I. Our Hope in the Midst of Tragedy 00:00
Well, as we begin today, I just want to take a moment and address what I know is on all of our hearts and minds, and that is the shootings that have been happening lately. If you go online, if you watch the news, if you go anywhere, it’s everywhere. And I just want to remind us of one thing, and that is that our hope is that the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our God (Rev 11.15). What we do in looking to build the kingdom is the answer to the world’s suffering, not because we’re so great, but because he’s so great.
So don’t get caught up in the fighting over how to solve the problem, with government regulation or with schools or mental health facilities. Those all might be good things, but our hope is in the name of the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth (Ps 124.8). And so as we remember these tragedies, the people who have suffered, in our prayers (and we absolutely should, because they need Jesus right now), let’s just not get caught up in the fear and the anger and the bitterness that can get stirred up in the midst of these tragedies.
II. Worship and the Pull of Culture 01:02
So as we talk today, we’re actually talking about what I think is a response to the very culture that has allowed for these tragedies to occur. We’re talking about three responses to our culture that are antidotes to some of the problems that I see day in and day out, and that is our worship, welcome and wonder. Today we’re going to talk about welcome.
But I wanted to just recap briefly last week, when we talked about worship, because these things build on one another: that we need to remember to not fall prey to the cult of self-worship. I will tell you that despair comes out of falling prey to the cult of self-worship, the cult of idolatry. If you put anything in the place of God, it leads to despair, because it will not answer your problems. It will not fulfill your needs. The only space that can be filled, that God-shaped hole in our heart, is God himself. That’s what worship’s all about. You worship what is highest, because anything less is going to lead us to be less than what God made us to be. And we will remember this mantra: “Let all that I do declare that I am not the glowing center of the universe.” Luckily, I am not. God is.
Now, why do we keep talking about our culture as we talk about these things? Why don’t I just sit here and preach the Bible, just talk about the Bible? There are people who think that preaching should only ever talk about Scripture and exposition in the Greek and Hebrew. But what shapes us in our life more than anything, in my opinion, is the culture that we are in. Now, luckily for us, we are not bound to worship or follow the ideals of our American culture. In fact, we are a part of a different kingdom, a different culture, that is the culture of the body of Christ. So the fact that you are in this room actually helps me live my life better, because I’m a part of your culture, and it helps buffer me from the influence of the secular culture that we’re in.
Last time I talked about this, I used the example of the ocean, and how the tides can drag us off of our course without us even realizing it, fifty yards down the coast, and you’re like, “Oh, wow, how did I get here?” because there’s the constant pulling. I have another example today, and hopefully this will work. It’s a new technology that I haven’t used before, but I’m hoping you guys can see it. It was working this morning. Oh, there it is. Huzzah!
So I’ve got here a couple of props, but as my wife so succinctly pointed out, you can’t see this compass from the pews, and so I came up with a hopefully innovative solution. So this is a compass. I know you’ve seen it before, and as you can see, it’s pointing north right now. But you know how a compass operates: by magnets. It’s sensing magnetic north. And just like true north, Jesus, the kingdom of God, should be our orienting pull in our hearts. But culture is like this big magnet I have over here, and if you guys can see that, it pulls the compass wherever it goes.
So you might think, “Well, why don’t you just preach the gospel, preach the Scripture? You don’t have to deal with all these cultural things.” Yeah, well, it’s going to be pretty hard to follow the gospel when your culture is pulling you in exactly the opposite direction. So keep that in mind as we’re talking. The Scripture is to form us so that we can actually be oriented to true north.
Did you know that our life is like a journey? Have you ever read The Pilgrim’s Progress? It’s a road that we go on, and if your compass is pointing in the opposite direction, you’re going to end up in hell. That’s the answer. If your compass is pointing you the wrong way, you’re going to end up in hell, in this life and the next. And so what we’re doing today and in this series is reorienting ourselves towards Christ, true north. We’re recalibrating our compass this morning.
III. Welcome 05:46
And we’re recalibrating around this concept of welcome. Now, I know “worship, welcome, wonder,” the W’s were really nice, but I do think there’s actually something important about this word welcome that is being lost in our culture today. I looked up a few different definitions, and I’m going to start with this definition of welcome: “received gladly into one’s presence and companionship.”
Now, we can all think of somebody who is not welcome in our home, welcome to be our companion or our friend. But I will argue today that our life as Christians is designed and fulfilled as we become people who can radically welcome the unwelcome. Our culture does not teach you that. Believe it or not, we live in one of the most individualistic cultures in the entire world. So if somebody’s an inconvenience to you, it is very logical in our culture to just unfriend them from Facebook, or don’t spend any time with them, or don’t talk to them, or move, get away from the inconvenient people in your life. That is not the kingdom of God. Not at all.
IV. The Oppression Olympics 07:07
So as we talk about this, I want to talk about three things that are pulling us away from the radical welcome that Christ has taught us. Number one, I want to talk about a common occurrence in our day and age, in our parlance and our social media. There is this competition that happens in the public sphere that is pulling us away from the radical welcome and acceptance that we are formed in as the kingdom of God, and that is the common practice of using identity markers of group identity as your true self. You’ll recognize it when I talk about it. It’s this competition to determine status or oppression, or who’s the enemy and who’s the in-crowd, and I’ve heard it called actually the Oppression Olympics: who gets the most claim to being a victim.
Now, this is something that is very new and modern, and also as old as the history of time. We all know it happens in children. “Oh, my brother came and he pushed me,” Ruby says. And I go, “Well, what did you do to him?” “Well, I bit his finger half off.” I don’t know what’s happening. That’s at least what it looked like at first. But you see, there’s this thing in us that wants to be the victim, wants to be the one that everybody pays attention to, wants to have status, and we will do anything to get it. That is deeply inbred in our culture, and it’s happening right now in what I’ve called the Oppression Olympics.
So a black gay trans man is going to have certain markers that erase his personhood and replace him with these group identities that declare he is so oppressed because he has these group identities. And on the flip side, a white cisgendered straight male is an oppressor. There’s no identity there. There’s virtue flags or oppression flags that are being waved around. And I don’t really care, how do I say this, I don’t really care about how many monikers you can add to your name. The problem is they’re erasing a person on both sides of the spectrum. You become only your race, your sexuality, your gender, and not Sam Mercer or Christian Harris or Chris Carpenter. You lose your identity when you subscribe to these group identity markers. You lose who you are, and that’s exactly the opposite of what Jesus does for us.
What they’ve done is they’ve sorted the world into neat groups of us versus them. This takes place even outside of that arena. Maybe you’re like, “Well, I don’t struggle with that.” Well, how about the political arena? Those dumb Democrats, those evil Republicans. That’s everywhere you look. There’s a way of identifying with your group. Those stupid Washington (used to be Redskins) fans: as a Cowboys fan, those are the enemy. This takes place all the time.
But instead, the Bible is the only answer to this problem that’s as old as Cain and Abel. The answer is this: each individual finds their identity in the human Christ. We are not just humans; we are a part of the humanity of Christ. Therefore we can welcome each person, not because of their traits or the groups they belong to, but because they are made in the image of Christ. In Galatians 3:28 it says:
28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Gal 3.28
That’s the answer to the division in the world. There is no longer an us versus them. There’s only us. There are those who are saved and those whom God wants to save. That’s the only division among humanity.
This does not mean, of course, that your ethnicity is rewritten and we’re all some androgynous non-ethnicity, or we don’t get to say, “I’m American,” or whatever. “There’s no Jew nor Greek”: that’s not what they were talking about. He didn’t tell the slaves to just go tell their masters, “Well, there’s no slave or free.” In fact, he clearly instructs them: you have to honor the authority in your life. And just as importantly, it means that you don’t get to just change your gender. I’ve heard people try and use that to say, “Well, there’s no male or female, so what do you care?” That wasn’t the point. The point was, you get to be who you are, as a Jew, as an American, as a man, as a woman, as a slave or as a free man, and yet your core identity remains in Christ Jesus.
It means that that free man finds his identity in Christ. But more importantly and more radically, what it means is that the slave is also made in the image of Christ. So how are you going to treat slaves if their identity is in Christ? Well, we’ve seen the logical steps that have been taken through the blood-soaked earth of history that have led to the abolition of slavery in most modern countries, because of verses like this that say you matter, not as a group, but as a person in the image of Christ. All oppression is challenged when you look at everybody as an image bearer of Christ.
I will say this: Christians, more than any other worldview, actually have a reason to be against racism, misogyny and any other form of exclusion or oppression, because our worth is actually not in the fact that I am intelligent and good-looking and white and all of these things, as if those mattered compared to the identity we have in Christ. In fact, Paul says all of his good works were like dirty rags. It’s the grace of Christ, for all of us. So we don’t get to look at anybody and say, “You’re not good enough.” It’s what Christ has done in us. So that is one of the many ways our culture is trying to pull us from our compass, our direction towards radical welcome of any individual.
V. Wired for Connection 13:02
Now, in the midst of that there’s been so much brokenness, because don’t you know that we are all wired for connection with God and connection with each other? But I would argue that we have probably the loneliest culture in the history of mankind. Or at least it has been argued statistically that we are more isolated, more separated than we have been in history, at least in modern-day history. I think that’s easily true.
In fact, there’s a couple of statistics I was reading earlier. 61 percent of young adults aged 18 to 25 claim that they experience serious loneliness frequently or all the time. That’s more than half of young adults, who should be hanging out with all their buddies all the time, because what else are they going to do? They don’t have kids yet. What are they doing that they’re lonely? And then compare that with 63 percent of the same group suffering significant symptoms of anxiety and depression. It’s pretty interesting that those numbers are almost exactly the same.
There are countless reasons for this, but let me just link it to two causes, two other things in our culture that are really pulling us from the community that God wants us to build: radical individualism and iPhones.
VI. Glowing Rectangles 14:21
Let’s talk about iPhones first. Now, you may be thinking, “Oh, I’ve got a Samsung.” It applies to all of these things. There are different brands of Kleenex, but you can still ask for a Kleenex and we know what you mean. Same thing with iPhones. Smartphones are a major problem in our culture.
Technology is neither good nor bad. You guys know that. It doesn’t have a moral compass. It’s how it’s used that is good or bad, and we have not paid attention to how our technology is used. In fact, it’s been argued that our technology is using us, not vice versa.
I think there’s a bit of disconnection for those who didn’t grow up with iPhones. I’m just going to argue a little bit. I know that out of my friends, there’s not a single one of them who would give their teenager access to a phone 24/7 without any limits. I’ve talked to a lot of people about this because I think it’s fascinating. They’re like, “Are you kidding? My kid doesn’t get a phone with complete unlimited access until they move out of my house, because I know what I did when I had my phone. I was addicted to social media, to all these other things, all these problems, to trying to be connected, to running this rat race that we’ve been looped into, and I don’t want that for my kids.”
We need to regulate our use of technology. It’s old, tried and true; this has always been true. We need to regulate our use of technology. But it’s sped up so much recently that we need to pay special attention to what’s happening when we carry the world in our pocket. It used to be you had to go to a special place to find some of the seedier evils of this world. Now you can take it with you anywhere you want to go. There’s a problem here. Watch then how you walk (Ephes 5.15).
I really don’t want to get lost in this point, because I think we all know. I don’t think you guys need me to hammer in that these things are dangerous, these things are hurting us, these things are causing disconnection. I think it resonates with us. But I just want to suggest a couple of things to think about.
We need to have some rules around this technology. There could be better ones than others, but these at least we can think about. I think there need to be places where your technology doesn’t go, where you aren’t attached, you aren’t tethered to the outside world, to the temptations that come with our glowing rectangles. There’s four places I want to suggest thinking about banning phones and TVs and everything else related to glowing rectangles.
Number one is the car. Now, of course, you could use it for your maps and whatnot. But what if everybody in your car was actually talking to one another instead of texting? Now, of course, as a driver, we know that’s a pretty awful decision to make. I wouldn’t suggest that. But even everybody else in the car: what if you actually had a conversation on your drive on the way to church this morning with your kids? Some of you maybe need to just talk to your spouse sitting next to you.
Number two, and this may be my most important one: what if you got rid of glowing rectangles in your bedroom? The bedroom is a place of intimacy, of safety, of rest. It’s not a place to be plugged into your phone. What opportunities are lost when a husband and wife take their phones into their bedroom instead of speaking to one another?
The dinner table. Ever since the beginning of time, man has been organized around dinner tables. In fact, the end of time is a marriage feast. It’s one of the prime places of connection, and yet you see all the time four people sitting around a table just texting away right next to one another.
And lastly, vacation: a time to get away from the normal routine, a time to spend time one with another.
Now let me tell you, these are all hitting me personally. These are all things that I’m trying to do in my family, and you can ask Haley for my report card. It’s not going to be a glowing review, but I am working on it. I am working on it, because I think we need to reclaim connection. There have been studies where kids have literally answered that all they crave from their parents is eye contact. They don’t even know that eye contact is missing. They’ve grown up in a world where they just don’t have it, because the mom could be saying, “Oh, how was your day at work today?” while she’s looking at her phone. We need to reclaim connection. We need to be the different people that are called Christians, not reflecting our culture but reflecting God’s kingdom.
Now, if the very idea of not having your phone in one of these places scares you, maybe ask God for some wisdom around that. I definitely know that my kids won’t have phones in the bedroom. That is for darn sure. They won’t have phones at the dinner table. The hard part is, my wife encourages me that means we should probably not do that too.
VII. Radical Individualism 19:57
And then our last cultural touch point that we’re going to talk about today is this culture of individualism. By individualistic, what I mean is that the culture is focused almost entirely on the values of the individual over and against the values of community. Radical individualism basically teaches that in every decision of your life, unless you’re hurting somebody, you should make the decision based on your own desires and inclinations, without considering any other factors.
Could you imagine if somebody was looking at colleges and you encourage them, “Well, why don’t you stay local so you can help your family with some babysitting?” That’s anathema to the way our culture teaches and runs this world. The idea is, “No, you should go to the best college, where you can get the best degree, so that you can build the best life, so that you can do this.” That’s what our culture is teaching us.
Abortion is the most extreme form of this radical individualism: the rhetoric around the freedom that the mother can sacrifice her own child for her own happiness. It infuses all the choices in our culture today. And again, I don’t want to get bogged down, because there’s been so much written, so much thought about in these areas. But I want to say one thing: in our individual culture, in order to have a society where the individual mattered, we have created a culture where the community does not. And God in the Bible teaches that we must hold on to both of these things. We must understand the value of every individual image bearer, while laying our lives down for one another to build the kingdom of God. There’s a balance here that only Christianity has, that only Jesus lived, but that we all are aspiring to.
VIII. Living Stones 22:31
This is exactly what we were talking about last week. As I said, we treat the church as the scaffolding to build our lives, when the biblical picture is about coming together as living stones to build the house of God. There’s two completely different pictures of how we’re living our life. Are you building your life, and the church is your scaffolding? Or are you coming together to build something bigger than yourself, something that’s eternal? Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will be also (Matt 6.21). So we go into First Peter 2, verse 4:
4 As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, 5 you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 1 Pet 2.4–5
I want to just point out one thing here. Jesus was rejected by men but holy and precious in the sight of God, and he was rejected by men so that you will always be welcome in the sight of God. It’s actually that he has taken all of the rejection in the world (the opposite of welcome is rejection) into himself, that we might be a culture of radical welcome.
We don’t have any excuse to not forgive people. We don’t have any excuse to exclude people, because every one of us deserves to be unforgiven and excluded, except by the work of Jesus Christ on the cross, in his death and his resurrection. The reason why we should love others and welcome others is because he first loved and welcomed us. It’s put beautifully in this collect:
“Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.”
This is the antidote to our culture: a God who stretches out his arms on the hard wood of the cross, who does not minimize suffering but takes it all upon himself, that we might be free to live life abundantly, in welcome of one another, in love with one another, building his kingdom on earth. Expanded a little bit, Paul says in Ephesians 2:
19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. Ephes 2.19–22
That’s the vision of the church. That is what it is. We come together, and another passage says you are fitted together. Imagine a brick wall. I know my dad did some bricklaying, so he kind of knows what this is about. But imagine a brick wall, and you’re trying to find the piece that fits just perfectly into this wall. Back in Jerusalem they didn’t have machines that would cut the stones to fit. When they’re talking about this, they’re actually talking about a mason who had to use what he had. He could shape it a little bit, but he had to find a way to join those together, and the craft was in finding something that was so unified it was all one big structure, and it wouldn’t fall, it wouldn’t have weakness.
That’s what God is doing with us, which means you don’t get to be the way you are for the rest of your life. It means he’s got to round the corners and smooth some edges. It means you have to give up some stuff that doesn’t fit in the kingdom of God, in the body of Christ. It means, more specifically, in this church I’m being fit together with Thomas, or Sam’s getting fit together with Nathan, or whatever. We are all being built together into the household of God.
Jesus gives us just a glimpse of the radical love that that takes, in what we read today in our Gospel as he’s praying. He said, “that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them as you have loved me” (John 17.23). God loves us the way he loves Jesus. That is insane. I know my mom says that there’s no favorite child in her family, but I know which ones are better and worse. Let me just say, I’m kidding. But maybe not. God loves you like he loves Jesus: you, the one who messes up, the one who’s stubborn and prideful and arrogant and loud and annoying. If he can love even you, maybe we can love them, or each other at least.
It’s all about what God has done. I know I’ve been talking a lot about what we should do, but it’s really all about what he has done and is accomplishing in our life.
IX. Baucis and Philemon 27:10
As we’re finishing up, I just have two stories that’ll wrap us up. One of them is from Greek mythology, so stick with me here for one second while I talk about the best the world has to offer, and it’s so close to what we get in the kingdom.
There’s this guy named Zeus. You guys know him. He’s got the thunder and the lightning (we just watched Hercules with the kids the other day), the big beard. Most people think of our God as another form of Zeus, which is just not true. Our God’s the God who ends up on the cross. It’s a little different, but people get them mixed up.
Okay: Zeus and Hermes went in disguise as peasants, and they asked to be let in to dinner at a thousand houses. All rejected them. No welcome. Then they arrived at the house of an old couple named Baucis and Philemon. I don’t know which one’s the boy and the girl. They’re kind of interesting names. But this old couple let them in and hosted them as best they could. They had very little food, and their wine was of poor quality, and their dinner table had to be propped up with an old pot because it only had three working legs. They also made up their own bed for the strangers and claimed that they would sleep on the floor next to the fireplace, since their bones were old and needed the warmth.
As they ate, the glasses and pots they were using transformed into silver. The wine became transformed into a vintage fit for the gods, and their food and wine never ran out. At the end of this story the gods revealed themselves, and they asked Philemon and Baucis what reward they want. And they reply they want to be priests to worship the gods and never be separated in life or in death. The gods are pleased, and the little hut becomes a temple of the gods, and they lived worshiping the gods until they both died together and became twin trees growing at the front of the temple.
It’s a beautiful story. Lots of Christian overtones, lots of things that link to what we’re thinking about. Their house becomes a temple of God because of the welcome, the radical welcome.
X. The Least of These 30:19
And I would say we need to learn from that story. We need to let that live in us. Stories live in us, in the way that we think and move, and we need to have stories like this in us.
But Jesus actually takes it further than even this. Because you see, what the Greek myth says is, you should be nice to peasants because you never know which one’s actually a god in disguise, or you never know which one’s a king, or you never know which one’s powerful. You never know what reason you might have to be nice to this person. But the biblical story says even more. It says, actually, that peasant, not a god in disguise, deserves to be loved because he is a representative of Christ. Everyone we meet is a representative of Christ. There’s no God in disguise; there’s just God in them, in everyone. It’s completely radical, and you can’t believe that Jesus says this, but that’s what he says, as he’s sorting people in eternity:
34 Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ Matt 25.34–40
So we’ve talked about all the ways our culture wants us to close in and focus on ourselves and building our own lives. But we’ve got to know that we live in a different kingdom. Our kingdom says that actually, if you want to serve Christ, you’ve got to serve them. You’ve got to serve each other. You’ve got to serve not just other people, but the least of these.
In the fight against the magnetic pull of our culture, the world aims at polarization (see what I did there? Because compass, and the poles) to separate us into categories of us versus them. But Christ entered that world and was condemned as the ultimate enemy on the cross, and he welcomed us with arms wide open, even then. This ultimately is not a message about how we need to love others, although it is that. This is a message about the radical welcome of Christ towards you.
So as we end, let’s just remember the words in Revelation:
17 The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price. Rev 22.17
Amen.