Say What? For/Against

So my name is Greg Hampton. I'm one of the pastors here. We are in I think our third week of our series called Say What?

And forgive me if this one feels just a little bit all over the place, but I think it comes together in the end, so stay with me.

All right. All right. So let's jump right in. We're going to be in our Bibles in the book of Luke, chapters 9 and 11.

Luke 9 · chapter mention

It goes Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans in what is called sometimes the New Testament, the Second Testament, the Newer Testament, etc. etc.

So if you want to open up your Bibles to Luke, if you don't have one, you can download one from any of the digital app stores, or you can grab one for free on our bookshelf out here in the lobby before you go home today.

They're blue. And we're going to be in Luke, chapter 9. We like to have the tradition of giving the scriptures our full attention.

Luke 9 · chapter mention

Whatever way makes the most sense for you to give the scripture your full attention, do that.

One of the ways that we also do that is to stand together, anyone that would like to or is able.

So let's go ahead and do that. Anyone that would like to join me in standing as we read the scriptures.

Luke 9, starting in verse 49, says this.

Master, said John, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us.

Do not stop him, Jesus said, for whoever is not against you is for you.

And then skip ahead to Luke, chapter 11. This is going to be verse 14.

Luke 11 · chapter mention

It says this. Jesus was driving out a demon that was mute.

When the demon left, the man who had been mute spoke, and the crowd was amazed.

But some of them said, By Beelzebub, the prince of demons, he is driving out demons.

And then in the next few verses, Jesus explains why that's ridiculous.

So let's skip to verse 23, where he says, Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the scriptures that they have persisted throughout the millennia,

that we still have them to look at, to consider, to learn from.

I pray that whatever you have to teach us today, that it would stick,

that it would become a part of the framework of our faith, that our faith would become stronger,

and that we would become more like your son Jesus. Amen.

Amen. Thanks, guys. You can have a seat.

All right. So fun topic that we don't talk about all that much,

but it is both an ancient and a modern Christian belief that spiritual darkness can have a physical effect on a person.

Now, not all Christian branches believe this. Some don't believe there are any demons at all,

and would say that anything described in such a way in the scriptures is actually just psychosomatic, which I find problematic.

The opposite theological end of that concept is that spiritual darkness is a very active, and is very active even now today,

and that any illness of any kind is purely a spiritual issue, which is also problematic.

But it's not only problematic, it can be hurtful, and I think it can become harmful.

Now, I personally believe that there is spiritual warfare in the earth, on the earth, even today,

because I believe that Jesus dealt directly against it when he was walking with his disciples.

But I don't believe, as they say, that there is a demon in every bush. Have you heard that phrase?

Have you ever heard the other phrase, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail?

Yeah, that phrase was coined by a guy named, anybody know? I didn't know who it was by.

Abraham Maslov. But now you know who that is, right? Some of you do.

Some of us know who Abraham Maslov is from the Maslov's dog experiment.

All of us are going back to our grade schools and junior high schools thinking, oh, I remember that.

It's the one where dogs learned or were conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell,

because all the other times they heard a bell, they got a treat, right?

At first the bell would ring and the dog would have no idea what was going on,

and they'd be given a treat for apparently no reason, and then their mouth would salivate

because that is what happens to mouths when they get food that they like.

But then the bell would ring and the dog would salivate before getting a treat,

until eventually the bell would ring, the dog would salivate without getting a treat.

They'd been conditioned to associate treats with the bell and their body would physically respond.

Some people in some belief systems have read the handful of times in the Gospels

that a demon made someone sick, and they've been conditioned to believe that that must be what is happening all the time.

This isn't far from what Maslov meant about the hammer.

What people believe conditions them to see what they want to see, to be one kind of instrument or another.

If they become a hammer, and if they think that a demon is the source of every ailment,

then a lot of people are going to get hurt as they're hit by hammers.

Sometimes even Jesus gets hit with a hammer. What do I mean?

Alright, so in this passage that we read, Jesus says, who is for me and who is against me?

And both of those times there is something, there is a spiritual warfare event happening.

Both of those passages, that determination of who is with Jesus or who is not with Jesus

was made based on their ability or inability to see something God did and know that it was good or evil.

In the first passage, the disciples are telling Jesus that they saw a guy casting out demons in the name of Jesus,

and I love it, and they go, and we tried to get him to stop Jesus.

They have no idea who he is, and we're given the impression that Jesus doesn't know who he is either,

at least that he hadn't met him, he hadn't taught him how to do this.

That this guy just knows that there is something special about the name of Jesus.

That evil flees at the mere mention of the name of Jesus, and so this guy is just acting on that.

So Jesus says, hey no, that's good. He's moving in the same direction as us.

The guy is doing good because of me.

That guy knows that my name is the opposite of evil, and so he is for us.

On the other hand, in the second passage, it's Jesus that casts out a demon,

but the people around him, presumably religious leaders and other people that didn't understand what he was doing,

accuse him of being demonic. They see Jesus do something good.

They see evil flee at his command, and they assume that he is evil.

They don't understand it because they're a hammer, and Jesus is a nail, and so they swing.

See, someone can have no idea who Jesus actually is and do what is right because of him,

and Jesus will say, that guy is on our side. No, don't stop him from doing that good thing.

But someone else can know exactly who Jesus is and see someone do what is right because of him,

then accuse that person of partnering with evil because it doesn't fit their theology.

Jesus wants us to be more like the first person than the second,

because when we look at good and call it evil, because that good is being done by someone we don't know

or someone we disagree with, we can find ourselves working against God.

This has happened countless times throughout history, countless times throughout the history of the church.

God starts doing something new, and instead of being open to this new good thing, parts of the Christian world,

parts of the church end up calling it bad or evil and trying to stop it,

not knowing that they're setting themselves against the work of the Lord.

And I'll tell you why that happens. It's because we rarely admit just how little of God that we understand,

just how little of God we have yet to experience.

Our knowledge of God is like meeting an elephant in the dark. You guys heard this story?

It's a parable that dates all the way back to a Buddhist text 500 years before Jesus.

And it has countless versions since then, so I'm going to tell a version that is useful for today.

It goes something like this. Imagine a group of people heard that there's this new animal that had been discovered,

and it was being called an elephant. And it's long enough ago that there was no pictures of an elephant,

there was no drawings of an elephant, there was no description of an elephant.

For whatever reason, the people that had the elephant on exhibit were trying to keep it secret, exactly what it was.

As a matter of fact, if you wanted to come see the elephant, you had to visit the elephant in the dark.

Now, so you go with all of your friends, and you all go into this room with the elephant,

and each one of you feels one part of the elephant, the first person who happens,

your friend who just happens to be really into reptiles. We all have that one friend that's really into reptiles.

They ended up at the trunk. Yeah, everyone just thought of that one person, didn't you? Yep.

They end up at the trunk, and they go, well, obviously this elephant is a part of the snake family.

Another person was at the ear and feeling a little hot, they were a little stuffy, they said, it feels like a fan.

A woodworker felt its leg and said the elephant is like a log, it's like a tree trunk.

A stonemason was at the elephant's side and said it's flat like a wall.

A seamstress felt the tail and said it's like strands of string on a rope.

The last person was kind of a fearful person, afraid of the dark,

and shrieked when they bumped into the sharp end of the elephant's tusk.

When they all left the room, they were all convinced by their experience that they knew what an elephant was.

And this is why sometimes we can see something new that God is doing and so easily disagree with it.

Because it doesn't feel like the part of God that we have experienced.

Depending on how you grew up, some of you grew up in churches, some of you grew up in Catholic parishes,

some of you grew up Lutheran, some of you grew up like me, Presbyterian, some of you grew up Methodist or Evangelical of some sort.

Some of you didn't grow up at all, no, you did grow up.

Some of you didn't grow up in a church, maybe some of you just were always universalistic,

or maybe some of you were a part of another world religion and you had all of these different perspectives.

But you still probably only had one perspective.

And then you put a bunch of people that have all these different experiences of God into the same room with each other.

The goal isn't for people that we meet that have experiences, we've got for us to argue with them and go,

that's not my experience of God, the goal is for us to leave the room and listen to the stories of the other people's experiences.

When we leave the elephant room, we're not meant to argue about what the elephant was like,

we're meant to listen and trust our brothers and sisters to let their stories give more shape to what we believe an elephant is.

There's a quote on our website about what kind of theology that we want to have as a church,

because obviously we're non-denominational, we're not a part of a larger, we're not Methodist, we're not,

there is one, some churches will call themselves inter-denominational just because they know that they branch so many different things between Jen and myself and Chris.

Like we've been a part of a lot of different denominations so we kind of played early on with the idea of maybe calling ourselves that,

but we're not a part of a denomination and so we don't have just one book that we go,

this is exactly, this is the exact theology that we ascribe to and so we want in our public declaration of theology to have a good way of describing it.

There's a theologian from the 17th century named Rupertus Maldinius, he has a quote that says,

In essentials, unity, in non-essentials, liberty, in all things, charity.

Because none of us have experienced every part of the elephant, we can all share in the mystery of how all these extremely different experiences fit together to make one beautiful thing.

One of the ways that we remind ourselves of what could be essential is to occasionally, usually on the fifth Sunday of a month, to recite the Nicene Creed together.

And what I love is that the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed, they are ancient, they are 1500 years old, they're extremely old and the church globally accepts these.

If you walk into a Methodist church or a Catholic church or a Baptist church, any kind of Christian church across the globe that you walk into will either recite the Nicene or the Apostles Creed together.

There's something uniting about it, but the other thing I love about it is that while it touches on so many things that we can agree on about who God is, it doesn't tell you exactly how to believe those things.

It doesn't tell you how to believe God.

It begins by speaking of how we believe that God the Almighty is creator of heaven and earth, but it doesn't stick you into a quarter about exactly how we did that.

We are meant to draw us back to what we can stand on together without fighting about how we disagree, because sometimes Jesus will do something right in front of us that we've never seen before and so it confuses us.

And our knee-jerk reaction will be to swing a hammer.

But we're meant to be a little bit more like the first person than the second.

Openness, tolerance, inviting.

So what I want us to do is to actually say the Nicene Creed together today.

It is the fifth Sunday after all.

But let's recite this together.

And it's long, but it's important.

If there's a part that you don't believe or don't agree with, feel free just to not say it.

But let's stand together on all the things that God is pointing us to.

We believe in one God, the Father the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father.

God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.

Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man.

For our sake, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered death and was buried on the third day he rose again.

In accordance with the scriptures, he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

With the Father and the Son, he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets.

We believe in one holy, universal, and apostolic church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Now it doesn't mean that all of us understand exactly what all of that means.

What it means is that we have places to go, places to look at to go. How do we stick together?

And when we see things that we don't understand, how do we stay open to what God might be doing?

So that if we go to Jesus and say, Jesus, we saw so and so doing such and such,

that we will accept it when he says, do not stop them, for they are with us. Amen. Amen. Let's pray.

Jesus, I thank you for the way that you were welcoming, that you were inclusive.

But we also learn from the moments that people rejected you.

I pray that we would not find ourselves on the side that is rejecting something new that you're doing.

Even after 2,000 years, I believe that there are still new things that you have to do.

I thank you that we get to be a church, that we get to be community, that we get to carry each other.

I pray that our hearts and our eyes would be open to the new things that you would have us do. Amen.