First Meditation: To Clap or Not to Clap

Well…we had two important things to do this morning with the sermon:

• First, to say something about financial stewardship, since it is Stewardship Sunday and we being committing to the financial budget and ministries of Bethany for 2006.
• Second, to finish our series on the Apostles’ Creed, with the last piece on “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.”

So, money and eternity. Money and eternity. I started out thinking I could somehow wrap them both into the same sermon. But it kept coming out sounding like the more money you gave, the greater the assurance of eternal life! Since I didn’t want to get too close to that, at the risk of not saying enough about either topic, I instead split the sermon into two distinct meditations. So let’s talk about stewardship first.

If you read your Bethany Briefs this month, you’ll know why I entitled this “To Clap or Not Clap.” If not, you’ll get it in a second.

We have a worship issue here at Bethany, you know. I wish all the issues we faced were only this big. The burning question is, do you clap during worship…or not? Now, I don’t mean do you clap on 1&3 or 2&4 to keep rhythm with one of the praise songs. I mean, when there’s a great piece of special music, or a moving baptism, is it the right thing to clap, to applaud? After all, we’re not watching a musical, or sitting at a concert. In those cases, we clap for the performer(s), to honor them and show our appreciation.

But this is a different venue. We’re here to worship. We’re here to honor God, to show God our appreciation. If we clap, are we applauding God, or the performer? And if you clap for one thing, do you clap for everything? [for instance, you never clap after a sermon!] It gets murky. I tend to think the cleanest way is to not applaud unless its truly to applaud God for something.

But is it possible to applaud after a moving moment in such a way that we actually are worshipping, that our applause is actually not for the performer, but the God into whose presence we are drawn? The baptism of John Schwinn last week was so powerful, it just felt like the right thing to clap.

And so the “controversy” rages. Regardless of what you think of this issue, though, I bet you would have been surprised, along with Anne and me, this last September. Anne and I went and visited a church in South Seattle that a friend of mine pastors. It’s a very small church, the day we were there just 30-40 people at the service. And I happen to know that money is very tight for this congregation, both for the community and many of the people in it.

They had a very lively worship leader, and at one point in the service he said with great enthusiasm… “And now…we have a chance to worship God by bringing our tithes and offerings!” The same thing one of us says every week. But then, the funniest thing happened. The entire congregation immediately broke out in spontaneous applause, smiling and clapping and even a few “hallelujahs” and “amens” thrown in!

Now, I’m not trying to idealize this congregation, or say “we should be like that.” But it was just such a refreshing thing, as though a collective voice welled up in them and said “Oh, boy, now we get to give back to God!” It seemed like such an attitude of the heart. And I think it’s the heart issue that concerns God, when it comes to giving.

We try not to overemphasize finances at Bethany, but it’s hard not to notice that the scriptures- and Jesus- talk an awful lot about money. In fact, I looked all through the scriptures this week for things related to finances and giving. I want to pretty much just read seven short ones to stack up how scripture deals with giving.

1. Several places in Exodus, like Exodus 23:19 it says “Bring the firstfruits of your crops to the house of the Lord.” That answers one question that pops up, “Do I give God all the extra funds we have left at the end of the month?” The answer is, Don’t give God the leftovers.
2. Again in Exodus, 22:29 it says “Do not hold back offerings.” What posture should we have in our giving? Be open-handed. God gives to us, we give away and back.
3. In Deuteronomy, it says, “Set aside a tenth (tithe) of what you produce.” So, how much am I to give? The easy answer is 10 percent, though that’s probably not nearly enough for some of us, and it doesn’t answer the difficult issue of 10 percent of gross earnings or net earnings!? But interestingly, Deuteronomy also tells what the tithe is set aside for: for the fatherless, widows and aliens in the land who have nothing.
4. Don’t play games with honoring God with our finances. “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse,” God says in Malachi. “Stop robbing God!” Malachi underscores that what we have belongs to God.
5. The lessons continue in the New Testament. In Acts, the Apostle Paul quotes Jesus as saying, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
6. In 2 Corinthians Paul talks about giving and says, “Each should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”
7. We are to give sacrificially. Jesus commends the widow who gives out of her poverty and scarcity, rather than a larger amount out of some abundance.

I still remember the day that Jerry came to the office door at
7 am on a Sunday morning. Jerry had a hard life, and money was certainly not plentiful. (Jerry is the same guy who I met a couple of Easter mornings down at the lookout.) The first time I ever met him, he knocked on the office door and when I answered, he handed me a handful of bills, about $75 and said,

“This is for the church. You guys are doing good things for people.”

He turned to leave and I called after him,

“Jerry, what do you want done with this?”

He said, “You decide.” And he walked off.

Do we give out of abundance or poverty? Do we give in a way that causes us to live differently, or just out of surplus?

All of these lessons are good ones, and any one of them would be great to wrestle with in more depth. But the thing that struck me was that the thread that ran through them all was that giving is a heart issue. It’s not a game to play, or a formula or technique or guarantee or a minimum level or any of those things we want to make it.

Giving is a matter of the heart, because I believe that God is after our hearts. When we give, God frees our hearts to be available to other people, and available to Him.

I doubt that we’ll become a community that starts clapping when it comes time for the offering. But I long for a heart in me that rejoices, that automatically exalts, that sings out “This is great! Now we get to give to God, and God’s work in the world.”

So, this morning we’re going to bring to the Lord both our normal offering, and, if you are ready, your pledge cards for the 2006 year. But we’re going to do it a little differently this morning. The ensemble is going to come to lead us in singing, and the ushers will start the baskets at the back of the sanctuary instead of the front. After the basket has gone down your row, I want to invite you to stand to continue singing, and by the time it gets to the front, we’ll all be standing and singing our praises.

Second Meditation: The Content of the Will

We want to look this morning very briefly at the last few lines of the Apostles Creed, which we’ve been talking about and using for the last seven weeks. The very first week we looked at it, I told you about a legend which grew up in the early church about how this ancient creed came into being:

After Pentecost, the apostles knew they would be disbursing into all the world. The story says,

“As they were therefore on the point of taking leave of each other, they first settled on an agreed norm for their future preaching…”

And the way they did this, the story says, was that they gathered together and each of the twelve contributed one clause that they felt just had to be included. The result was the Apostles Creed.

I told you that I could so easily imagine Peter insisting that “forgiveness” be one of the foundations of the Creed, or Doubting Thomas demanding that Jesus’ resurrection not be left out.

So as we come to the end of the Apostles Creed, I tried to imagine them figuring out how to end it. “We’ve already got Jesus resurrection in here,” they might have argued. “But how about ours? And how about ending on our hope for the future?”

And so the creed says “I believe…in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Amen.

One of the great things about having kids grow up in your house is…it affects the kind of entertainment you get. I laughed when I looked at the movies we own the other day. We’re pretty short on thought-provoking, intellectually stimulating documentaries. We’re pretty long on things like Aladdin,Thirteen Going on Thirty or Michael Jordan Slam Dunk Highlights.

Another title on our shelf is a kids movie from a while ago called “Little Big League.” It’s a story about a boy named Billy Heywood who is eleven years old when his grandfather (Jason Robards) passes away. His grandpa owned the Minnesota Twins, as in the major league baseball team. Anyway, at the beginning of the movie Billy and his mom end up in an attorney’s office to hear Grandpa’s will read, but instead the attorney puts in a video tape.

Grandpa had made the video some time before he died, so his face and voice appear on the TV, and he greets them and tells them a few details and then says “Billy…I’m leaving you the Twins.” Billy, of course, can’t believe it. What has he done to deserve this? He has just inherited the Minnesota Twins. It’s a staggering, unexpected thing!

Imagine finding out that your inheritance is something so large as to stagger the mind, something you couldn’t even really imagine. In our passage, Peter talks about our inheritance. I wonder if our minds and ears can grasp something so large.

Peter tells us that through the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have an inheritance that is “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for us.” He is protecting us “for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” And “You are receiving…the salvation of your souls.” Our inheritance, in the end.

The Apostles Creed, after telling us so many other things, finally tells us about the end. “I believe…in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Two short phrases to clarify all the imaginative possibilities about death, (something which we will all encounter)… and beyond.

Scripture talks about at least two things that happen upon death. First it seems that we are immediately received into Christ’s presence in some way. Jesus promised the thief on the cross “Today you will be with me in paradise.” But second, we will experience the resurrection of the body. We will somehow be transformed. We will be resurrected.

Now, this is different than a philosophical belief in the immortality of the soul. What the Greeks of old believed was that the soul was the only thing that mattered…the body was useless, just a cage that held us for awhile. Many of us probably believe that without thinking about it.

This can lead to a couple of problems.

• First, it makes us look past the needs of human beings right around us, instead of striving to compassionately care for people, because if the body doesn’t matter or even is evil, we can just ignore it.
• Second, it leads us to think of a kind of afterlife where our soul is released from the body at death, and flies up to be absorbed into the great oneness of God, almost as though the person we are just sort of vaporizes away.

When the creed says, “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” it is remembering that we are actually unique, whole people. That is the way God designed us, body and soul together. That’s who we are. And the Apostle Paul says most emphatically that because we get to share in Christ’s resurrection, we will receive resurrection bodies. They will be different than what we now have, but they will be us, in fact perhaps making us most fully into the people God intended in the first place.

This earthly body dies, but just as a huge plant grows from a seed which bears little resemblance to it yet is a part of it, so will we receive what Paul calls “spiritual bodies.” “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.” And what this means is that we get to enjoy God. Not become part of some floating cosmic mist, but WE get to enjoy God.

The resurrection of the body is also not reincarnation, the idea that upon death we are reborn to live again and again and again. Many people would actually call that hell, not heaven! No, we die just one time, and because of Christ Jesus, we are raised to be with God. That is one piece of our inheritance.

The other piece is “life everlasting,” or we might say “eternal life.” Again, we do not become part of some cosmic soup, but we are given life in all its fullness, all its richness, with God. Eternal life is not endless existence, but life abundant in Christ, which we have the great privilege of beginning now, here, on earth.

We get to enjoy part of our inheritance now. We can love, risk, feed the hungry, care for the poor, welcome the stranger now…because we need not fear the end. We will be with our Lord. We have his assurance that the end of life on earth is not the end of the story. There’s a place for us in heaven, with Him. We will be with God, and that will last and last.

In a couple of weeks, the film version of the first book of the Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis will be out. In the final book of the series, The Last Battle, the English schoolchildren who have been the main characters are caught in a train wreck, and find themselves in heaven, and in the presence of Aslan, the Great Jesus-like Lion. Aslan says,

“You are – as you used to call it in the Shadow-lands—dead. The [school] term is over; the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning.”

Then the narrator ends the seven books with this:

“As He spoke, [Aslan] no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can say that they lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read; which goes on for ever; in which ever chapter is better than the one before.

The Creed started with a statement of our faith in God…I believe in God. It ends with our hope that we will one day get to stand in the presence of that God. The inheritance is laid out before you. In Christ, it is bigger than we could ever have imagined.

Let’s together confess our faith in Christ using the Apostles’ Creed.