be offered to God. They would be killed in a certain way, roasted, prayed over, and then the servants of the temple could eat. Grain offerings functioned in a similar way.
A sacrifice is always something good. You can’t ever sacrifice something you don’t like. If you give a couch to the church that you were going to throw away anyway, that isn’t a sacrifice. It may be helpful to the church, but the point of the sacrifice is about what you want and desire, not the object itself. The lamb has no religious value in itself. The turtledove, the goat, the grain offering. They are meaningful because people wanted to keep them. If you offer your best lamb to God, that means you cannot enjoy it. If you offer a grain offering to God, that means you have less grain to live on. It can’t help your family get by another day. To make a sacrifice means to let go of something that matters to you.
We see a different kind of sacrifice in them movie, The Rescue, about the 2018 Thai cave disaster, where there were 12 boys and their coach who were stuck In a cave.
The floods came that they didn't know how to get out. Today, we’re going to show a clip of what it took To get one boy out. The boy has already been sedated by the cave-diver anesthesiologist, and now they're taking them on the final journey. They don’t know what is going to happen, but they are willing to sacrifice themselves to see.

### 1:21:08 - 1:23:00

My friends, we're continuing our series on the rescue on looking at how God rescues us, how God saves us. We are trying to understand the language of salvation in a fresh way. How salvation is not a state that we are in. How we are saved from something and how we are saved for something. We began this series talking about what salvation is. Salvation is not just a future thing. It is a present thing. We can live into it now. God is now rescuing us from sin. The next week, we talked about where we are. How if we pretend about where we are, if we lie about where we are, God can't save us; we're going to reject Christ's offering of love. Then, last week, we talked about what we need to do to be saved and how we can't save ourselves. Even if we're the smartest and the fastest and the strongest, we cannot save ourself. We need grace. We need Jesus. And sometimes we are our own worst enemies.
Today, we’re going to talk about how we are saved. The method in the movie is very complicated. It takes a lot of steps. There's a lot of logistical support offered by the US Air Force, special ops team, that came in and organized the rescue. Part of the preparetion for getting the kids out is a R.O.C. or Rehearsal of Concept, that the Americans share with the cave divers. It is a military practice that is “a dry walk-through of a plan between a commander and their subordinates ensuring a shared understanding of the plan.” It is a big operation and 6,000 things that could go wrong.
You have these cave divers, who are weekend hobbyists, who are sacrificing their time to do this, who have never been in this life or death situation before. There is a doctor who is doing something that seems unnatural, knocking a kid out in a cave, putting a mask on his limp body, putting his face under water and then pushing him out. Once they make it to cave three, there's a crew that pulls the kids out of the water. And then over 200 folks are ready who bring the unconscious boy on a stretcher out of the cave. It is a complicated endeavor to save these kids.

It is important to realize that throughout the Bible, there are a number of different models of salvation or rescue. In the Old Testament, we start with Noah and the ark. The Noah model is not very good for everyone else. Noah and his family live. Animals survive two by two. They're doing okay. Everyone else outside of the Ark, sorry. We have the Passover model of the Exodus, of God freeing the Hebrew people from slavery. But that left a lot of other people behind. The Passover itself, the last of the miracles of Moses, caused a lot of Egyptian children to die. The passing through the Red Sea, caused a lot of Egyptian soldiers to die. And then we have the rescue story of Joshua. Joshua, after Moses has died, is tasked with taking the people into the promised land, but it's already occupied. And so they take away the lives and land of the people who were there. All of these models include sacrifice, but it is usually the other people who are sacrificed. For each of these, there is a remainder. People left out or left over. Next week, we will talk about who deserves to be saved, but these models are important.

And then we get to Jesus. How does Jesus save us? The English language has a wonderful word to describe this called Atonement. It has an ominous ring to it, unless you break it down to its separate parts. Atonement. At-One-Ment. It is a description of how God makes us one.

There are a number of theories about how Jesus saves us. All of them are based in Scripture.

The earliest is known as Christus Victor or the ransom theory. It understands Christ’s sacrifice as a ransom to the devil who is lord of the world. But the sacrifice is almost like a trojan horse. The devil thinks he is getting a holy man to control, and instead gets God made flesh, and in this the devil is defeated. Scriptures like Hebrews 2:14: “Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, he also shared the same things in the same way. He did this to destroy the one who holds the power over death—the devil—by dying.”

Another theory is known as Moral Influence by the monk, Peter Abelard. Which basically claims that “the cross changes our ethical behaviour because there, in the crucified Christ, we come to understand something of God’s love for us. This love motivates us to change the way we live.”[^1]
Romans 5:8 points to this: "But God shows his love for us, because while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” As well as 2 Corinthians: “He died for the sake of all so that those who are alive should live not for themselves but for the one who died for them and was raised.”

Finally, there is the satisfaction theory of the atonement. First introduced by Anselm of Canterbury and then modified into what is known as Penal Substitution. Here is a helpful summary.

> “We have all robbed God of the honour that is due to him. For that honour to be fully repaid, something greater than all creation needs to be offered in compensation — our situation is that serious. No one but humans must pay it, but only God has the power to. Only he could offer something so valuable that it is the equivalent to everything in creation. The debt is total; the obligation to pay it is total; the power to pay it is zero. What better solution, then, than that God should become human, and, in that human nature, pay the debt? This is the reason for the God-Man. That he should offer himself is more than enough to satisfy divine justice; so, in fact, it merits a reward. The Son has no need of such a reward; so freely bestows his merit, his reward, on all those who believe in him. In this model, God is fully himself, both in his justice and in his mercy, fully expressing both attributes at the cross, resulting in an all-sufficient solution to the human predicament. Gone are the bargains with the devil…God shows himself to be the sovereign of his world.”[^2]

The main scripture for this view comes right after our reading for today, Hebrews 10:12-14: “But when this priest offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, he sat down at the right side of God. Since then, he’s waiting until his enemies are made into a footstool for his feet, because he perfected the people who are being made holy with one offering for all time.”

In seminary, these are often presented as competing notions. It is one of those questions that is often asked for ordination: what is your model of atonement? How does Jesus save us?

I think the questions matter and the thoughts matter. It is incredibly amazing that we are privileged to be able to contemplate God. You don’t need to go to seminary to think about how Jesus saves us. How we are in need and Christ offers himself for us. Contemplating who God is for us can offer us depths of joy and purpose in seeking God more in our life.

But when we come down to the cave of our own lives and our desperation. When we come down to sin and our need for grace, these theories don’t save us, Jesus does.

As one of my teachers said, “Look, if you need a series of truths to assure yourself that Jesus has been raised from the dead, worship that series, don't worship Jesus.” There is no prior claim and understanding of salvation or life or purpose than Jesus Christ. There is no theory or model or empirical system prior to who God is for us in Christ. It is a radical position in a technical sense. Radical means to get to the roots. A radical change is a change that pulls a thing up, roots and all. The radical faith of Christianity is that there is no substance or idea beneath Jesus Christ that we can stand on. Salvation is not found apart from this.

The point of the cross is not to give your life meaning but to give you life. It is not about finding yourself but getting out of your own way. Getting you out of the cave and into the light of the real world; the light of the kingdom of heaven which is near. Repent. Turn away from the ways of destruction. You don’t have to be a child of night. Christ saves us by ransom, by influence, by satisfaction and substitution. Christ saves us by going all the way to the cross. It is a sacrifice: a giving of something good for something greater.

In this season of Lent, we need not overcomplexify what is already beyond our comprehension. We don’t need to become cave-divers or navy seals for Jesus to save us. The simplest biblical example of salvation, though, is also the hardest. When Jesus comes up to the Peter and Andrew by the seashore. “Lay down your nets and follow me.” Lay down who you were. Lay down who you think you need to be. Lay down your expectations and hang ups. Lay down your guilt and sin. Lay down your peccadillos and little white lies. We compexify things to get around this stark call. We complexity to justify the status quo, but calls us to lay them down. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near. Jesus is here for you. Accept him. Accept life. Accept a new world. He will pull you out of the cave. He will turn your mourning into dancing.

Let us pray,
God of us all, you are always more ready to listen than we are to pray. Help us in this season to reach out to you, to have faith in you, to lay down our burdens and your feet, and walk freely as children of light. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[^1]: [https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/29-march/features/features/is-there-one-doctrine-of-the-atonement-ransom-substitute-scapegoat-god](https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/29-march/features/features/is-there-one-doctrine-of-the-atonement-ransom-substitute-scapegoat-god)
[^2]: Ibid.


title: I Believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth

themes: apostles-creed creation idolatry stewardship faith-and-belief grace-as-gift

text:
**Scripture:** Genesis 1:1-5; 1 John 4:1; Hebrews 11:3; Ezekiel 18:13; Romans 3:23; Ephesians 2:8; Luke 14:26-27
**Series:** 2022

> Launching a series on the Apostles' Creed, Wilson uses the grammatical distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs to argue that Christian belief is never a vague 'I believe' but always belief in the particular Triune God. Doctrine is what God has revealed about Godself, and confessing 'I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth' (Genesis 1:1-5) means God alone is eternal Creator and therefore alone can save; no human institution, nation, family, or economic system is almighty or eternal. He presses this against idolatry (Calvin's idol factory, Norse myths, a distant Zeus, Rowan Williams vs. Dawkins) and especially against the modern financial system of credit, debt, and interest, which the Bible (Ezekiel 18) condemns. To truly believe God created everything is to receive life as undeserved gift rather than entitlement, to be redeemed rather than affirmed, and to live a transformed life of thanksgiving.

**Illustrations:** transitive-intransitive-verbs, calvin-idol-factory, norse-mythology-odin, distant-zeus, rowan-williams-dawkins-debate, lemaitre-big-bang, credit-credo-root, comfortable-life-spicewood

---

# October 9
## I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth

When God began to create the heavens and the earth— the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters— God said, “Let there be light.” And so light appeared. God saw how good the light was. God separated the light from the darkness. God named the light Day and the darkness Night. There was evening and there was morning: the first day.
Genesis 1:1-5

I was an English major in college. I loved studying English in school. I love to read. I love literature. I love creative writing: all these things. But I never really encountered heavy grammar throughout my education. Even at the college level, I never had to diagram a sentence.

I came to appreciate grammar later in life, while I was in seminary, especially in learning Greek and Hebrew. It was in translating and understanding the challenge of translating that I came to appreciate grammar and syntax.

So, as an English major, and as a late to life grammar nerd, I want to bring up a concept that many of you may have forgotten: transitive verbs and intransitive verbs. And I know, it's like, “oh my gosh, pastor Wilson comes back and all he's doing is giving us grammar lessons.” Well, it is a little more than grammar lessons.
For a religion that claims that Jesus is the Word made flesh, the Logos of God, in which we receive the words of God in Scriptures, the language itself matters. The grammar matters. The syntax matters if we actually wish to understand what God is speaking to us today.
It matters tremendously for the life of faith. What are we talking about when we talk about God? That's the issue of what is referred to as doctrine or theology? What do we talk about when we talk about God? Doctrine isn’t about us or what we do or don’t do or should do or shouldn’t do. Doctrine is what God has revealed to us about Godself. Doctrine is about God, full stop. Doctrine is what has been revealed about God, full stop.

An issue of central importance is to make sure that we are talking about God and not talking about an idol of our own creation. As John Calvin said, the human heart is an idol factory. We create idols for everything. From the beginning of time, humans have created idols about everything. You can’t go a paragraph in the Old Testament without the Hebrew people receiving a promise, turning away, building an Idol, God rebuking and forgiving them, and the cycle starts again.

As well, belief or faith are often spoken in an intransitive way which is incoherent for Christian faith.

For a grammar nerd refresher course, a transitive verb has a direct object and an intransitive verb does not. For instance, run, rain, die, sneeze, sit, smile, these are intransitive verbs. To say, “I run” or “it rains” is to make a complete sentence.
A transitive verb needs an object, like the verbs borrow, bring, promise, have, believe. Sometimes, we can say “I believe”, or “I have faith” in an intransitive way, but that is incoherent. It is totally incoherent. And it opens us up to that human heart idle factory. This is the vacuity of people today who say they are spiritual and not religious. In which spirits are you connected? In which way are you not religious? In what do you believe? In what do you have faith?

The question matters deeply: are we talking about the Triune God, the Father with the Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, or are we talking about something else?
1John 4 tells us to not “have faith in every spirit but to] test the spirits—whether they are from God.”

The claim of Christianity is not that there exists some ephemeral spirituality that we all have access to and which compels us to be a little kinder. No. This claim is concrete and summarized here in the Apostles’ Creed.

### Series Intro
We are starting series on the apostles creed, the historic doctrinal statement of the faith. We are going to look at how the creed encapsulate scripture and offers it to us in a way that shows us what has been revealed from God about who God is, how the world is, why we are in need, how Jesus saves us, and what we should do about it.

The first word in the Latin of the creed, spoken in the underground baptistries of the ancient world. is Credo, which is a first person, singular verb. I believe, I believe in God Credo in Deum. I believe in God.

Which God, what do we mean by God?
Credo in Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem cæli et terræ,
I believe in God, the Father almighty maker of the heaven and earth, of the skies and the lands.

The Creed begins, as the Bible begins, with Genesis. It begins with God, the Father, before creation. It begins with a statement about creation. A statement about creation that has been controversial. Up until the 1920s with Father LeMaitre’s theory of the Big Bang. Most people, most scientists from cultures all over the world, believed in the eternity of the world and the universe. This was true for scientists and for myths around the world. Scientists believed in a steady state universe that was eternal.

Most creation myths viewed the universe as consisting of a human plane and a supernatural plane, with an assortment of deities or gods impacting the human plane. They usually had special powers. A common structure of the mythology of creation comes from the Norse with Thor and Odin and this idea of Asgard the higher land, and midgard, the middle land. Odin, doesn't create the world, he is a part of it. The gods are within it.

Often people project onto the God of the Bible this mindset, imagining that God is really powerful, but really far away, kind of like a Zeus that doesn't use lightning bolts as much. They imagine that God is really far away, sometimes controlling us, sometimes not.

That’s not a Christian Religion. At one point, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was in a debate with a very loud atheist, Richard Dawkins, about the nature of God. Rowan was pressed, and he said, if God is just another part of material existence, that God needs to die, that God cannot save us.”

This is why the beginning of the Bible, the beginning of the creed, the beginning of all existence matters. If God is not the creator, God cannot be the savior. If God did not create, God has no power over us or over the world. Sure, such a god might have limited power here and there.. They may have a really cool hammer or catchphrase, but ultimately they have no relationship, no connection, no power to save, no reason in which to believe in them.

### Scripture
> “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

The first act of creation is not light. It's the making of what is formless. It is the making of the matter out of which creation shall emerge.
As Hebrews 11 puts it, “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”

The universe is not eternal. God is eternal. Now what does that have to do with us today?

I mentioned how this was controversial before the big bang. It still is controversial today, though in a different way. Most scientists would agree that there was a creation event of sorts. Even staunchly atheistic cosmologists would say that prior to the big bang, something was, but we can't study what was going on, so we can't say yes or no about it and should avoid the question. “What was there?” Which is fine. If, scientists ever find a picture of God, it is not a picture of the God of the Christian faith who has no material substance.

It is controversial today because to say and believe, I believe in God, the father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, is to say that there's no human institution that is almighty.

To claim God as Father is not to claim a gender for God but to call God father because “he bears fruit out of himself and requires no fructifying that he is called Father, and not in the sexual sense, for he will be the Creator of man and woman, and thus contains the primal qualities of woman in himself in the same simultaneously transcending way as those of man”[^1]

There's no human institution that made something from nothing and no human institution that's eternal: not this city, not this county, not this state, not this country, not this global economic system. None of it is eternal. And none of it can save us.

### Credit
The institution in which most people encounter faith, most people all over the world, is not church or religion, but in financial transactions, in this funny little word called credit. Credit, from the same Latin root as credo, I mean, it's the same verb. Credit is the third person singular, as opposed to the first person singular, instead of ‘I believe.’ Credit is ‘he or she believes’. He or she believes that you are good for your word. And a bank gives you a loan. They believe that you will pay it off. And it is in their interest for you to do that. You pay them interest to keep them interested. When you have a credit card, it is a card in which the bank believes you will pay it back.

This may seem completely separate from religion as you understand it, but the Bible actually has a lot to say about financial transactions. And we all encounter credit in our lives a lot more than credo.

The Bible talks about finances a lot. Land use is a major concern of the old testament. Using just weights is also super important. The Bible talks a lot more about finance than it talks about sex, and the words of the Bible on loans, on interest, on debt, on jubilee, these words speak strongly against our contemporary financial system.

The prophet Ezekiel speaks in the starkest terms. He says that anyone who “lends at interest, and takes profit; shall he then live? He shall not live. He has done all these abominations; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon himself.” Ezekiel 18:13 ESV. These words of scripture are unambiguous.

This system, which offers great wealth in this country and around the world, is convenient, but it isn’t biblical. It is convenient to believe in the status quo from which we have benefited, but it is not biblical. It is convenient to assume that the word of God speaks harshly to other systems than the one in which find ourselves, but it is not biblical.

To really believe that God is all powerful and created everything is to admit that all our assumptions about how the world works could be washed away through the power of God. I am justified in nothing save Jesus Christ. Not this country or world-system, not my family or my actions. As Paul says in Romans, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And yet as Paul says in Ephesians, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” Even with this radical understanding of grace, Jesus takes it further in the Gospel of Luke. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” There is no ground to stand on save the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ.

As the unchangeable doctrine of the United Methodist Church says in Article 1.
> “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body or parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the maker and preserver of all things, both visible and invisible.”

What we know of God comes from God. It has been revealed by God. Not on the news or social media; God did not choose those media. Not in biblical values. The bible never talks about values. Values language is a way to avoid actually reading the Bible. God reveals Godself here holding the Bible] and here and here.

To say, I believe in God, the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, is not to say a thing about the past, but about reality, present reality.

To say I believe in an intransitive way is not to say much at all. My belief could be anything: belief in myself, belief in a sports team, belief in a set of values. But an intransitive belief is never a belief in the Christian God.
To say, I believe in God. The father mighty, is a claim about the present reality that we need to live into. We need to live into it in our daily life. By looking at the world, not as this necessary thing, that always was, but as a gift from God. A gift that humans have spurned again and again, but yet still can receive.

To claim concretely our belief in the particular God of the bible is to strike a blow against an idolatry that would deceive us and use us for its own ends. God and faith are not tools to further any political or economic end. God created everything not so that some of us could have a comfortable life in Spicewood, Texas, in 2022. God sent Jesus not to affirm us but to redeem us and this world which is in need of redemption.

My brothers and sisters, receive this gift of faith in God almighty. You are not the savior. You are not the creator. You are made and molded by God. You are loved by God. Your neighbor is loved by God. Your dog is loved by God. The trees are loved and lovingly made by God and seen as good.
You have been given a great gift in life. You don’t deserve it. The world owes you nothing. So live as if you have been given a gift, not as if you're entitled to any of it. Not as if you're entitled to a society that's like the one of your childhood, not as if you're entitled to Christian culture or biblical culture. Jesus doesn’t give us culture but life, redemption, transformation.
You have been created by God as a gift. Give thanks and honor that gift by how you live.

Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, we thank you for your glorious act in creation. We thank you for the gift of faith and revealing yourself to us. Help us to respond to your grace by living a transformed life offered to others. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[^1]: Balthasar


title: I Believe in Jesus Christ, His Only Son, Our Lord

themes: apostles-creed jesus-is-lord faith-and-science conversion idolatry ineffability-of-god christology

text:
**Scripture:** Psalm 2:7-9; 1 John 2:4; Matthew 11:28-30; 2 Corinthians 1:20
**Series:** 2022

> Continuing a series on the Apostles' Creed, Wilson preaches the clause 'I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord' from Psalm 2:7-9. He warns that we tend to remake Jesus in our own cultural image (Schweitzer, Sallman), which is a pagan idol; unpacks the titles Jesus (Joshua) and Christ (anointed/Messiah, not a surname); and argues that moving from general belief in God (natural theology, Aquinas) to faith in Jesus as Lord requires revelation by the Holy Spirit. Mystery means something disclosed, not hidden. Confessing the creed is a baptismal, life-changing claim: to say 'I know him' (1 John) and not follow is to be a liar. Christ calls us to conversion, to drop our nets and to call the burdened to him (Kierkegaard), offering radical love, mercy, and the assurance that in Jesus God has said yes to us (2 Corinthians 1:20).

**Illustrations:** cultural-portraits-of-jesus, schweitzer-quest-historical-jesus, sallman-head-of-christ, mr-christ-not-a-last-name, aquinas-five-ways, slavery-family-values-idols, kierkegaard-come-here-to-me

---

# October 16
## I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord

I will announce the Lord’s decision: He said to me, “You are my son, today I have become your father. Just ask me, and I will make the nations your possession; the far corners of the earth will be your property. You will smash them with an iron rod; you will shatter them like a pottery jar.”
Psalm 2:7-9

Visual images of Jesus display the breadth of cultural difference across the world. There are portraits of Jesus, drawn or painted, in almost every culture that has existed in the last 2000 years. Portraits that make Jesus look like radically different people.
Here are a few examples
Powerpoint slides except the last one]

Jesus has been portrayed in different ways because of the different impact the gospel has made on different cultures. Usually, though, we personally connect most with images of Jesus that correspond to our own image of Jesus. As the scholar Albert Schweitzer wrote a hundred years ago in his book, “the quest for the Historical Jesus.” Often when we look for Jesus, we find a face that looks a lot like us staring back. A conservative finds a conservative Jesus. A liberal finds a liberal Jesus. A radical finds a radical Jesus, not only in how he looks but how he acts.

This is a great challenge. If we believe that Jesus is the son of God, the word made flesh, the perfect human, the perfection of humanity, there is a part of us that wants that perfection to look a little more like us than not. Part of this may be so that we don't have as far to go to get there. If Jesus likes the things I like and dislikes the things I dislike, gosh, I'm almost there. We're close to bridging the gap between the divine and me.”

And yet this is an entirely pagan view of Jesus. It has nothing to do with the Jesus of the Bible, the Jesus of faith, the Jesus of mercy and grace and transformation. And honestly, when we look at these pictures of Jesus, the portrait that is furthest from the Jesus of the Bible is the most famous one of all,

Last Powerpoint Slide Picture of Jesus]

painted by Warner Sallman, a portrait from 1950, with over 500 million copies around the world. To follow Jesus is not to make him more like us, but for us to become more like him.

## Series Intro
We are continuing to look at belief in God through the creed. We're starting with the second clause of the apostles creed. I believe in Jesus Christ. His only son, our Lord. Jesus Christ.

The word, Jesus, is the Greek version of the word, Joshua. Joshua, the great figure from Numbers and Deuteronomy and his own book. Joshua, the patriarch who led the people into the promised land when Moses could not enter it. Joshua, because of his faithfulness to God, was able to lead the people home.
Now with Christ.

Christos means ‘anointed’ in Greek. It's the translation of, Messiah, Mechiach, The anointed one of God. Messiah does not mean son of God. It means anointed of God.

It is also important for us to state up front that Christ was not Jesus' last name.
It wasn’t, “Uh, hi, well, good afternoon, Mr. Christ, how are you doing today?”

Last names or patronyms as they exist in the modern world didn't exist as much in the ancient world as we know them today.

What does it mean to believe in this man whom we refer to as Jesus Christ? What does it mean to have faith in Jesus Christ?

The scripture I wanna jump off from is Psalm 2, this great Psalm of Thanksgiving, is also a psalm about the connection between God, the Father, and God, the Son.

You are my son today.
I give the nations to you.

We also have here an understanding of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. That this carpenter's son is, in fact, Lord of all the nations, ruler of all the nations, just ruler in a way that's different from the world. And the only way we can get there, get to Jesus, is by faith, by faith in him. We can’t see Jesus as lord on our own. People have tried but it doesn’t quite work.

Talking about the existence of God apart from faith is called natural theology.

There are a number of different arguments about natural theology that have gone on since ancient times, about whether you can prove the existence of God by reason alone.

Aristotle had arguments for this Plato had arguments for this Different people, over the centuries, have had arguments for this. Thomas Aquinas had his famous five ways, which some of you may remember from growing up Catholic

With all this, belief in God in general is different from belief in Jesus Christ.

The only way to get from some general awareness of divinity in the world to the particularity of God in the person of Jesus Christ is by the fact that it is revealed to you, that it is unveiled for you, that it is disclosed to you through the Holy Spirit.

This is an act of faith. That this person that we refer to as Jesus Christ, Joshua, son of Joseph, is God the Father's only son and is our Lord. These are acts of faith.
There's no historical or material record that could offer an entirely compelling argument for this reality. It is a mystery of God.

Now, the word mystery is thrown around in religious circles in bad ways, like a cop out. “What about this? Well, it's a mystery”
🤷♂
Mystery in Greek is mysterion, something that has been disclosed and revealed.
It's translated in Latin as sacrament. Something holy and set apart that is disclosed for us. A mystery is not something we don't understand or something that is hidden from us. In fact, a mystery is something that has been revealed to us. That Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one of God, the Meshiach on whom the world longs, the only son of God, the Lord of all the nations, our Lord, this claim, I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, Our Lord, is a claim about all of human reality. All of existence.

It is a claim about the history of the universe and the future of the universe. It is not a light thing you say and drone on about. The original apostles creed was a baptismal creed. It was stated when someone entered the church. Before they entered the waters and put on the white robes of new life, they would say these words.
It is a life changing claim.
To be honest when saying these words is to not live a life of lies anymore. It is to change directions. It is to drop your nets.

In the first letter of John, the Apostle writes, “whoever says, ‘I know him’ and does not keep his commandments is a liar.”
When we say, I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son our Lord, we are saying, I know him. I know this Jesus, this God out of whom all things were created.

And to say, “I know him” and not to follow him is to be a liar.

Now we have mercy. We have forgiveness through this, but God calls for a radical shift in life, a radical shift that's not based on these portraits of Jesus that every culture is able to create. A radical shift that is not based on our own preconceptions or biases. A radical shift that is not based on some idea of Christian culture or Christian values or family values. Jesus never talked about values.
If you need a set of values to believe that Jesus is god, worship those values, don’t worship God. If you need Jesus to look a certain way, and you are uncomfortable by images that don’t conform to expectations, worship that look, don’t worship God.
I say this because this is what has happened over the last two thousands years. Christians have turned the good news of Jesus Christ into a distorted cultural artifact that has become an idol. Christians have used values and aesthetics to justify sins of enormous magnitude. Slavery in the south was justified through Christian values. Domestic violence has been justified through family values, but those are idols.

When you encounter the risen Lord, Jesus Christ, everything changes, because you see the world with different eyes; the blinders have come off.
Do you see that Jesus is Lord? Do you see that Jesus is God?
Do you see that Jesus is one with the Father and the Spirit?Then everything changes in how we live our lives. How we go to sleep at night, how we raise our kids, how we work at our jobs, how we relate to our neighbors, how we seek the face of Jesus in our neighbors, how we are willing to see the face of Jesus in ourselves.

The clause about Jesus Christ in the Creed goes on for a while, but it begins with this essential encounter. If you say that you know him and don't follow his commandments, you're a liar.

Well, pastor Wilson, what are his commandments? It is the call of Jesus, which is at once the simplest commandment and the hardest. When he comes to his friends, his disciples, on the seashore and says, “lay down your nets and follow me.”
When he comes to the people near the city and says, “come to me, all you who are weary and heavy Laden, and I will give you rest, Lay down your burdens at my feet, for my yoke is easy. And my burden is light.
Christ calls us to come but Christ also calls us to, in turn, call others to him.

Søren Kierkegaard paints this call in a stark light:

> “Come here to me." Amazing! Human sympathy does, after 'all, willingly do something for those who labor and are burdened; we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, make philanthropic donations, build philanthropic institutions, and if the sympathy is deeper we probably also visit those who labor and are burdened. But to invite them to come to one, that cannot be done; then one's entire household and way of life would have to be altered. It will not do, when one is living in abundance oneself or at least in joy and gladness, to reside together in a house and live together in a common life and in daily association with the poor and wretched, with those who labor and are burdened.[^1]

But those are the people who Jesus calls. And those are the people whom Jesus exhorts us to call. Jesus calls us to transformation, to utter and total change. That's what conversion is, it is going one way in life and then going another.

But what about those of you who have been Christians for most of your life, do you still need to turn your life around?
Yes. Always and everywhere and everyone, yes.
What if you haven't believed? What if this faith thing is still strange and weird?
What if it hasn't been revealed to you that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God? What if you’ve got a ways to go in this journey of belief?

My hope and my prayer is that, through this space and this encounter with the risen Lord, you will encounter his love and his mercy. You will meet him, not his values, his person here for you, and realize that you are worthy. You are forgiven and you are offered a life of love. God saw our need and sent Jesus to us.

You don’t have to say yes to God. You can still dismiss it. I mean, Christians have been dismissing God's love for 2000 years. The Hebrew people before Jesus were dismissing, God's love from the very beginning. Most of the Bible is about people spurning God's offer of love and mercy. And yet God has remained faithful.
And to this day, God is faithful.
You may say no to God, but in Jesus, God has said yes to you. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians, “For all the promises of God find their Yes in him.”
Jesus is not just a swell guy from a while ago. Jesus is not just a handsome figure in a painting, but, as the UMC Confession of faith says,“truly God and truly man, in whom the divine and human natures are perfectly and inseparably united. He is the eternal Word made flesh, the only begotten Son of the Father”[^2], the Lord of heaven and earth, he has offered himself for us. He has offered himself for you. He has called you by name and said, follow me, follow me to a life of radical love, a life of radical mercy, a life of radical hope.
Let us pray,

Heavenly Father, meet us here in this place. Redirect our lives. Forgive us for lingering in our old ways and show us the peace of your presence. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[^1]: Practice in Christianity, 13.
[^2]: Confession of Faith Article 2


title: I Believe in the Forgiveness of Sins

themes: forgiveness sin-as-debt divine-economics cheap-grace transformation lords-prayer apostles-creed

text:
**Scripture:** Matthew 18:23-34; Isaiah 40:1-5; Joshua 13:15-20; Exodus 10:17; Ruth 4
**Series:** 2022

> Part of a series on the Apostles' Creed, this sermon unpacks 'I believe in the forgiveness of sins' through the biblical language of debt and economics. Drawing on Aramaic where the word for sin literally means debt, the Lord's Prayer ('forgive us our debts'), and the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18, the preacher argues that forgiveness is a concrete economic reality, not an abstraction. God practices a 'divine economics' that defies moral hazard and worldly efficiency by wiping clean our ledger of sin, even when we are junk-rated and undeserving. To believe in the forgiveness of sins is to believe in the radical possibility of transformation, and the 'as we forgive' of the Lord's Prayer compels us to extend that undeserved mercy to others.

**Illustrations:** ut-economics-major, worldly-philosophers-heilbroner, boaz-redeemer-ruth, columbus-debt-instruments, roman-empire-debt-collapse, scaled-debt-forgiveness, moral-hazard-2008, junk-bond-rating, oprah-you-get-a-car

---

# January 22
## I believe in the forgiveness of sins

Comfort, comfort my people!
 says your God.
Speak compassionately to Jerusalem,
        and proclaim to her that her compulsory service has ended,
    that her penalty has been paid,
    that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins!
A voice is crying out:
“Clear the Lord’s way in the desert!
    Make a level highway in the wilderness for our God!
Every valley will be raised up,
    and every mountain and hill will be flattened.
    Uneven ground will become level,
    and rough terrain a valley plain.
The Lord’s glory will appear,
    and all humanity will see it together;
    the Lord’s mouth has commanded it.”
	Isaiah 40:1-5

When I started at UT as a freshman, my first major was economics. The reason was quite practical. It is one of the few practical things I've done in my life, it didn’t hold, but I started in the right direction.
I had read a book in high school called The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner. It was about, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith and early economists. I thought that if I studied economics, there would be more job prospects than studying philosophy. I could think rigorously and be compensated for it. Or maybe go to law school.

So that was the original plan. God got in the way of it. But I was still interested enough in economics to be able to keep up with different literature over the years.
As I took my call to ministry more seriously, I started  studying the scriptures in a more serious and rigorous way than I had before. It was at that time that I started seeing all the economic language that exists throughout the Bible. For example, Joshua 13 begins a long series of chapters about land distribution among the children of the tribes of Israel.

> “Moses provided for the clans of the Reubenite tribe. Their territory ran from Aroer by the rim of the Arnon Valley and the city in the middle of the ravine, and the whole plateau as far as Medeba. It included Heshbon and all its cities that are on the plateau: Dibon, Bamoth-baal, Beth-baal-meon, Jahaz, Kedemoth, Mephaath, Kiriathaim, Sibmah, the Zereth-shahar highlands, Beth-peor, the slopes of Pisgah, and Beth-jeshimoth.”
Joshua 13:15-20 CEB

It goes on for a while. We have the fine print of the covenant here. These are real places. Real land that is given to people based on God’s promise. I think it is amazing that passages like this are found in the Bible. A lot of it reads like old fashioned titles and contracts. Not a lot of sermons or devotionals look at biblical real estate. We can always read it with apathy: “what does this have to do with me?” “I don’t care about ancient Jewish contract theory.”Or, we can read it humbly and realize that God cares about such things.

Another example from the Bible is the language of a redeemer. For instance, in the Book of Ruth, the reason why Boaz is a redeemer is that he is the closest relative of Naomi’s husband. You can’t sell land to anyone in Israel. It has to stay in the family. There were no real estate agents. The redeemer is someone who has a claim over the land, that is, Naomi's husband's estate and her son's estate. Redemption wasn’t about eternal salvation but a highly functional economic transaction.

Another example is debt. Debt and debtors are found throughout the old testament. Usury, or any interest bearing loan, is universally condemned in the Bible. But the more prominent example is in the Lord's Prayer. In the more literal translation of the Lord's Prayer. Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who have a debt against us.

Jesus isn’t just talking about metaphorical debts. It's actual debts. And as we think up how this line in the creed: I believe in the forgiveness of sins, if we get too far away from the language of debt, transaction and economics, then we are no longer in the world of the Bible.

## Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on the apostles creed, that historic doctrinal statement of the faith. We are going to look at how the creed encapsulate scripture and offers it to us in a way that shows us what has been revealed from God about who God is, how the world is, why we are in need, how Jesus saves us, and what we should do about it.

Today, I believe in the forgiveness of sins.

The root of the word economics comes from the Greek word for the home. It's the study of like goes on in the home in these kinds of ways. Basic expenses in a way, right? Like how much flour does a home need? And over the last 600 years, innovations in accounting, probability, and in investment instruments have continually taken place. Economics is not just an innovation over the last hundred years. There were incredibly complicated economic influences 500 years ago. For example, Christopher Columbus's journey to America was funded through a series of complex debt instruments. In some ways, they were more complex than loans today because they had to get around usury laws and so they couldn’t explicitly give someone an interest based loan.

Economics of the ancient world was also very complicated. One of the better theories for why the Roman Empire collapsed has to do with the collapse of economic communication and taxation between regions. They could no longer withstand the levels of debt leverage that had been going on for 2 or 300 years due to disruptions in communication. It wasn't because the Empire converted to Christianity. It had to do with some over leveraged individuals who no longer could communicate with their investments.

Debt is complicated in the ancient world and we need to hold onto this language of debt when we talk about sin and the forgiveness of sin.

In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, “the word for a debt that one owes a lender, hôbâ, is the standard term denoting sin.”[^1] This also works with forgiveness. Exodus 10:17 says “Now forgive my sin once more and pray to the Lord your God to take this deadly plague away from me.” In Aramaic, it reads “remit the debt of my sins.”[^2]

Sin as debt is found especially in the Parable of the king in Matthew 18.

>Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. When he began to settle accounts, they brought to him a servant who owed him ten thousand bags of gold. Because the servant didn’t have enough to pay it back, the master ordered that he should be sold, along with his wife and children and everything he had, and that the proceeds should be used as payment. But the servant fell down, kneeled before him, and said, ‘Please, be patient with me, and I’ll pay you back.’ The master had compassion on that servant, released him, and forgave the loan.

>“When that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him one hundred coins. He grabbed him around the throat and said, ‘Pay me back what you owe me.’

>“Then his fellow servant fell down and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I’ll pay you back.’ But he refused. Instead, he threw him into prison until he paid back his debt.

>“When his fellow servants saw what happened, they were deeply offended. They came and told their master all that happened. His master called the first servant and said, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you appealed to me. Shouldn’t you also have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you?’ His master was furious and handed him over to the guard responsible for punishing prisoners, until he had paid the whole debt.

>“My heavenly Father will also do the same to you if you don’t forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” - Matthew 18:23-34

It is easy to make sin abstract. But when we talk about the forgiveness of debt, we get concrete really quickly. If a friend is rude to you one evening, it is easy to move on. If a friend owes you money, it is much more difficult.

As well, if you owe someone 50 bucks and they say it's good, it's one thing. It's nice. If you borrow 50 bucks, it's nice, you know, great.  They forgive the debt and you are a little freer.

If you owe someone $500,000 and they say, “don't worry, you're good. I'm gonna write it off.” There is a different sort of forgiveness going on.
Or let’s look at a house in the area. 2.35 million. I saw this week on Zillow. Right down the road. Buy the house, get it, thanks. Bank then says, “actually, you know what? You don't owe us anything.”  That's a pretty remarkable situation to be in. You thought you were in the position where you owed this much money. It turns out now that the loaning institution says you don't owe it anymore. They've redeemed your debt and they have wiped it clean.

Now, one of the ways that this might be discussed in economic language is the problem of moral hazard. Moral hazard is this idea that if you just keep on forgiving, bailing out institutions, they're going to start counting on that bailout. And so they're gonna act in a reckless way that damages the financial infrastructure of the country. You heard the language a lot in the news, especially during the 2008 financial crisis.

So you don't want to fall prey to moral hazard in modern economics. And yet, if we did what we say in the Lord’s Prayer: (forgive my debts as I forgive those who have debt against me); this would seem to be exactly what causes moral hazard.
The hinge of the gospel now comes down to the response: what do we do now that that debt is wiped away? Do we act in such a way as contemporary economic theory would assume?  That is, after forgiveness, do we act in a reckless way knowing that God will bail us out no matter what? Do we do whatever we want because we know there won’t be any consequences?

Or do we change, do we receive the possibility of change?

To believe in the forgiveness of sins is to believe in this radical possibility of change, to believe in the radical possibility of transformation. That my giant ledger of sin, what I owe God, what I owe others, will be taken away. My whole life, I've just been building up debt. I've been taking out loans. I've been taking out loans of sin. I've been taking out these sin loans.
I've been not loving, avoiding loving people, I’ve been not praising God in all things, I’ve been building up a ledger.
And the act of faith is that it's going to be wiped away clean. Like a debt that you no longer owe.
Now, that's a different sort of economics than the world in which we live. Divine economics is different from American economics or the global economic system. A bank that forgave every loan would not be a bank very long. A car dealer that pulled an Oprah every week and said, “you get a car, you get a car, you get a car,” would not be in business for long.

But God shows us, in the life of Christ and in the forgiveness that he offers us, this incredible inefficiency of divine justice. It's not fair. I mean, I deserve to be punished for my sins. I deserve to be punished for the ways that I have harmed others, for the ways I've ignored others, for the ways I have turned my back on other people in my life, for the ways I've passed people on the street, for the ways I've rationalized my life choices, ignoring the consequences of my actions. This is not self hatred but reality. Justice demands it.

The forgiveness of sins is not just the letting go of a few little things here and there, but it is a radical transformation of how we view ourselves and how we view the world. More than anything, how we view God. “Wait, God is willing to bear the risk of forgiving me. What if I'm not worth it? What if I don't deserve it? What if I'm not good on it? I can’t pay back this note, God?”
God is willing to, to bear that risk. Even if my bond rating is junk, I'm junk status, fairly junk status, and yet God is willing to bear it.

Then God asks for the next big thing: to bear others. As we pray in the Lord’s prayer, forgive us our debts, as we forgive.” That as we is enormous. God offers us forgiveness but compels us to offer it, as well. This is the crux of the parable I read earlier from Matthew 18. It is hypocricy to receive mercy and then to go and not give it. It may be a good business practice to seek the forgiveness of your loans but not to forgive another’s loans. It may be good business practice but it is not how God offers us life. Mercy is not a cudgel to be held over our neighbor but a gift none of us deserve.

May you remember that whatever debt you are carrying in your soul, whatever you think is too much, it is not too much for God. If you think you are not worth it, you're worth it to God. This is what it means to believe in the forgiveness of sins. It is not just a good notion; it is a radical act of faith,

Let us pray,

God of compassion, you have reconciled us in Jesus Christ who is our peace: Enable us to live as Jesus lived, breaking down walls of hostility and healing enmity. Give us grace to make peace with those from whom we are divided, that, forgiven and forgiving, we may ever be one in Christ; who with you and the Holy Spirit reigns for ever, one holy and undivided Trinity. Amen.

When I am mean, and hurt my friends, lord forgive my sins.
When I hold back from loving my kin, lord forgive my sins.

As I forgive others who have hurt me,
Will you forgive me from my inconsistency.
As I forgive others will you, lord, forgive me.

[^1]: Anderson, 27.
[^2]: Anderson, 28.