People Helping People

SERMON: 2013-06-30--ac13100--people-helping-people SOURCE DURATION: 00:44:21.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: The entire provided window contains continuous sermon material, starting with observations about natural disasters (theological exposition) and concluding with pastoral application, prayer, and theological exposition regarding the resurrection and end times. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Planet Earth, as you know, is no stranger to natural disasters. We've seen that again this past week as we've seen the images coming out of southern Alberta, the floods in Calgary, especially in High River, to a lesser degree in Medicine Hat. The spring runoff of mountain water, together with a low pressure system that got locked in place and that continued to drop precipitation, caused the Bow and the Elbow rivers to overflow their banks with devastating consequences. Damages are pegged somewhere between $3 and $5 billion. And if you've seen the images of people trying to clean up their basements and their houses, it's beyond comprehension. Interestingly enough, this year marks the 60th anniversary of the 1953 flood in the Netherlands that I experienced as a youngster. It's one of my earlier memories. I know that we were out of our home that time for a period of six weeks. It is a devastating experience to come back to the damage that has been caused by water. And that is but one of the natural disasters that has been in the news this past year. Prior to that, we had stories of flooding in Eastern Europe where the Elbe and the Danube rivers did similar things, overflowed their banks, caused likewise billions of dollars worth of damage. And then prior to that, we had the stories of the tornadoes ripping through what's called Tornado Alley, part of Oklahoma and Kansas and some of those states in the U.S., billions of dollars worth of damage once again, and the loss of many, many lives. Prior to that, raging wildfires, California and Australia. And all of those are but a few of the natural disasters that have been in the news this past week. In fact, I did a little bit of research this past week and discovered that in the United States alone for the six months of this past year, there have been over 100 natural disasters that have been in the news. And you wonder sometimes, is it just our imagination? Is it just better communication so we hear more of these stories or are disasters increasing? Is it what some people call the fruit of climate change? Is it simply coincidence? Is it perhaps the judging hand of God upon creation? And in that point particularly, these words from Isaiah the prophet are always powerfully in my mind. Listen to the Isaiah 24, the verses 4, 5, and 6. The earth dries up and withers. The world languishes and withers, the exalted of the earth languish. The earth is defiled by its people. They have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes, and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore, a curse consumes the earth. Its people must bear their guilt. Therefore, earth's inhabitants are burned up and very few are left. Someday I want to preach in that passage because I think that passage gives us the spiritual underpinnings of a creation that groans under the travail of human sin. And given the direction of where humanity is going, I think it's fairly safe to predict that things will get worse rather than better because all of creation, as I said, groans under the weight of our collective sin. And someday I want to talk about that but not this morning because what I want to do this morning is show you from scripture that apart from all of that, there is still another whole reason why sometimes God allows natural disasters to happen and that is to encourage people to help people. Because that you will notice is the context of these verses that we have read together from Acts chapter 11. Agabus is a prophet. He has his home base in Jerusalem. He makes his way to Antioch where this terrific revival is taking place and he stands up and through the spirit he predicts there's going to be a major natural disaster in the form of a famine. Luke goes on to point out that this famine indeed happened and it happened during the reign of Claudius. Now we know from history that Claudius reigned as Emperor in the Roman Empire from AD 42 to 54. He died in 54 under suspicious circumstances, probably poisoned by one of his five or four wives that brought him to an untimely end. But we know also from history that during his reign there were four famines over the Roman Empire and one of those was particularly severe in the land of Judea. So sometime around AD 45 or 46 we have this famine. Now what happens in response to this famine is what is interesting in this text because what do other believers in the Roman Empire do when their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem are confronted by such drastic practical needs? Well they come to their aid. Listen again to the verses 29 and 30. The disciples each according to his ability decided to provide help for the brothers living in Judea, this they did sending their gifts to the elders by Barnabas and Saul. The disciples there are Gentile believers living mainly in what we call Greece or Macedonia today. And they are stirred by the need of their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem and they take up an offering and they send it to the church in Jerusalem through the hands of Paul and Barnabas. Paul writes about that in more detail in a number of places in his New Testament letters one of which is Romans 15, 26, and 27 where he says, "For Macedonia and Achaia were pleased to make a contribution for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem. They were pleased to do it and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have shared in the Jews spiritual blessings, they owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings." And so here we have an entirely different reasons why sometimes God allows natural disasters. It is to enable people to help people in the context of scripture particularly to help Christians to be the hands and the feet of Jesus so that in practical ways God's love and compassion can come to demonstration in how we come to the aid of those who suffer and who are traumatized. Now to put that this morning in its biblical and its theological context I'm going to ask you to watch with me a 17 and a half minute video featuring a woman by the name of Dr. Diane Langberg. This is a talk that she gave about a year ago to a gathering of influential business and media people around the world. By way of introduction she is a Christian psychologist. She carries on a private practice based in one of the suburbs of Philadelphia but she has traveled all over the world and she has a particular heart of compassion for people who have been traumatized. And while most of the trauma that she speaks of in this talk is the result of man's inhumanity to man she does reference natural disasters also and at any rate trauma is trauma wherever you find it. It is an honor for me to be here and talk to you about something very close to my heart. You don't need me to tell you that it is a numbing world. The digital world and media tsunami overwhelm us and often we cannot even take in sound bites but today I would ask you to marshal the forces of your minds and hearts and come with me for just a glimpse of this world that our God so loves. This world whose anguish he bears. He's asked us to look with him, he's asked us to step away from the numbing and listen to his heart and his thoughts so come and listen with me to a small piece of the heart of our God for this fearful fallen world. Last summer I was in Ghana speaking at a conference on violence against women and children and while there we were taken to visit the Cape Coast Castle. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were forced through its dungeons and its door of no return onto slave ships. It had five dungeon chambers for males and descending into the darkness of one of those dungeons was claustrophobic. Two hundred men shackled and chained together stayed in the dungeon for about three months before they were put onto ships and sent across the Atlantic. We stood in one of those male dungeons listening in the darkness to the whole horrific story when our guide said this, "Do you know what's above the dungeon?" We all shook our heads no, "The chapel," he said. Directly above two hundred shackled men, some of them dead, others of them screaming, all of them filthy, sat God worshipers. They sang, they read the scripture, they prayed and I suppose they took up an offering for the less fortunate. The slaves could hear the service and the worshipers could hear the slaves some of the time because they often had somebody down there trying to keep them quiet. It took my breath away, the evil, the suffering, the humiliations, the traumas were overwhelming and the visual parable was stunning. The people in the chapel were numb to the horrific trauma beneath their feet. We have dungeons in our world today too, tent cities in Haiti and Ivory Coast, genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, wars around the world and relentless systemic violence in our own inner cities. Do you know that all of these events produce traumatized human beings? One in four soldiers today is a child and there are two hundred million children living on the streets of this world. Amnesty International says that one in three females is beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime. You think about that statistic the next time you sit in an airport or walk on a city street or sit in a conference or the pews of your church. One in three, child sexual abuse, child marriage, female genital mutilation, physically and psychologically harmed countless females around the world. Girls have acid thrown in their faces because they went to school and they are stoned to death because they managed to get themselves raped. The dungeons are here and sometimes they even sit down next to us. All of these things from tent cities to abuse, things you and I find difficult to comprehend or hold for very long in our minds are endured by human beings one at a time. They result in traumatized human beings. Traumatism means that they live with recurrent tormenting memories of atrocities witnessed or born. Memories that infect their sleep with horrific nightmares, destroy their relationships, their capacity to work or to study, torment their emotions, shatter their faith and mutilate their hope. Trauma is extraordinary you see, not because it rarely happens, but because it completely swallows and destroys normal human ways of coping and living. The dungeons of this world are filled with traumatized people. And as it was in Cape Coast Castle, the usual response to atrocities is to try and remove it from the mind. Those who've been traumatized want to flee the memory of its occurrence and we who listen find we want to flee also. We find it too terrible to remember and too incomprehensible to put into words. That is why we use the phrase unspeakable atrocities. The great tension is the futile attempt to forget the unspeakable even while it continues in the mind, sometimes screaming. That push pull between the need to forget and the need to speak is the central dialectic of trauma. And the tension is not only experienced by individuals or families but by institutions and yes even nations. It is not only experienced by the traumatized, it is experienced by those of us who bear witness to trauma. I know something of this tension because as a psychologist I have worked now not 35 but 38 years with things like sexual abuse and rape and domestic violence and combat trauma and genocide and sex trafficking. I have looked into traumatized eyes all over this globe as I have traveled and I've seen the push pull in my clients who were too terrified to remember and speak but who cannot forget. And I have witnessed families and churches and yes nations deny the existence of evil and trauma in their worlds and I know the tension exists in those who bear witness because it resides in me. You know we see an atrocity on the television or on the internet and soon after we look for a way to remove ourselves. The stories threaten our comfort, our position, our systems. Trauma stories are vile and messy and disruptive and traumatized people need attention and assistance often for a very long time. The trauma stories of our own families or institutions and organizations get buried and geographical distance and the push of a button enable us to do the same with entire nations just ask Rwanda. We are in fact quite like the chapel goers in the fort in Ghana. So what are we to do? Choose complicity by turning away in silence or flip from cause to cause trying to do something which is sometimes about making ourselves feel better isn't it? Or feeding some voyeuristic need or render judgment and categorize the traumatized as they, you know if they were more responsible or made better moral choices they would not be suffering. Under the form of worship in that chapel in Ghana lay the darkness and oppression and tyranny of slavery, all things that blight and destroy human beings created in the image of God. But I think that you know that Christianity does not look like being folded up with evil and sitting on top of dungeons. I think you know that following Christ does not look like complicity with a system that butters our breads and fills our coffers while we stand on the back of those created in the image of God. It does not look like praying and singing and giving money on top of screams and unspeakable suffering and filth and death. Christianity is not about calling others them, somehow unlike us, not human. When we were in the dungeon our guide pointed to the chapel above and he said this, "Heaven above, hell below." But I would argue this morning that heaven was not above because that is not what heaven does. What does heaven do? Heaven leaves heaven. Heaven leaves its place and space of comfort and songs and purity and plenty and heaven comes down. If the people of that chapel had truly worshiped the God of the scriptures they would have been in the dungeon, in the filth and the darkness and the trauma and they would have entered in so that they might bring out. Mark 17 says, "These men have turned the world upside down." The church goes into the dungeon, why so the dungeon becomes the church? God came down to lift up, he became like us so we might become like him and he came to this dung filled dungeon you and I call earth and he sat with us and he touched us and he loved us and he brought us to himself and he enters the dungeons of our hearts and transforms them. He did not treat us as them but became one of us so that we might be his. God is power becoming little and coming down to embrace what is alien. There is no them, there is only us. We were the slaves in the dungeon and he did not take us out so we can stand on the necks of the oppressed and worship him for not leaving us back there with them. He's called us as his body to follow his head, to go back into the plague infested dung heap so that other slaves might find freedom and go back with us and find yet more. When our God interfaces with this world, he leaves the higher and he descends. He leaves beauty and enters chaos, he leaves pure and becomes filthy and he demonstrates that our God does not just speak with words, he also acts first in the heart dungeons of human beings so that they can then through their lives lead others out of dungeons. Jesus demonstrated in the flesh the character of God, we are his body, we are to do the same. When God's people worship over and separate and untouched by the trauma of this world, they are not worshiping the God of the scriptures because there is nothing in the scriptures to suggest that being complicit or neutral or uncaring to the cries of traumatized human beings is godly. The scriptures do say that the dungeons of Cape Coast Castle existed below because they were first in the hearts of the so-called worshipers. Sadly the body of Christ has often failed to see trauma as a place of service, but you know if we survey just the natural disasters of our times, the earthquakes, the tornadoes, the hurricanes, the tsunamis, and combine that number with the victims of human atrocities in our inner cities, our wars, our genocides, our trafficking, our rapes, our child abuse, the number is staggering. And I think that if we as the body of Christ look out on suffering humanity, we would realize that trauma is perhaps the greatest mission field of the 21st century. The people of God have sometimes hidden in their chapels. We worship and sing and give money and periodically we stick our heads out to tell other people what they're doing wrong. We've often blamed those who suffer for their trauma and we have often as Christians failed to recognize that systems can be corrupt and power abused, even our power, and that like our Lord there are many people in this world who suffer from totally undeserved injustice and trauma. We have not gone to the dungeons and have sadly been blind to the fact that that is simply an exposure of the dungeon that is in our heart, for it is a heart that is not like God's when we refuse to go. He who bore the anguish of this world in order to make all things new. Many of us, many of you in this room see and you want to enter in and I am glad. Thank you. You are in places of power and influence. Some of you are in the alleys and the brothels. You don't want to hide in the chapel and that's good and it pleases the heart of our God. But listen, do not be seduced. The chapel is not a place, it is a person, it is a head with a body. And as in the physical realm, if the body does not follow its head, it is a very sick body indeed. But it is also true that the dungeon is not a place, it is the human heart. Because of course there is no corporate greed without humans, is there? There is no rape or abuse without human beings and there are no corrupt systems without humans to protect them and lie about them. Our first call my friends is not to places, be they chapels or dungeons, our first call is to person, to love and obedience to Jesus Christ no matter the cost and to hearts that will tolerate no dungeon corner to exist out of his light, whether it is here or there. Many have thought if you avoid the dungeons of the world that's how you stay clean. But to do so is to fail to follow our Savior who went to the dung heaps of this world. Many of you go, go, but remember this, the dungeon is first in us, that is what has created all the dungeons out there. We must not fool ourselves into thinking we follow our Savior where others have failed to do so all the while hiding dungeons in our own souls whether it be pride or pornography. One last look with me at this world that our God so loves. Stand and look and listen to the story of Cape Coast Castle and see the trauma of this world as one of the primary mission fields of the century in which we stand. It is one of the supreme opportunities before the church today. Our head left glory and came down to this traumatized world and became flesh like us. He literally got in our skin. He did not numb. He did not flee the atrocities of this world. The question before the house this morning is will we, his body, also leave our heavens and our chapels and enter the trauma of terrified and shattered humanity whether they sit in our pews or are across the ocean in the name of Jesus. We are complicit with the perpetrators if we refuse to go. We are also complicit if we go ignoring the refuse in our own hearts. If the church does not enter into trauma then I would ask you is she really then living as the body of an incarnated God? I pray we will follow our head full of the lights and life of Jesus Christ to the corners first of our own hearts so that we might bring him into the trauma dungeons and turn this world upside down which, as you all already know, means actually turning it right side up. Thank you. I'm going to talk, isn't it? I don't know how many of you here noticed that the sign above that chapel quoting Psalm 132 is written in Old Dutch. Did you notice that? I have no idea what the history of that is. But the juxtaposition that she makes of the chapel up here and the dungeon down here is just mind boggling. But how easy it is to see the sins of previous generations when in our own day and age, just to use one example, we abort children by the millions and have no idea what it really is that we are doing because every generation has its own definition of right and wrong and good and evil and chapel and dungeon. There are many things about that talk when I first heard it that stirred my soul deeply. But I think the thing that stirred me the most was her constant reminder that if we're going to follow Jesus who is the head, who left heaven to become dirty with us, that if we are his followers as his people, we need to be prepared to leave our sanitized world and our sanitized notion of Christianity and invest ourselves deeply in the lives of broken and traumatized people. I'm so glad that as a church community, we remain committed to our vision and to our mission, our mission being to reach the lost, to restore the broken, to equip the saints and to release the workers. God's passion is that we step into the messiness of other people's lives even as Jesus stepped into the messiness of our own lives so that we could bring hope and redemption and good news. That's not an easy task. And on many levels as a community, we've had to pay a high price for that. And those who lead those kind of ministries continue to pay a high price. And the question that we often ask is how can we avoid numbing out as she talks about it? How can we avoid turning away from the pain that is out there and continue to remain engaged in a way that is wholesome and redemptive? I mean, isn't it true that after a while you get tired of bloated infants being shown on World Vision commercials? Isn't that true? And sometimes when you hear the traumatic things that happen, everything inside you wants to shut off, walk away from it, don't let it touch me, and especially don't let it touch my children. Because keeping safe and sanitized is a value that we all aspire to. How do we have the grace to be followers of Jesus and stepping from the chapel into the dungeon? Well, I think Paul's second letter to the Corinthians gives us an interesting clue and insight because 2 Corinthians has a couple of chapters in which he gives us insight information on how these believers in Macedonia and Achaia went about collecting money for the needy saints in Jerusalem. Listen to this, 2 Corinthians 8, the verses 1 to 5. And now, brothers, we want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches. He is writing here to the believers in Achaia. And he says, "Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity, for I testify that they gave as much as they were able and even beyond their ability entirely on their own. They urgently pleaded with us for the privilege of sharing in this service to the saints. And they did this, and they did not do as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then to us in keeping with God's will." Now, notice a couple of things that he is saying there. Here is a group of Christians who are excruciatingly poor. I mean, a level of poverty that most of us cannot even begin to identify with. And yet, when they become aware of what is happening in Jerusalem, the famine that has hit Judea, they are clamoring. They are clamoring to be allowed to come to their aid. And they take up a collection amongst themselves, a collection that is far beyond anything that Paul would have hoped or expected from them because it is, in fact, beyond their ability. They just abound in generosity to these other saints who are in dire straints. And what's interesting about that in this particular passage is that Paul gives us two reasons why they do that. Notice how it surfaces in verse 5. They did this, and they did not do as we expected. That's kind of a tough sentence there, but what Paul is saying is he didn't think that they would be able to rise to the occasion. They didn't do as he had thought they would be able to do. But then notice how it goes along. They gave themselves first to the Lord and then to us in keeping with God's will. And therein lies the key to their generosity, and therein lies the key to God's people, to their generosity through all the ages. It always begins by giving ourselves to the Lord, to be a Christian, is to know that body and soul, in life and in death, I am not my own, but I belong to my faithful Savior, the Lord Jesus, who is committed to giving of Himself to me so that out of His generosity, I can give abundantly to those who are around me. And then he says they gave themselves not only to God, but he says they gave themselves to us. In other words, their spirituality wasn't some vague, disembodied spirituality. This was a concrete spirituality. They were committed to community, the blessings of God, that they knew they would receive from God, they passed on concretely to the church in Jerusalem by the hands of Paul and Barnabas. They trusted them with their generous offering. So there is always love for God and love for your fellow neighbor that is tied together, and as you know, that's why I always picture it in this way, if God is the source of life, He gives us everything that we need. He wants us to acknowledge that He is the giver of all because He blesses me. I can now follow His example and I can share my resources with people around me. That is at the heart of the Christian faith. That is why Jesus says the commandments of God can be summarized in this fashion. Love God above all and love your neighbor as yourself. On these two depend the whole law and all the prophets. To talk about loving God without at the same time loving the people that God places around us is a misnomer because to truly love God is to love your neighbor, and if these worshippers in that chapel were truly worshipping, as she says, the God of the Bible, they couldn't have sat on top of the screams of the slaves beneath them if you see the pictures of that door of no return that she talks about, which is where they went to the ships, and then if you see how they were loaded into the sheep, worse than cattle, laid prone next to each other, hundreds of people in a boat, many hundreds would die on their journey over them, you say how in God's name can people who claim to be Christians conduct themselves in that fashion. Isaac Newton, or John Newton you will recall, author of Amazing Grace, was one of those captains of slave ships until God captured his heart and his heart got illumined about the horror of the carryings on. To truly love God is to express that love in an ongoing, deepening relationship with people around you, including especially those who are most wounded and most hurt and who are most traumatized, and you've heard me say this many times, if the church is relevant to life of the world today it must learn to identify the traumas of our day and age, questions that nobody has answers to, and we need to be able to take a living Jesus who rose from the dead and who conquered the grave and who can speak into those situations and change lives unspeakably by the power of his resurrection, that's what it is to be a church. So let me ask you this morning, let me leave you with two questions, number one, who has the Lord used in your life to bless you? We all stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, as I said the other time while it is true that God and his providence will often meet our needs supernaturally and sometimes in miraculous ways, fact of the matter is most ways in which our needs get met is through members of his body, sometimes a father, sometimes a mother, sometimes a brother, sometimes a sister, sometimes a complete stranger. God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. Take a moment on this count of today weekend and do some reflecting if you can, as you look over your life, who has there been that God has used as his hands and his feet? Somebody who has blessed you spiritually maybe, led you into a deeper realization of who Jesus is or emotionally or psychologically listened to your pain and listened to your tale of woe and embraced you with the comfort and the love of Jesus or somebody who bailed you out in times of distress and who helped you physically or financially or some other way. Who has God raised up who have been his hands and his feet who left their comfortable cozy little world and got involved in the messiness of your life? Can you think of any such people? Show me your hands. If you haven't thanked them in a long time, would you write them a note? Would you give them a hug? And would you say, you know, if it hadn't been for you, I would not have known the love of God in this place. Do you think that would be a good thing to do on a count of today weekend? My second question is this. Who is there in your life or in your circle of influence that the Lord calls you to bless? Who do you know who is struggling in the dungeons of this world? And maybe it's a dungeon of their own making, and maybe it's been their own stupidity and their own sin, but maybe it's also the result of living in a world that has fallen and people who have taken advantage of them and people who have messed them over. Who do you know for whom you can be a helping hand? Who do you know where you could leave your comfortable little world and listen to their sad tale? Reach out a helping hand and know that as you embrace them by the power of God, as Shakespeare said many years ago, sorrow shared is sorrowed heft. And who is there that you can lift out of the miry clay and set upon a solid rock? And I'm not suggesting that you go pounding on doors trying to find such people. Just ask the Lord, "Are there such people in my proximity or are there such people in my family or are there such people in my business or are there such people in my relationships? Lord, what is it that you want me to do?" As you give yourself to the Lord and as you give yourself to the church and to the passion and the ministry of the church, God will show you. And then as you do good to all men, especially to the household of faith, so, scripture, as God leads you, you will discover afresh the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ because he left the glory of heaven and lived our life and died our death so that by his resurrection he could burst wide open the gates of hell. And the day is coming when the whole universe will be filled with the glory of the Lord because at the curtain fall of history, God's people will conquer and they will be victorious [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:44:18.780; remove through 00:44:21.000] and the saints of God will forever, they will forever celebrate the goodness of our God. [CUT] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:44:21.000; resume after this marked segment]