Phillippians

Okay, let's have our check-in on Philippians.

What Philippians is doing for you or challenging you or how you see this as different from what we've been doing.

It's a terrible question, but it's meant to be very open-ended.

Well, what's your reaction to Philippians?

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Paul was your uh stronger than I think I would be able to do it.

He has a belief I think that suffering is a good thing and make you appreciate it in life.

And by his suffering, he taught other people.

Yeah, and the prison's uh he was there to teach them so that he could be in doing what he thought was the thing to do, even though he was being persecuted.

And you think that makes him different or better than you?

I think it makes him stronger.

I don't know if I could be uh the same.

I would probably try, but he raised children.

Yeah, how is it different?

Give up my life for my kids.

I think it's really important that sometimes we hear things like suffer for the gospel and and and what our our heads do, depending on how we were trained, is that when you suffer or hurt, that pleases God somehow because it proves you're willing to put up with pain.

But I want to fix that if I can, because if you if you go there, then suffering is inherently good.

And I think the image Paul tries to give us, which is why I came back to children, is suffering that results in other people having more life, which is really about life sharing, and then you have to decide whether that's suffering or not, uh, is really what Paul's talking about.

So he didn't get beaten up physically to make God happy or to prove some kind of point about the point at strength of his conviction.

He suffered physical beatings as a way of sharing life with other people.

Just like Martin Luther King Jr.

on the march from Selma to Birmingham suffered physical beatings as a way of sharing life.

So I think sometimes the thing we make the disconnect with in our faith is suffering is not inherently good.

Suffering that produces life is about sharing love, which I think he was trying to say in vulnerability.

And then sometimes, like as a parent, would you say, Did you suffer changing diapers?

And in the moment you might have said yes.

But looking backward, you would say, No, of course not.

That's what good parents do.

And this is why I think Paul is able to say, all this stuff I did for you.

So you can call it suffering if you want, but I was glad to give you extra life.

In the moment, it's hard, but retrospectively, not a doubt in my mind about doing that.

So I don't know if that makes him a better person or not.

I just think sometimes we we take words like this and we act as though they're completely different from what we're doing when in fact there's a lot of congruence.

And the question is, can we extend that natural care we give other people, that life sharing beyond immediate family members?

And in the moment it hurts, but the question is, does it give more life?

I think.

And and in that sense, you're able to go from suffering to rejoicing.

And I know this is really funny, but having raised kids, um, boy, there were moments where I just did not want to clean those diapers up.

But but I will tell you, I'm super grateful that I had that experience attending to my kids' most basic needs.

I would not trade it.

Now, when other people say, Do you want to hold my baby?

Absolutely not.

I don't need to hold your baby.

Like, that's cute.

You hold it, you change it.

But for my kid, with whom I have an attachment and want a relationship, boy, there was no hurdle to that.

It was please let me do it, no matter how bad it smells, or if I get peed on while I'm doing it, to be there for my kid.

Again, I I it's not suffering retrospectively.

It's not.

It was joyfully given.

I don't know if that makes sense.

And if you haven't had kids, that's okay.

We've all served people in different ways.

Whether it was at work with a difficult client, and boy, it was like, oh, in the moment I wish my I wish it just sort of go away, but you push through that, and later you're like, well, I'm really grateful for who I was in that moment.

And I think that's what Paul's trying to get us to think about.

And and this is the word he uses, believe.

It's the the word believe is really maybe a better understanding of like we trust this is going somewhere.

Even though we don't always feel like it.

And I think that's really, really important.

I can't make myself feel any particular way.

Like I can want to love somebody in my feelings and it never works out, but I sure can prove that I trust by the way I treat that person.

And and I think that would be true for Paul.

I mean, look, if he loved everybody really and it was easy, he's different from me.

Oh.

Any of these um disciples married?

So definitely Peter was married, we know, because Jesus heals his mother-in-law.

Right?

That shows up in the gospel.

Paul, we don't know.

Uh there's a lot of conjecture.

He says, I wish everybody would be like me, and maybe he's celibate, or maybe his wife died.

I mean, we just don't know.

It would have been very abnormal for him not to be married.

Yeah.

Where were these spouses?

Were they home, they weren't out hiking around with the other?

Well, it's hard to know because being itinerant would be, I mean, very non-traditional.

Yeah.

It would really upset family life.

So, like in Peter's case, did he have kids?

We don't know.

Did his wife stay home?

Now, Peter didn't like roam all around for a long time.

I mean, he came back to bed almost every night.

So when you hear that they went to Caesarea and then they went to the Galilee, all that stuff's really close.

And we don't realize that it's really close.

Um I guess that's just another picture we get.

It's not.

And so Paul, we don't know.

He went back to Antioch for like 10 years.

He could have been married, could have been married, but then he goes on these missionary journeys and comes back.

That would have been very abnormal.

But possible he comes back.

I mean, again, we don't know.

He never mentions kids, he never mentions a wife, but that doesn't mean he didn't have them.

There's even been conjecture about Jesus, right?

When you when you hear like that Da Vinci Code stuff, and and again, well, people say, well, it never mentions Jesus' wife, but it never not mentions Jesus' wife, and the norm of the day was you were married.

Now, look, this I think actually is one of those great hypothetical questions when we talk about the diagram on the board.

It's really important.

If Jesus had a child or had a wife, would that child or wife be any different from the rest of us?

Well, a lot of people would say since Jesus was divine and human, his child would be like some kind of demigod.

But I want you to think through that, right?

How present is God in the table?

Oh, I don't know.

50% present or completely present?

I mean it.

I'm just thinking logically.

Is God everywhere all the time?

So is God omnipresent?

That's the question.

If that's true, then there's nowhere God can't be.

Right?

This is one of the biggest problems with hell is separation from God.

It can't be true.

Because if that's true, then there is somewhere God does not exist.

So that doesn't work.

If God is present everywhere, can God be more present in one place than another?

No.

I mean, that's a logical contradiction to say yes.

Presence has to be equally distributed.

Which would mean God is as present in the table as God is in my body.

If I were to say otherwise, then that kind of distorts the whole idea about God being everywhere all the time.

So here's the real tough one.

Is God more present in Jesus than God is in you?

Or is the difference that Jesus was aware of God's presence in ways that we're not?

That sounds really, really, what do I want to say?

Um heterodox.

But it's a logical proposition.

I just don't think it's almost logical.

It doesn't always have to be logical.

It doesn't have to be logical.

But I think logic can guide us to some really important things.

And I and I think the reason why that's so important is in the diagram he showed you, he left down another diagram, which is a three-tiered universe.

God comes down, and then at the name of Jesus, every knee on earth and under the earth.

Did you notice that?

Yes.

Are there any knees under the earth in your brain?

No way.

But they sure believe the knees under the earth.

That's Sheol.

That's all the dead stuff.

And all the knees above the earth.

Those are like the heavenly beings.

In that three-tiered universe, everything is oriented towards God.

So in some ways, what you hear is Jesus is not just in heaven and not just on earth.

Jesus ends up in the grave.

In Sheol.

And that's what faith says, right?

When Jesus dies, he goes to the place of the dead, which means God goes to the place of the dead.

So again, there's nowhere God isn't.

Was God more present in heaven than in Jesus?

Well, we have to say no, right?

Otherwise, only part of God understood suffering and death.

And which parts?

Well, maybe not the important parts.

These are the kinds of things Christians have bickered over for a long, long time.

And by the way, this is why Muslims and Christians can't get along, because Muslims say God cannot suffer.

Cannot.

God is too big to suffer.

And the Christian message is God's business is shown in suffering.

Now, I didn't mean to say Muslims are wrong.

What I mean to say is this is where the tension between Jesus and Christianity and Islam really is.

Christians say Jesus suffers.

Most Christians would say he didn't really suffer, it just looked like it, which is number one heresy in the church.

And why he suffered is another thing.

Did he suffer because God delights in pain, or did he share his life so we could have more?

This is how these these are important questions that we get at in Philippians that I think get at the core of whether we can rejoice or not.

So because we're here and we have this white frontal, it shows a pelican and her little babies.

And I don't know if you know this, the most visible symbol in Elizabethan England.

Like you can, if you go to England and go through churches and you see the pelican and the little chicks, you know that was built right around the time of Queen Elizabeth.

Because they thought that during a time of famine, a mother pelican would prick her chest and feed her blood to her chicks so that they wouldn't die.

And it's called a pelican in her piety.

It's a very, very strong image in Elizabethan England.

And we have it here because we had pelicans in the bed.

What's great about the image is the mother does not kill herself.

If she did, she would kill her babies.

What the mother does is shares her blood, which is a biblical symbol for life, with people who need life so that they can grow.

Sometimes church talks about sacrifice equals death and sacrifice equals pain, but this is a correct thing to say sacrifice is about sharing life with other people so they have more.

If I have a dinner at my home and invite guests, it's a sacrifice.

Oh my god, it's too easy.

No, it's not.

Sharing life with other people is sacrifice.

Whether it's enduring beatings or enduring somebody's grumpiness or saying hello to somebody when we walk on the street, you share life.

That is a way of making something sacred.

Makes us easier to understand.

Well, I hope it makes it easier to relate to and hopefully it closes some of the gap between us and faithfulness and between us and God, because I think in general, the church I grew up in taught me there's just such a huge gap between God.

It's so big, and all these heroes were such a great people, and you can never be like them.

Well then what's the point?

If I can never be like them, what do they have to say for my life except for how bad it is?

On the other hand, if I can learn from them and emulate them in my own way, then the scriptures are actually trying to inform me.

I was a little bit strong, sorry.

I do want you to know the hymn he diagrammed is something that scholars would tell you almost unequivocally is the oldest part of the New Testament.

So it's older than the letter to the Thessalonians.

He's quoting a hymn.

We've lost the tune to the hymn, but we've got the script.

Christ being in the form of God, form.

And this is the word that informs the Nicene Creed.

Um, so I'll just give you this fun little bit.

The word in Greek is homooousia.

Homo means the same.

In Latin, you know it's different.

Like a homo sapien, that's a Latin word, not a Greek word.

So homo and Greek means same, like homogenous is the same all throughout.

And oozeia is the same form, and that's like a tricky word because in Platonic thought, form starts with a capital F.

The forms, if you know, remember Plato, Plato said all the Greek gods, that's all cogwash, because Greek gods are worse than human beings.

He said instead the way the world works is like this.

There are these um, he always talks about horses, but it's better to talk about dogs, because there's two dogs in the room, and they look different, but they both have the form of dogness.

Curiously enough, the Great Dane and the Chihuahua have the same form, even though it's expressed dramatically different.

So, really, the the forms are sort of like the archetypes from which they come.

That's a really good one to go back to as well.

The archetypes come actually from the virtues, and uh Greek virtues are different from Christian virtues, that's good to know.

And the virtues come from the logos, which we hear in John, that in the beginning the logos became flesh and dwelt among us.

The logos from whom the virtues and the forms emanate became flesh.

So, form is this interesting thing.

It's like the archetype, but it's also like the chemical formula.

So, if I were to tell you that this is the chemical formula for God, Jesus had the same chemical formula as God.

That's what the hymn is saying.

They're the same in element, like substance.

This is what shows up in the creed.

God from God, light from light, true God from true God begotten, not made.

This is what informs that homoousius.

And yet did not consider equality with God, and it depends on your translation.

The one I memorized was grasped, but I think exploited is actually probably the better word.

So even though Jesus was the same in form as God, had the same chemical formula, he didn't exploit his power or godliness, but he did this instead.

This is one of those um big Greek words.

You know, we have this other one here.

I actually saw a commercial in the Super Bowl about this.

It was, I mean, a great commercial was wrong.

Um it's a I mean, whatever.

Anyway, like you learned agape love is better than these other kinds of love, and it's not.

These are different ways of describing love, they're not either or bits, right?

I mean, honestly, by the way, this isn't this is brotherly love.

The Super Bowl commercial got it wrong.

It said it's love between friends.

No, Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love, this kind.

The love I have for my brother is also of that kind.

It's also that.

But love between brothers is a little different between love between intimate equals.

Which is erotic love.

By the way, erotic love isn't just sensual, it's about intimacy.

There's no way you can have unconditional love without having some erotic notions to it.

Erotic doesn't mean you have sexual intercourse, it means intimacy.

So I would tell you that if you have this for your spouse and you don't have that, it's time to go to marriage counseling.

I I mean it.

These again are just meant to point us to the ways in which we experience the forms.

So love shows up in these expressions, but they all have the form of love.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

Just like the Chihuahua and the Great Dane are expressions of the form.

This word is like one of these words in the New Testament, it's sort of big, and it means essentially self-emptying.

Self-emptying doesn't mean you make yourself nothing.

What it means is you take the blood, the life that is within you, and you make it available to other people.

When Jesus empties himself, he doesn't make himself nothing.

He makes himself and his life utterly available.

What's really important is God doesn't empty him, his church doesn't empty him, his spouse doesn't empty him, he empties himself.

And this is actually one of the biggest problems in the way we do it is that, and I'm talking mostly to a group of women, church has made women empty themselves instead of women having the option to empty themselves.

Oh, well, we had the choice.

Well, no, you didn't because you were told you had to do it.

You're told you had to do it.

And this is really important in gender studies.

I hope you understand what I'm saying already, right?

It's one thing to choose, and it's another to do it.

So, what do I mean?

There's women, and you can see this, it still happens today, hopefully, we pray to God, less than it happened 40 years ago, whose husband abuses them and they go to their pastor, and the pastor says, Go back and suffer for the Lord.

That's not self emptying.

That is not self emptying, that's not what Jesus did, and that's not what he wants us to do.

Self-emptying is when a woman knows she has choices that she can make and she says, I'm willing to give him another chance because I don't have to.

Now, if a woman has no options, she can't empty herself.

If a woman can't get alimony or childcare, she cannot empty herself.

Does this make sense what I'm saying?

Same with men.

If there's no alimony or child care or refuge place, you can't leave an abusive relationship.

You have nowhere to go, and therefore you don't have a viable choice.

We sometimes say, oh, she can leave whenever she wants to.

Again, if a woman has nowhere to go and no education and no resume and no parents who will take her in, she can't choose that.

I hope that's helpful to hear.

That's all bound up in this hymn.

Christ didn't have to, he picked to.

And therefore, God gave him the name that's above every name.

And you know what that name is, right?

It's not Jesus.

The name Jesus gets, and this comes right back to this, they're of the same form.

The name Jesus gets is God's personal name.

This is an early way of saying if A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C.

God equals Jesus, Jesus equals God, so they become now interchangeable.

You're not supposed to say, but you can say Jesus.

Although, truly, since they're equivalent, I hope you understand what I'm saying.

This is part of the reason why Christians use the word Jesus because earliest Jewish people could not pray to God's holy name.

Could not.

But they could say Jesus.

It's good to know.

But this part right here is the in God's name.

And then this just means salvation.

So Jesus and Joshua are the same name in Hebrew.

Absolutely the same.

Some people refer to Yeshua Hamashiach.

To what?

Hamashiach.

Yes, I'm going to tell you what that means.

So in Greek, the word we get is Christ being in the same form of God.

Christ means anointed one.

In Greek, which in Hebrew is the word Mashiach.

So Christ and Messiah are the same word.

By the way, when people say let's keep Christ in Christmas, he's right there.

That's the Greek letter chi and it stands for Christ.

It's just a shorthand way of writing it.

It's not exmas, it's Christmas.

What is the Baptist outlook on whether Christ is God?

Whether Jesus is God.

Is it the same as Christmas?

Yeah, all creedal churches, Protestant or Catholic, say Jesus equals God.

I have a friend who's Baptist who says that Jesus was not God.

You know, here's the great thing about the Baptist Church, really, it's changed.

But the Baptist Church is not a creedal church.

So no Baptist church is going to say the Nicene Creed.

It's changed, though, that if you want to be a Southern Baptist church, you have to have a particular statement of faith.

And if your church doesn't have it, you can't be a Southern Baptist.

You just have to be your own.

So it's possible she got that from I'm thinking she misunderstood.

I'm pretty sure she misunderstood.

That's what I was saying.

Yeah, in fact, I mean again, having grown up with a good tradition of Baptist life, we didn't pray to anybody but Jesus.

And part of it is because of this hymn.

And part of it is, I would tell you, most nobody knows that God has a personal name like you do.

Christians just have no understanding of that.

We think God's name is God in the Bible.

And this is very different.

Also, Muslims have no name for God.

God is so big, God can't have a name.

Allah means God.

Hebrew has a word for God, but Hebrews have a name for God too.

God is like what you said, he's too big.

When I pray, I pray to Jesus, but that's because I relate more to someone who was once human, I guess.

Very fair.

And I'd say if you read the book The Shack, that's part of the discussion as well, because we're able to come up with an image in human likeness.

Whereas, what on earth does the Holy Spirit look like?

In Istanbul, the most famous image is like a tornado.

That's just kind of hard to contebilize sending my prayer to a tornado.

Okay, so self-emptying is this is this big deal we get in the hymn, and then we hear that every knee shall bow, Jesus gets the same name, and every mouth proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

So to hear that Jesus is Lord is another play on words.

Jesus is capital Lord, which is the name for God in Hebrew.

Greek, you can't do this in Greek.

It doesn't work.

John is the only gospel that really tries to do it.

People come to get Jesus and they say, Are you Jesus of Nazareth?

And he says, I am, and they all fall back.

That's the only gospel where that happens.

In Greek, that's ego in me, which is I I am I am.

Sort of how it works, right?

But God's name doesn't translate into Greek.

Because it doesn't sound like ego in me.

It sounds like you just can't make that noise in Greek.

You just can't do it.

But it means that.

So this sets the tone for the letter, is what the guy was saying, is it's really about us choosing to make our lives available.

And when we make that choice, instead of when we're forced, we're able to rejoice in what we've picked.

When we're forced, resentment and bitterness naturally will come.

You can't rejoice when you're bitter.

You had no choice.

When you choose, you can.

And this is one of those interesting things.

Sometimes it's sort of like, God, you know what?

I've got to have this night meeting, and I've got to go to Waco on Thursday.

And it's another thing to say, I picked this life.

I picked it.

Sometimes the peculiar the particulars bother me, but I chose this.

And so I can rejoice in my choice.

And if I can't, I can make a different one.

Another way to say this is that if you're on a cross suffering for somebody and nobody's getting life out of it, get down.

Because we all know people who like to be on crosses and be self-righteous and martyrdom, and nobody gets life out of it.

Now I can't help tell you one more story about this if you don't mind.

And if you've been here on Palm Sunday, you've already heard it.

But this is one of my few stories that I'll tell because here's the word kenosis in Greek.

It looks like that.

And this is my fishing story.

So uh I would tell you a fishing story really fast because for me it was really, really helpful.

Um I lived in Alaska for uh three months, and um I lived with a guy who took me, not just fishing, but catching.

And there's something really, really amazing about catching a salmon at 3 a.m.

and being able to see the lure hit it in the mouth, which is what you can do in the summer, right?

So, you know, salmon are born in fresh water in really small pools, uh, and they're born, they an adult salmon lays like 3,000 eggs, and sure enough, within a year they're the size of your finger, and there's about 167 left.

So think about the attrition there.

When they get to be the size of your finger, something kind of clicks in them, and and scientists haven't really figured out the mechanism.

Let's just call it a call happens, and they hop out of the fresh water and get into those waters, those rivers that are crystal clear, and they swim downstream into the ocean.

Um during the swim, by the time they get to the bay, they're the size of your hand, and uh 26 of them make it into the ocean sustainably.

Because when they hit that salt water, they have to change literally the way they breathe.

A lot of them go belly up, gasping for some kind of air.

Birds grab them, other fish grab them.

26.

Then they start this swim in the Pacific Ocean, and all the salmon in Alaska swim by really close actually to Japan.

They'll swim about 24,000 miles within two or three years.

And um, they get to be, some of them will get to be 90 pounds, so they can be really, really big.

And then one day the same mechanism that sent them out of the fresh water clicks and they come back.

And they can sniff out, and nobody knows how they do this either.

Exactly the same river they swam down, even though like the mineral content can differ by like one or two parts per per billion.

So how they find that it's just you know hard to know.

This time they have to swim up against the waters that carried them, and you've seen these almost it's all inspiring.

Almost supernatural to be able to swim up a waterfall.

Absolutely.

And uh this time they're big and they're strong with the ultimate swimming machine, right?

And uh this time they won't make the conversion, they can't go from the salt water to the fresh water, so they cover themselves with slime and they don't eat, like they know they're dying.

Uh they start swimming, and as they go, they burn their fat, and there's people trying to catch them.

Like you can see bears up there eating them.

There's combat fishermen shoulder to shoulder trying to snare them.

And believe me, you can catch if you know what you're doing.

Um, up they go, and um, while they're swimming against the waters that carry them down so easily, since they're going to die, they go through this huge change.

All of the red pigment, all of the fat, goes from inside to the out.

So the meat goes white, the skin turns fire engine red.

They grow a really big hump on the back of their neck, their face turns green, and their jaws get really long and hooked, and they grow these spiny teeth that are like two inches long, razor sharp.

Three of them make it back to the pool they were spawned from.

They lay their eggs and they and they die.

That's it.

So Jesus was born in one of these little pools.

Nazareth is a village of like a hundred people.

He grew up watching what everybody does.

His culture raised him and carried him.

He swam in the big waters of whatever his dad did, a day laborer, carpenter, whatever you call it.

And then one day, a switch flicked, he started swimming against the waters that grew him by saying, Hey, God didn't make um humans for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for humans.

He touched lepers.

He said things like, Love your neighbor as yourself, right?

Which, by the way, that wasn't new.

He just reminded people of that.

In Holy Week, the Pharisees, the Sadducees try to hook him.

The bear of the Roman Empire tries to gobble him up.

He makes it back, and a small group of disciples start their own swim, right?

The thing that's different about Jesus is on his swim back upstream, he doesn't change.

So it's very natural swimming against the currents that carry you to get a hump on your back, to grow teeth, to change your colors, because after all, when you're trying to do the right thing, why are people making it so hard?

Very natural to get a self-righteous hump of indignation.

Very natural to get teeth that bite at people that are making this really good swim positive.

Jesus didn't change his colors.

And in that way, he's supernatural because he empties himself.

And I would tell you I think that's the gospel in a nutshell.

Is that we swim against the currents that raised us that are wrong while emptying ourselves enough to take care of the people that are making it hard.

That's in the letter.

And if that's our mindset, we're able to rejoice instead of becoming self-righteous.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Okay, I talked a lot, sorry, about that hymn and about our trust.

What else was in the letter for you guys?

When I was reading them at the end, I thought, wouldn't it be nice to have access to all those letters that have disappeared that you've never seen?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What was a note?

I would tell you, I if it's okay to say, I mean, I think that's a really interesting question, not just what's lost, but what's yet to be written?

So the tagline of the United Church of Christ is that God is still speaking?

And surely we believe that's true.

So what letters are we yet to write?

It may not be that they make it into this book, but I don't think they need to.

But I think the question is, how are we going to write God's voice to people at a time in which they need to hear it?

And in what ways would we do so?

Like the saints of it.

You know, they're still writing.

Sometimes I have trouble distinguishing saints from the sinners.

I mean, I know we're all the sinners, and I know I'm not one of the saints.

No, no, you but that's not right.

Biblically, that's not right.

Biblically, you are one of the saints.

We're saints in the moments we point to God.

And who in their life does not have a moment?

Because just by your very being, you point to God.

I mean, I'm pretty sure that's right.

Even if I can't find anything, since God is everywhere, God's in you, which means you point to God one way or another.

I mean, I'm I'm convinced that's the New Testament vision.

I think I'm one of those saints.

It's like the grocery cart that has the wonky wheel.

God keeps yanking me back.

I think that's okay because we we, you know, and this I think is really, really important.

Martin Luther King Jr.

has showed up in the book Holy Women, Holy Men, which we've tried to include modern saints.

He's not canonized by the Catholic Church.

The Episcopal Church doesn't canonize saints.

We don't do that.

Um but he was a philanderer.

I mean, he was absolutely awful to women.

Don't do that.

But boy, he did some other amazing and inspiring things.

And I think that's just a great reminder what sainthood is.

It doesn't mean that you're perfect, it means you point people to God in meaningful ways.

And if they weren't, there's no hope for us.

You know, because they can't do anything for us.

It's important just to say up front, when we read Galatians, Paul uses profanity.

Like, does he say heck and golly?

No.

Like, no.

And in the Baptist church I grew up in, you weren't allowed to use those words.

But they're in the Bible, they're not in your translation because, well, you wouldn't want children reading that in the Bible, would you?

I don't know if I would want them reading that, but I think it's important to know as adults, like Paul uses that stuff.

So is it right or wrong?

And it probably depends who you're talking to and when.

The first time I read the Old Testament wasn't as an adult, because in the Catholic Church they tell you stories, but you're not, you don't read it yourself.

And the first time I read the Old Testament, I remember thinking, you know, nothing's changed.

I mean, they're doing the same stuff back thing that's going on today.

It's not anything new.

Yeah, I think that's really helpful, particularly as we look at like, sorry, I don't want to be controversial, but like modern political rhetoric, to say like that something new is not right.

There's nothing new about this.

And um, sometimes we say, oh, like it's so bad, and and and then there's this really question, are we just finally making public what's always been private?

And is that good or bad?

I don't know, it's it's something, but there's nothing new to it, right?

These really great kings like David are loathsome.

I mean, loathsome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why did they throw in Acts 1600?

So that you can read according to Luke, like how it is that Paul came to Philippi, and you can just have that frame in your head.

How we ended up in jail.

How we ended it up in jail.

Yeah.

Because this this girl who was a fortune teller lost her ability to perceive people.

But I guess my question has to do with the Jesus left the uh disciples with Holy Spirit.

That's different from the spirit this girl had.

Yeah, she's got an unclean spirit, and but I think that's really helpful, by the way.

Notice Paul does not drive the spirit out because he initially is overflowing with compassion.

He just finds her annoying.

I don't know how I'm doing that.

Okay.

And that's a really good thing to remember that we don't always have to have the right motive to do the right thing.

The right thing we'll do, whatever we bring to the situation.

So, did they not have the Holy Spirit before Jesus left it with them?

It's a really great question, and the church of my youth sure said no.

Although I would tell you, like when you read the Psalms, cast me out away from your presence, O Lord, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.

Um, I don't know.

I mean, remember that the Holy Spirit decoded, spirit means moving air.

And usually it means breath.

And holy doesn't mean piety, it means something that's like special or set apart.

So don't take an extraordinary way of breathing away from me.

How would you know if you're enapted with the Holy Spirit as opposed to another?

Well, I think that's a great question.

So, one way that our Pentecostal brothers and sisters say is that you speak in tongues or you like to faith healings because then there's evidence.

How do we know?

Some people say you are overwhelmed with a feeling.

We've only said that for about 250 years because of the movement called Romanticism.

And I would tell you, one of the chief romantics in the modern church was John Wesley.

So he had this idea that personal piety was this dramatic feeling change, and don't just think like I feel nice or I feel happy, but very visceral feeling deep.

But that's only 250 years old.

So people have had a really hard time locating this without things like speaking in tongues.

But I guess the question is.

Is it something that you only get it once in life, or do we breathe in the Holy Spirit every now and again, whether we know it or not?

Or is it with us continuing?

Like faith and love are always in us.

We're not always in faith and love.

So there's moments in which we breathe with God, and there's moments in which, frankly, we just do our own bit, as if we weren't there.

What seems to be ironic to me is this this woman apparently was going around telling people to listen to these guys because they were speaking in behalf of God.

And then they said quit.

That's weird.

Yeah, but I didn't notice he got annoyed.

Yeah, like leaves alone.

Even though I mean it sounded like she was on their side, but it just leaves it like that.

Okay, and then maybe ended up in jail.

Well, I'm I'm puzzled as why would you necessarily do she's trying to do what would appear to be the right thing, although, of course, maybe they attracted the wrong kind of attention because uh that put them in danger because obviously the rest of the world was not all ready to hear about this stuff.

But why does a child fight what the mother tells them to do?

You know, they're she's trying to lead them to being a good human, and they just look at her like you know, you are not gonna make me do that.

And she is a lot.

And a slave.

I feel that it's late doing this on behalf of some of the masters.

Can make money.

So I got a little idea.

On the other hand, it's an excuse for them to put a jail where they have all these other experiences and a lot of interesting things happening.

Right.

I think it's okay to be to find it confusing because it could mean a lot of different things.

It could mean that they finally become annoyed, they realize that there is something, instead of like a holy breath, there's there's something like disturbing, and they're able to do something about it, and they initially don't notice that, or that they can do something and finally they do.

It could be that they just again just become annoyed, like a kid going, like, I am so great, I am so great, I am so great, stop! It could be that.

And it to be honest, either one can take us to a life-giving place because I will say sometimes in justice, we don't do anything about it until we somehow become annoyed with it.

And it also does it indicate that anybody can cast out spirits using the name of Jesus Christ?

Uh, I think it depends how we read it.

It's it's tough.

I would tell you this.

And maybe I can get you.

You stuck this right in the middle of all this, you know, love and beauty of.

So I grew up hearing that that's possible and that demons possess people, and that you can lose your complete faculties, and demons are these like monstrous entities with wings and they're black and they've got teeth and all that, and then we destroy your soul.

Um, that's one way to read the scriptures.

My good friend Walter Wink would say, like, actually, ancient people didn't think like that at all.

Um, ancient people understood things to be demonic that we don't know how to fix still, like mental illness.

And I would tell you, boy, if I thought exorcism would fix somebody's mental illness, I'd be all over it.

But all the research I've said is that person isn't broken.

This is really tough.

To say that you've got a disease and need to be fixed is the completely wrong approach.

I don't know how to cope with all of that stuff.

I don't, because I've got mental illness myself, apparently.

If you've had more than three depressive incidents in your life, you're mentally ill.

Oh, well no, we just use that term for people who are schizophrenic.

Not anymore.

And what do we do about that?

Like, how do you fix somebody?

You say, well, stop being depressed.

That's part of who they are.

So if you fix them, you've gotten rid of them.

I mean, this is a tough, tough bit.

There is an exorcism right in the Episcopal Church.

This is good to know.

The only one who has it is the bishop.

And just for fun, because confirmation's coming, the bishop rarely does exorcisms.

I would have to say, Bishop, I want your permission to do the exorcism right with such and such a person.

The bishop would have an interview with me about whether I can do that or not.

And from what I understand, there's a process.

Like, I have to do a particular kind of fasting and prayer for a few weeks.

I have to go to confession, and then if I do the right, I have to burn it and bury the stuff I use.

Um, because of the way I grew up, I am not real interested in doing it.

Because the way I grew up was about all this stuff is real and insidious, and I just don't know what I think about it.

I'm not really comfortable messing with that.

If somebody needed me to do it, I would transcend myself.

Nobody's asked me to do it.

Usually people say, hey, there's demons in my house, and I say, How about a house blessing?

Yeah.

But I think that the things I'm more afraid of are things that are called reactive attachment disorder, in which a child who's been neglected as a kid will never be able to trust that the world is good or that they have agency.

And there is no intervention that will change that, that has been discovered.

There's no medicine, there's no therapy.

All we can do is teach kids to like pretend like they believe is okay, but they never will trust or believe it.

So if you adopt an orphan from Romania that's been.

Then you better get ready for hell.

You better get ready for it because it is coming into your home.

Basically, what's going to appear to be a psychopath in your house.

You got it.

And people who say, I was a drug addict and Jesus took all that away, they're lying.

Their brain has permanently changed my addiction.

And every day they have to resist going into the well-marked door that goes down to hell.

This is what all the training agrees with.

That doesn't mean that their life is compromised.

It just means that there's a very well-marked door that says hell is this way, and it's very easy to open that door and go right down the steps.

And sometimes we know not to go down there, and we do because we've been down there.

I hope I'm not misrepresenting psychology here.

No, I don't think it's steps.

I think it's one of those shoots like you see in the screen.

And in fact, maybe there's actually no floor.

You step through the door and then you just fall into it.

Yeah, there's very nothing incremental.

Like you've you've turned the switch actively right back on.

Maybe it's helpful to know that the average alcoholic needs three and a half inpatient rehabs before it works.

And in general, an alcoholic will go to one and fall off the wagon and they say, Well, hell, I'm totally broken because it didn't work.

Because if you have one drink, you failed.

Which sends them back under the bench because the whole thing came from being a failure.

I mean, this is if we could fix that by laying on hands or with an exorcism, I mean, the world would be a different place.

I'd be doing exorcisms every day.

But I can tell you, I don't believe it works like that.

I don't trust it works like that.

I think it takes a ton of work.

A ton of work.

That kind of problem.

And there are people that say full-time industry.

Because other counselors and be surrounded by the people.

And those people will tell you that their success rate, if it's 100%, they're lying.

I mean, there is no 100% success rate there.

There's not.

There used to be in 70.

And really, I think some of those people in there would probably agree that despite these people like doing well, there's something wrong with them.

They've still got problems with the alcoholics.

This is the tough thing about the whole curriculum because if you read the 12 steps, it's really about living, it's not about alcohol abuse.

It's about being wholly present in yourself.

So, really, the steps are designed not for you to talk about how like you've messed your life up, but to talk about your fears and your resentments and how you can move out of those into a place of like health in the world.

And sometimes we think, oh, it's just about alcohol, and really it's about healing, because I would tell you, there's many things that are socially acceptable that show up in the same kind of mental category as alcohol.

Like workaholism, it's the same switch in your brain.

And it's full of fear and resentment and not being present in your life.

But it's socially not just acceptable, but like praiseworthy, like good for you, you got stuff done.

But there's a switch in your brain that says I'm only worth something if I get something done, and that's just a terrible way to live.

We don't have workaholics anonymous, no one takes that seriously.

Some people would say having an eating disorder is like a step down from NAT.

No, it's the same switch in your brain.

It's about how you view and live your life.

Socially acceptable though, because we like skinny people no matter what it takes to get there.

So, hey, if you look skinny, then you're you're praiseworthy even if you're throwing up or if you're an exercise bulimic.

We love exercise bulimia because those people work out, but they are no more present in themselves than an alcoholic because they're always thinking about how they have to contend with being awful.

How we drive that out, I don't know the answer to that, but I do think there is something about a community trying to walk together into wholeness where we say, hey, not that you're broken like irretrievably and no good, but that area is the area in which light can really come out of you and come into you.

I mean, that's the Leonard Cohen song, right?

We all have cracks, it's how the light gets in.

Yeah.

And that comes back to him talking about vulnerability.

Uh I didn't mean to say that, hey, it's okay if you're an alcoholic.

I don't mean it like that.

Uh but that is one of those places in which God's light can really come in through your vulnerability.

Well, uh reading someone's book is like maybe you have to have a broken heart for love to enter.

Maybe I'm not quoting that correctly.

Well, I think maybe what he's trying to say in the video that I think is really helpful is you have to have a permeable heart.

Yeah.

Because if you're not willing to risk loving somebody who may not love you back, well, you just can't love.

And our tendency to try to control other people's choices is not loving because it doesn't give them the opportunity to accept or reject what we're giving.

And I think that's the biggest thing coming back for me.

God doesn't make investments in us, God gives us stuff.

Investing is about control.

Gifts are about, now I'm vulnerable.

Yeah.

But I do think you ask a great question coming way back.

I think we're still scratching our heads like, what's an unclean spirit?

How do we meaningfully drive them away, whatever that means?

How long does it last?

And how do we function as a community in which there are certainly going to be unclean spirits?

And why do they stick that into the middle of this?

There's some reason for that, I guess.

Well, I think because it's true, I think it's true to life.

And again, if if we I think take unclean spirit and think about demons, we're missing the opportunity to think about the unclean spirits that we're most afraid of.

We are most afraid of mental illness, of failure, of drug abuse, and alcoholism.

And those are the things we are most afraid of.

And if instead we can seem of these like people from the Exorcist that turn their head around that you've never seen in your life, we're missing the people that we are most afraid of every single day, and those forces that are in us that are bigger than we are.

Goodness isn't the only thing bigger than us.

You can watch the Nuremberg rally and see what happens when a mob mentality takes over people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like getting two photos instead of just one.

I've overtalked this, I'm sorry.

But I think it's important.

And what we do about it, I think is hard.

I don't know if you were here three years ago.

No, I don't think anybody was here.

Four years ago, I met a man on a Friday who wanted to come to church.

He was really interested in getting confirmed, and he told me he was a bipolar schizophrenic.

So we talked for a little bit.

I told him here's how confirmation works, all that.

He came in on Sunday morning and didn't come in late, and he sat relatively up front, and the sermon started, and of course, it was one of my better oratories and was sort of wonderful.

And he just stood right up and started saying something.

I mean, it wasn't awful.

He was like, Well, I sort of think this, and everybody sort of like looked to the emergency exits.

Yeah.

My Verger was thinking this guy maybe was gonna be violent.

He just stood up and said some stuff, and then he said, like, hey, I really like your haircut, and then he walked out.

And uh I I Runo, everyone was like, You look so cool and compliant.

Somebody was like, I thought you were staging a skit.

Um, but I just had nothing, I had no idea what to do.

I didn't say like sit down or stop, I just let him say what he wanted to say, and then he left.

And um, you know, like that man definitely had an unclean spirit.

And it doesn't mean he's less than me.

And what's interesting is a lot of times we're really bothered by that in church because we're not used to people interrupting like the flow of things as we're used to.

And you know, the sermon for me at that point was by sitting still and like not freaking out, you let this man do whatever he needed to do and leave on his own terms, and um, and maybe that's what church is really about.

Now, I will tell you later, I went home and like cried over that idea that this was going to be every week happening.

He didn't come back, but this is what he did, and he left.

And how do we treat people who have unclean spirits and what do we do?

It's just it's hard.

And coming back to Philippians, I think that gets us to that verse that's the most uh abused verse I've ever heard in the whole Bible, which is I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.

Because the immediate context is I've been beaten, I've been stoned, I've been whipped, I've been made fun of, I've had people stand up in the middle of my sermons and interrupt me, and I can do that.

I can do that because I've chosen to empty myself.

I think I think that's what it's all about.

People who say, like, I can run a marathon without training because I can do all things through Christ, are they ridiculous people.

I mean, I can become a professional basketball player because I can do all things in Christ.

You know, I mean, if I if if Jesus grew me another two or three feet, maybe, but like that's not happening.

So make your hand.

The context of the letter is really all about not suffering, but it's all about sharing life.

And I can share my life under any circumstances if I choose to, and if I'm willing to empty myself.

The beginning says, consider other people greater than yourself, which means look at other people's needs and see if you can meet them instead of just spending time on your own.

It doesn't mean everyone's better than you.

It means pay attention to others' needs and see what you can do, and they might return the favor, and that's how we live in community.

Yeah.

And if they don't, it's okay.

Part of what's important about being in church is that someone does.

So if we're reaching out all the time and no one is giving us life, it's not sustainable.

And that's why I think watching church on TV is great.

You know, if that gives you guidance or whatever, but those people don't care about you.

They don't.

No ideologue cares about you because they don't know you.

And that's why community is essential, whether it's in a run club or a cooking group or a book club.

It doesn't have to be Sunday mornings, but if nobody is giving you life, you're gonna run out.

I just I think that's right.

Definitely more than just go with your it's it's one of the problems with a megachurch is that people don't know if you're there or not, and we like that.

And there's been times in my life I really like it, but it's not sustainable.

And when the speaker goes, the church goes with it.

Because the next person can never be the same.

The only way those places work is if there's small groups in which people care for each other and there's meaningful service in which people care for each other and offer care outside.

I said I'm over talking and I keep doing it.

I'm sorry.

I I well it's interesting.

What am I missing in Philippians for you?

Because we've only really talked about one or two issues here.

I just had a little question about um on page 164, it says, Ever since the Jerusalem uh council, Paul had been gathered.

What I'm wondering is, what was the Jerusalem Council?

Okay, so a reminder we read this in Acts, and this is where this group of Jerusalem, which is like one of the earlier churches headed by the James, the brother of Jesus, they do they talk about whether or not people can be rightly considered Jews if they haven't been circumcised.

Oh, okay.

And they end up deciding yes, but they can't indulge in prostitution or fornication, which are really the same thing, and they can't have blood.

Oh, that's right.

And they shouldn't eat meat sacrificed to idols, but that's all meat, which is challenging.

Paul's gonna take that on when we read 1 Corinthians next week.

Which is my favorite letter because it's all over the place.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, thanks.

Instead of worrying, prayer.

I always remember that I've been told that worries fur for things you don't want.

But I can't trust it's hard to break away from that.

It's a tough one to not like troubleshoot it.

I guess the real question is um comes back to that trust that's supposed to inform whether we empty ourselves or not.

He said in the video, this is eschatological revelation.

And I think the the principle here is that if I knew putting my daughter in a private school that costs$20,000 a year and involved me driving into Houston all the time and wrecking my schedule, if I knew that was gonna make her happy and whole and safe, I would absolutely do it.

But since I don't know, it's anxious.

If we knew how it would end, we could put up with whatever it takes in the middle.

I'm sure that's right.

It's hard to put up with what takes up in the middle, though, if we're not sure it's gonna work.

So I think the thing is, do we trust that God's gonna work this out?

And if we do, we can put up with what's in the middle.

Or are we actually really uncertain?

And I would tell you, most of my fundamentalist brothers and sisters are absolutely uncertain because they're afraid of God.

And what they do is they try to convert other people to make God less mad at them.

That's I don't think anybody would tell you that, but that's my reason.

I have a problem with not the first exactly, but how people use the verbs and be not anxious.

Some people use that as a commandment.

And if you are anxious, then you're not a good Christian, you're not trusting God.

Rather than viewing it as an encouragement.

If you're not anxious, you can't create things.

Right.

You can't music.

It's a human condition.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think because we don't define our terms very well, and we sort of assume we're all talking the same language, and anxiety is actually no feeling at all.

It's energy that has nowhere to go.

And the same is true with anger, actually.

Like if we're really thoughtful about it.

No one feels angry.

People feel frustrated or disappointed or betrayed or confused.

Or afraid.

Or afraid or like they're being taken advantage of.

And we take all of that, I mean, we teach our kids very few words.

I'm sad, I'm happy, I'm mad.

I mean, that's a basic like parlance for how we feel.

And anxiety, I mean, I think we hear the word worry, but again, anxiety is just energy we don't know where to put.

And it can amp us up and it can overwhelm us and all that.

So the the the question is don't be anxious.

Don't be anxious, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.

So when that energy comes, God, how do we map it?

And prayer is not a question that we always ask.

Remember, if God spoke first, and Genesis says God spoke first, like let there be light, prayer might be when we answer God.

Not when we ask, it might be when we answer.

So imagining God in the room with all this energy, where can we put it?

It may not involve asking at all.

It might just be imagining that God is with us in the middle of this energy, so where can we invest it?

And this is one of those interesting things.

I might have said it on Sunday, and I'm still trying to work this out.

I should let you know, every preacher has one sermon.

We only have one sermon in us, and all of them come back to that one, and we're just trying to work something out.

And um, I think one of the things I'm trying to work out is that some people I know who've had terrible cancer at the end of it are grateful that they had it.

Because they learned from the cancer how to be present in their lives.

I know other people who had careful cancer and it absolutely broke them.

So it's not a one-to-one, and there's no way God says, Boy, Patrick's got a bad attitude, I'll afflict him and that'll teach him.

I know it does not work that way, I'm convinced.

But I do think that part of what this is telling us, whether we're beat up or we're suffering, or actually whether we're fine, we have this opportunity in the middle of anxieties to be grateful even for the worst things that have happened to us because they've made us ourselves.

Oh, cancer ruined my life.

Well, cancer made you who you are.

It's part of your story.

Would you do it again?

Maybe not, but it doesn't matter.

I mean, actually, the question, the answer probably is, yeah, because it made me who I am, and I'm grateful for that.

And if an alcoholic can't do that, they haven't recovered.

If the alcoholic says, I hate I was an alcoholic, instead of I accept that that happened in my life and it's made me whom I am, they're really in danger of a relapse.

Because that self-hatred will take them right back into alcohol abuse.

I don't love that like particular family members have were verbally abusive to me as a kid because I don't like the way that I always use words and talking to other people.

And I want to say it comes from that.

On the other hand, that has given me a particular sensitivity that if I choose to invest in, if I choose to invest in properly, it can be very life-giving.

You know what to do.

I know what not to do.

At least.

He said, I would recommend that you use the shoe on the other foot test to determine if something is appropriate.

And I said, That's like uh others.

That was his version.

That's what you said.

It's tough.

And then we get the exhortation, I think, that's the hardest thing, and this is what the spiritual disciplines are all about.

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, commendable.

If there's anything excellent or worthy of praise, think about those things.

Where is that exactly?

At the very end of the letter, it's in chapter four, verse eight, which means I think the opportunity is to take that energy that has nowhere to go and think about places where it might be commendable and honorable and true and just.

You have a message for a message, which is great, but it may not be uh pointed out.

So it comes in in chapter four.

Oh, I see it here.

Okay.

That's it.

And I didn't read it to you.

Well, I think I think it offers us a really good spiritual practice that we don't do, and it's not as easy as it sounds, but is instead of meditating on the things we're afraid of or the things that take that energy we have and put it into things like you're worse than me or I'm not good enough, think about other stuff.

And I I told you this on Sunday, and I think it's really, really important.

I had a professor who said, write down where your head goes, just let it go.

Don't fight it, write down where it goes, and at the end of the month, look and it'll tell you where you are.

And it's not something that you need to beat yourself up over, but it says, okay, look, I say I want to be generous and I want to be tolerant or I want to be respectful, but I find myself thinking about that person in my neighborhood that has like sweatpants on and I don't know if they're safe.

I find myself thinking about that a lot.

So, what could I do with that anxiety?

I find myself thinking a lot about my shopping needs or what it's going to take to make me happy or what's the next thing.

So instead, how could I just take a moment and think about where I am right now and be grateful for that spot before I move on to the next thing.

We talked about this last night at Theology on Top.

I hope you didn't mind me saying this because you weren't there, but um, we're talking about guns in church.

And um it doesn't matter what we concluded about it, but I would tell you that I think one of our biggest problems as Americans, and I include myself in this, is that uh violence and gun violence are entertaining for us.

And the proof of that is we watch violent movies and we play violent video games and we have violent ads, and we watch that stuff, we consume it, we choose to do it.

Maybe you don't, but I will tell you: like in this neighborhood, you can walk by somebody's TV and you can hear bullets being shot.

Now they moved here so their kids would not have to live in Pasadena where that happens, but they brought violence into their home in a controlled environment, and ultimately they're worshiping the thing that they were afraid of.

And we suffered from that.

Now, that can be a real buzz kill because I would tell you it's really hard to enjoy any movie.

Like if you really want to teach your daughter to be like a second-class citizen and like uh be subjugated to men, you watch you some Disney movies because it happens everywhere.

If you want to teach your kids that violence is how you fix bad guys, you watch you some Disney movies because that's the only way you fix problems, is that good guys beat up the bad guys.

And it's a myth.

It's a myth that says I can drive out evil by being evil myself.

This brings us back to Walter Wink that you mentioned earlier, his third way.

His third way.

That's one of the things I love about what I'm saying.

I'm so pleased you read that.

I think he's exactly right.

The whole book series is incredible.

If you're really bored, you can read, curiously enough, he's an out, he's he's an out, he's outed himself.

He's a gay priest in the Episcopal Church in New York.

Walter Wink, he's also a major New Testament scholar that says we completely get angels and demons wrong.

It's really about these powers systems of sin, which is the kind of stuff you hear me say all the time, because I think it's right.

I'm more afraid of that than of these spiritual entities that look like winged things.

I'm more afraid of things like racism and ageism and uh because they're everywhere.

So our imitation is what do we think about and what do we accept?

And G.K.

Chesterton, who's a great Catholic theologian, said, most people don't disagree about what's evil.

We usually just disagree about what evil is acceptable.

And I think that's the difference between John Kennedy's misogyny and the misogyny of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

The difference is that it's out and I'm okay with it and I'll defend it versus at least I've privatized it because I know it's wrong.

Or at least y'all know it's wrong.

So I'm going to hide it.

I don't mean it's better, I just mean it's different.

Because now we've decided we'll put up what we'll put up with is really high.

We'll put up with name-calling, we'll put up with partisanship, and we choose to do that.

What can I do?

Vote for people who aren't like that.

Say, when something's wrong, say, look, you're a child of God and all, but that behavior's wrong.

And I don't want it to enter my life.

It enters my life because I go park at the Costco, and uh man, that's a real that's a real unveiling.

Okay, let's do one Corinthians next week.

What happens again?