A sermon given during the Profession Eucharist of the Company of Jesus, October 11, 2008 at the Davis-Cain Cabin, Lexington, VA. Third of a series of three talks.
Tonight we come to receive two new vocations into the Company of Jesus. We describe ourselves as a Third Order Franciscan and Benedictine Community. We come from many different places and from many different backgrounds. Because we are so spread out, we are mostly a ‘virtual’ community. Our emails and phone calls go a long way towards helping us know each other, but it’s not and can never be the same as living together in a cloister, or even in the same town or attending the same church. These profession retreats and services are a partial attempt to mitigate the distance that separates us, helping us to continue to forge relationships ‘electronically’ between our face to face meetings.
Our calling in the Company of Jesus is monastic – essentially alone, even if we are married and have families. Because there are not many of us in any one place, we have to walk out our calling mostly alone. That’s how it was when I first became a Benedictine. There wasn’t another CoJ member within 400 miles of me. But it didn’t matter because I knew what God had built into my spirit and what he was calling me to, regardless of what anyone else did.
But after a while, a funny thing began to happen. God brought Mark Goldman alongside me and we started walking out this life together. Mark and Brenda and Cindy and I began to meet for dinner, conversation and prayer on a monthly basis. We began to have a sense of Community together, and this was tremendously encouraging. Later, God also brought a Franciscan, Sr. Connie Mershon, and another Benedictine, Ryan Connor to walk with us – Ryan and his wife Shannon joined our monthly dinners and things were going swimmingly for us as a CoJ ‘Chapter” - until October 1, 2006 - when we started All Saints – and soon afterward bought Hope House - and that’s when our schedules began to get really complicated and our monthly meetings became quarterly, and if it keeps up, probably semi-annually! Our sense of community has taken a hit.
We live in a paradoxical world. Because of the Internet and phone service, I know some of you who live 400 miles away better than my next door neighbor. Because we live so close to each other in cities, we put distance between ourselves emotionally. We know intimate details about each other via Facebook, but not that our next door neighbor is having major personal problems. When it comes to our church life, it’s sometimes not a whole lot better. Unless we have a small group structure where we can come to know one another, it’s very possible to go to church with someone for years without ever really knowing them personally or spiritually. We have to work intentionally to build community.
One of the things that was so impressive about the very early Christians was that they were living a life of close community. They were seeking God through prayer and they were taking care of one another –Loving God and loving their neighbors.
Tonight, I believe that God is bringing together The Company of Jesus and All Saints Anglican Church into a new interaction a new expression of Christian Community – one that has a lot to do with our Mission of loving our neighbors as ourselves.
I’ve said before what a powerful impact the 8th Day Life Center had on me personally, and I’ve always wondered if God wouldn’t somehow bring that ministry back around in a new form. Back in the ‘Day’ Fr. David and I dreamed about having a religious order close by St. Luke’s Church to pray and to support the 8th Day ministry as an ‘apostlate’ (as the Roman Catholics would say).
Now, I believe God is doing something similar with Hope House as the Center.
Historically, the monastic pattern as been that a group of (voluntarily) poor monks go to a desert or waste place and set up a monastery. Through their continual prayer and work (ora et labora) the monks begin to produce agricultural surpluses, which they use to help feed the poor in their area. As a result, the whole region is built up and stabilized, allowing for civilization to flourish. Material blessings come to the people surrounding the monastic house as a result of the blessings overflowing from a worshipping community, and many are drawn to follow the Lord. In short, the community is transformed.
BUB
To a much smaller extent, we’ve seen this sort of pattern with Hope House. Every since November of 2006, we’ve been meeting on Friday afternoons for “None”. We pray for the families of the slain teenagers and then “prayerwalk’ around the block and pick up trash. We frequently meet and talk to our neighbors, sometimes we pray for them directly. We’ve begun to know our neighbors – most notably the new managers of a gas station convenience store on the corner, where another murder occurred several years ago. For several weeks, we’ve been picking trash there at the station and getting to know Abe – a Muslim, and Christo, an Orthodox Christian.
One of our All Saints ministries is what we call Bless Ur Biz – BUB – in which we go to businesses and pray a blessing over them. This past Saturday, Abe and Christo allowed us to come and bless their business. By God’s grace He gave us favor with them, and they welcomed us very warmly. It’s been very gratifying to see this kind of reception, and I believe we are bringing the Life of Christ to the world through this work. We are creating community with our neighbors through expressions of care, concern and divine blessing.
Another recent event took place that made a big impression on me. Thursday evening, September 25, about 30 people gathered at Hope House for a candlelight service to mark National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims. Those gathered included members of All Saints, family members of the murdered teens, the Mayor, Police Chief and Treasurer of the City of Huntington – and several press people from TV and newspaper outlets.
That night, in the midst of a dark, unfinished construction site, I caught a vision for people gathering there at Hope House to pray the daily offices, seeking God in the darkness in order to bring the Light of Christ to the community. I could envision Company of Jesus members relocating to this struggling, ‘desert’ of Huntington, living in apartments close by Hope House, working in secular jobs, or even industries yet to be conceived through the Neighboring Initiative, praying the offices at Hope House – creating Christian community in order to bring blessing and transformation to our larger community.
What we’re talking about is like the concentric rings created by dropping a pebble into a pond. Hope House is a ministry taken on by a small community of believers, but it has touched both the community of suffering families, as well as the larger community of Huntington and the surrounding region. Our slogan for Hope House is: Turning Tragedy into Triumph. It seems to me that the Lord has indeed done that. Through media coverage, there is almost no one in the Tri-State region who doesn’t know what is happening at Hope House – and I believe it has been a great blessing to everyone – even in its smallness and unfinished state.
But there is an even bigger task to take on – praying for revival.
On September 21, in my Chapter Talk, I related how Cindy and I heard Rhonda Hughey speak at a local church in Huntington. David and Carol Ann were there as well. Rhonda is one of the leaders of the “International House of Prayer” in Kansas City. Its mission is to lift up 24/7 prayer and intercession, and indeed, hundreds of people have been doing this continual prayer for nine years now. Rhonda also is very involved in the “Transformation” movement which encourages people to pray earnestly for God to visit our communities and to dwell with us in a manifestly glorious way. Ms. Hughey had just returned from visiting Fiji, where hundreds of villages have experienced mind-boggling divine transformations.
In her talk, Hughey related a typical scenario, in which village leaders recognize that their lands and waters have become barren and that their communities are dying. Drug abuse, suicide, murder and ecological degradation all flourish and nothing seems to slow down the decay. However, when the people realize that they have turned from God and pursued their own wicked ways, and then repent as a community, God visits them, heals them spiritually and physically – even restoring their lands and healing their waters. Dead Coral reefs begin to grow overnight, polluted rivers are cleansed suddenly, and fish return immediately to places they had abandoned. Again, all of this is God’s response to the people recognizing their sin, repenting, and asking Him to come and be Lord of their community.
The people of Fiji have seen 200 villages in a row transformed when the people began calling out to the Lord en masse. They devoted themselves to prayer – morning and evening for hours at a time, abandoning all else because of their desperation for God.
In every case, the key to transformation was prayer.
I believe that we, the Company of Jesus and All Saints Anglican Church, are also being called to pray for such a revival. That’s what monastics are called to par excellence – to pray continually, seeking union with God in the spirit of humility. In places where monks have sought God with such humility, community transformation has always followed in its wake.
Impact of Order upon church.
Kurt Nielson was pastor of a flagging Episcopal church in Oregon. He went on a pilgrimage to Scotland and Ireland and came back very impressed with the Celtic pattern of doing church – in which the monastery was really the spiritual hub of the parish.
“What if,” wondered Nielson, “the focus of the community was not maintenance, but mission and nurturing the passion of pilgrims? …What if, like the traditional Celtic communities which included people of many states of life, there were various opportunities to live a committed and passionate path within the parish bounds…What if we broke through the walls separating church from neighborhood, and from other churches? What if we were to truly be a place where the poor and the most abused could find refuge? What if the future flowed from the gifts of our members, the gifts of which God is so lavish in giving, and we followed those gifts and let those gifts determine our plan?” (Urban Iona, pg. 148).
This is what I think God is calling us to do: To create a Christian community in which All Saints Anglican Church and the Company of Jesus find common ground in continual prayer, which becomes the basis for Community Transformation.
The physical location for this would be Hope House, but community members would live close by, and work day jobs but commit themselves to living out the ‘Eighth Day Life’ exemplified by the early church.
Of course, not everyone is called to living in such physical proximity. This will be a sovereign call of God upon certain individuals. But in this vision, the monastic disciplines and lifestyle become the wellspring of spirituality for the local church, while the Third Order folks also receive help and community from church members.
Since this notion of Eighth Day Life is central to this vision, I am proposing that we in All Saints adopt the name for our small groups. Instead of saying All Saints East, West or Central, we would call these “Eighth Day Life Groups” and perhaps adopt a patron – Benedict, Francis, Patrick, Brendan, etc. The object is to equip our members to live the Life themselves and to take it out to others.
For those in the Company of Jesus, I would like to propose that each member seriously ask themselves whether or not God may be calling him or her to relocate to the ‘mother community of the Order, Huntington, WV – always realizing that this is a very special ‘missionary’ calling, only to be considered in the same spirit as one discerns a call to Third Order monasticism.
Regardless of where we live, each member of the Company of Jesus should devote themselves to practicing the monastic disciplines, to pray especially for this Community effort in Huntington, and to be open to forming Eighth Day Life Groups in their own areas and to presenting seminars in local churches based on these ideas.
Tonight, after this service I am going to hand out a packet of information called The Four Practices for Eighth Day Life. This packet was inspired by some work done by Fr. Peter Matthews at St. Patrick’s Anglican Church in Lexington, KY. While the packet is designed to be used as the basis for discipleship at All Saints, it can also be adapted for use by the Company of Jesus, or for any other local church.
Tomorrow, as part of our Morning Prayer, I would like each of us to fill out the Spiritual Plan worksheet in the packet and then eventually review it with myself – or Father Mark. I know we won’t be able to do it all tomorrow, but I would like for us to get a good start on it and to eventually use this process as the basis for our new members and discipleship instruction.
I am very excited about what God will do through this vision and look forward to how individuals will walk it out. I thank God for these new vocations we celebrate tonight and for all that he is doing through All Saints Anglican Church and Hope House.
May God be Glorified. Pray for me, a sinner. Amen.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Eighth Day Life and Mission
Second of three talks given at the ASAC /CoJ retreat
We’ve just finished going through some formative practices of prayer. I want now to give some brief history and show how God has woven the threads of our lives together over the years.
I beg your indulgence as I give you some of my personal background; I’m also going to call on many of you along the way. I hope to tie these threads to our sense of Mission – another of our Four Practices.
I was originally introduced to Benedictine spirituality through Fr. Pete Turner, after he attended A Benedictine Experience retreat d in Washington D.C. Listening to Pete desribe the experience, it occurred to me the Rule of Benedict, which was written to guide the communal life of monks and nuns, could be adapted to create an intensive outpatient counseling program to be housed in a local church! Fr. Pete suggested that I contact David Green, rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on the west side of Charleston and talk to him about the idea. We connected and eventually collaborated on the formation of The Eighth Day Life Center, an intense, week-long program of counseling and spiritual direction based on a Benedictine model of prayer and spirituality.
(The notion of the 8th Day comes from the Church fathers such as Augustine of Hippo, who said that the day of Christ’s resurrection is a new day of creation.)
Between 1996 and 1998, our team ministered to about 75 “Seekers”, helping them through ‘eight days’ of personal and spiritual healing. Fr. Pete was involved in several of those early classes, and he really became a living icon of St. Benedict to me. The whole 8th Day experience profoundly transformed my own spiritual life and ministry, eventually pointing me towards profession in the Company of Jesus and Holy Orders – directions that were not even on my radar screen up until then.
Fr. Mark and Brenda were attending St. Luke’s at the time and in a little bit we’ll hear how their lives intersected with ours…
My involvement with the 8th Day Life Center ended in 1998, but in
2001, I was introduced by friends to the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, a “Continuing” Anglican group of the Convergence, Three Stream type, and began to discern a call to Holy Orders. On the eighth day of the eighth month of 2001, I was ordained Deacon by Bishop Rob Hoyt, in Sparta TN. A year later, I was ordained Priest – not really knowing exactly why, but being certain I was called to the Priesthood.
Through the Diocese of St. Cuthbert, I met Fr. Mark Camp, a former Baptist preacher, who had become a Franciscan member of the Company of Jesus and he put me in touch with Abbot Geoffrey Ames. In July of 2002, I made my profession as a Third Order Benedictine.
At a professional conference in 2003, Mark Goldman approached me about becoming a Benedictine himself.
( Here Mark+ Goldman gave a brief statement about becoming a Benedictine and the four of us beginning to meet on a monthly basis.)
Later we would include Ryan Connor. I’ll have him say something a bit later.
About 2003, my daughter Leah introduced me to David and Carol Ann Frederick and David invited me to a Saturday mens’ meeting.
(Here David told briefly about Mission Tri-State).
It was David who told me about St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and how they had affiliated with the American Anglican Council. Cindy and I started attending St. Andrews in 2003, right after the Gene Robinson vote – and that’s where we met Tom and Cathy and Ron and Clara Norma and Tony.
Fr. Mark Camp became Abbot of the CoJ, after Geoffrey Ames. In 2004, Abbot Mark+ was consecrated Bishop +Mark, and I was elected Abbot of the Company of Jesus. I have continued my day job as a Christian Therapist, and a professional supervisor – and that’s how I met Ryan Connor (here Ryan told briefly his background).
But I’ve also continued in the Benedictine walk, helping new aspirants discern their calling to our order, overseeing the work or our Vocation Directors and leading retreats for the Company of Jesus - which is how I’ve met Vaughn and Darren and Dale and Ed and David.
In 2006, a bunch of us from St. Andrew’s got fed up with what was happening in the Episcopal Church and finally decided to leave. (Tom Proctor really spearheaded our effort to start All Saints Anglican Church. Tom told about contacting Bishop Mark and getting started with the APCGS).
Mark Goldman had recently been ordained a Deacon and I asked him to come alongside and to work with me in planting this new work.
And that‘s how we met Lisa and Bruce and Debbie. ( Lisa told about learning of the new work and coming over from Ashland.)
We officially began on October 1, 2006 with about 18 of us meeting at Barboursville City Hall and then St. Hampton’s for about 14 months.
Back up one month. In September of 2006, the house where four teens had been murdered came up for sale and I felt God impress upon me the need to do something about creating a memorial to the slain teens.
I preached about this one Sunday at All Saints and in November, several of us, including David Frederick et al. began meeting on Friday afternoons to pray that God would make a way for us to buy the house. In February of 2007, for the Lordly sum of $10,000 we bought a cursed and decrepit property and started Hope House, a ministry that has really become synonymous with All Saints Anglican Church in the Tri-State region.
We have continued to pray every Friday afternoon in good Benedictine fashion, and have held two annual Memorial Eucharists for the Victims of Violent Crime. We have been renovating the house with help from the community and have ministered to many walk-in folks from the area while we were working. Our outreach to the area has included picking up trash in a one block area and holding a candlelight Vigil for Murder Victims. We’ve been able to minister directly to each of the families of the four teens, and are now in the process of developing a local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children.
A central concept in all this is that we are taking Christ’s “Eighth Day Life” into our community. That includes something we call “Bless Ur Biz” – BUB. (Have Bruce tell about how we went to his business and to the Chevron station).
The concept of Eighth Day Life reaches out to include all facets of life. Christ’s death and resurrection have ushered in a new day of creation and we are taking that Life to the world for its redemption and transformation. Broadly put, this is our mission.
I believe that Hope House presents us in All Saints Anglican Church and the Company of Jesus with an opportunity to reach out to the urban Huntington. (Cindy told about her passion for working with the children of the poor. Ron Clay told about his ministry as a Big Brother.)
We want to provide mentoring services at Hope House to help with the fathering process and to encourage stability in the urban community. We have instituted The Neighboring Initiative to help with our administration of Hope House and to act as a platform for our other future outreach ministries, including the annual Steven Ferguson Award for Exemplary fathering and churchmanship.
One of the really exciting things that is happening right now is that Anne Swedberg, one of our Neighboring Initiative Board members is putting together a drama based on interviews with family members and friends of the four teens. She is teaching a class at Marshall University about this technique and her students will do a lot of the actual interviews. Then, students from the Theater department will actually put on the play. The University is behind this project and has also agreed for us to do some fund-raising for Hope House around this play.
Lastly, we continue to be involved in Mission Tri-State. Recently, we participated in a Blessing of the Four Corners of Huntington, asking God for revival. As ministers from Mission Tri-State have gathered to hear from Rhonda Hughey about some of the wonderful things that are happening in places like Fiji, where God is coming in His presence and completely transforming the communities. The “fire and cloud” are descending and whole villages are getting saved and seeing their very land transformed by the Presence of God.
The leaders of the initial village transformations have taken this transformation to some 200 additional villages and have followed a process of gathering the civil leaders, church leaders and laity together and repenting of their sins, and asking God to come and transform their land – and even to dwell tangibly with them. Unlike former brief revivals, this movement is one of habitation – where God comes and stays.
But the process involves the entire community. And this is where we’re going to end this session, because I have more to say about this in our Profession service this evening.
We’ve just finished going through some formative practices of prayer. I want now to give some brief history and show how God has woven the threads of our lives together over the years.
I beg your indulgence as I give you some of my personal background; I’m also going to call on many of you along the way. I hope to tie these threads to our sense of Mission – another of our Four Practices.
I was originally introduced to Benedictine spirituality through Fr. Pete Turner, after he attended A Benedictine Experience retreat d in Washington D.C. Listening to Pete desribe the experience, it occurred to me the Rule of Benedict, which was written to guide the communal life of monks and nuns, could be adapted to create an intensive outpatient counseling program to be housed in a local church! Fr. Pete suggested that I contact David Green, rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on the west side of Charleston and talk to him about the idea. We connected and eventually collaborated on the formation of The Eighth Day Life Center, an intense, week-long program of counseling and spiritual direction based on a Benedictine model of prayer and spirituality.
(The notion of the 8th Day comes from the Church fathers such as Augustine of Hippo, who said that the day of Christ’s resurrection is a new day of creation.)
Between 1996 and 1998, our team ministered to about 75 “Seekers”, helping them through ‘eight days’ of personal and spiritual healing. Fr. Pete was involved in several of those early classes, and he really became a living icon of St. Benedict to me. The whole 8th Day experience profoundly transformed my own spiritual life and ministry, eventually pointing me towards profession in the Company of Jesus and Holy Orders – directions that were not even on my radar screen up until then.
Fr. Mark and Brenda were attending St. Luke’s at the time and in a little bit we’ll hear how their lives intersected with ours…
My involvement with the 8th Day Life Center ended in 1998, but in
2001, I was introduced by friends to the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, a “Continuing” Anglican group of the Convergence, Three Stream type, and began to discern a call to Holy Orders. On the eighth day of the eighth month of 2001, I was ordained Deacon by Bishop Rob Hoyt, in Sparta TN. A year later, I was ordained Priest – not really knowing exactly why, but being certain I was called to the Priesthood.
Through the Diocese of St. Cuthbert, I met Fr. Mark Camp, a former Baptist preacher, who had become a Franciscan member of the Company of Jesus and he put me in touch with Abbot Geoffrey Ames. In July of 2002, I made my profession as a Third Order Benedictine.
At a professional conference in 2003, Mark Goldman approached me about becoming a Benedictine himself.
( Here Mark+ Goldman gave a brief statement about becoming a Benedictine and the four of us beginning to meet on a monthly basis.)
Later we would include Ryan Connor. I’ll have him say something a bit later.
About 2003, my daughter Leah introduced me to David and Carol Ann Frederick and David invited me to a Saturday mens’ meeting.
(Here David told briefly about Mission Tri-State).
It was David who told me about St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and how they had affiliated with the American Anglican Council. Cindy and I started attending St. Andrews in 2003, right after the Gene Robinson vote – and that’s where we met Tom and Cathy and Ron and Clara Norma and Tony.
Fr. Mark Camp became Abbot of the CoJ, after Geoffrey Ames. In 2004, Abbot Mark+ was consecrated Bishop +Mark, and I was elected Abbot of the Company of Jesus. I have continued my day job as a Christian Therapist, and a professional supervisor – and that’s how I met Ryan Connor (here Ryan told briefly his background).
But I’ve also continued in the Benedictine walk, helping new aspirants discern their calling to our order, overseeing the work or our Vocation Directors and leading retreats for the Company of Jesus - which is how I’ve met Vaughn and Darren and Dale and Ed and David.
In 2006, a bunch of us from St. Andrew’s got fed up with what was happening in the Episcopal Church and finally decided to leave. (Tom Proctor really spearheaded our effort to start All Saints Anglican Church. Tom told about contacting Bishop Mark and getting started with the APCGS).
Mark Goldman had recently been ordained a Deacon and I asked him to come alongside and to work with me in planting this new work.
And that‘s how we met Lisa and Bruce and Debbie. ( Lisa told about learning of the new work and coming over from Ashland.)
We officially began on October 1, 2006 with about 18 of us meeting at Barboursville City Hall and then St. Hampton’s for about 14 months.
Back up one month. In September of 2006, the house where four teens had been murdered came up for sale and I felt God impress upon me the need to do something about creating a memorial to the slain teens.
I preached about this one Sunday at All Saints and in November, several of us, including David Frederick et al. began meeting on Friday afternoons to pray that God would make a way for us to buy the house. In February of 2007, for the Lordly sum of $10,000 we bought a cursed and decrepit property and started Hope House, a ministry that has really become synonymous with All Saints Anglican Church in the Tri-State region.
We have continued to pray every Friday afternoon in good Benedictine fashion, and have held two annual Memorial Eucharists for the Victims of Violent Crime. We have been renovating the house with help from the community and have ministered to many walk-in folks from the area while we were working. Our outreach to the area has included picking up trash in a one block area and holding a candlelight Vigil for Murder Victims. We’ve been able to minister directly to each of the families of the four teens, and are now in the process of developing a local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children.
A central concept in all this is that we are taking Christ’s “Eighth Day Life” into our community. That includes something we call “Bless Ur Biz” – BUB. (Have Bruce tell about how we went to his business and to the Chevron station).
The concept of Eighth Day Life reaches out to include all facets of life. Christ’s death and resurrection have ushered in a new day of creation and we are taking that Life to the world for its redemption and transformation. Broadly put, this is our mission.
I believe that Hope House presents us in All Saints Anglican Church and the Company of Jesus with an opportunity to reach out to the urban Huntington. (Cindy told about her passion for working with the children of the poor. Ron Clay told about his ministry as a Big Brother.)
We want to provide mentoring services at Hope House to help with the fathering process and to encourage stability in the urban community. We have instituted The Neighboring Initiative to help with our administration of Hope House and to act as a platform for our other future outreach ministries, including the annual Steven Ferguson Award for Exemplary fathering and churchmanship.
One of the really exciting things that is happening right now is that Anne Swedberg, one of our Neighboring Initiative Board members is putting together a drama based on interviews with family members and friends of the four teens. She is teaching a class at Marshall University about this technique and her students will do a lot of the actual interviews. Then, students from the Theater department will actually put on the play. The University is behind this project and has also agreed for us to do some fund-raising for Hope House around this play.
Lastly, we continue to be involved in Mission Tri-State. Recently, we participated in a Blessing of the Four Corners of Huntington, asking God for revival. As ministers from Mission Tri-State have gathered to hear from Rhonda Hughey about some of the wonderful things that are happening in places like Fiji, where God is coming in His presence and completely transforming the communities. The “fire and cloud” are descending and whole villages are getting saved and seeing their very land transformed by the Presence of God.
The leaders of the initial village transformations have taken this transformation to some 200 additional villages and have followed a process of gathering the civil leaders, church leaders and laity together and repenting of their sins, and asking God to come and transform their land – and even to dwell tangibly with them. Unlike former brief revivals, this movement is one of habitation – where God comes and stays.
But the process involves the entire community. And this is where we’re going to end this session, because I have more to say about this in our Profession service this evening.
Introduction to Worship & the Four Practices
The introductory talk given to the joint retreat of All Saints Anglican Church and the Company of Jesus held October 10-12 at the Davis-Cain Cabin in Lexington, Virginia. First of three talks.
The disciples of Jesus followed him for three years without being Christians. Even though they rubbed shoulders with Jesus and saw him minister healing, miracles and wonderful teaching, they still didn’t quite get it that Jesus was God in the Flesh. True, Peter did have some flashes of insight. And the day of the Transfiguration was really cool, but it wasn’t until Christ was resurrected that they began to get it that Jesus was God.
The thing they were really convinced of was that Jesus was real. He was a real person and he really was God in the flesh - the exact representation of God the Father. There was none of this nonsense about Jesus being a good teacher or a highly moral person – even a spiritual genius – anything but God. No, even the last holdout, Thomas, summed up nicely the attitude of the disciples towards Christ when he said, after looking at Jesus’ wounds up close and personal, “My King and My God.!”
They were all totally sold at that point. They believed: Jesus is God. He died for our sins, he arose from the grave and we have talked to him, touched him, eaten breakfast with him, and seen the reality of his resurrection in the breaking of the bread. Their relationship with him was very personal. As a result their lives were totally transformed.
At his ascension, Jesus told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the coming of the Spirit that he would send. The disciples devoted themselves to prayer until the Spirit came and empowered them for ministry. After that great and wonderful event in which 3,000 people were added to the kingdom in one day, Acts 2:42 tells us that “they were continually devoting themselves to the apostle’s teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and to prayer.”
Going on in the same passage, we see that there were signs and wonders taking place, the believers were selling their possessions and sharing with one another, taking meals together in each others’ homes, worshipping together in unity at the temple, and rejoicing as the Lord was adding to their number day by day, those who were being saved. This manner of living can be thought of as ‘Eighth Day Life” – life lived in the New Day of Christ’s resurrection, the Eighth Day of Creation. (Acts 2:43-47).
Theme: Out of this wonderful description of new life in the Spirit, we can discern four basic areas of Christian practice: Worship, Community, Formation and Mission.
This weekend, we will look at these four areas of Christian Discipleship and explore ways of integrating them into our lives – all for the purpose of fulfilling the two Great Commandments: loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves. At the end of our time together this weekend, we should be well along the way to creating a spiritual plan for our lives that incorporates these Practices and helps us to grow in our love of God and our neighbor.
We’re also going to explore what it means that we are all here together – members of All Saints Anglican Church and the Company of Jesus. In some ways we are like the crowd that was assembled on the Day of Pentecost. We have Kentuckians, West Virginians, (native) Ohioans (me), Pennsylvanians, North Carolinians and Georgians and New Yorkers all in one place –each speaking their own languages , but able to understand each other!
So I’d like for us to imagine that we’ve just been saved on the Day of Pentecost and it’s now the day after. Maybe if we do what they did, we’ll get what they got – namely: a sense of awe, signs and wonders, unity in our community, gladness, joyful praise of God and an increase in the number of believers day by day.
Does anyone here think that sounds good? ….Alright!
So - what do we do? And how?
Worship: Fixed Hour Prayer
One of the things they did was to continue in the prayers. “The prayers” refers to ‘fixed hour prayer. Already at the time of the Apostles, the Jewish people had a tradition of saying standard prayers at certain hours of the Roman day:
Prime, the first hour @ 6:00am
Terce, third @ 9:00am
Sext, sixth @ 12pm
None, ninth @ 3pm
Vespers around 6pm
There was likely also prayers before bed and vigil prayers offered in the middle of the night or very early morning.
Acts 3:1 tells us that Peter and John were going up to the temple for prayer at the ninth hour (3pm). This tradition of fixed hour prayer was based on Ps. 119:164: “Seven times a day do I praise you”… Later, St. Benedict would adopt this pattern of fixed hour prayer and utilize standardized texts for the services. Shortly we will pray Compline together. We get this service pretty much verbatim as Benedict laid it out 1500 years ago.
Also, in the Book of Common Prayer, we have Morning and Evening Prayer services. It’s fair to say that the root of Anglicanism is Benedictine because when Thomas Cranmer compiled the first BCP, he compressed the monastic hours down into these two services, which form natural hinge points for our day. Morning and Evening Prayer are primarily public in nature, as of course, is the Eucharist, while the fixed hour prayer is often done privately.
As we go through our weekend, we will be praying several different types of offices, including Compline, Morning Prayer and the Eucharist, as well as some of the devotions for individual and families. We’re also going to be introduced into the use of the Anglican Rosary and make our way through the Way of the Cross
Adapted from St. Francis.
These times of worship should help us to actually experience ‘the prayers’ first hand. In the process, I hope you will catch a glimpse of a “continuous cascade of prayer” going up before the throne of God as we become aware that as soon as we finish one hour of prayer, someone in the next time zone will be taking up the same prayer. This is one of the ways that we can ‘continually devote ourselves to prayer.” I think it’s fair to say that the members of the Company of Jesus are here because they are drawn increasingly to a life of prayer and that the Prayers sustain them and help them grow in a way that is very daily, and often very humble, but ultimately very powerful. Such prayers virtually formed our Western world and can have a powerful impact on transforming our culture today.
So as we go through the weekend let’s worship as the early Christians might have, and trust the Lord, that if we do what they did we may get what they got. Amen.
Compline followed.
The disciples of Jesus followed him for three years without being Christians. Even though they rubbed shoulders with Jesus and saw him minister healing, miracles and wonderful teaching, they still didn’t quite get it that Jesus was God in the Flesh. True, Peter did have some flashes of insight. And the day of the Transfiguration was really cool, but it wasn’t until Christ was resurrected that they began to get it that Jesus was God.
The thing they were really convinced of was that Jesus was real. He was a real person and he really was God in the flesh - the exact representation of God the Father. There was none of this nonsense about Jesus being a good teacher or a highly moral person – even a spiritual genius – anything but God. No, even the last holdout, Thomas, summed up nicely the attitude of the disciples towards Christ when he said, after looking at Jesus’ wounds up close and personal, “My King and My God.!”
They were all totally sold at that point. They believed: Jesus is God. He died for our sins, he arose from the grave and we have talked to him, touched him, eaten breakfast with him, and seen the reality of his resurrection in the breaking of the bread. Their relationship with him was very personal. As a result their lives were totally transformed.
At his ascension, Jesus told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the coming of the Spirit that he would send. The disciples devoted themselves to prayer until the Spirit came and empowered them for ministry. After that great and wonderful event in which 3,000 people were added to the kingdom in one day, Acts 2:42 tells us that “they were continually devoting themselves to the apostle’s teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and to prayer.”
Going on in the same passage, we see that there were signs and wonders taking place, the believers were selling their possessions and sharing with one another, taking meals together in each others’ homes, worshipping together in unity at the temple, and rejoicing as the Lord was adding to their number day by day, those who were being saved. This manner of living can be thought of as ‘Eighth Day Life” – life lived in the New Day of Christ’s resurrection, the Eighth Day of Creation. (Acts 2:43-47).
Theme: Out of this wonderful description of new life in the Spirit, we can discern four basic areas of Christian practice: Worship, Community, Formation and Mission.
This weekend, we will look at these four areas of Christian Discipleship and explore ways of integrating them into our lives – all for the purpose of fulfilling the two Great Commandments: loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves. At the end of our time together this weekend, we should be well along the way to creating a spiritual plan for our lives that incorporates these Practices and helps us to grow in our love of God and our neighbor.
We’re also going to explore what it means that we are all here together – members of All Saints Anglican Church and the Company of Jesus. In some ways we are like the crowd that was assembled on the Day of Pentecost. We have Kentuckians, West Virginians, (native) Ohioans (me), Pennsylvanians, North Carolinians and Georgians and New Yorkers all in one place –each speaking their own languages , but able to understand each other!
So I’d like for us to imagine that we’ve just been saved on the Day of Pentecost and it’s now the day after. Maybe if we do what they did, we’ll get what they got – namely: a sense of awe, signs and wonders, unity in our community, gladness, joyful praise of God and an increase in the number of believers day by day.
Does anyone here think that sounds good? ….Alright!
So - what do we do? And how?
Worship: Fixed Hour Prayer
One of the things they did was to continue in the prayers. “The prayers” refers to ‘fixed hour prayer. Already at the time of the Apostles, the Jewish people had a tradition of saying standard prayers at certain hours of the Roman day:
Prime, the first hour @ 6:00am
Terce, third @ 9:00am
Sext, sixth @ 12pm
None, ninth @ 3pm
Vespers around 6pm
There was likely also prayers before bed and vigil prayers offered in the middle of the night or very early morning.
Acts 3:1 tells us that Peter and John were going up to the temple for prayer at the ninth hour (3pm). This tradition of fixed hour prayer was based on Ps. 119:164: “Seven times a day do I praise you”… Later, St. Benedict would adopt this pattern of fixed hour prayer and utilize standardized texts for the services. Shortly we will pray Compline together. We get this service pretty much verbatim as Benedict laid it out 1500 years ago.
Also, in the Book of Common Prayer, we have Morning and Evening Prayer services. It’s fair to say that the root of Anglicanism is Benedictine because when Thomas Cranmer compiled the first BCP, he compressed the monastic hours down into these two services, which form natural hinge points for our day. Morning and Evening Prayer are primarily public in nature, as of course, is the Eucharist, while the fixed hour prayer is often done privately.
As we go through our weekend, we will be praying several different types of offices, including Compline, Morning Prayer and the Eucharist, as well as some of the devotions for individual and families. We’re also going to be introduced into the use of the Anglican Rosary and make our way through the Way of the Cross
Adapted from St. Francis.
These times of worship should help us to actually experience ‘the prayers’ first hand. In the process, I hope you will catch a glimpse of a “continuous cascade of prayer” going up before the throne of God as we become aware that as soon as we finish one hour of prayer, someone in the next time zone will be taking up the same prayer. This is one of the ways that we can ‘continually devote ourselves to prayer.” I think it’s fair to say that the members of the Company of Jesus are here because they are drawn increasingly to a life of prayer and that the Prayers sustain them and help them grow in a way that is very daily, and often very humble, but ultimately very powerful. Such prayers virtually formed our Western world and can have a powerful impact on transforming our culture today.
So as we go through the weekend let’s worship as the early Christians might have, and trust the Lord, that if we do what they did we may get what they got. Amen.
Compline followed.
The Vineyard of the Lord
A sermon delivered to All Saints Anglican Church on October 5, 2008 at the Convent Chapel of St. Mary's Medical Center, based on Psalm 80, Isaiah 5: 1-7, and Matthew 21: 31-46.
Have you ever been hiking in the country and come upon some wild grapes? They look plump and purple, and your taste buds start to taste the sweetness of the grape before it even gets into your mouth. But when you actually try one of those grapes, it’s sour and bitter – and you can’t spit it out fast enough!? If you can relate to this little example you might be able to catch a glimpse of how God feels about his Vineyard sometimes. Today, three of our readings make use of the Vine or Vineyard metaphor:
Ps 80:8: “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it.
Who or What is this Vine? In Isaiah 5:7, Israel is actually named as the Vineyard:
7 For the vineyard of the Lord of hostsis the house of Israel,and the men of Judahare his pleasant planting;
In Matthew 21:33-46, Jesus tells a parable about Israel: “There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country..
Compare this language to Isaiah 5: 1,2:
My beloved had a vineyardon a very fertile hill.2 He dug it and cleared it of stones,and planted it with choice vines;he built a watchtower in the midst of it,and hewed out a wine vat in it;and he looked for it to yield grapes,but it yielded wild grapes.
Apart from the actual picture of the Vine and the Vineyard, the theme that I think holds all these passages together is summed up poetically in that last couplet: “…he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” Because it yielded wild grapes, the Vineyard then experiences loss.
Let’s look at the background of Psalm 80 to begin to see how this works out in Israel’s history:
Background
2 Kings 17:2, ff describes how Hoshea, the son of Elah, began to reign in Samaria over Israel. This is the area where the tribes of Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh, mentioned in Psalm 80, lived. It was in the far north of Israel’s territory and vulnerable to Assyria. Hoshea reigned nine years – and he “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” Because he did evil, Shalmaneser of Assyria forced Hoshea to become his vassal and to pay tribute – ‘protection money’ if you will.
Apparently Hoshea was a player and schemer. He tried to cook up something with the King of Egypt and failed to pay his tribute…so Shalmaneser put Hoshea in prison and made war on Israel for three years, until Samaria was captured and the people were taken away to Assyria in exile in about 722 BC.
Exile Because of Idolatry
The text goes on to tell us explicitly that:
7 … this occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt…
These are the same people in Psalm 80:8 :
“You brought a vine out of Egypt;you drove out the nations and planted it.”
God prepared the ground for Israel to flourish - and it actually did take root and begin to grow. It “stretched out its branches to the Sea – the Mediterranean - and its shoots to the River – the Euphrates. Israel was fruitful. But they turned away from the Lord.
II Kings 17:9 tells us that the people worshipped the gods of the peoples they conquered. “They built for themselves high places in all their towns, from watchtower to fortified city.”
They engaged in idol worship, the very thing that God told them not to do. And God warned them through prophets to turn back, but they wouldn’t listen. They abandoned the commandments, took up divination and even practiced child sacrifice to Baal.
Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight. None was left but the tribe of Judah only” (II Kings 17:18).
This is what caused the Psalmist’s lament in Ps. 80:4-6:
4 O Lord God of hosts,how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?5 You have fed them with the bread of tearsand given them tears to drink in full measure.6 You make us an object of contention for our neighbors,and our enemies laugh among themselves…
You would think that when the tribe of Judah, to the south, observed all that happened to their northern neighbors, they would have been warned, but no!
II Kings 17:19: Judah also did not keep the commandments of the Lord their God, but walked in the customs that Israel had introduced. 20 And the Lord rejected all the descendants of Israel and afflicted them and gave them into the hand of plunderers, until he had cast them out of his sight. This is the event our Isaiah passage references. Out of these experiences of Israel and Judah, we can state a Life Principle :
God desires for his People to be fruitful, but when his people fail to bear good fruit, they experience disaster.
Isaiah 5:4ffm, God laments:
What more was there to do for my vineyard,that I have not done in it?When I looked for it to yield grapes,why did it yield wild grapes?
5 And now I will tell youwhat I will do to my vineyard.I will remove its hedge,and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall,and it shall be trampled down.6 I will make it a waste;it shall not be pruned or hoed,and briers and thorns shall grow up;I will also command the cloudsthat they rain no rain upon it.
7 For the vineyard of the Lord of hostsis the house of Israel,and the men of Judahare his pleasant planting;and he looked for justice,but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness,but behold, an outcry!
God was looking for justice and righteousness, but instead he found bloodshed and outrage. The vineyard of the Lord did not produce good fruit, so it was destroyed.
Now fast forward to Israel in the time of Jesus. You would think that with all this as background the Jewish establishment would understand the importance of being faithful and fruitful – of taking care of the Vineyard of the Lord. But Jesus tells the story of the tenants and prophetically identifies the Jewish leaders as those who kill the Son – who spill blood when they should be producing righteous fruit for the God the Father, the Vineyard owner.
The result, says Jesus is that …” the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.” V.43
Mt. 21:45” When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them.” They got it. They realized that Jesus was impugning their leadership.
Jesus was saying that Israel had failed to bear righteous fruit, and because of it, God was going to take the Kingdom away from them and passed it on to others - the Gentiles. This began formally at the Day of Pentecost, but was marked in tragedy in 70 AD when the Romans invaded Jerusalem and burned the whole city, including the Temple. That was the day the Vineyard was destroyed in earnest.
Now, this is all very bad for the Jewish people, but how, you may ask, does this relate to us today?
Let me just relate it in terms of my own experience. I grew up in a Christian home, but rejected the Gospel decisively when I was about 14. By the time I was 20, I realized I was morally bankrupt. Because I saw nothing larger than Me in my life, I had become arrogant and self-centered. I tried to make Music a god in my life, but found that Music wasn’t big enough to give my life transcendent meaning. I used other people to further my own ends and was cynical about the possibility of Love. I had begun to use alcohol as a vehicle to oblivion. And there was even a time, when I was in my first year of college, that I was suicidal, thinking that there was no good reason on this Earth to keep on going. I was a dead man walking. Multiply this by millions, and you have a picture of a Vineyard that produces wild grapes.
But Thanks be to God, He pursued me until I saw the way out of Death: to simply repent and believe in the God who made me and died for my sins.
I’ve told the story before about how when I prayed for God to forgive me and come into my life, it was literally like someone opened the window and the Wind of God’s Spirit came into the room. I experienced the Reality of God as a Person, and I suddenly realized that it was possible to have a real relationship with Christ.
Over the years, I’ve learned the importance of staying close and connected to God, to walk with him every day, To talk to Him about the things that are important to me, and to listen to Him when He speaks in that Still Small voice. Jesus called it Abiding in the Vine. It’s how we produce good fruit, and literally the difference between Life and Death.
Friends, God’s basic saving message to us is this: Repent of the sin of self-sufficiency and learn to Abide in Him so that you can bear good fruit. It’s not just a message to pagans either. God’s message of repentance is addressed to His own people:
2 Chronicles 7:14: …if my people, who are called by my name will humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. (the Vineyard, if you like)
It’s not just ‘wicked people’ that need to repent, it’s God’s people! If we ourselves will repent of our practical atheism and faithlessness, God will bring healing into our lives and our land – and we will be a fruitful people, the Vineyard of the Lord.
Jesus is the Vine, and we are the branches. We must ‘abide’ in the Vine, for apart from Him, we can do nothing. (Jn. 15:5).
How do we abide in Him?
1) Call Jesus Lord and walk with Him every day.
2) Worship the Lord in the beauty of Holiness. Be faithful in public worship of God.
3) Offer up your life to Him. Everything that you have has come to you from him. Offer everything you have back to Him and let your Tithe of time, treasure and talents be the beginning of your giving.
4) Tend the Vine. Spend time with God in private worship, Bible study and formation practices such as Holy Reading, fasting, etc. Allow yourself to be formed by the Lord through these practices.
5) Finally, Be the body of Christ to each other and the world through loving one another and caring for each other’s needs. Share your faith with others and take the love of Christ to the world.
As we repent and abide, we look also for restoration as a people. Take out your inserts labeled “A Prayer for Restoration” and let’s say this together:
Restore us, O God;let your face shine, that we may be saved!
Turn again, O God of hosts!Look down from heaven, and see;have regard for this vine,the stock that your right hand planted,and for the son whom you made strong for yourself.Then we shall not turn back from you;give us life, and we will call upon your name!
Restore us, O Lord God of hosts!Let your face shine, that we may be saved!
Amen.
Have you ever been hiking in the country and come upon some wild grapes? They look plump and purple, and your taste buds start to taste the sweetness of the grape before it even gets into your mouth. But when you actually try one of those grapes, it’s sour and bitter – and you can’t spit it out fast enough!? If you can relate to this little example you might be able to catch a glimpse of how God feels about his Vineyard sometimes. Today, three of our readings make use of the Vine or Vineyard metaphor:
Ps 80:8: “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it.
Who or What is this Vine? In Isaiah 5:7, Israel is actually named as the Vineyard:
7 For the vineyard of the Lord of hostsis the house of Israel,and the men of Judahare his pleasant planting;
In Matthew 21:33-46, Jesus tells a parable about Israel: “There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to tenants, and went into another country..
Compare this language to Isaiah 5: 1,2:
My beloved had a vineyardon a very fertile hill.2 He dug it and cleared it of stones,and planted it with choice vines;he built a watchtower in the midst of it,and hewed out a wine vat in it;and he looked for it to yield grapes,but it yielded wild grapes.
Apart from the actual picture of the Vine and the Vineyard, the theme that I think holds all these passages together is summed up poetically in that last couplet: “…he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” Because it yielded wild grapes, the Vineyard then experiences loss.
Let’s look at the background of Psalm 80 to begin to see how this works out in Israel’s history:
Background
2 Kings 17:2, ff describes how Hoshea, the son of Elah, began to reign in Samaria over Israel. This is the area where the tribes of Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh, mentioned in Psalm 80, lived. It was in the far north of Israel’s territory and vulnerable to Assyria. Hoshea reigned nine years – and he “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” Because he did evil, Shalmaneser of Assyria forced Hoshea to become his vassal and to pay tribute – ‘protection money’ if you will.
Apparently Hoshea was a player and schemer. He tried to cook up something with the King of Egypt and failed to pay his tribute…so Shalmaneser put Hoshea in prison and made war on Israel for three years, until Samaria was captured and the people were taken away to Assyria in exile in about 722 BC.
Exile Because of Idolatry
The text goes on to tell us explicitly that:
7 … this occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt…
These are the same people in Psalm 80:8 :
“You brought a vine out of Egypt;you drove out the nations and planted it.”
God prepared the ground for Israel to flourish - and it actually did take root and begin to grow. It “stretched out its branches to the Sea – the Mediterranean - and its shoots to the River – the Euphrates. Israel was fruitful. But they turned away from the Lord.
II Kings 17:9 tells us that the people worshipped the gods of the peoples they conquered. “They built for themselves high places in all their towns, from watchtower to fortified city.”
They engaged in idol worship, the very thing that God told them not to do. And God warned them through prophets to turn back, but they wouldn’t listen. They abandoned the commandments, took up divination and even practiced child sacrifice to Baal.
Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight. None was left but the tribe of Judah only” (II Kings 17:18).
This is what caused the Psalmist’s lament in Ps. 80:4-6:
4 O Lord God of hosts,how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?5 You have fed them with the bread of tearsand given them tears to drink in full measure.6 You make us an object of contention for our neighbors,and our enemies laugh among themselves…
You would think that when the tribe of Judah, to the south, observed all that happened to their northern neighbors, they would have been warned, but no!
II Kings 17:19: Judah also did not keep the commandments of the Lord their God, but walked in the customs that Israel had introduced. 20 And the Lord rejected all the descendants of Israel and afflicted them and gave them into the hand of plunderers, until he had cast them out of his sight. This is the event our Isaiah passage references. Out of these experiences of Israel and Judah, we can state a Life Principle :
God desires for his People to be fruitful, but when his people fail to bear good fruit, they experience disaster.
Isaiah 5:4ffm, God laments:
What more was there to do for my vineyard,that I have not done in it?When I looked for it to yield grapes,why did it yield wild grapes?
5 And now I will tell youwhat I will do to my vineyard.I will remove its hedge,and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall,and it shall be trampled down.6 I will make it a waste;it shall not be pruned or hoed,and briers and thorns shall grow up;I will also command the cloudsthat they rain no rain upon it.
7 For the vineyard of the Lord of hostsis the house of Israel,and the men of Judahare his pleasant planting;and he looked for justice,but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness,but behold, an outcry!
God was looking for justice and righteousness, but instead he found bloodshed and outrage. The vineyard of the Lord did not produce good fruit, so it was destroyed.
Now fast forward to Israel in the time of Jesus. You would think that with all this as background the Jewish establishment would understand the importance of being faithful and fruitful – of taking care of the Vineyard of the Lord. But Jesus tells the story of the tenants and prophetically identifies the Jewish leaders as those who kill the Son – who spill blood when they should be producing righteous fruit for the God the Father, the Vineyard owner.
The result, says Jesus is that …” the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits.” V.43
Mt. 21:45” When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them.” They got it. They realized that Jesus was impugning their leadership.
Jesus was saying that Israel had failed to bear righteous fruit, and because of it, God was going to take the Kingdom away from them and passed it on to others - the Gentiles. This began formally at the Day of Pentecost, but was marked in tragedy in 70 AD when the Romans invaded Jerusalem and burned the whole city, including the Temple. That was the day the Vineyard was destroyed in earnest.
Now, this is all very bad for the Jewish people, but how, you may ask, does this relate to us today?
Let me just relate it in terms of my own experience. I grew up in a Christian home, but rejected the Gospel decisively when I was about 14. By the time I was 20, I realized I was morally bankrupt. Because I saw nothing larger than Me in my life, I had become arrogant and self-centered. I tried to make Music a god in my life, but found that Music wasn’t big enough to give my life transcendent meaning. I used other people to further my own ends and was cynical about the possibility of Love. I had begun to use alcohol as a vehicle to oblivion. And there was even a time, when I was in my first year of college, that I was suicidal, thinking that there was no good reason on this Earth to keep on going. I was a dead man walking. Multiply this by millions, and you have a picture of a Vineyard that produces wild grapes.
But Thanks be to God, He pursued me until I saw the way out of Death: to simply repent and believe in the God who made me and died for my sins.
I’ve told the story before about how when I prayed for God to forgive me and come into my life, it was literally like someone opened the window and the Wind of God’s Spirit came into the room. I experienced the Reality of God as a Person, and I suddenly realized that it was possible to have a real relationship with Christ.
Over the years, I’ve learned the importance of staying close and connected to God, to walk with him every day, To talk to Him about the things that are important to me, and to listen to Him when He speaks in that Still Small voice. Jesus called it Abiding in the Vine. It’s how we produce good fruit, and literally the difference between Life and Death.
Friends, God’s basic saving message to us is this: Repent of the sin of self-sufficiency and learn to Abide in Him so that you can bear good fruit. It’s not just a message to pagans either. God’s message of repentance is addressed to His own people:
2 Chronicles 7:14: …if my people, who are called by my name will humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. (the Vineyard, if you like)
It’s not just ‘wicked people’ that need to repent, it’s God’s people! If we ourselves will repent of our practical atheism and faithlessness, God will bring healing into our lives and our land – and we will be a fruitful people, the Vineyard of the Lord.
Jesus is the Vine, and we are the branches. We must ‘abide’ in the Vine, for apart from Him, we can do nothing. (Jn. 15:5).
How do we abide in Him?
1) Call Jesus Lord and walk with Him every day.
2) Worship the Lord in the beauty of Holiness. Be faithful in public worship of God.
3) Offer up your life to Him. Everything that you have has come to you from him. Offer everything you have back to Him and let your Tithe of time, treasure and talents be the beginning of your giving.
4) Tend the Vine. Spend time with God in private worship, Bible study and formation practices such as Holy Reading, fasting, etc. Allow yourself to be formed by the Lord through these practices.
5) Finally, Be the body of Christ to each other and the world through loving one another and caring for each other’s needs. Share your faith with others and take the love of Christ to the world.
As we repent and abide, we look also for restoration as a people. Take out your inserts labeled “A Prayer for Restoration” and let’s say this together:
Restore us, O God;let your face shine, that we may be saved!
Turn again, O God of hosts!Look down from heaven, and see;have regard for this vine,the stock that your right hand planted,and for the son whom you made strong for yourself.Then we shall not turn back from you;give us life, and we will call upon your name!
Restore us, O Lord God of hosts!Let your face shine, that we may be saved!
Amen.
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