Church Thinking

Bloody Faith

Ephesians 2:13

But now in Christ Jesus, you who were far away from God are brought near through the blood of Christ’s death.

Where would the self-help and business media be without the secret habits of highly successful people? Almost every week there’s a new article outlining a high-flying individual’s behaviors—with the implied promise that using the same techniques could deliver us fame and fortune, too. You’ll hear how top CEOs like Elon Musk begin work early, skip breakfast, and divide their time into small, manageable tasks. Other inspirational figures are more idiosyncratic in their habits. Bill Gates, for example, would reportedly rock backwards and forwards in his chair while brainstorming. This was a bodily means of focusing his mind that apparently spread across the Microsoft boardroom. Further back in history, Charles Dickens carried around a compass so he could sleep facing north, something he believed would contribute to more productive writing. Beethoven counted exactly 60 coffee beans for each cup, which he used to power his composing. Why do successful people follow such eccentrically specific habits? And why are we so keen to read about them and mimic them in our own lives? A key reason for this is that humans are social creatures; we are primed to look to people of higher status for advice. Given this tendency, it may be only natural that, reading a biography of a famous writer or watching an interview with a billionaire businessperson, we are tempted to take on their idiosyncratic rites and rituals. All in the hope that we can somehow achieve the same success, without recognizing how many other factors would have played a role in their achievements.

This may sound like Milton Wright, the father to the Wright brothers who famously said “Men will never fly, because flying is reserved for angels.” But I want to say that AI is not a living thing. As much as some people want to make AI the next step in evolution it is not a living thing and never will be. I know that some people will argue this but to be living something must be able to die and so far I have not seen enough to even image that AI really understands death. Central to all human experience is death and that is what makes us seek to understand the meaning of the human existence. It is in this space that we seek a higher power and want to know if there is someone in control beyond ourselves. Death is such a terrible thing and it is a scary place to even think about but it is the end of all humans and so we must deal with it. The hope that is found in Jesus is that death is not the end of us. Paul, the writer of First Corinthians in chapter fifteen talks about the power of death and how Jesus changes that. Often we as the church don’t talk about death but it is central to the point of what God is doing. In the beginning of the Bible one of the first issues that is addressed is about death. Both the curse of eating the fruit and of Cain killing his brother. God makes it clear that death has entered into the human situation and will have to be dealt with at some point. For me death is one of the things that I struggle with because my heart is all about life but if I want to fully embrace life I have to consider death and what is means. Getting to this place where we think through death also helps us seek God and look to the work that Jesus does. Our faith tells us that death is not the end of all things but a transition and God offers a very real hope that death can enter us into something more glorious than we can imagine. It is up to us to take the offer God makes about death and learn what it means.

Cars are interesting things because what they do is actually a spin-off of events that are not directly related to the motion that the car produces. Each car is really a heat machine and as a byproduct from the heat energy that the engine makes the car moves. There are many things that work like this and the one we want to consider is death. People dying may be the inevitable part of the human condition but it can be genuinely considered an after effect and not principal part of what it means to be human. Death only happens after humans sin and so to understand death we actually have to talk about sin and what it is and why it is. Sin is basically the rejection of God. We often think of is as something we do but Jesus says that our thoughts can be sin and so the idea is that sin is a mind set that rejects the authority of God. When we reject God’s authority in our lives, we begin to act against the righteousness of God and thus we act in sinful ways. Lets go back to Cain because God warns Cain about his thinking because God knew what would flow from what Cain was contemplating. This is why God directs us to think about righteous things because that will lead us to a righteous God. When we scorn God we are also giving up on the source of life. If God is creator of all things so how can we live without Him? Death then results from us being separated from God. To literally deal with death we have to deal with our sin and that means some how coming back into a relationship with God. Our problem is that there is no way back to God. We owe God perfect righteousness and once we have sin it is part of our lives there is no way to fix the problem. Because of our sin we have condemned ourselves to the result of our choice and that is death. So the question is how do we deal with sin and the answer to that is a loving God who invites us to come and trust in Him and know that He can and will deal with the results of our sin. This is where our hope in Jesus Christ comes from and it is a desperate hope and also a real hope.

I have always thought that the church has two seasons backward. Lenten season is characterized by denying your self and a sense of quilt and remorse while Advent seems to be one of expectation and excitement. For me the fact that Jesus has to be born because of my sin is tragic and it is heart breaking that God has to become flesh so He can die for our sins. Easter is the time when we celebrate Jesus over coming sin and death and it should be a period of joy as we get closer to the central point of our faith. To get to the resurrection, Jesus has to die and that death has such power in it. The verse we are looking at talks about the death of Jesus and that is because if we are going to be people of faith we need to know what it cost God to set us free. So often we spend a lot of time at Easter celebrating Jesus walking out to the tomb but we need to go back and see why that has to happen. Jesus’ death should humble us and should help us to grasp how terrible sin is. Our faith is in a God who chooses to come and die so that we can be free from the power of sin and death. It should be us up there on that cross dying because it is our sin that is the problem. We should not be so cavalier about sin if the only way to cope with that it takes God Himself dying. Death is the result of our sin and yet Jesus willingly comes and dies for us. You could not make a more tragic story if it were not for the fact of the resurrection and so instead of being tragic we find hope. But let it be clear, sin requires death and we need to sit and spend some time thinking about the fact that death is what we deserve but God offers life because of the death of Jesus. Leaning to trust God starts with these truths about sin and death and we will not grow in our faith until we grieve what Jesus had to do. Sin is a terrible thing but we have a greater God and that is our hope.

In all the TV shows about home renovations everyone gets excited about demo day. And I get the concept, normally were there is this prohibition about destroying things but on demo day you have to wreck if you want to change things. Let me say that I hate demo. My family owned a construction business and one of the things that we did was renovations and demo was part of that process and it was dirty and messy and very hard. Very quickly I learned that I like the rebuilding better then the demo but to get to the rebuilding the demo had to happen. Our faith is much like that process. In Jesus death we learn that death must happen to find the redemption we want and need and in that death we see something that needs to happen in our lives. Jesus tells us that if we want to live for Him we must die to our selves. In short Jesus tell us one of the things that we have to do is demo our old selves so God can remake us into what we were meant to be. This dying is not an easy thing but God does not leave us alone but shows us and empowers us to die so that we might live. Be aware that this is not for the faint of heart. It will take all we have and we will have to learn to trust in Jesus in the deepest ways. King David in Psalm twenty three talks about walking in the shadow of death and I think he is talking about this issue. Central to this point is the question of sin in our lives. God is going to talk about sin and we are going to have to die to sin and facing that will not be a good time. What will be joyous will be the finished result when God is done working in us. Just as people have to trust the designers in the those TV shows we need to trust that the designer of life will get things right in the rebuild.

As you get older, an interesting thing happens, people you know start to die. Over the last three years we have lost a beloved aunt, a mother, a sister and a brother. The grief of those losses are real and because I miss them I have shed a tear or two. We as believers should grieve the death of Jesus. How can we not fall before God and weep that Jesus died because of us? In all of history there is not a more tragic event and we cannot just walk by this and not feel the great burden of sorrow that is attached to it. The good thing is that grief drive us to be the humble, righteous and loving people God wants us to be. On the other side of life is the fact that at the same time we are losing people we love we are giving birth to grandchildren that is filling our house with joy. Followers of the living God should also celebrate the death of Jesus because in the death all of our sins are paid. Our lives should be filled with joy and we should weep because we have a God who longs to set us free instead of destroying us. Jesus is not just about some understanding of facts but we should feel the deep emotions that flow from this terrible event.