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it is my privilege to introduce Jack Haberer and I give you the facts but not just the facts Jack Haberer began his life in the fold of the Roman Catholic Church and then changed course in the Jesus movement of the 70s to give his life to Christ at the age of 15 That is where he learned to play the guitar, or at least that's where he ought to have learned to play the guitar, because everybody in the Jesus movement plays the guitar. He earned his BA at Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, New York, a Master of Divinity at Gordon Conwell, where he may have become a Patriots fan, but maybe not. and finally went to our beloved Sister Seminary, Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta.

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He served as pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Satellite Beach, Florida, and then went to Clear Lake Presbyterian Church outside of Houston, both places where everything indeed is rocket science. his next step was to become the editor and publisher of Presbyterian Outlook the village green for Presbyterians may be combat duty as well where he had for has for nine years steadfastly preached the gospel of reconciling unity to and for the church this is a message he whetted also as a member of the theological task force on peace unity and purity of the church several years ago he stood in this very chapel explaining the process devised by that group and urging all present to pursue this larger calling of reconciliation that is something that he has pursued in his capacity as editor and speaker around the nation at churches and retreats and elsewhere that call remains for us and I'm sure will be central in his new call as pastor of Vanderbilt Presbyterian Church in Naples Florida where everybody goes to retire leaving much unsaid for subsequent introductions let us now be taught and inspired by Jack Haberer

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in his first Westervelt lecture with the mysterious and erudite title of Modi Apostolande. Thank you, Whit, for your warm welcome. Thanks to Ted. Where are you, Ted?

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Oh, I thought you might have snuck out. Okay, well, good, thank you. It is such a privilege to be sharing with you all. I've loved this school ever since I got to Texas in 1994, 21 years ago, when I first came to the Clear Lake Church and began soon coming up here for continuing ed opportunities, engaging with the students, and ultimately getting to having a whole lot of time with Ted Wardlaw as a real close friend.

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I'm sorry, Ted, I bailed on you when I left. But then again, I've now done my duty. I've apologized. Ted and I were raised by the same mother, miles away from one another, but we both have the habit of apologizing when you walk in the room, just to get it out of the way.

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So consider it done, folks. No more apologies, at least for the next hour. Beverly, thank you for excellent work. You've warmed up the crowd.

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I warmed up the seat. I hope it's very warm. Are you seated there? It is just think of Florida weather keeping you cozy there, but just outstanding work.

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First time to be able to hear Beverly in action and wow, outstanding, great work of the text. It's very intimidating to try to do a synthetic kind of working of the text when someone's really working the text as she is. I usually do it that way in the pulpit. I am looking at things in a bigger drawing together mode these days with regard to the topic before us today.

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So let's put our seatbelts on. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Really?

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Are you serious? Thy will be done on earth as in heaven. You sure you really want it that way? Do you even know what it looks like?

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Do you have any idea what that means? I'm guessing that it's been prayed at least a trillion times, at least when I think, especially of all of my Catholic relatives who do the rosary a few times a day, it adds up. And yet, when it comes down to it, sincere as we are when we pray.

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that, and I trust that's true for you and as for me, do we really get it? We Christians know that we're supposed to be good. We have that sense that that's the way it's supposed to be, if only because we've gotten the guilt trips along the way from beloved mothers or others and others. But then again, there's also something that really is deep-seated in us that wants it, I believe.

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I put it this way, from good morning to good night, those bookends of our days, our hearts yearn for goodness that dwells in the farthest reaches of our most heroic dreams. Or if you will, out on the horizon, although that's not quite the way you were using horizon. But there's something in us that yearns to do right to do good, to be a good person, to be faithful and responsible.

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Then again, we also like to be bad. We like to be bad. I was too old to get it when my kids started talking about being bad back in the 1990s. It took a long time to figure out that they were saying the opposite of what they actually were saying.

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It was one thing to say, you're looking good. It was another thing to say, you're looking bad. The ultimate compliment was to be bad. And this guy is speaking of a trillion prayers.

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He sold a trillion copies of that album about being bad. There is that ambivalence within us, using very big terms and images of the flesh and the world of the devil and scripture. And they earn something of a competition. We're a battlefield for some of that.

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The good does get reinforced and built upon by the very fact that as believers, Jesus Christ says, If you love me, you will do my commandments. There's kind of a natural desire within us to please the one we love. And by the work of the Holy Spirit, the law of the Torah is being written in our minds and inscribed in our hearts. But because we stumble and fail and thoughtward indeed daily, we do go to our God in apology and a kind of repentance.

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And we're offered the gift of forgiveness as Jesus having died for our sins and grants us away a process of righteousness that can make us different. And so we confess our sins. But in the old days, we weren't done with that. Well, of course, we hear the word of assurance, the affirmation of forgiveness, but even in the old days, we weren't done with that either.

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In the good old days, we then would recite something. Do you remember what that was? None of you are old enough to remember the Torah, the Ten Commandments. To recite the Ten Commandments.

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In fact, some of the Dutch Reformed churches still hold on to that. It's a couple of generations back that Presbyterians would do that as a regular form. go to some of the old reformed churches on the front wall, you'll see the Ten Commandments actually printed on there or painted on there. Why?

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Because of, well, the third reason for the law, and that is to instruct us on what it is God does want us to do, what the will of God does look like for us to live into here on earth as well as in heaven. But usually we have some problems. Because we Christians have a tough time knowing how to really apply those Ten Commandments and how to work those Ten Commandments and how they really come out for us in our regular daily living. For one thing, we have a way of wondering, okay, there it is.

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Are they really to be absolutes? We commonly speak of the Ten Commandments as absolutes that must be followed always and at all times. And in the context of that, though we tend to make relative what's absolute and make absolute what is relative, and even with the commandments themselves that sound to be absolute, they were chiseled in stone after all, the Bible doesn't do a very good job of sticking with them. Hello, are you there?

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You know, some of them just seem so plain right, just plain right, and others to be violated just plain wrong. And yet, when we dig into all of this stuff, or when we face a particular situation, particular issue, decision to make, the Ten Commandments may not be really clear as to how they apply. There might be a situation, values clarification exercises where there's some validity to them, even though they're kind of going out of style, where you have one that's gonna have to be violated to meet the other or the other to be violated to meet the one. And so we struggle to understand God's will for us, listening to those commandments, but also to circumstances and an inner sense of

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what feels right, that sense of call within us. But if it comes down to it, those circumstances can guide us just as wrong as they can guide us well. The people we ask for counsel may be just giving us their own prejudice. And that inner witness of the Spirit might just be a reflection of what we ate an hour ago.

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And we just really don't know what scriptures to read. What's more? We really have a hard time with those scriptures themselves. The Bible does give off some mixed messages.

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Oh, and by the way, so does the church. Yeah, we've had a few discussions, disagreements among us about how we do all this together. On the different viewpoints, yes, on same-sex relationships, yes, on beginning and end-of-life questions, on addressing and relating to undocumented immigrants, economics between open markets and government focusing on the less fortunate, national defense versus individual freedoms, denominational affiliations, loyalty, or come away and be separate. A lot of all of this, I'm venturing into the world of writing another book on the question, What's so great about being good after all?

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Subtitled, How Jesus' Followers Discern God's Will and How You Can Too. It's a nice long title, worthy of the Puritans, I think. And why try to weigh in on a field of, well, I have some study but don't have the PhD in ethics as others. Why weigh in?

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Well, I think because a lot of our talk about right and wrong and doing good, being good is malarkey. That is, it's often wrongheaded, sometimes just got a bunch of platitudes about it, about things that we say we believe but don't really do ourselves. Sometimes it's really, really impressive sounding intellectualism, but it doesn't really land on the real ground or real people live. And it's often just half baked.

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I think we can do better than a lot of what at least is out in the pop literature about doing right and doing well. And so I also want to particularly take a close attention, pay close attention to the writings of the apostles. Jesus' primary interpreters, the ones through whom we meet the living word of God. Yes, existentially in prayer, in connection with God, but the data is what we've got there in the text.

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So I've coined the term modi apostolandi. I don't... know my Latin, so don't kill me for it. It's basically the moda operandi of the apostles, and so I just contracted it together.

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Being an editor for nine years, I've been making up words every time I come out right through it. And that's just what I do. I am a professional. Don't cry that in your pulpit.

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The other reason for doing this is that I think some of our best ethicists are the folks in our pews who haven't read the books haven't gotten caught up into the scholarship but have just been instinctively seeing living out the thing they're learning in your in the preaching pastors and the education classes educators and have been reading in their Bibles and somehow assimilating and somehow taking in that which is the Spirit writing the laws of God in our minds and inscribing them on their hearts. And so that they often, at least somehow intuitively, are actually making better decisions about right and wrong than they would ever be able to articulate or speak in a lecture format.

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Some of them have a really hard time. In fact, many of us have a really hard time saying it is what it is we do and how it is we decide what we do and how we got to where we are. Because often when we are asked how do you decide or understand God's will, we tend to go back to a formula we learned back in Intervarsity Christian Fellowship or Campus Crusade or the Presbyterian Youth Fellowship or whatever it was. We have this formula we've kind of memorized back in our younger years and we go back to that and tell them that's what we do.

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And yes, we do it maybe once or twice a year or maybe less. We're kind of like the MV quarterback. Yes, he is from Boston.

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I didn't see the after game interview this time I was having while I was over at Bob Bull's house. Some of you know Robert Bull, a neighbor of ours and part of the church down in Florida. And so we were just having too much fun partying. But I do know that a lot of times after the quarterback of this winning team in the Super Bowl is handed

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the MVP trophy, it's often the winning quarterback of the winning team, and is asked with the microphone in the face, how is it you did it? How did you win this game? How did you pull it off? And they're suggesting you have about 20 seconds to respond.

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Well, the quarterback often says something like this. It was all about the offensive lineman. Those guys gave me the time to throw. They opened the holes for the runners.

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They were just spectacular. Now there's a good reason for the quarterback to say that because they are the ones that protected his butt and they're the ones that will do so next year if he says something really good about them at that time. But then truth be told, there were other reasons they won the game as well. The good pass receivers actually caught the passes the quarterback threw.

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the great ball carrying of the running backs, the stifling defensive play of the guys on the field when the quarterback is off the field, the great coaching coming in from the sidelines, the great trades made by the team's coaches in the offseason, the great research done by the team's scouts to know what the other team does, and all the money invested by the team's owners to put the best players as possible on the field. All of those reasons are reasons why the team won that game. But because the quarterback had 20 seconds to say something that was going to make the offensive lineman feel really good, he said it in quick order. And so it is with us that often when it comes to understanding and discerning and explaining how we understand and discern God's will and plan, we do it in very reductionistic, simplistic ways that don't really get to the reality of what's going on that is far more complex

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things and thoughts and ideas and questions that are far more intricate, far more overlapping and ambiguous than meet the standard of a short, simple formula. I want to suggest to you a generic label of what I'm calling integrative Christian ethics. Not that it's original or that term is anything special, but just for my own brain. And I'm calling it that because I want us to think about a Christian ethics that is thoroughly, unashamedly Christian.

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That we absolutely are committed to being guided by the will and word of Jesus Christ and through his interpreters. And that we also be biblical in the sense of that we take seriously the things that are taught in the Bible, take seriously the episodes in the Bible that fly in the face of the teachings of the Bible, because they do. Take seriously ways that commands said in one place of the Bible get contradicted by commands said in other parts of the Bible. Take seriously ways that Jesus and the apostles revamped, reworked, amend, and sometimes throw out texts and teachings of the Hebrew scriptures that was their text of scripture for the time.

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In other words, treats the Bible's ambiguities as seriously as it treats the Bible's points of emphasis and clarity. And I say integrative because I really believe that God does intend for us to make sense out of all of that, to live a life that's integratively and inspirationally and powerfully led by the Holy Spirit of God. And that that word of God is in fact the prime textbook for us to do that.

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It acknowledges that God has revealed God's self in the person of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. But that means that God revealed God's self in a very contoured way. Just as we have been hearing much from Old Testament studies, Hebrew scripture studies, that God did choose to reveal oneself to the world, not through the Greek philosophers that were hanging around in that era, in basic concepts, categories of analytical study.

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But God did so through narrative that gives us a whole much more contoured, complicated, and interesting God to know and to honor and try to glorify. So all the more with Jesus. I was a freshman in Bible college right out of high school. And just had a deep love, teenage love for Jesus.

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Had thrown my life into the Jesus movement and very much involvement in Christian coffee houses and yes, playing the guitar and piano both in Christian rock bands. Yeah, you had that right. And right before going to school, I'd seen Jesus Christ Superstar, the movie. Loved the music, saw the Broadway show.

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I lived in the New York area and got to see the movie. And it was a really weird movie. The Broadway show is just wacko, crazy, cool. But the movie was just like, this guy's really pathetic.

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Well, I had a course in the Gospel of Mark for a semester. We're supposed to write a paper about some topic in the Gospel of Mark because I'm the son of a psychology professor. I thought, you know, I think I'll do a paper on the emotions of Jesus as depicted in the Gospel of Mark. So I did the obvious.

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I went through my Gospel of Mark. started underlining every word or phrase that depicted something about Jesus' emotions or feelings or personality style, I almost lost my faith. He is all over the map. He has, I mean, the guy, it was like manic depressive, although I didn't know the term, but he was all, I mean, I was, I really was shaken up by this, particularly because I had the image of Jesus from Jesus Christ Superstar in the back of my brain.

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just kind of playing out as I'm reading about all these ways that Jesus came across to people. He didn't act very God-like in his, at least that stoic sense of God that I thought was what way God would be. Well, so are our scriptures in general, and it's the presentation of Jesus in particular. The God, I believe, did speak those scriptures, the apnustas, the spirit or God breathing of life into the writers to bring forth the word of God, though in very specific context and very specific language and very specific purposes that were true to the individual human doing so.

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But in the midst of all of the complexity of that, got a whole lot of questions. for us to have as we try to ask what was said there and then 10,000 miles and 2,000 years away or more speak to here and now. I've been wrestling these questions for 25 years. I want to tell you that as a graduate of Gordon Conwell, it was interesting.

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I had a wonderful education there. I'm deeply appreciative of it, as I've gotten to know great Presbyterians from the great Presbyterian seminaries. Believe it or not, most of our exegetical methods are almost the same as you were taught.

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That was one of the things that came out in theological task force on peace and purity, although I'd heard it and seen it already. It wasn't out there in a fight and fundy world. But it was one that did say, for all the professors, you had to sign every year on the dotted line that you affirm the inerrancy of the text of Scripture. And

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in that context, we were taught to exegete the text, always asking what is the original intention of the original writer to write to the original readers. And the quick question that always came up, though, well, not often, because it took some nerve to ask it. I'm not sure I did have the nerve. It was probably someone else who did.

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But ask the question, but what about Jesus' own use of the Old Testament? Or the gospel writer's use of the Old Testament, particularly Matthew, when they quote something as having been fulfilled that someone else had said before, but what the person had said before was really unrelated to what Jesus had actually done or how the person was interpreting that. How do you deal with that?

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The standard answer was, Jesus can do that. You can't. And they'd say, the apostles, they can do it too. Just don't you ever try.

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In integrity, we'd stick to the original intention of the original text as best as we could believe. Of course, and that's the great exegetical task, is to try to find that out. I always know that we never are sure that we've got it, but we try to do our best to keep digging, digging, digging, digging to see what we might be missing. But in the process, to ask, but what about the way they use those texts in such different ways sometimes that don't follow

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what seemed to be very good principles for biblical interpretation. Well, putting it all together, tomorrow I'll tell you a story that really started me on this journey of interpreting the text or working the text with regard to the moral and ethical questions. It all began way back in the 1980s in my first years of my pastorate. I'll give you a hint.

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It was when a member of the church collapsed and nearly died on the way into the service. And now on Monday morning, I had to meet the son to help decide what to do about her being about 90% brain dead. And that was before we had discussions about end of life medical ethics. We'll get to that tomorrow.

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But over the years ever since then, I've wrestled these things with the idea that I would maybe write a book after I retire because I'll lose my job no matter what it is, where it is for writing it. But a couple of years ago, I in the midst of all of these crazy battles that we've been, and yes, it's been kind of the war zone working in the Preston Outlook. Jill, welcome to my world.

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Jack, hand to Jill. It's so neat for us to be able to be together. Yesterday was the first time on the job, day on the job of Preston Outlook. But finally decided maybe it's time to man up and take these thoughts and really, really dig them out and put them out there for more conversation.

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Well, here's where I am first of all I think we need to if we're going to do this we've got to get more clear on what is actually an absolute let's start at the beginning God I think it's a place a good place to start I think it's okay to say for us for Christians we're going to stand on the absolute that God is one God in three persons commonly known most often known as Father Son Holy Spirit the God and characters God of holiness of justice of love the essentials of the gospel full humanity and divinity of Christ the incarnation dying death of us for the sins resurrection ascension the gift of grace which by faith justifies redeems saves unites adopts us that's I'm gonna stand there for absolutes.

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But then when you move from talk singly and specifically about God and begin to talk about what does that look like in our lives, everything becomes a little bit more ambiguous. Can something be 90% absolute? Have you heard something almost absolute or mostly absolute? The word absolute allows for nothing but the absolute absolute.

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I believe we've been making a mistake a long time to speak of any of our human laws or the way we do anything as an absolute. If it's about God, we can go there. But beyond God's own self-defining existence, everything else is a little bit less than that. And so backing away from that absolute clear and final language, I suggest that what we do have

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a few conversations that Jesus had with people about what, how, what's expected, what's the right thing, what's the most important thing, what's the greatest commandment? Yes, to love God with heart, soul, and mind, or heart, soul, mind, and strength, another gospel. And to love our neighbor as ourselves. That those two basic principles, summary statements, give us

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two categories under which we are to understand how it is we are to live uh in a life of moral and ethical obedience and honoring of God I don't think anybody here is going to argue me yet but where do we go from there can I suggest the word aspiration or aspirations There's something about the teaching in Scripture that yearns, that draws, that pulls out from us or implants into us better a vision for something that we're not or something that we've not been yet. Something about calling us forward above and beyond what we've imagined for ourselves that would say that's where we're aiming for. What I've done is I've among, in my study, I've spent a lot of time reading a lot of those texts in the scripture, key teaching texts for our living, did spend some time digging through the confessions, the great confessions of our faith, and also just kind of listening to conversations in the church.

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And there seemed to be, for me, and I'm sure there's certainly a lot of amendability in this, seven ways of loving God that have really kind of come to the surface. Seven ways. To glorify God. What is the chief end?

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To glorify God and enjoy God forever. To fear and revere or have an awe-struck relationship with God. An honor of God is God. God is God and we are not.

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God is above and beyond and holy and with Isaiah we fall down and when we see the awesomeness of the holy God. But on the flip side, there's also that matter of adoring God. That transcendent God is also the imminent one. The one that we would fear ends up wrapping God's arms around us and holding us like the mother holding her baby to her breasts.

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To trust God, I'm sorry, to trust God. All those calls to live a life of faith. But we know that that's more than intellectual assent to facts. It's entrusting our lives into the God who is our God.

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Putting on the mind of Christ. What would Jesus do is a cute little bracelet thing that has some inspirational value to it. But putting on the mind of Christ, as both promise and call to us, that we would become ones who think as Jesus did think, that we really seek to become one's transformed in the renewing of our minds so that we can live forth kind of life that would demonstrate God's glory and goodness and character.

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Number six is taking up our cross to follow Christ. You can throw into this language about obedience or submission and coming under the authority basically and wanting as all of us to submit our lives to God but that we recognize that as Jesus called the disciples, so he calls us to really let go of what we have been and what we are and what we have to be followers of Jesus. And the

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The one that may seem a little bit out of place because we've largely pushed it out of place is Keeping Holy the Lord's Day. I love that piece in that book, the collection of books that were, a collection of studies were done about by Joe Coulter and Mulder and who was the third? Lewis, yeah, Lewis Weeks. He has the article about

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Sabbath keeping and the art of changing the subject. I grew up in North Jersey, Ramsey, New Jersey, and eight miles from us is the town of Paramus. Any of you have been to Paramus, New Jersey? Paramus has, even in my childhood, more square feet of shopping per square mile than anywhere in America.

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Back then, town of 25,000, 7 enclosed shopping malls, each one with at least two department stores, an amazing array and collection of stores. It's where the New Yorkers would go to go shopping. It's 15 minutes west of the George Washington Bridge, and with lower sales taxes, they could beat the prices of a lot of the New York City shopping. The only problem was that the stores were closed on Sundays.

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You know what the problem is? They're still closed on Sundays. Yeah, believe it or not. And that's because those Dutch Reform folks with the commandments on the front wall of their church also always find a way to get the majority votes in the town council in Paramus, New Jersey.

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Nice, great hub of the Reformed church folks, CRC and RCA, that still keep those doors closed on Sundays. Keeping hold of the Lord's day. Well, moving ahead, loving people.

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Another seven. Now again, there's nothing special about seven, even though it's called the perfect number and this is going to be the perfect book. No, not at all. But it just came out this way.

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Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. Sounds right. Tell the truth. and both particular truth and just honest be accurate but also lift up the truth of Jesus and his love do justice be a steward that is take all that is in your care as caring for God's property not owning it for your own choose life be a life giver be out there promoting life wherever you can in every way be faithful particularly to love and love and live into covenants

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covenant relationships, be faithful in those, and cultivate community, both immediately and in family and in community, faith community, but in the larger community as a citizen of honorable contribution, involvement for all near and far. I put it out this way. That's called a spreadsheet. After serving two churches filled with rocket scientists, aerospace engineers, chemical engineers, and engineers of every kind, with whom, whenever I had an idea, someone would show up with a spreadsheet on how to implement it, I just got into my brain.

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I don't know how to think without a spreadsheet in front of me. And so I've taken these and spelled them out. You may not be able to read them, but it's the same that I've said before, to glorify God, fear and revere God, adore God, trust God, put on the mind of Christ, take up your cross to follow Christ, keep the Lord's day holy. All aspirational magnets to pull us closer to God and the same with one another.

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Doing unto others, telling the truth and the good news, justice. stewardship, choosing life, being faithful, cultivating community, and those great phrases, people of God, body of Christ, temple of the Spirit. But then you've got to go from there somewhere else, a little further into what I'm using as term benchmarks or standards. We have, this is largely where we,

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dubbed the word and put the word absolutes. These are the things we expect you to do so you get it right. These are things you're supposed to do. This is what good people do.

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This is the right thing to do. These are the things we need to write into law and ensure that they will not be violated. However, as I've been suggesting, the Bible's got a whole lot of places where they're not done, where it's not been that way. And we'll get to some more.

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We will get to the thing about how the apostles did all this. Don't always do it that way. In fact, everyone, I pretty much have cataloged pretty much every one of the commandments is violated somewhere in the Bible with impunity or even with endorsement. It's there.

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That's our challenge part of this. And all of us is to read our Bibles as they are, not the way we want to. And by the way, I trust people's intention that when they do read past things that are contradictory.

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It's not that they're really trying to pretend it's not there, it's just that they didn't notice. There's something within us. It wants to hold things together in some kind of logical, realistic whole.

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And so we miss those. Which, by the way, when you really get focused on them, we often despair and just say, the Bible doesn't say anything about this subject. Whereas in fact, the Bible does say something about that subject. And that's where I go to the idea of a benchmark, a kind of a measuring stick.

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That's about a yard, right? Would you say that's 36 inches? Are you confident? Are you sure that's 36 inches?

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Well, it's somewhere nearby, right? It might be around that. But who's to say for sure unless you have the measurement right there? If it's close, this isn't so close to 36 inches.

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This is a whole lot about right closer somewhere. That's what a benchmark does. It kind of sets up a pattern, a way of things generally being measured. And so it is with a scale, gives us a basis for measurement, but it doesn't mean you have to be all there to be near there, approximately there.

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I'm going to give you a little more chart there, okay? Standards and benchmarks. Here we go. To glorify God, a way that we stand or benchmark that is that we worship God with the people of God.

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Any argument there? Okay. Fearing, revering God at the very heart. Basic is you don't have false gods, you don't have alternative gods.

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There is only one God, though you shall not have false gods, other gods before me. Adoring God, to pray unceasingly, to commune with God constantly, to be in relationship with God, kind of stands to reason, doesn't it not? Trusting God with all our hearts and lean not on our own understanding. Putting on the mind of Christ, that is to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, and having our minds informed by the word of God.

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as a benchmark for that. Taking up our cross to follow Christ at very minimum to confess our sins when we're convicted of them, to receive the grace, the good news of forgiveness that comes with that already waiting for us when we present our sin and striving to live a life in obedience to God. And for keeping the Lord's day holy at very minimum to speak of all days as holy. This is the day the Lord has made

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But it's not a Sunday, is it? Yeah, they all are. It still counts. It still counts.

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But then let's go beyond that. Let's get more specific. There are ways in which the church has become even more specific in visible, tangible, measurable ways through the centuries. in ways they were back in the early church, the way the church of Israel before the incarnation were norming or having standards and expectations on what this all looks like as we live it.

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And so I want to suggest that we also have applications that have been the general consensus of the church. Now this has got a lot more room for negotiation. Because that's the church that we know. There are other churches of other traditions, other churches in other parts of the world that have tended to normalize or make patterns of how they do that.

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But they still have an instructive function for us in helping guide us and giving a sense of how we do things. And so we'll go on, look at this. Okay, we're worshiping the Lord to the glory of God, generally gathering for Sunday congregational worship with the word in sacrament, in revering God to raise daily repentance from the alien alliances, masters, dependencies, addictions that hold us back.

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And that's right. It's not that it's not a simple answer for the addictions by any day, for any of these. Absolutely not. But that we still come back to God and say, okay, we've got to start here, Lord.

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I know I messed up. Help me. Help me. To adore God, that being in regular discipline of individual prayer, in a regular pattern of prayer with others, in trusting God, in gratitude to obey, seek to obey God's will, trusting God's promises to be fulfilled.

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So we are redeemed and elevated and saved, literally. Putting on the mind of Christ by way of personal Bible study, group Bible study, learning from multiple sources to learn the faith. and in terms of taking our cross submitting to the church discipline and accountability and all of that and that giving the Lord's Day holy that we do specifically set the Lord's Day aside for worship rest and renewal of relationships but let's take a minute in this and park there a bit what does that look like for us I mean since when have ministers taken Sundays off I mean We were off.

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We're off the other six days a week. We only work the one day, but we have to work on that one day. You're supposed to laugh, okay? That's supposed to be funny.

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But that's the big hard working day. And it was for the priests surrounding Moses when the commandments were given and taught and implemented and all the way through the scriptures, those who were leading the people in their worship were working on the Sabbath, were working on the Lord's day. What about that? My first.

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church I was pastoring, I had a wonderful fellowship of other ministers and we definitely was the priest, the minister, and the rabbi, a few of my very best friends in that group, and Rabbi Paul Grobe, having been a very liberal professor of philosophy in the University of Indiana, he kind of gravitated to the more conservative side of Judaism and was now the rabbi of the town's Temple of Shalom. synagogue. He had a condo just across the street from the synagogue so he wouldn't have to drive a car on the Sabbath. He wouldn't have to work.

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He could just walk his way there. And although if you went and drove by the synagogue on Friday evening or Saturday morning services, the cars were all over the parking lot. He didn't tell the people not to drive. What's more, we asked him, so what about the electricity?

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turn the lifetime is work, right? He says, oh, yes, it is work. Never do it. I says, so how do you do that?

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He says, well, we have a Gentile custodian. I thought, well, how convenient is that? That's great. We gave him a hard time.

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All the time, in fact. Through the ages, We've done something else about the Lord's Day. We've said, well, what day is your Sabbath, Pastor?

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Well, Monday, Friday, or maybe another day along the way. We adopt the notion, idea, the concept of Sabbath, and we adapt it. We adopt it and adapt it in a different way. and make that our Lord's Day.

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And that's not just for pastors, it's for educators, it's for church musicians, it's for a lot of the folks that are volunteering their time on Sundays that are just as exhausted at the end of the morning as those who are in the pulpit. There's finding another time to have their adapted Sabbath. In fact, the scriptures kind of support that. Okay, by the way, the word I'm going on now is

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approximations and adaptations. Those are the key words that we're going to stick with until we're done here. Exodus 31, whoever does any work in the Sabbath is to be put to death. No doubt about that.

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But then on the Sabbath, not only did Jesus heal, but he also allowed the disciples who were hungry to begin picking some heads of grain and eat them. Hey, brothers, wait till sundown. Okay, I think they could have survived a few more hours, but Jesus let them go ahead and do it. what's that about?

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What about this thing about no, the law is not going to pass away, not neither jot nor tittle, and yet he's letting them reap and rub and prepare the grain for their own eating. And then Paul in Romans, Discussing the whole question about Sabbath-keeping and Lord's Day-keeping, he says, Some consider one day more sacred than another. Others consider every day alike.

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Everyone should be fully convinced in their own mind. You know the closing verse of the book of Judges? There was no king in the land, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes. That's not generally seen as a word of commendation for the great spiritual obedience that they had.

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And yet, Paul is essentially echoing that and say, yeah, whatever sounds right to you, you go with it. Hello? I'm getting nervous. And so alternative rhythms of rest and renewal for those working on Sundays to look at how we might approximate or adapt these.

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aspirations, benchmarks, and applications to our situation. Consider those who cannot get out of the house on Sundays for whatever reason or have to work somewhere. None of us wants to commend TV services as an alternative to Sunday worship, but sometimes that's all they've got. Trusting God.

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Well, we're also supposed to be good stewards of what we do have in managing those kind of things, investing, preparing for retirement and all that. We do adjust and adapt. We don't just say, okay, I'll give it all at the church and I'll just trust God to provide at the end.

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Adoring God. Well, yes, we do struggle in faithfulness. We can carry a whole lot of extra guilt for not getting it all perfect or we can count small improvements as more than setbacks and stakes stepping forward. and taking up our cross there in following Christ is not just simply being passive and letting everything go on.

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There's also a matter of effort, work, and sometimes the word ambition can fit in to faithfulness, faithful ways of being in the faith. putting on mind of Christ, studying widely, broadly, as informative as possible. That is not just Christian literature, but literature from all kinds of sources that all of the forms of education and liberal arts, of other religious traditions and all of that, to all be engaging in feeding our own growth, our maturity as persons and lovers of God. I'll add one more.

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Oops. on this question of revering God and having no false gods. One of the most seminal texts in what I'm developing here has to come from that Jerusalem council story in Acts chapter 15. Wherein the apostles stirred up by this thing about the God-fearers finding Jesus and getting baptized by Peter without having first been circumcised, they are basically a cohort of Roman soldiers,

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And what do we do with that? And they're arguing and fighting all around it. So they gather for the first general assembly of the Presbyterian church there in Jerusalem. And like the Presbyterian general assemblies, they shouted and screamed and hollered.

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And they didn't even get it to a vote. James just finally says, OK, this is what the Holy Spirit's telling us. We're going to do this. And without quoting any words from Jesus, which would have just given a little bit more credibility to this.

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They said, okay, circumcision is no longer required. The mark of the covenant for the people of God, since the calling of Abraham and Sarah to be the parents of that nation, suddenly it's just set aside. Oh, they hold out, and in fact, they said, we'll light up on all these kinds of things, except for four, no meat offered to idols, no blood, no don't eat things strangled and refrain from sexual immorality. And sure enough, they held fast on this thing about don't eat meat offered to idols.

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Because to eat meat offered to idols means that you are engaging in idolatry. And all of those Christians spread out through the Mediterranean basin in these cities where you have sanctuaries, temples built to the gods of the Roman pantheon or the Greek pantheon, Though the people brought their animals, they had them sacrificed as a part of their worship, and sure enough, they were sold then out in the marketplace as a way to get your meat. In fact, in those cities, basically, there are two places to get meat.

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It was either in those marketplaces next to the temples, or you went to the synagogue to get your kosher meat. And sure enough, there was a controversy. What do you do about that as believers? What do we do about all this stuff?

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What if we're kind of hanging around with some pagans? We're trying to share Jesus with them, you know? We're just trying to be good neighbors and all that. What if they serve us some food and we don't know where it came from?

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And what do we do about that? Well, the Apostle Paul was really simple about it. He says, you should eat whatever is sold in the meat market without asking any of the questions over your over scrupulous conscience.

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For the earth is the Lord's and all its fullness. If a pagan asks you to dinner and you want to go, feel free to eat whatever is set before you without any asking any questions through conscientious scruples. But if your host should say straight out the meat has been offered to an idol, then don't eat it for his sake. I mean, for the sake of his conscience, that is his conscience, not yours.

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Get that? It's called don't ask, don't tell. No, Bill Clinton, you weren't original. No, it's don't ask, don't tell.

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Huh? At the end of the century, or the last probably book of the New Testament, John, in his letter of Revelation, two of those letters to the churches condemn people for eating meat offered to idols, and yet Paul's saying, eh, no big deal. What about that? Well, for one thing, he had a higher priority at that point of being a good citizen, a good neighbor with your pagan neighbors and being one of lifting up Christ and not shunning and pushing them away.

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And so just don't let it bother you. It's food after all. Spoil the Egyptians, that's an ocean I latched onto decades ago, that as when the Israelites were leaving Egypt and God said, go take the spoils of the Egyptians on your way out, which is kind of a form of endorsed thievery. They did that and they took that with them and guess how they made the Ark of the Covenant?

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Where'd the gold come to make the Ark of the Covenant and the other furniture for the tabernacle that was built out in the wilderness. Of course, that same gold helped them to make, what was that other thing they made? Yeah, the idol, yeah. It's kind of a dangerous thing to take those things of the world and use them because they can get the best of you, but they can also be used for the glory of God.

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And living life on the edge in glorying of God in a world that's such a mixed bag and mixed message means living a life in danger but for the sake of the glory of God saying okay we'll take some chances we'll take the spoils of the Egyptians and see what good things God can do with them although always being a bit careful about that well that's that Loving God. Now it comes to the, I'm gonna do the people thing.

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I'm gonna do this quickly because I'm not gonna share much because it would kill me for it. How to love people. These seven things. I'm gonna say a couple, just a couple of them.

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quickly. Again, those, as we said, now standards and benchmarks, how do you do unto others what you'd have done to you? Well, be generous. Serve others, including your enemies.

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Sharing the good news means telling the truth, capital T of Jesus' story and the small T of honesty and just being an honest person. Doing justice, breaking chains of injustice. Amen? Being a steward, all assets, everything that we have or around us and can influence, we recognize to be God's property and honor God in the use of it.

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And cultivating community by a spiritual, moral, and missional transformation. That seems to work, right? Oh, I'm not going to mention, I'm skipping the choose life and be faithful. We're not going to touch that.

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But let's talk about truth-telling. Here's Jacob and Esau. Which one got the blessing, the honest one or the liar? Okay?

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Rahab and the spies, she's honored in the New Testament because she welcomed the spies. That's her job. Okay? And was not killed because she was lying about them being there.

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Okay? And why did the writer, if he was leave of the word prostitute, couldn't they just mention her name and hope that people wouldn't realize who she really was? And then there's that parable of the dishonest manager where Jesus just plain says, because he was dishonest, he did well. You need to learn from him and follow his example.

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I'm sorry, that's a little bit of paraphrase, but that's pretty much what it says. And no, I've never preached on that text. You know the Geico commercial? Could switching to Geico really save you 15% more on car insurance?

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Was Abe Lincoln honest? Remember what comes next? Old black and white film of Mary Todd Lincoln looking rather portly in a very sophisticated dress. Does this dress make my backside look big?

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Perhaps. There are some times when honesty is not the best policy. And when it's your seven-year-old daughter or granddaughter that wants to know if you like her new dress and you think it looks hideous, you don't tell her. It's not the loving thing to do.

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Of course it isn't. We know that. So tell white lies for kindness' sake sometimes is an appropriate adaptation of being truth-telling that we all do. Oops, oops, oops, skipping over that, had some stuff that got bled into that one.

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I'm not gonna get that one yet. Well, avoid manipulations and action enabling. Okay, I'm gonna go to the final. Oh, is that, I had to think, the whole thing crashed an hour before I got over here this morning.

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I lost some of the stuff at the end. Let me go back to this way. Doing justice, as a matter of a distributive justice and disciplinary justice. justice that does hold court as necessary, but also sees our justice as a creative means of caring for those who do not have as we do, and recognize that doing to others means that you look to see, having a positive obligation to do for others, provide for others, and help others to obtain what you cannot, or what you would consider to be key and critical.

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Being a steward, being about tithing financially, being about the environment, about the times and the talents, but also the environment in which we are placed and have an influence on its use and proper utilization. Cultivating community within the faith community and like, well, or communicating discernment and all of that. We'll fill in the rest of the blanks tomorrow. And I'll particularly focus on those two categories that I've carefully dodged, the one about choosing life and the other one about being faithful, or if you will, euphemistically, eros and thanatos.

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I'm going to talk with you about those really very tough issues because they are the presenting issue for me to get into this kind of study and wrestle this over these years. I want to go back to what I said early on. Most of our people Do this kind of reasoning most of the time without ever labeling it as such.

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Most of our people, people are growing in the love of God that, yeah, are sinning in thought word and deed daily, but not as a constant, that have that yearning for a goodness that's out on the horizon of our imagination, that is that to which the loving God, the holy God calls us, the God of justice. Most of our people are making good decisions regularly and intuitively. Not going back over a checklist of absolutes to say, am I doing this right? And certainly not carrying around a spreadsheet.

01:00:22.760 - 01:01:28.080

I'll acknowledge that that's not the way they're doing it, and it's not the way the apostles were. But that what this spreadsheet is trying to capture is a kind of reflection and thinking that I've been finding in the text, all over the text. Not just in the New Testament, this is in the Old Testament as well, but it's particularly so in the New Testament where they had actually the holy scriptures of the Torah before them and were now living this reality of the new covenant in Jesus in a way that was both affirming all the history and roots of being the people of God back to Genesis 12 and even back to Genesis 1 and God's creation made in the image of God. But that by, in the process of being conformed in the image of Jesus Christ, by the work in the spirit, writing the laws in our minds and inscribing them on our hearts, have been living into the complexities and ambiguities of thinking that has been alive for them.

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The other thing that caused me to come out of the closet in terms of talking these ways, is that when I listened to that younger generation, that are saying, we don't want to have anything more to do with this. It's not just because they hear the church is being too close-minded, or that they're hearing the church be too radically different, or that it's just that they don't want to be a part of a church that keeps fighting like it does. It's also they want to be in a church wherein their complicated questions don't keep getting simplistic answers.

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They want to have a faith that's big enough for the complexities of the world in which they're growing up. These digital natives, that is, who've lived in the context of the digital world, the internet world, have been raised in a whole different world from the rest of us that are over 30 years of age. And they want a faith that has enough substance to it. enough room to it, enough values and principles at the center of it, but love room and range to apply them, that it's worthy of investing themselves into it.

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It's been very heartening when I've shared this on one level or another in different places, how many 20-somethings have said, I've been waiting to hear this. For us older folks, it might be a little more foreign, but I'm hearing a resonance there. And so what is it that's so great about being good? There is that yearning for that in God, a fullness and a wholeness in God.

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There is a possibility of growing and maturity, of having a witness of integrity and candor, of living a life in joy. that knows the forgiveness and the insights and the wisdom and the transformation and the the empowerment of spirit that is that have always been the gift of God to us in Christ Jesus I think there's something for us to explore I looking forward to having more conversations with you exploring today and tomorrow and Beyond amen