By virtue of your heritage, intelligence, education, and wealth, you are a royal.
Slaves effect change thru rebellion.
Employees effect change thru strikes.
Royalty effect change thru inspiring others with a vision.
I am a royal.
I am a resource.
Others are resources.
I can negotiate.
It's not manipulation if you can find a way for others to meet their needs by meeting yours.
A team is always stronger than an individual. Start building your team.
Engage, manage impressions, fight for what you want.
The way to peace is to focus on interests and to find ways to enlarge the pie.
Love is putting another's self interest before your own.
To forgive is to bear the cost.
It is hard to rebel for very long against someone who has your best interest at heart.
Go where you are wanted.
Corollary: Don't stay where you're not.
God will never tell you what the meaning of your life is. That is for you to decide.
Some ways of thinking are better than others. You have a choice.
You always have a choice.
If what you are doing isn't working, try the opposite.
Blessings and curses often come as two sides of the same coin. At some time in your life you need to acknowedge the curse, but it makes for a much happier life, to live in thankfulness for the blessing.
Don't confuse opportunity with curses.
An enemy is someone who will go out of their way to injure you, even to their own detriment.
Don't confuse the praise of an enemy or the reproof of a friend.
Financial wealth is measured by how long you can live on what you have if you are not able to work.
Wealth is created by helping more people do more with less.
There are more kinds of wealth than just financial. Tithing will help you find them.
The first essential for a successful business is integrity.
Even if you don't believe in God, it is good to live as though you do; to be responsible to some one greater than yourself and to live in gratitude for the gifts of life.
In marriage, hang in there it is always better on the other side.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
The Theolgian's fallacy.
One of the errors that theologians make is in believing that they can arrive at truth by logical analysis of the Bible and other ancient texts. For example, "exegetical preaching" is commended. The problem is that the universe is not logical. The idea that one could arrive at truth through logical thought experiments went away with the dark ages. That is the whole purpose, and power of the scientific method, to find out why the universe doesn't act the way our logic says it should.
There are two conclusions:
1. Theologins will never arrive at the truth unless they subject their ideas to real world testing, and rather than dismissing science, they should embrace it, use it, and encorporate it's findings into their theology.
2. Religious people may feel threatened as scientists start to study and test spirituality. They shouldn't. Truth is truth no matter where it is found, and error is still error, no matter how long we have believed it to be true. We may discover things that treaten our world view, but isn't that what we should expect? After all, we always say that God is beyond human understanding.
Of course the scientist's fallacy is that, just because he can see it, taste it, hear it, and he knows how it works and what is going to happen, that God is somehow not involved.
There are two conclusions:
1. Theologins will never arrive at the truth unless they subject their ideas to real world testing, and rather than dismissing science, they should embrace it, use it, and encorporate it's findings into their theology.
2. Religious people may feel threatened as scientists start to study and test spirituality. They shouldn't. Truth is truth no matter where it is found, and error is still error, no matter how long we have believed it to be true. We may discover things that treaten our world view, but isn't that what we should expect? After all, we always say that God is beyond human understanding.
Of course the scientist's fallacy is that, just because he can see it, taste it, hear it, and he knows how it works and what is going to happen, that God is somehow not involved.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
An Open Letter to Jan Paulsen
Dear Jan Paulsen
Re: Honoring the Creator God. Adventist World-NAD July 2009
Most of the time I am content to allow criticisms stand or fall on their merits, but there comes a time to speak up. I am astonished that Angel Rodriquez would write an article attacking teachers in our Adventist schools and I am absolutely appalled that The Adventist World would publish such biased and unfounded misrepresentation of another person’s interpretation of scripture. Our church was founded on the work of honest believers diligently searching the Bible for not just any truth, but Present Truth. Attacking our teachers in this way goes against every principle of decency, honesty and integrity that we as Adventists stand for. I call on our President Jan Paulsen and administrators at every level to oppose such malicious attacks on our teachers and schools in every way possible.
Aside from the time, based on Usher’s chronology, which no one believes is inspired, Genesis 1-3 is astonishingly congruent with modern interpretations of the development of the Universe. God claims to be the creator, and then says, “I the Lord change not” Mal 3:6. The only way God can be a creator and not change is if he is continually creating, which by definition means that the Universe will evolve as God continually creates. He is also eternal, which means that we should see some pretty old things around, which we in fact do. Besides, why would God lie to us by creating a world only 10,000 years ago and making it look like it is millions of years old? Who could trust a God like that? If you let down your prejudice and look around, you will see that everything evolves. It looks to me like evolution is a fundamental part of God’s character.
Re: Honoring the Creator God. Adventist World-NAD July 2009
Most of the time I am content to allow criticisms stand or fall on their merits, but there comes a time to speak up. I am astonished that Angel Rodriquez would write an article attacking teachers in our Adventist schools and I am absolutely appalled that The Adventist World would publish such biased and unfounded misrepresentation of another person’s interpretation of scripture. Our church was founded on the work of honest believers diligently searching the Bible for not just any truth, but Present Truth. Attacking our teachers in this way goes against every principle of decency, honesty and integrity that we as Adventists stand for. I call on our President Jan Paulsen and administrators at every level to oppose such malicious attacks on our teachers and schools in every way possible.
Aside from the time, based on Usher’s chronology, which no one believes is inspired, Genesis 1-3 is astonishingly congruent with modern interpretations of the development of the Universe. God claims to be the creator, and then says, “I the Lord change not” Mal 3:6. The only way God can be a creator and not change is if he is continually creating, which by definition means that the Universe will evolve as God continually creates. He is also eternal, which means that we should see some pretty old things around, which we in fact do. Besides, why would God lie to us by creating a world only 10,000 years ago and making it look like it is millions of years old? Who could trust a God like that? If you let down your prejudice and look around, you will see that everything evolves. It looks to me like evolution is a fundamental part of God’s character.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Thank you Eve. A Sermon about Death
Opening slide/meditation thought
Mary Oliver:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal,
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it,
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Special Music: It is well with my soul.
An Apology:
For the apologies:
My preacher dad told me never to apologize at the start of a sermon, but there is an exception to every rule. This sermon is the exception.
For the topic:
When Pastor John asked me to give another sermon in church, I asked him what I should talk about, because for me the hardest part of preparing a sermon is deciding on the topic. I was surprised when he said, “Why don’t you talk about death? You probably know more about death than anyone else in our congregation; why don’t you talk about that.”
Some of you didn’t come to church to talk about death. You find the topic morbid, depressing, or anxiety producing. To you I apologize. I hope that by the end of the sermon you will see something that warms your heart.
For the organization of the sermon:
Those of you who are linear thinkers like my wife, and my friend ___, will have a hard time. This sermon will be more like a stained glass picture. I am going to describe several pieces of the picture in detail, and at first they are going to seem unrelated. Then at the end I will arraign all the pieces together into a picture that I find beautiful and compelling. The temptation will to be to argue over the pieces, but what I really want to do is talk about the picture. For the linear thinkers, I will put a list of the pieces on the screen. For now, don’t worry about how they are connected or where we are going.
For the Traditionalists:
I need to apologize to the traditionalists in the congregation. I think this sermon is going to be very distressing to you. At first it will sound like I am turning everything inside-out. I ask you to be patient with me. In the end, you will most likely not agree with everything I say, but I think on the whole we will come out together alright.
Ok, before I talk about Death, here is the first seemingly disconnected piece of the picture.
Why did God create Life?
We have Paul’s statement, “For the Joy that was set before him”, and John’s statement that, “God is Love.”
How is this statement? “God created the world because He loves life and wants to experience it with you.” Is that a reasonable statement that most of us can accept?
But what about the tragic life?
_______, if you were in the place of God and you knew everything you know about _____'s life in advance, even the pain you are feeling right now. If you knew that it would turn out exactly as it did. Would you still have chosen for ______ to come into existence? Would you have chosen life? Knowing what you now know, and feeling this terrible pain that you now feel. Would you have chosen ______ ?
I recently asked the father of Tony, a 6 yr old boy dying with a brain tumor, and the mother of a 19 year old autistic boy the same question. I got the same answer, Oh, Yes! Most certainly!
What about the most tragic of lives, the victims of the Holocaust? Let me read you from Corrie Ten Boom’s book
"Betsy and I walked to the square where roll call was being held in the concentration camp. It was still early, before dawn. The head of our barracks was so cruel that she had sent us out into the very cold outdoors a full hour too early.
Betsie’s hand was in mine. We went to the square by a different way from the rest of our barracks-mates. We were three as we walked with the Lord and talked with Him. Betsie spoke. Then I talked. Then the Lord spoke. How? I do not know. But both of us understood. It was the same Presence I had felt years before in the old cathedral in Haarlem.
The brilliant early morning stars were our only light. The cold winter air was so clear. We could faintly see the outlines of the barracks, the crematorium, the gas chamber, and the towers where the guards were standing with loaded machine guns.
“Isn’t this a bit of heaven!” Betsie had said. “And, Lord this is a small fore-taste. One day we will see You face-to-face, but thank You that even now You are giving us the joy of walking and talking with You.”"
Heaven in the midst of hell. Light in the midst of darkness. What a security!
(Tramp for the Lord P200)
Listen again to Betsie’s last words as she lay dying. “. . . must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here.” (The Hiding Place. P 159)
Life is worth living. Even the most limited and tragic life has value and meaning in relationship with God.
Eternity is a quality, not a quantity.
By eternal, theologians are not just referring to a long period of time. They are referring to a fundamentally different form of existence. The great I AM is eternally present in all of time, past, present, and future, and all of time is only a small portion of God’s experience.
To the extent that man is a spiritual being made in the image God, we share this quality. The infant, the child, the teenager, are all still present in the adult. Part of the joy of having children is the joy of bringing those parts of us back to the surface again.
The physical creation is “time bound” which means that effect invariably follows cause. But the spiritual world is eternal, and because the spiritual world is eternal, it is possible for the future to determine the past.
For example, Adams fall resulted in Christ's future death; yet Christ's future death influenced Adam's past. Remember the story about the conference between God and Christ over the creation of this world? It was only after the “lamb had been slain” that man’s creation began. The relationship between fall and redemption was woven into the fabric of the universe at its creation.
Again, we have the example of the two thieves next to Christ. In the physical realm for both, and even for Christ, effect invariably followed cause unto death.
For the thief on the left, the cross represented the natural consequences of a life of greed and rebellion.
But when the thief on the right found the door into eternal life the past for him was changed.
The life of rebellion and defeat became a life of submission and victory.
The life leading to condemnation became a life leading to forgiveness.
A hopeless journey became a journey to hope.
A life of greed and selfishness became a life blessed by a great gift received with gratitude.
A barren, fruitless life became a bountiful life with a harvest of countless thousands of souls who have learned how, by his example, to find salvation in Christ.
Mrs. White tells us that our greatest wound will one day become our greatest blessing. Our greatest failure can become our greatest strength. In the spiritual or eternal realm, your past can be changed by your future without ever violating the law of cause-and-effect that operates in the physical realm. Christ called you to experience eternal life, and you can, even on the day of your death.
The experience of Death:
Although most doctors take care of dying people, rarely does a doctor actually see someone die. In the hospital they make rounds for a few minutes in the morning, by the next morning the patient is gone. It is rare that the doctor is actually there at the moment of death. My job at Hospice House has given me the rare opportunity to be there when people die. We have 15-20 patients on service at any one time and I am there all day long so I am able to watch.
Here is one thing I have learned that I didn’t expect.
There is one thing that I can say confidently and unequivocally about death.
I can guarantee you that none of you will ever experience death.
Never.
How do I know? Well, when I first started working at Hospice House, I used to wonder, “What is death? What is it like?”
Then I noticed that sometimes patients would be very close to death. They would be unresponsive for a day or more and then sometimes, just before they died, they would have a little rally. They might look around the room, and respond to a simple question like “Do you have any pain?”
So I asked them, “Tell me, what is it you are feeling?” or “What are you experiencing?”
What I saw was a brief pause as if they were searching their memory followed by a startled muteness.
At first I thought maybe it was just too late and they were too weak to respond. So I asked another patient and got the same response; once, twice, three times, four, five.
It was always the same. So finally I thought, well, maybe they are communicating, but why would I get a startle response? I could understand a grimace of pain or frown of sadness, even a blissful look of peace, but a startle? What could possibly be startling about that question? “What are you experiencing?”
Then it hit me. “The living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything”[1] Of course, death is already upon them. They can’t answer the question because death is the absence of feeling. There IS no experience. That is what is startling! To wake up and hear the question and to search the memory only to realize the answer is impossible. We take experience so for granted that, it is startling to find it gone.
When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me that death was like sleep. Like a deep sleep where you go to sleep at night and the next instant it is morning. But death is not like that at all, because when you wake up in the morning you know that you were asleep. You have a sense of “being asleep”. In death there is not even the awareness of sleep.
We only experience life, we do not experience death.
We might feel the terror before the impact.
We might feel the flutter in the chest and the fading of the vision when the heart stops.
We might feel the growing fatigue as our life force ebbs away.
We might feel the confusion of a failing memory.
We might feel the agony of the tumor gnawing at our bones.
We might feel the unraveling of the threads of life; but what we do NOT feel is death.
In a very real way, death does not exist because it is the absence of existence.
I know we talk about people dying, but it is only a figure of speech. People don’t die. They stop living.
Tell me, what did you experience at the time of the big bang? Were you excited?
What did you think about during those billions of years from the big bang until God created this earth? Were you bored?
Were you in awe when God separated the land from the waters?
Did you celebrate the day David felled Goliath?
Describe for me your feelings the night you were conceived.
These questions might in some way give you a sense of the emptiness of death, but not really. Even here there is a difference. These events actually happened, and they have left a residue of consequences that you can look at and examine. You can play the tape backwards and through imagination you can recreate those events and so arrive at an answer. But not so with death. Except for what remains in the minds of those still living, death leaves no residue.
The Glad Game - What is good about death?:
Do you all remember the movie, Pollyanna? Let’s play the “Glad Game”. What is good about death?
What about Hitler? Stalin? Edie Amine? Pol Pot? The Green River Killer? I am glad they are all dead.
What if industrial tycoons who built the railroads never died? They were a hard driven bunch. What if they were still alive and continued to marshal all of our nation’s resources toward building railroads instead of Highways? I think I am glad that they died and that new technology was given a chance.
Do you have a good boss? Do you have aspirations? If you do, what if your boss never retired?
For the baby boomers here; What if the adults in your life who could not tolerate your praise and worship music were still in power? What if you never ever in your entire life ever got to raise your heart in praise?
The universal testimony is that the nearness of death brings blessing.
Sometimes a terminal diagnosis gives people a second chance at life. It loosens the chains that have bound them, giving them the courage to finally let loose and live.
Some times as death nears, independent people learn to accept love and care. Finally, perhaps for the first time in their lives, their families have an opportunity to express their love through caring service.
Sometimes withdrawn people will lose their inhibitions and begin to reach out and tell their stories.
As death approaches, families often find healing.
Without denying the bad, I want to acknowledge the good.
Is wisdom good?
I will define “Wisdom” as the ability to understand how things work and what the consequences of various actions will be; in other words, to know right from wrong. Tell me; is it better to be naïve or to be wise?
Naiveté has a lot going for it. It is certainly pleasant to be naïve, but it’s pretty vulnerable. I think most of us would choose wisdom.
How about the rest of these virtues: Courage, Compassion, Kindness, Generosity, Self-sacrifice, Vigilance, Endurance, Protectiveness? Are these good? Do you affirm and value them?
If you answered yes to that question, then I am going to argue that you in fact agree with the choice that Eve made in the garden. Why? Because while some virtues such as Love and Innocence, can exist in a perfect environment, others cannot. Look at the list again.
Wisdom - Failure
Courage - Fear
Compassion - Grief
Kindness - Sorrow
Generosity - Poverty
Self-sacrifice - Greed
Vigilance - Danger
Endurance - Stress
Protectiveness - Weakness
Perseverance - Difficulty
Tenacity - Strain
Victory - Defeat
You cannot have wisdom, which is the ability to distinguish right from wrong if there is no wrong to distinguish. It is logically impossible. Each one of these virtues represents a positive response to the consequences of evil and cannot appropriately be exercised in the absence of evil. Each virtue above represents a characteristic of God’s character that would have forever remained unknown if it were not for His response to evil.
What kind of a choice did God give Eve in the garden?
Grape or Apple?:
If you are thirsty, you have a choice of two drinks.
This is grape juice. It tastes wonderful and powerfully refreshing. If you drink the grape juice you will feel completely satisfied. In fact, you will feel stronger and stronger every time you drink it until you are finally strong enough to live forever.
This is apple juice. It looks good, also tastes great, and when you drink it you will feel a wonderful exhilaration that you cannot ever experience in any other way. But be careful.
Apple juice is Radioactive. If you drink it you will die.
After the exhilaration wears off, you will begin to feel very tired and heavy hearted.
You will get more and more tired, until you can hardly move.
Your skin is going to get thin and baggy. It will tear and never heal.
You will get terrible oozing sores that drip foul smelling fluid on everything you touch.
Then you will feel a deep gnawing in your bones until every bone feels like it is being slowly crushed and ground to a powder, one by one, every one, at the same time.
Your lungs will fill up with fluid and you will cough, but as you gasp a breath in order to cough, you will only inhale more water that you can never swallow.
Soon, you stomach will cramp with an uncontrollable diarrhea.
Unable to move you will lie there in your own stench until your head starts to swim. Slowly at first, but then faster and faster waves of nausea will wash over you until finally, you vomit. Only you can’t stop vomiting. You wretch, and wretch until you vomit a bucket of blood, followed by bucket after bucket of blood until you finally, mercifully slip into oblivion never to wake again.
Only it doesn’t stop there. The radioactivity never dies. It will stay behind in every drop of sweat, urine, stool and blood. It will contaminate every place you go, every person you touch. It will surely infect your spouse, your children, and every single person who ever cares for you, and everyone who cares for them forever and ever until every person you ever loved comes to the same gruesome fate.
Here you go, which do you want to drink? Ok, you choose the grape juice. Is there anyone in this room, who would choose differently? Given the choice between pure good and pure evil, is there ANY thing I could say that would convince you to choose evil? No? Of course not.
Ok, so then here is the crucial question. Why did Eve choose the apple? Is that really the choice that God gave Eve? If that was the choice, then why was the tree called “The Tree-of-the-Knowledge-of-GOOD-and-Evil”, not just “The Tree of the Knowledge of Evil”, or simply “The EVIL tree”? If the only choice Eve could make was between good and evil was it really a true choice? Would Eve have had any real freedom of choice? I think not.
Deception:
Ok, well let’s try again. This time, you still choose the grape juice. Go ahead drink it.
A-hah! I tricked you. I really put the poison in the grape juice. You are doomed to die!
Notice if Eve is deceived, then, she may die, but she is not guilty. Who is guilty? It isn’t Eve. Eve didn’t commit either murder or suicide. In this case Eve becomes a victim. In the case of deception the guilty party is either Satan the deceiver, or God who is an incompetent teacher.
There is no need for a savior. Eve doesn’t need salvation, she need exoneration. She needs a qualified teacher who can reveal the deception, and a Judge who knows the truth and can vindicate her innocence.
Again, if Eve was deceived, then God truly IS guilty, the judgment of Rome was just and Christ only got what He deserved, death on the cross. (Is that the guilt that Christ took on Himself when God made Him to be sin for us? – close, but not quite.)
So we see that there are only two types of choices that are truly free.
1. The choice between ONE GOOD and a DIFFERENT GOOD.
2. The choice between ONE EVIL and a DIFFERENT EVIL.
A GOOD God would have given Man the first set.
Only an EVIL God could have given Man the second set.
The only way for Eve to be truly guilty and to require salvation is if she voluntarily and knowingly chose Evil.
Given the choice between pure good and pure evil, no one would ever chose evil. At best it is only theoretical. It is not a real choice that anyone would make.
The only way for God to remain good, and still give man true freedom of choice, is to give man two valid good choices. So how can a choice include evil and still be considered a good, valid choice?
A Complex Good:
We need to go back and look at those choices again. Have we missed something? How can the second choice be good?
The first GOOD option was to choose the Tree of Life: to remain in innocence.
The DIFFERENT GOOD option was to choose the “Tree-of-the-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil”.
How do you interpret that name?
Was it the – “The tree of (the knowledge of EVIL) + (good)”? – no, that would make God Evil.
“The tree of (the knowledge of GOOD) + (evil)”? – no, again that would make God sneaky or incompetent.
“The tree of KNOWLEDGE of (GOOD + EVIL)”? Maybe.
If the good and the evil came together as an inseparable package, then maybe that could be considered a legitimate choice. Some of you will remember my illustration of the Corvette. The blessings and curses of owning a Corvette come together in one package. The blessings of power, fun and prestige and the curses of high loan payments, high insurance payments and the risk of big tickets are like two sides of the same coin. You can’t separate them. Mrs. White states that our greatest trials will become our greatest blessing. So, maybe there is something here. Also look at the death of Christ. Was the Death of Christ the most heinous crime in the universe, or the ultimate gift of Love and self sacrifice? You see, it was both. The blessing and the curse come together in the same event. You can’t have one without the other.
Notice that this second option is a little more complex than the first.
The first is simple. It is naïveté with a life of innocence. I am going to call this a “Simple Good”.
The second option is more complex. It is WISDOM with the knowledge of both, Goodness and Life, along with Evil and Death. It is guilt with redemption. I am going to call this a “Complex Good”
Putting it all together – The Complex Good.
We all know about the Evil part of the COMPLEX GOOD. We have been told the story of the fall from the perspective of the Evil since childhood, but what about the GOOD? What was GOOD about Eve’s choice? What was SO GOOD that Eve was willing to incur the penalty of guilt and death for herself and all her children to obtain it?
Here is where we need to pull the pieces together.
1. Part of the answer to understanding the question of why God permitted evil, and why Eve chose Evil is to understand the eternal quality of spirituality. Remember that Christ was the Lamb that was slain from before the foundation of the world. God did not give Eve a choice that included Evil WITHOUT Redemption. True, the second choice included the destruction of all that was, but it also included the seeds of a new creation. This is the path through the valley of the shadow of death that leads to a higher mountain top, to a new and greater good, to a deeper and more complex spirituality.
Yes, “In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die”, but that death was not a Christless death. Adam and Eve died with Christ. That same day, they died and were recreated. They were born again unto newness of life. They came to experience a more intimate relationship with God than had ever been possible before the spirit of God came to dwell within. Eve became a partaker of the very nature of God. She became the Bride of Christ, and Adam became
Heir to the Kingdom.
2. Yes, there is a physical death, but none of us will ever experience it. Only Christ the eternal God can be said to have truly experienced death. For the rest of us the nearness of death brings the bitter sweet blessing of a grief well born. A blessed opportunity to reflect on our life and comprehend its meaning and purpose. It brings one more chance to become the people we have always wanted to be. One more opportunity to heal relationships and then finally to experience utter dependence and that truest love which is not based on what we can accomplish, but on who we are.
3. Part of the reason God permitted, and Eve chose evil, is for the value of those virtues we talked about.
The Simple Good of naiveté was replaced with the Complex Good of wisdom.
The Simple Good of Innocence was replaced with the Complex Good of Enmity-towards-Evil.
Doubt about God’s goodness was replaced at the cross with the certainty of His love, respect and trustworthiness.
His Justice toward Evil was wedded to his Mercy toward sinners.
Fear of God’s wrath was replaced with the confidence of His love toward sinners.
Without the fall, these blessed features of God’s character would never have been known.
God warned Satan that things were not a simple as they appeared. God promised to put enmity toward Evil into the heart of Man. Imagine the astonishment and frustration of Satan as the spirit of God working in the heart of man met him blow for blow.
Guilt was met with forgiveness.
Grief was met with Compassion
Sorrow with Kindness
Poverty with Generosity
Greed with Self-sacrifice
Danger with Vigilance
Stress with Endurance
Weakness with Protectiveness
Difficulty with Perseverance
Strain with Tenacity
And ultimately, Defeat was turned to Victory and
Death is turned to Life.
Conclusion:
The commandment says, “Honor your mother and your father that your life may be long in the land that the LORD your GOD has given you.” Many people, and in my younger years I too have reviled Eve for the choice that she made, but I now want to go on record here saying that I honor Eve in her choice.
The choice to forsake the simple goodness of innocence to embrace the greater and more complex good of knowledge with wisdom, of loss with redemption, guilt with forgiveness, and death with new birth and finally to become a partaker in the divine nature was, I believe, a valid, honorable and courageous choice given to her by a wise, fair and loving God.
And whether I have the privilege of living the relatively rich and peaceful life of 21st century America, or the anguished and courageous life of 20th Century Germany, I will still value the life God gives me.
Whether my life is long and prestigious as Mrs. _____’s, or as vibrant and as brief as _____’s, I am thankful for the love that braved the risk, and gave me birth.
For the JOY of loving and being loved, I will with Christ embrace the grief of death and loss.
For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain, if during my brief life I have but once looked on the face of Jesus and felt His embrace, then in all things, I am content.
Thank you Jesus.
Thank you Eve.
Prayer.
I would like to leave you with one final thought, a poem by James Weldon.[2]
Weep not, weep not, She is not dead;
She’s resting in the bosom of Jesus.
Heart-broken husband-weep no more;
Grief stricken son-weep no more;
She’s only gone home.
Day before yesterday morning,
God was looking down from his great high heaven,
Looking down on all his children,
And his eyes fell on Sister Caroline,
Tossing on her bed of pain.
And God’s big heart was touched with pity,
With the everlasting pity.
And God sat back on his throne,
And he commanded that tall, bright angel
Standing at his right hand:
Call me Death!
And that tall, bright angel cried in a voice
That broke like a clap of thunder:
Call Death! - Call Death!
And Death heard the summons, and he
Leaped on his fastest horse,
Up Death rode to the Great White
Throne, and waited for God’s command.
And God said: “Go down, Death, go down,
Go down to Savannah, Georgia,
Down in Yamacraw,
And find Sister Caroline.
She’s borne the burden and heat of the day,
She’s labored long in my vineyard,
And she’s tired, she’s weary,
Go down Death, and bring her to me.”
While we were watching around her bed,
She turned her eyes and looked away,
She saw what we couldn’t see;
She saw Old Death. She saw Old Death.
Coming like a fallen star. But Death didn’t
Frighten Sister Caroline;
He looked to her like a welcome friend.
And she whispered to us: I’m going home,
And she smiled and closed her eyes.
And Death took her up like a baby,
And she lay in his icy arms,
And she didn’t feel no chill.
And Death began to ride again-
Up beyond the evening star, O
ut beyond the morning star,
Into the glittering light of glory.
On to the Great White Throne.
And there he laid Sister Caroline on the
Loving breast of Jesus.
And Jesus took his own hand and wiped
Away her tears,
And he smoothed the furrows from her
Face, and the angels sang a song,
And the angels sang a little song,
And Jesus rocked her in his arms,
And kept saying: “Take your rest,
Take your rest, take your rest.[3]
[1] Ec 9:5
[2] James Weldon Johnson in his poem, Go Down, Death, affirms the importance of the Bible for African American Christians and their understanding that death does not have the final word for those who believe in God.
[3] Smith P. Facing Death: The Deep Calling to the Deep. Kearney, Neb: Morris Publishing Co; 1998:37-39.
Mary Oliver:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal,
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it,
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Special Music: It is well with my soul.
An Apology:
For the apologies:
My preacher dad told me never to apologize at the start of a sermon, but there is an exception to every rule. This sermon is the exception.
For the topic:
When Pastor John asked me to give another sermon in church, I asked him what I should talk about, because for me the hardest part of preparing a sermon is deciding on the topic. I was surprised when he said, “Why don’t you talk about death? You probably know more about death than anyone else in our congregation; why don’t you talk about that.”
Some of you didn’t come to church to talk about death. You find the topic morbid, depressing, or anxiety producing. To you I apologize. I hope that by the end of the sermon you will see something that warms your heart.
For the organization of the sermon:
Those of you who are linear thinkers like my wife, and my friend ___, will have a hard time. This sermon will be more like a stained glass picture. I am going to describe several pieces of the picture in detail, and at first they are going to seem unrelated. Then at the end I will arraign all the pieces together into a picture that I find beautiful and compelling. The temptation will to be to argue over the pieces, but what I really want to do is talk about the picture. For the linear thinkers, I will put a list of the pieces on the screen. For now, don’t worry about how they are connected or where we are going.
For the Traditionalists:
I need to apologize to the traditionalists in the congregation. I think this sermon is going to be very distressing to you. At first it will sound like I am turning everything inside-out. I ask you to be patient with me. In the end, you will most likely not agree with everything I say, but I think on the whole we will come out together alright.
Ok, before I talk about Death, here is the first seemingly disconnected piece of the picture.
Why did God create Life?
We have Paul’s statement, “For the Joy that was set before him”, and John’s statement that, “God is Love.”
How is this statement? “God created the world because He loves life and wants to experience it with you.” Is that a reasonable statement that most of us can accept?
But what about the tragic life?
_______, if you were in the place of God and you knew everything you know about _____'s life in advance, even the pain you are feeling right now. If you knew that it would turn out exactly as it did. Would you still have chosen for ______ to come into existence? Would you have chosen life? Knowing what you now know, and feeling this terrible pain that you now feel. Would you have chosen ______ ?
I recently asked the father of Tony, a 6 yr old boy dying with a brain tumor, and the mother of a 19 year old autistic boy the same question. I got the same answer, Oh, Yes! Most certainly!
What about the most tragic of lives, the victims of the Holocaust? Let me read you from Corrie Ten Boom’s book
"Betsy and I walked to the square where roll call was being held in the concentration camp. It was still early, before dawn. The head of our barracks was so cruel that she had sent us out into the very cold outdoors a full hour too early.
Betsie’s hand was in mine. We went to the square by a different way from the rest of our barracks-mates. We were three as we walked with the Lord and talked with Him. Betsie spoke. Then I talked. Then the Lord spoke. How? I do not know. But both of us understood. It was the same Presence I had felt years before in the old cathedral in Haarlem.
The brilliant early morning stars were our only light. The cold winter air was so clear. We could faintly see the outlines of the barracks, the crematorium, the gas chamber, and the towers where the guards were standing with loaded machine guns.
“Isn’t this a bit of heaven!” Betsie had said. “And, Lord this is a small fore-taste. One day we will see You face-to-face, but thank You that even now You are giving us the joy of walking and talking with You.”"
Heaven in the midst of hell. Light in the midst of darkness. What a security!
(Tramp for the Lord P200)
Listen again to Betsie’s last words as she lay dying. “. . . must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here.” (The Hiding Place. P 159)
Life is worth living. Even the most limited and tragic life has value and meaning in relationship with God.
Eternity is a quality, not a quantity.
By eternal, theologians are not just referring to a long period of time. They are referring to a fundamentally different form of existence. The great I AM is eternally present in all of time, past, present, and future, and all of time is only a small portion of God’s experience.
To the extent that man is a spiritual being made in the image God, we share this quality. The infant, the child, the teenager, are all still present in the adult. Part of the joy of having children is the joy of bringing those parts of us back to the surface again.
The physical creation is “time bound” which means that effect invariably follows cause. But the spiritual world is eternal, and because the spiritual world is eternal, it is possible for the future to determine the past.
For example, Adams fall resulted in Christ's future death; yet Christ's future death influenced Adam's past. Remember the story about the conference between God and Christ over the creation of this world? It was only after the “lamb had been slain” that man’s creation began. The relationship between fall and redemption was woven into the fabric of the universe at its creation.
Again, we have the example of the two thieves next to Christ. In the physical realm for both, and even for Christ, effect invariably followed cause unto death.
For the thief on the left, the cross represented the natural consequences of a life of greed and rebellion.
But when the thief on the right found the door into eternal life the past for him was changed.
The life of rebellion and defeat became a life of submission and victory.
The life leading to condemnation became a life leading to forgiveness.
A hopeless journey became a journey to hope.
A life of greed and selfishness became a life blessed by a great gift received with gratitude.
A barren, fruitless life became a bountiful life with a harvest of countless thousands of souls who have learned how, by his example, to find salvation in Christ.
Mrs. White tells us that our greatest wound will one day become our greatest blessing. Our greatest failure can become our greatest strength. In the spiritual or eternal realm, your past can be changed by your future without ever violating the law of cause-and-effect that operates in the physical realm. Christ called you to experience eternal life, and you can, even on the day of your death.
The experience of Death:
Although most doctors take care of dying people, rarely does a doctor actually see someone die. In the hospital they make rounds for a few minutes in the morning, by the next morning the patient is gone. It is rare that the doctor is actually there at the moment of death. My job at Hospice House has given me the rare opportunity to be there when people die. We have 15-20 patients on service at any one time and I am there all day long so I am able to watch.
Here is one thing I have learned that I didn’t expect.
There is one thing that I can say confidently and unequivocally about death.
I can guarantee you that none of you will ever experience death.
Never.
How do I know? Well, when I first started working at Hospice House, I used to wonder, “What is death? What is it like?”
Then I noticed that sometimes patients would be very close to death. They would be unresponsive for a day or more and then sometimes, just before they died, they would have a little rally. They might look around the room, and respond to a simple question like “Do you have any pain?”
So I asked them, “Tell me, what is it you are feeling?” or “What are you experiencing?”
What I saw was a brief pause as if they were searching their memory followed by a startled muteness.
At first I thought maybe it was just too late and they were too weak to respond. So I asked another patient and got the same response; once, twice, three times, four, five.
It was always the same. So finally I thought, well, maybe they are communicating, but why would I get a startle response? I could understand a grimace of pain or frown of sadness, even a blissful look of peace, but a startle? What could possibly be startling about that question? “What are you experiencing?”
Then it hit me. “The living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything”[1] Of course, death is already upon them. They can’t answer the question because death is the absence of feeling. There IS no experience. That is what is startling! To wake up and hear the question and to search the memory only to realize the answer is impossible. We take experience so for granted that, it is startling to find it gone.
When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me that death was like sleep. Like a deep sleep where you go to sleep at night and the next instant it is morning. But death is not like that at all, because when you wake up in the morning you know that you were asleep. You have a sense of “being asleep”. In death there is not even the awareness of sleep.
We only experience life, we do not experience death.
We might feel the terror before the impact.
We might feel the flutter in the chest and the fading of the vision when the heart stops.
We might feel the growing fatigue as our life force ebbs away.
We might feel the confusion of a failing memory.
We might feel the agony of the tumor gnawing at our bones.
We might feel the unraveling of the threads of life; but what we do NOT feel is death.
In a very real way, death does not exist because it is the absence of existence.
I know we talk about people dying, but it is only a figure of speech. People don’t die. They stop living.
Tell me, what did you experience at the time of the big bang? Were you excited?
What did you think about during those billions of years from the big bang until God created this earth? Were you bored?
Were you in awe when God separated the land from the waters?
Did you celebrate the day David felled Goliath?
Describe for me your feelings the night you were conceived.
These questions might in some way give you a sense of the emptiness of death, but not really. Even here there is a difference. These events actually happened, and they have left a residue of consequences that you can look at and examine. You can play the tape backwards and through imagination you can recreate those events and so arrive at an answer. But not so with death. Except for what remains in the minds of those still living, death leaves no residue.
The Glad Game - What is good about death?:
Do you all remember the movie, Pollyanna? Let’s play the “Glad Game”. What is good about death?
What about Hitler? Stalin? Edie Amine? Pol Pot? The Green River Killer? I am glad they are all dead.
What if industrial tycoons who built the railroads never died? They were a hard driven bunch. What if they were still alive and continued to marshal all of our nation’s resources toward building railroads instead of Highways? I think I am glad that they died and that new technology was given a chance.
Do you have a good boss? Do you have aspirations? If you do, what if your boss never retired?
For the baby boomers here; What if the adults in your life who could not tolerate your praise and worship music were still in power? What if you never ever in your entire life ever got to raise your heart in praise?
The universal testimony is that the nearness of death brings blessing.
Sometimes a terminal diagnosis gives people a second chance at life. It loosens the chains that have bound them, giving them the courage to finally let loose and live.
Some times as death nears, independent people learn to accept love and care. Finally, perhaps for the first time in their lives, their families have an opportunity to express their love through caring service.
Sometimes withdrawn people will lose their inhibitions and begin to reach out and tell their stories.
As death approaches, families often find healing.
Without denying the bad, I want to acknowledge the good.
Is wisdom good?
I will define “Wisdom” as the ability to understand how things work and what the consequences of various actions will be; in other words, to know right from wrong. Tell me; is it better to be naïve or to be wise?
Naiveté has a lot going for it. It is certainly pleasant to be naïve, but it’s pretty vulnerable. I think most of us would choose wisdom.
How about the rest of these virtues: Courage, Compassion, Kindness, Generosity, Self-sacrifice, Vigilance, Endurance, Protectiveness? Are these good? Do you affirm and value them?
If you answered yes to that question, then I am going to argue that you in fact agree with the choice that Eve made in the garden. Why? Because while some virtues such as Love and Innocence, can exist in a perfect environment, others cannot. Look at the list again.
Wisdom - Failure
Courage - Fear
Compassion - Grief
Kindness - Sorrow
Generosity - Poverty
Self-sacrifice - Greed
Vigilance - Danger
Endurance - Stress
Protectiveness - Weakness
Perseverance - Difficulty
Tenacity - Strain
Victory - Defeat
You cannot have wisdom, which is the ability to distinguish right from wrong if there is no wrong to distinguish. It is logically impossible. Each one of these virtues represents a positive response to the consequences of evil and cannot appropriately be exercised in the absence of evil. Each virtue above represents a characteristic of God’s character that would have forever remained unknown if it were not for His response to evil.
What kind of a choice did God give Eve in the garden?
Grape or Apple?:
If you are thirsty, you have a choice of two drinks.
This is grape juice. It tastes wonderful and powerfully refreshing. If you drink the grape juice you will feel completely satisfied. In fact, you will feel stronger and stronger every time you drink it until you are finally strong enough to live forever.
This is apple juice. It looks good, also tastes great, and when you drink it you will feel a wonderful exhilaration that you cannot ever experience in any other way. But be careful.
Apple juice is Radioactive. If you drink it you will die.
After the exhilaration wears off, you will begin to feel very tired and heavy hearted.
You will get more and more tired, until you can hardly move.
Your skin is going to get thin and baggy. It will tear and never heal.
You will get terrible oozing sores that drip foul smelling fluid on everything you touch.
Then you will feel a deep gnawing in your bones until every bone feels like it is being slowly crushed and ground to a powder, one by one, every one, at the same time.
Your lungs will fill up with fluid and you will cough, but as you gasp a breath in order to cough, you will only inhale more water that you can never swallow.
Soon, you stomach will cramp with an uncontrollable diarrhea.
Unable to move you will lie there in your own stench until your head starts to swim. Slowly at first, but then faster and faster waves of nausea will wash over you until finally, you vomit. Only you can’t stop vomiting. You wretch, and wretch until you vomit a bucket of blood, followed by bucket after bucket of blood until you finally, mercifully slip into oblivion never to wake again.
Only it doesn’t stop there. The radioactivity never dies. It will stay behind in every drop of sweat, urine, stool and blood. It will contaminate every place you go, every person you touch. It will surely infect your spouse, your children, and every single person who ever cares for you, and everyone who cares for them forever and ever until every person you ever loved comes to the same gruesome fate.
Here you go, which do you want to drink? Ok, you choose the grape juice. Is there anyone in this room, who would choose differently? Given the choice between pure good and pure evil, is there ANY thing I could say that would convince you to choose evil? No? Of course not.
Ok, so then here is the crucial question. Why did Eve choose the apple? Is that really the choice that God gave Eve? If that was the choice, then why was the tree called “The Tree-of-the-Knowledge-of-GOOD-and-Evil”, not just “The Tree of the Knowledge of Evil”, or simply “The EVIL tree”? If the only choice Eve could make was between good and evil was it really a true choice? Would Eve have had any real freedom of choice? I think not.
Deception:
Ok, well let’s try again. This time, you still choose the grape juice. Go ahead drink it.
A-hah! I tricked you. I really put the poison in the grape juice. You are doomed to die!
Notice if Eve is deceived, then, she may die, but she is not guilty. Who is guilty? It isn’t Eve. Eve didn’t commit either murder or suicide. In this case Eve becomes a victim. In the case of deception the guilty party is either Satan the deceiver, or God who is an incompetent teacher.
There is no need for a savior. Eve doesn’t need salvation, she need exoneration. She needs a qualified teacher who can reveal the deception, and a Judge who knows the truth and can vindicate her innocence.
Again, if Eve was deceived, then God truly IS guilty, the judgment of Rome was just and Christ only got what He deserved, death on the cross. (Is that the guilt that Christ took on Himself when God made Him to be sin for us? – close, but not quite.)
So we see that there are only two types of choices that are truly free.
1. The choice between ONE GOOD and a DIFFERENT GOOD.
2. The choice between ONE EVIL and a DIFFERENT EVIL.
A GOOD God would have given Man the first set.
Only an EVIL God could have given Man the second set.
The only way for Eve to be truly guilty and to require salvation is if she voluntarily and knowingly chose Evil.
Given the choice between pure good and pure evil, no one would ever chose evil. At best it is only theoretical. It is not a real choice that anyone would make.
The only way for God to remain good, and still give man true freedom of choice, is to give man two valid good choices. So how can a choice include evil and still be considered a good, valid choice?
A Complex Good:
We need to go back and look at those choices again. Have we missed something? How can the second choice be good?
The first GOOD option was to choose the Tree of Life: to remain in innocence.
The DIFFERENT GOOD option was to choose the “Tree-of-the-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil”.
How do you interpret that name?
Was it the – “The tree of (the knowledge of EVIL) + (good)”? – no, that would make God Evil.
“The tree of (the knowledge of GOOD) + (evil)”? – no, again that would make God sneaky or incompetent.
“The tree of KNOWLEDGE of (GOOD + EVIL)”? Maybe.
If the good and the evil came together as an inseparable package, then maybe that could be considered a legitimate choice. Some of you will remember my illustration of the Corvette. The blessings and curses of owning a Corvette come together in one package. The blessings of power, fun and prestige and the curses of high loan payments, high insurance payments and the risk of big tickets are like two sides of the same coin. You can’t separate them. Mrs. White states that our greatest trials will become our greatest blessing. So, maybe there is something here. Also look at the death of Christ. Was the Death of Christ the most heinous crime in the universe, or the ultimate gift of Love and self sacrifice? You see, it was both. The blessing and the curse come together in the same event. You can’t have one without the other.
Notice that this second option is a little more complex than the first.
The first is simple. It is naïveté with a life of innocence. I am going to call this a “Simple Good”.
The second option is more complex. It is WISDOM with the knowledge of both, Goodness and Life, along with Evil and Death. It is guilt with redemption. I am going to call this a “Complex Good”
Putting it all together – The Complex Good.
We all know about the Evil part of the COMPLEX GOOD. We have been told the story of the fall from the perspective of the Evil since childhood, but what about the GOOD? What was GOOD about Eve’s choice? What was SO GOOD that Eve was willing to incur the penalty of guilt and death for herself and all her children to obtain it?
Here is where we need to pull the pieces together.
1. Part of the answer to understanding the question of why God permitted evil, and why Eve chose Evil is to understand the eternal quality of spirituality. Remember that Christ was the Lamb that was slain from before the foundation of the world. God did not give Eve a choice that included Evil WITHOUT Redemption. True, the second choice included the destruction of all that was, but it also included the seeds of a new creation. This is the path through the valley of the shadow of death that leads to a higher mountain top, to a new and greater good, to a deeper and more complex spirituality.
Yes, “In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die”, but that death was not a Christless death. Adam and Eve died with Christ. That same day, they died and were recreated. They were born again unto newness of life. They came to experience a more intimate relationship with God than had ever been possible before the spirit of God came to dwell within. Eve became a partaker of the very nature of God. She became the Bride of Christ, and Adam became
Heir to the Kingdom.
2. Yes, there is a physical death, but none of us will ever experience it. Only Christ the eternal God can be said to have truly experienced death. For the rest of us the nearness of death brings the bitter sweet blessing of a grief well born. A blessed opportunity to reflect on our life and comprehend its meaning and purpose. It brings one more chance to become the people we have always wanted to be. One more opportunity to heal relationships and then finally to experience utter dependence and that truest love which is not based on what we can accomplish, but on who we are.
3. Part of the reason God permitted, and Eve chose evil, is for the value of those virtues we talked about.
The Simple Good of naiveté was replaced with the Complex Good of wisdom.
The Simple Good of Innocence was replaced with the Complex Good of Enmity-towards-Evil.
Doubt about God’s goodness was replaced at the cross with the certainty of His love, respect and trustworthiness.
His Justice toward Evil was wedded to his Mercy toward sinners.
Fear of God’s wrath was replaced with the confidence of His love toward sinners.
Without the fall, these blessed features of God’s character would never have been known.
God warned Satan that things were not a simple as they appeared. God promised to put enmity toward Evil into the heart of Man. Imagine the astonishment and frustration of Satan as the spirit of God working in the heart of man met him blow for blow.
Guilt was met with forgiveness.
Grief was met with Compassion
Sorrow with Kindness
Poverty with Generosity
Greed with Self-sacrifice
Danger with Vigilance
Stress with Endurance
Weakness with Protectiveness
Difficulty with Perseverance
Strain with Tenacity
And ultimately, Defeat was turned to Victory and
Death is turned to Life.
Conclusion:
The commandment says, “Honor your mother and your father that your life may be long in the land that the LORD your GOD has given you.” Many people, and in my younger years I too have reviled Eve for the choice that she made, but I now want to go on record here saying that I honor Eve in her choice.
The choice to forsake the simple goodness of innocence to embrace the greater and more complex good of knowledge with wisdom, of loss with redemption, guilt with forgiveness, and death with new birth and finally to become a partaker in the divine nature was, I believe, a valid, honorable and courageous choice given to her by a wise, fair and loving God.
And whether I have the privilege of living the relatively rich and peaceful life of 21st century America, or the anguished and courageous life of 20th Century Germany, I will still value the life God gives me.
Whether my life is long and prestigious as Mrs. _____’s, or as vibrant and as brief as _____’s, I am thankful for the love that braved the risk, and gave me birth.
For the JOY of loving and being loved, I will with Christ embrace the grief of death and loss.
For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain, if during my brief life I have but once looked on the face of Jesus and felt His embrace, then in all things, I am content.
Thank you Jesus.
Thank you Eve.
Prayer.
I would like to leave you with one final thought, a poem by James Weldon.[2]
Weep not, weep not, She is not dead;
She’s resting in the bosom of Jesus.
Heart-broken husband-weep no more;
Grief stricken son-weep no more;
She’s only gone home.
Day before yesterday morning,
God was looking down from his great high heaven,
Looking down on all his children,
And his eyes fell on Sister Caroline,
Tossing on her bed of pain.
And God’s big heart was touched with pity,
With the everlasting pity.
And God sat back on his throne,
And he commanded that tall, bright angel
Standing at his right hand:
Call me Death!
And that tall, bright angel cried in a voice
That broke like a clap of thunder:
Call Death! - Call Death!
And Death heard the summons, and he
Leaped on his fastest horse,
Up Death rode to the Great White
Throne, and waited for God’s command.
And God said: “Go down, Death, go down,
Go down to Savannah, Georgia,
Down in Yamacraw,
And find Sister Caroline.
She’s borne the burden and heat of the day,
She’s labored long in my vineyard,
And she’s tired, she’s weary,
Go down Death, and bring her to me.”
While we were watching around her bed,
She turned her eyes and looked away,
She saw what we couldn’t see;
She saw Old Death. She saw Old Death.
Coming like a fallen star. But Death didn’t
Frighten Sister Caroline;
He looked to her like a welcome friend.
And she whispered to us: I’m going home,
And she smiled and closed her eyes.
And Death took her up like a baby,
And she lay in his icy arms,
And she didn’t feel no chill.
And Death began to ride again-
Up beyond the evening star, O
ut beyond the morning star,
Into the glittering light of glory.
On to the Great White Throne.
And there he laid Sister Caroline on the
Loving breast of Jesus.
And Jesus took his own hand and wiped
Away her tears,
And he smoothed the furrows from her
Face, and the angels sang a song,
And the angels sang a little song,
And Jesus rocked her in his arms,
And kept saying: “Take your rest,
Take your rest, take your rest.[3]
[1] Ec 9:5
[2] James Weldon Johnson in his poem, Go Down, Death, affirms the importance of the Bible for African American Christians and their understanding that death does not have the final word for those who believe in God.
[3] Smith P. Facing Death: The Deep Calling to the Deep. Kearney, Neb: Morris Publishing Co; 1998:37-39.
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