When the Saints Go Marching Out

According to the L.A. Times in August 7, 1992, a 48 year old Illinois inmate named Jesse Loden, serving a 30 year sentence for attempted murder and other crimes, filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against the Illinois Department of Corrections claiming that his 1st Amendment freedom had been restricted because he was not permitted to worship in the nude. Other sources elaborated that Loden had wanted to cover his cell door for a few minutes each day so that he could pray in the nude, which he claimed was a requirement of his Technicians of the Sacred religion, described as "neo-African, voodoo-chanting."
"I'm not really sure why I have to be naked," Loden told reporters. "It brings me closer to God.")

We are living in times marked not only by moral ambiguity, but also with spiritual yearning. (Don Posterski)
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Life is a spiritual journey. Many get lost along the way, having been told that all roads lead to glory and that one’s right to choose a road of his liking is sacred. Whereas the part about the choice IS sacred, we must never just shrug our shoulders and default to the notion that all roads are... that’s just not true.

The Corinthian letters are especially suited to give guidance to men and women in today’s religiously troubled times. (Walter A Elwell/ Robert W Yarbrough)

Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth is one of his most readable. However, the reason for its readability is that the Corinthian church was having trouble shaking off the residue of the past lives of its congregants. Crazy Corinth was known all throughout the Roman world as Sin City- it was recognized for its decadence and permissiveness. At the centre of town was the temple of Venus, (goddess of love) which employed more than a thousand temple prostitutes to ‘collect offerings from the people.’

So Paul, charged by God, had decided to plant a church there on his second missionary journey (circa AD 50-51) The letter we have as 1st Corinthians is probably a composite of two of his letters to this struggling church. In its opening lines, Paul speaks of God’s work within the church and the town that surrounds it, past, present, and future...

1.2-3 ‘Sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy...’ We are reminded of what Jesus has done for us AND how we have been called to respond to this with personal purity and holiness.

1.4 ‘...because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus...’ In spite of the things that are not as they could be in the Corinthian church, thanks is offered to God for the grace that has been given and is evident.

1.5,7 ‘in EVERY way... not lacking... enriched... gifts and graces’ Here’s the word for the church in Corinth and for us today: You have everything you need to do the task to which God is calling you. Every spiritual gift needed to see God’s redemption dream realized in this moment is right here. (12.4-11)

God has richly furnished his church to do and be his work.
But there is little point in all these furnishings if we do not pursue their intended use.

God is at the beginning, middle and end of it all.

God calls us at the beginning to live through the middle with the end in mind.

His end: The realization of God’s redemption dream for the whole world. He calls us daily as saints to be a ‘Future Faith Church’ to go marching out. He has called us, recognizing that we can falter and reminding us that he will be faithful in providing us with all that we need in order to see his future faithfully realized in our lives.

When the Saints go marching out, the world will change forever.

transfer of ownership

For Christmas, a friend of mine gave me a book on a band that I've been a fan of for over 30 years, and in it I read some pop trivia that I had not yet heard. Funny how you can be paying attention to somebody's career for 30 years and still miss something as significant as their heroin addiction. Not funny at all, actually.

The other day I was talking with someone else about her journey out of a nicotine addiction. She had begun smoking again when her marriage broke down, and was now striving to break the hold of it for the second time. Her experience was interesting to me in that her smoking habit had begun again in secret as a coping thing. She had worked very hard to keep the truth of her tobacco use from her friends and her children because she feared their disapproval, and had seen the addiction progress much quicker than it originally had when she had been smoking to fit in with her friends as a teenager.

Thing is, addictions are private matters at first- they begin with dabbling in something, progress through regular involvement to dependency and ultimately slavery. The privacy factor is part of what makes it possible for a person to become addicted to something, I think. The dabbling and regular involvements are well-kept secrets, so that long before the time when a person's dependency has begun to interfere with his or her relationships, work, and other involvements/ responsibilities, there is a definite problem. Part of the problem- part of the slavery- has to do with the need to keep the story from going public. The grip of the disease tightens as the victim struggles to keep the problem hidden.

There are groups that exist to offer support and accountability to those who identify the hold that this or that addiction has upon their own lives. 12-Step programs afford the recovering addict with a structured, highly organized approach to systematically to break the hold of the addiction and cope with life outside its grip.

In one sense of the word, churches could be seen as support groups for recovering 'sin addicts.'

Redemption is a word often used to refer to the freeing of slaves. In the biblical sense, it denotes a transfer of ownership from a mighty master to the incomparable God. Jeremiah, a prophet of Israel commonly referred to as the weeping prophet, speaks of the Lord redeeming his people from the hand of those stronger than they. It's important to note that whereas the slave master is, indeed, mighty, this might does not compare with that of one called Lord. Whether we are talking politics and economics or applying homiletics, one called Lord is on an entirely different level than one who simply masters slaves.

But we mustn't be fools. Addiction to sin- in whatever expression it may take in the lives of people- is a big deal. It is mighty. It enslaves. We’re challenged by Jeremiah's word redeem to embrace the incomparableness of God and accept his Lordship, not to scoff at the spiritual calamity that befalls us on a daily basis. Thinking that sin is no big deal usually just leads to more sinning. However, we are to recognize that there is greater hope in God than there is hopelessness in the slave masters of this realm.

Lest we forget this, the Apostle Paul opens his letter to the Ephesians with an exciting exploration into the incomparableness of God. This past Sunday I rambled through this massive passage allowing very little room to explore any one theme in depth. In truth, this passage probably contains the conceptual outline for six sunday morning talks. For what it's worth, here's the executive summary...

1.3 Blessing: The blessings promised are largely Spiritual in nature and in context. There is no promise here of health or riches. We are not to think of God, his Kingdom, nor his Lordship in purely natural terms. Spiritual blessings are incomparable to natural ones.

1.4-6 God's will and our destiny: Can destiny be contingent upon our will? Definitely. Destiny is a deal requiring two consenting parties. God has made provision for all to both participate in his work and enter into his rest, but the full realization of God’s dream for our lives requires our willing involvement. God will not take us where we don’t want to go. His desire for the world is too great for us to envision, but whereas his will is incomparable with ours, it is essentially compatible. God desires partnership, but it is incomparable to any partnership that we might experience with other human beings.

1.7, 14 Redemption: is a buying back- purchasing one’s freedom to choose a life. This is accomplished in Jesus’ sacrifice. He is hope. In him is the hope of being able to truly accept God's offer of Lordship/ partnership in his work. Otherwise our sin addiction keeps getting in the way. God's intervention in Jesus Christ can only be provided by him since his holiness and worth are incomparable to that of any human being.

1.9-11 Mystery of God: What does God want? Relationship with us. “To know and to be known” by his crowned of Creation: Us. Knowing the Creator of the Universe and being known by him is incomparable to any other natural human relationship.

1.12-13 Belief and Trust: The engagement of our will with the will of God. Up until this point, all of the work has been God's. However, the believing and the trusting requires faith and it is only by faith that we have hope of accepting ‘the demand imposed upon the believer that he shall realize in this life that of the world to come.‘ (H. Chadwick) God requires that of us which no one else has the right to require.

1.14 The Guarantee: The greek word translated here as guarantee also has, in its nuance, the promise of an engagement ring... The Holy Spirit’s presence in our life (that deep spiritual connection that we simplify for the theology of our children as ‘having Jesus come live in your heart’) is a right-now taste of the mind-blowing intimacy we will enjoy with God in fullness later...

All of this is just some of what makes God incomparable and relationship with God worth proclaiming.

Redeemed how I love to proclaim it. Redeemed by the blood of the lamb.

(Fanny Crosby)