Dream Awakener

Donald Miller in his book Searching For God Knows What writes: “I have on my desktop a picture of a boy named Sasha. Sasha is one of the children of Chernobyl, a young boy born after the disaster that happened when the core at a nuclear facility in Russia melted and leaked. This little boy, Sasha, is perhaps 5-years-old, and he is gripping, with a tiny arm, the side of a crib. His other hand is flailing upward toward his ear, his head and shoulders the only portion of his body not mutated. On the right side of Sasha’s chest rises a lump the size of a softball, and his belly grows out disfigured before him as though he were pregnant, a truly painful sight.

His legs are oversized and blocky, and he has no knees, only rounded flesh flowing awkwardly to his oversized feet, which produce four toes each, the largest of which, as big as my fist, is distanced from the others and pointing itself in an opposite direction. From the bottom of his stomach protrudes a rounded flow of flesh as though it were a separate limb, stopped in half growth. Sasha, the article in which I found the picture states, is in constant pain, lives in constant pain.

As terrible as it is to compare Sasha to ourselves, I have to go there. I have to say that you and I were not supposed to be this way. As creatures in need of somebody outside of ourselves to name us, as creatures incomplete outside the companionship of God, our souls are born distorted, I am convinced of it. I am convinced that Moses was right, that his explanation was greater than Freud’s or Maslow’s or Pavlov’s.

I believe, without question, that none of us are happy in the way we were supposed to be happy. I believe that nobody on this planet is so secure, so confident in their state that they feel the way Adam and Eve felt in the Garden before they knew they were naked. I believe we are in the wreckage of a war, a kind of Hiroshima, a kind of Mount Saint Helens, with souls distorted like the children of Chernobyl. As terrible as it is to think about these things, as ugly as it is to face them, I have to see the world this way in order for it to make sense. I have to believe something happened, and we are walking around holding our wounds.”

And of course something happened, we all experience the effects of the Fall everyday, and we experience it in all of our relationships – our relationship with God, with each other and with creation. 

I was reading this past week about a married couple that had a quarrel and ended up giving each other the silent treatment. (Anybody ever do that?) A week into their mute argument, the man realized he needed his wife’s help. In order to catch a flight to Chicago for a business meeting, he had to get up at 5 a.m.

Not wanting to be the first to break the silence, he wrote on a piece of paper, "Please wake me at 5 a.m."

The next morning the man woke up only to discover his wife was already out of bed, it was 9 a.m., and his flight had long since departed. He was about to find his wife and demand an answer for her failings when he noticed a piece of paper by the bed.

He read, "It’s 5 a.m. Wake up."

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
Why is it so hard to get along sometimes?  Why do we find it hard to communicate honestly with each other?  Why do we sometimes lack the ability to work through our hurts and conflict in a God honoring way? 

CHURCH AS A FORETASTE
One of my biggest prayers for our congregation here in Hollywood and West LA is that we would be communities of faith where people get a taste of the future right now here in the present. 

Let me explain what I mean.  Leslie Newbigin one day was explaining to a class at Selly Oaks College about the Greek word “Arrabon”. He talked about how this is a word that we find mentioned in the New Testament, but has puzzled many scholars because it is not a classical Greek word.  And then they dug up a lot of parchments in the sands of Egypt and found that they were shopkeepers’ accounts and that “arrabon” was just the word that all the shopkeepers would use for cash on deposit, the cash that people would pay as a down payment for something they were going to purchase. 

As Newbigin was explaining this to a students at this college, one of the students who was from Egypt stood up at this point in the lecture as said, “We still use the same word in Cairo today.”  Apparently the Arabic word arbon is still being used today.  If you want to buy a suit in Cairo where you choose the material and style and have the tailor make it by hand, the tailor will ask you to put down some cash, spendable cash, not just an IOU.  Its cash he can go and have a drink with that day.  The point of that cash, “arbon”, is that it is a pledge that the full bill is going to be paid.  And this is the word that Paul uses over and over again for the Holy Spirit.

It would be like if you were going to a wedding, and you know how after the wedding and before the reception, typically the groom and bride take a lot of their pictures, together with all of the family.  And during this time, everybody else is kind of waiting at the reception for the wedding party to arrive, so that the celebration can begin.  Have you ever been at the reception, and you are waiting and waiting, and because you hadn’t eaten anything you start getting really hungry and thirsty.  Then finally you see some of the waiters and waitresses bringing out some glasses as well as some appetizers, and as you are eating the appetizers, you know that it won’t be long before the wedding party arrives and you will be sitting down to pig out. 

Well, the Holy Spirit is the appetizer for the messianic banquet.  The Holy Spirit has been given to the church so that we can enjoy the future in the present.  We haven’t just been given an IOU or a promisary note, but we have been given a foretaste, that assures us of a greater reality still to come.  In other words, the church is to be a community of people where the future can be experienced in the present by the power of the Holy Spirit. The church as a foretaste demonstrates what life is like under the rule and reign of god.  It anticipates the fullness of the Kingdom by daring to live the future now.

And Newbigin says, “The church is only true to its calling when it is a sign, and instrument, and a foretaste of the kingdom.”  The community that has learned to love one another, build one another up, admonish one another, encourage one another, forgive on another, live in harmony with one another, honor one another and be at peace with one another -  becomes a community where the promised fulfillment of creation is visible, tangible and experienced, even though not yet perfected.  That community becomes a theological experience, a foretaste of the coming reign of God. One of my biggest prayers for our congregations is that we would allow the Holy Spirit to have his way in our lives, so that we might taste the future in the present, and as a result we also become a people in which others can experience the reality of God.

In order to be a community that is a foretaste of the kingdom, we need to be a people who embody forgiveness, we need to be a people who embody the ministry of reconciliation, we need to be a people who are committed to resolving conflicts in a God honoring way.  Do you remember what Paul wrote in his second letter to the Corinthians? (II Corinthians 5:17-21)  Look at what he says -

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come:  The old has gone the new is here!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.  We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Notice what Paul says here, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come!  In other words, as a community of people in Christ, we are a foretaste of the new creation. God through Christ has done what the world has not been able to do; God has reversed the course that the world was on, by reconciling the world to Himself, and now it is our calling to embody the ministry of reconciliation.  We are called to represent the reality of God’s kingdom to this world by living lives where we are reconciled to God, reconciled to each other and reconciled to all of creation.  We are called to embody the ministry of reconciliation so that the message that has been entrusted to us is faithfully delivered to the world.