Bishop David Kendall's Blog

It will end as it began.  In the beginning God said, “Let there be … “ and in the end there will indeed be all that God says.  In the beginning it was very good and in the end it will be very good.  In the beginning the world, with potential waiting to be teased and directed to full expression, was hijacked by willfulness and rebellion.  In the end, there shall be rescue so thorough that no potential goes unfulfilled.  In the beginning human beings bore the Image and in the end the Image will shine brilliantly through these very humans.  In the beginning all of reality was free to be what God created it to be at first and then to deepen, stretch, grow and become.  In the end no such becoming shall be denied.  In the beginning humans beings were given authority and opportunity to care for all God made and to partner in the becoming that would bring fullness to all of it.  In the end human beings will play the role that most resonates with who and why they are.  In the beginning it was the Word that got it all started.  In the end that same Word will have the final say.  In the beginning the Spirit hovered over what could be.  In the end the Spirit inhabits and enlivens and empowers all that is and will be.

From here to there, Christ followers, remade after the original likeness and reformed for the original purposes, together reflect the very good that one day shall surely be and practice ways and relationships that move creation in good-ward trajectories.  No good will lack its best outcome.  No truth will go unrealized.  No beauty will fail to dazzle and delight. 

From here to there, Christ followers seek full engagement in every worthy pursuit.  Wherever they happen to be is exactly where they are best suited to be who they are and do what they were designed to do.  Whatever gift or passion or skill or education or capacity they acquire finds a place in realizing God’s good plans.  Whatever experiences they have had—the good, but also the bad and ugly—position them uniquely to reflect who they are and the reason they are, as well as the who and why for all others.

From here to there, when Christ followers earnestly, persistently, passionately and unitedly follow their Lord they already live out of the future freedom that will one day prevail over all now bound, and the fullness of life that will one day swallow up death in all its forms.  While others wonder whether there is hope and a future they demonstrate both in ways that enliven the hope of others. 

From here to there, Christ followers have opportunity to be the nucleus of the new world that God is even now creating.  Christ followers must be and do not as the first human beings, but as the Second  and Last Human Being, as Christ their Lord.  They join him in seeing and bringing to pass what is in sync with the new heavens and earth God will give.  They do not judge the world that now is or the people caught in its clutches or even those who seem bent on denying its demise and propping up its crumbling pillars, for that world already stands judged and is passing away.  Rather, amidst the passing currents they stand firm and then move forward reflecting the love, joy and peace of the kingdom already coming and inviting as many as will to set their hopes on coming grace. 

The apostle Paul describes the grace of God as “salvation-bringing” (Titus 2:11).  Many in the church would say, “Well, duh, of course!”  But let’s be sure to get as much of what Paul is implying as we can.  In fact, everything depends upon it for the sake of the church, the world and for our own sake.

 

I would suggest that the grace of God is the eco-system in which “salvation-life” is birthed, nourished, sustained, matured, and fulfilled.  Grace works powerfully and transformingly in our lives and world.  It does or it’s not genuine grace.

 

When Paul says elsewhere, “It is by grace you have been saved” (Eph. 2:5, 8) he’s saying far more than he is often credited.  He would insist that we find new life by grace and then live in new and different ways by grace, and then exercise telling influence or impact by grace—so that, over the course of time we actually participate in things only God can do.

 

We tend to recognize only one dimension of the grace of God.  It is God’s kindness and favor extended to us—just because.  It is the offer of another chance, a clean slate, pardon for any number of stupid or destructive or defiant things we’ve done.  It is open arms eager to embrace us.  Indeed, that is the grace of God.  But that’s not the whole of God’s grace.  God loves us and love always does something. 

 

Grace is also the power of God at work in the interests of his love.  On the strength of God’s grace therefore we are reborn, but on the strength of that same grace we also grow up, become mature, learn actually to live the Jesus life, learn and become adept at serving in partnership with Jesus.  All this and everything else comes by grace.

 

There is much confusion about this.  It is common, after the Protestant Reformation, to think that the opposite of grace is work or effort.  But actually the opposite of salvation by grace would be salvation by achievement.  Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to the notion that we could earn or achieve our way.

 

But grace works!  It enlivens our capacity to cooperate with all God wants to do, to be an appropriate agent of kingdom power—power that transforms us and others as it works through us.   That is why Paul can say work out your salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12). Not that we must work hard because our salvation is questionable or up for grabs.  Rather, the grace that saves works in us and with us and through us in saving ways.  So, work it out.  Cooperate fully with all the Holy Spirit wants to do in your life (see Phil 2:13 in this connection).

 

In his guidance to Titus, Paul says, grace trains us to say “No!” to ungodliness and worldly passions.  Every addict—of whatever sort—who has entered recovery will tell you they once sincerely and deeply believed that what came to enslave them actually was good, right and true.  They perceived their master as their great liberator and the bind they were in as the freedom they so desperately craved.  But at some point they learned it was all a lie.  It works the same way with the sin-addicted, which includes all of us.  The true grace of God awakens us to reality; it enlightens our eyes to see that what we thought was sweet is bitter, what we identified as life is actually death, and then that same grace reprograms our hardware so that we more easily recognize reality and no longer want to be driven by the things that once dominated us and drove us.  Finally, grace writes new software that permits us to live our lives with focus, according to what is right and in sync with the ways of God whose goodness and kindness make our life possible.

 

In many churches the only grace known is really just indulgence.  You are OK just as you are.  You blew it but that’s OK.  It’s just the way you are.  However you are is OK, just as however I am is OK.   That is, in many churches denial reigns—just like the addict that can quit any time and is really in control.  So members just continue to be themselves, nursing their sickness, dressing it up to look respectful, settling for little do it yourself projects to get us by, only to relapse to their same sick and unhealthy patterns of being and doing which everyone would like to change, even the sick, but which of course can’t really be changed.  Most everyone says that Jesus is a lovely person and is after all our Savior and has made it possible for us to go to heaven some day, though they hope not too soon.  The thought that they might actually live more like him seems attractive, but never really happens.  They just put up with whatever in relation to themselves and one another.  And perhaps they wonder why those on the outside do not see the wisdom of accepting their vision and joining their church.

 

What such a church needs is grace.  Not indulgence, but grace. Indeed, the only we reason we are not more like Jesus and do not carry on the continuing mission of Jesus in powerful ways is that we really do not want to be or we do not actually know what grace can do.  The grace of God that is salvation-bringing let loose in human life will shape that life into Jesus patterns.

 

We must be about such grace.  It must be the air we breathe, the life-support and life-thrive system on which we depend.

 

 

The apostle Paul is directing his younger colleague in ministry in serving a church that was in a state of mess (see Titus 2:11-14). The church often finds itself in such a state—check it out throughout history.  The myth of the perfect church, or even the untroubled church—is just that, a myth, a projection of our obsessive need to have everything all at once on our terms.  But that is not the church that we find and not the church God determines to use savingly, transformingly.

 

Rather, God will use the church that perceives and responds to grace.  A Third Note on grace is that no other religion has such a view of God or the gods, past or present.  In fact, the vocabulary of grace in the Christian sense doesn’t really appear in the Greek speaking/reading world and certainly does not become common until Jesus comes.

 

Literally, this is true.  The gods of the ancient world were supersized human beings—with increased and expanded powers but the same basic characters and traits as humans because they were fashioned as variations of the human image.

 

In Greco-Roman pantheons, the gods make demands, act by whim, do as you and I would if we were gods.  Gods are abusive and arbitrary, seeking their own advancement, and ever eager to use their power for such advancement.  Again, they do just the way humans do.  The gods exploit each other, especially those weaker than they, and care only about their own agenda.  The extent to which this sounds shocking or unthinkable to us today is the extent to which a uniquely Christian view of God and grace have permeated our conceptual world.

 

The gods of ancient and modern times have to be convinced, cajoled, and coerced to be kind.  And even when they are, they often prove unreliable.  To the gods one would and could never sing, “Great is thy faithfulness!”

 

[Even to the present hour—this is the same basic understanding and set of assumptions many people have about the gods or the divine or heaven or fate, or whatever God there might be.]

 

Only the God revealed in Jesus doesn’t need us, except that he loves us and made us to lavish his best on us, and to enter into loving familial relationship with us.  Only God as we meet him in Jesus pursues our well-being rathet than his own, because he has no need to pursue his own!  Quite simply only this God is!

 

Only the God revealed in Jesus comes to us in grace, in kindness, and in power that he uses in giving us a life, not because it’s good for him but for us.  NOTE: the key to the church’s mission—making disciples, followers of Jesus—is to get God right at this point.  There is no god like this God.  NO God meets us in the likes of Jesus, except our God!  Get God right, the grace of God, and God’s power will work

 

How imperative, therefore, that we be a church of such grace, the grace of God.  Pursuing people out of regard for their own well-being, eager to go to wherever they are, to seek them out, serve them, hoping in the process that somehow they will see the God that Jesus makes real. 

 

How scandalous it is for a church to become all about themselves, seeking to secure, maintain, protect, advance their own interests, often assuming they are synonymous with God’s.  No need for the church to be this way or to act in this way.  If we will be like our God in the way our God reveals himself—which is what the scriptures mean when they call us to holiness—God will be pleased and though we will still not be perfect in that ideal way, God will find in us a people he can use savingly and transformingly in the world today.  And, because we are this way and God works in this way, the world will be blessed.

As is our custom on Sundays, Lavone and I went to a worship service this morning, this Fourth of July.  As soon as we entered I knew we were “in trouble!”  There were numerous U.S. flags displayed over the front of the sanctuary.  In fact, the presence and visibility of the flag overshadowed that of the cross.  I had to look carefully even to identify the cross on the communion table in front of the pulpit and also on each of the shades covering our overhead lights.   Off to one side was a larger U. S. flag on a flag pole in front of which a U.S. military uniform was on proud display, to which the pastor made reference during his sermon. 

During the service we sang patriotic songs and even pledged our allegiance to the flag.  The sermon was a plea to find in the Lord our refuge when it seemed the “foundations of the righteous” (see Psalm 11 for the reference) were under threat.  It was hard to tell whether the pastor thought those foundations were the essentials of our faith, which he admirably and enthusiastically rehearsed in one section of the sermon, or were the Judeo-Christian, moral and spiritual commitments on which this nation was built and which made it great, or somehow both.  In the end, he concluded, while no one could shake the foundational doctrines of the faith, our nation’s moral foundation are indeed disintegrating, and the church exists to teach its own, and especially the children, to trust in the Lord. 

I am going to resist the temptation to go on and on about how disappointing this service of worship was and, at points, how simply wrong it was, perhaps even idolatrous.  Among other reasons, I will resist because I wonder whether the forms of worship that would have seemed right and God-honoring to us today, might be equally appalling to some other earnest Christ-followers.  I fervently hope and pray not, but I will not take this for granted.  Instead I will pause to remember that our worship must reflect the whole gospel for the whole world and person.

The whole gospel—the good news that Jesus came to declare, demonstrate and bring to fullness in this here and now world.  That gospel has to do with the Kingdom of God.  The good news that God is King and claims the whole of reality as his, that he is recapturing and recreating his once good world, so that in time all that has gone wrong gets set back right again.  The gospel is what Jesus proclaimed and then what Jesus activated—as he retraced the woeful path of the first Adam, lovingly absorbing its suffering and dying in order to bring the story to its wonderful new beginning. 

The good news of the God we worship extends to the whole world.  Around the throne there are and always will be throngs of folks from every nation, tribe and tongue.  Therefore, worshipping the one who sits on the throne must not be wed to smaller, parochial concerns.  Allegiance to the Lamb must not be confused with other forms of allegiance, no matter how noble they might otherwise be.  Allegiance to the Lamb must not be expressed in terms that would distract or hinder others from focusing on the Lamb and finding in the Lamb their All.  (What would my friends from Nigeria think of a sanctuary draped in the U.S. flag?  How would our brothers and sisters in Christ in Northern Iraq respond if they came to worship with us only to find a U.S. military uniform adorning the front of the worship center?)

The good news of the God we worship extends to the deepest parts of the human person exposing what has been broken, distorted and ruined, only then to heal, correct and regenerate.  And because of this deep reach within the human person, there are other reaches, relational in nature, that flow out of this good-news recreation that promises to reconcile and renew the tribal, racial, and ethnic divides that wreak such havoc everywhere.

The good news of the God we worship creates a fellowship, a family, of persons who delight in what God is doing through Jesus and His Spirit, and who enter in to what God is doing until the doing is done.  Thus, they do not worry about the foundations—which have already been laid and remain as solid as the One who built them, and they do not understand their reason for being as protecting themselves or their own.  No, they understand that they get to enter in to what God is doing—shining as light, permeating and healing as salt, transforming as leaven not just here but everywhere—until God is done! 

Don’t misunderstand.  There is nothing incompatible with a focus on the gospel and gratitude for the blessings we enjoy in the U.S., the blessings that come from living in a part of the world where opportunities and resources that allow us unhindered “entering-in” to what God is doing.  Let’s just not imagine that God needs us or our nation for God’s plan to work and let’s not forget that those with the greatest blessings and opportunities have the greatest responsibilities to use them to please the One who gave them.

The church under Titus’ charge is in big trouble. (see Titus in whole) It would seem that those on the inside are scarcely distinguishable from those on the outside.  It would seem that, whatever this salvation is that grace brings, it has yet to show its stuff.

 

Yet, Paul would insist that none other than the grace of God can speak to the church’s condition and in so doing to all the other conditions that could concern us.    In describing what God has done for us and all, Paul says the grace of God has appeared and he describes it as “salvation bringing.”

 

Survey the concept and you will find that grace has two aspects.  As everyone knows: grace means kindness and favor—unmerited favor of God toward us, for no reason other than God cares and loves us.  It is not because we are entitled, worthy and or have earned this, or ever could.  What makes it grace is just this quality—for “no good reason.”

 

As wonderful as this is, however, grace means more.  It is this more that we often miss.  Grace is also power, transforming, renewing power.  God loves us and does something about it.  Thus, grace is not passive, but active in giving, sustaining, and creating life that, in turn, generates creativity and life.  Grace gives rise to life that begets life.

 

Grace does because grace comes from God, and is “salvation-bringing” (see Titus 2:11).  Paul names Jesus Christ as “our great God and Savior” (see Titus 2:13)!  Grace is none other than the person of Christ in whom and for whom all things came to be and are, and through whom all things messed up will be restored, renewed, and recreated.  Jesus, our great God and Savior, is the embodiment, the appearing of Grace in this here and now world.

 

John says, in Moses came the law, in Jesus Christ grace and truth.  In that same gospel Jesus says, “I came that they (and we) may all have life, to the full (see 10:10)!   All of this is by grace:  Amazing kindness, lovingly reaching toward us, but awesomely powerful, making alive whatever comes under its (His) power. 

 

THE GRACE OF GOD in Jesus Christ brings “salvation,” eternal in kind but even now manifesting, at work dealing with the church, and interacting with the world savingly through the church that itself embraces, and is embraced by, this grace!

 

NOTE: The key to shining as light as Jesus calls us, to acting as salt in the world, to influencing a godless world toward its own well-being oriented around God as made known in Jesus—the absolute key, is the CHURCH’S OWN life by, of, in the grace of Jesus.  If we get grace right we will have kingdom impact, and righteous influence. 

 

And, this will happen in no other way.  Not by electing the right people, not by enacting righteous laws, not by any pressure or power we could exert by the rules of this world’s political, social, cultural arena.   What we and the world cannot do for ourselves or by ourselves, but desperately need, God can and does—ONLY BY GRACE.  More later …