Punished "by" our Sin #5

I heard an angry sermon this week. One that painted God as a God that was owed a debt. And, this God, sat in heaven demanding that debt be paid. The implication was ultimately that Jesus was punished on the cross instead of us. He took the big spanking and God was pleased. He then said, Jesus, willingly took the spanking, the debt was paid, and now, we can be forgiven of the debt. The punisher’s thirst was quenched.

While this is not entirely “untrue” it raises a lot of questions for me. First of all, I don’t think the Bible simply teaches Jesus was punished by the Father—we’ll talk about that some other time.

The greater one is, if Jesus suffered willingly on my behalf and now I am forgiven i.e. saved from punishment, what impetus is there for me to live holy? Jesus had to die for something greater than just giving me a get out of jail free card. It MUST be more than a legal transaction.

This is the problem I always had with the theology that says I do something wrong, go tell someone about it, and say a few prayers so I can turn around and do it again. Then, if I don’t get it right, when I die I will have to suffer a little bit more before I move on or, in some circles, I am born all over to get it right in some other form.

I grew up with an after-life perspective. God forgives our debt which is good because I do a lot of bad crap and then one day, he’ll take me away from all the crappiness to live in a land of no crap. This mentality is not helpful. This does nothing for me to take on a new posture, a new way of living.

Our sin carries with it consequences an innate punishment. Part of fixing the furniture requires us to work hard. To fix what we jacked up.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station hunkered down last week while waiting to find out if a piece of space junk would hit their temporary abode at about 20,000 mph. Experts estimate there are over 17,000 pieces of space junk 4 inches or greater, 20,000 in the 1-3 inch range, and 10’s of millions of smaller pieces floating around . . . out there.

Our lives are spent creating junk. And, often, being destroyed by it as it orbits back around and we say, “what the . . . ? Where did that come from?”

We create our own junk. Our own debt. Our own price to pay. Our own crap to dodge or . . . deal with.

I like Extreme Makeover, Home Edition. Here’s a family that is hurting from the effects of whatever. Let’s go in, fix what is broken, make new stuff, pay off the stuff they can’t pay for, give them some dignity, and love on them. Give them a fresh start. Give them freedom.

Debt is the opposite of freedom. When you are in debt, you have no freedom to do selfless things.

To fix the furniture.

To play your part.

To shadow God.

Punished "by" our Sin #4

We’ve been talking about sin as a monkey—you bring it home, it grows, it takes control, it busts stuff up, it hurts your family and flings poo. No one likes the effects of the full grown monkey. He must be snuffed out and stuff needs to be fixed.

God doesn’t punish us because we bring home the monkey. The punishment is the monkey. It will kill you. You brought that thing home. Now watch what happens.

God doesn’t wish the monkey on us or inflict us. He doesn’t taunt the monkey and get it to play mean tricks on us.

God says, I can protect you from the monkey. Follow me. Shadow me.

But, we disregard him. We refuse to shadow.

He doesn’t punish us so much FOR our sins as much as we step outside of His wisdom, counsel, guidance, love, and gracious protection.

Yes, there are passages in scripture that clearly represent God as pouring out his wrath. But take a close look at how it works. Again, God is not arbitrarily smashing people’s toys to somehow get back at them.

One of the key passages concerning God’s wrath can be found in Romans Chapter 1. Here it is from The Message:

18-23But God's angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can't see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn't treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand.

24-25So God said, in effect, "If that's what you want, that's what you get." It wasn't long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out. And all this because they traded the true God for a fake god, and worshiped the god they made instead of the God who made them—the God we bless, the God who blesses us. Oh, yes!

26-27Worse followed. Refusing to know God, they soon didn't know how to be human either—women didn't know how to be women, men didn't know how to be men. Sexually confused, they abused and defiled one another, women with women, men with men—all lust, no love. And then they paid for it, oh, how they paid for it—emptied of God and love, godless and loveless wretches.

28-32Since they didn't bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating. Look at them: mean-spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers. Bullies, swaggerers, insufferable windbags! They keep inventing new ways of wrecking lives. They ditch their parents when they get in the way. Stupid, slimy, cruel, cold-blooded. And it's not as if they don't know better. They know perfectly well they're spitting in God's face. And they don't care—worse, they hand out prizes to those who do the worst things best!

We enslave ourselves and dig ourselves deeper in spiritual debt or emptiness when we refuse to shadow God. It’s a deep cancer.

Joel Green and Mark Baker have some great things to say on this in their book, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross.

“It doesn’t mean that our behavior is irrelevant, simply that the way to fix our relationship with God doesn’t involve behavior modification as much as it involves complete submission and surrender.”

It’s easy to imagine someone who does none of the really bad things on a list in scripture (say, one of the Pauline lists) and still has no relationship with him.

Punished "by" our Sin #3

So, sin, in the Bible, includes the idea of disobedience to God for sure but it is not a complete picture of sin to think in terms of “being right with God or being saved means I do something bad, ask for forgiveness, God grants it, I’m safe.”

The problem of sin is bigger than your individual disobedience—although that is part of it. God’s plan is not to get it through your thick head to “stop disobeying” as much as he is looking for complete surrender of individuals, communities, cities, families, systems and he is looking to repair and set those things right.

When we set up guidelines for our children, it is because we love them, want the best for them, and know the end result.

When I send my son off to a party, we have a little unspoken language between one another where I remind him about the things the stay away from and the proper way to treat ladies. He knows the “rules.”

His keeping the rules does not get him extra privileges. He doesn’t come home and tell me all the good things he did so I will pat him on the back.

And, if he broke those rules, they would all have their own consequences far greater than things I cook up to punish him. And, it’s not my goal to make him pay for any crime. It IS my goal to help him understand what it looks like to have a life free of the burdens of the effects of sin that enables you to be the light of God in the world and love on people without being self consumed with your own disorientations.

I try to protect him from those repercussions.

My daughter used to hate wearing shoes outside. However, I would always tell her to wear her shoes and quit running around barefoot because she was going to hurt herself. Sure enough, on a number of occasions, I would catch her with her shoes off outside.

She always had an excuse.

I was on the grass.

We swept the street first.

I wasn’t really “running.”

And, EVERY TIME she would hurt herself. Of course, each time she would come crying to me to stop the bleeding. Then, the next time, she would think I was trying to rob her of her joy by making her put her shoes on.

Her “punishment” is pain, bleeding, not being able to walk the next day . . . the very things I am trying to protect her from.

(P.S. One of the greatest things now, with an adult child, is getting a call saying, “Thank you for teaching me _________ daddy.”)

Now, do I think God disciplines in a way that causes me pain to keep me from some greater pain? Heck, yeah. I don’t put that past him. That’s good fathering. That’s love.

But, God does not simply (as my good friend David says) “blind reward for virtue or blind punish for vice. He is motivated to set things right in the world. His activity is not designed simply to ‘remove sin’ but to bring completion to all creation. He is determined to do this through his people.”

The Bible doesn’t really support the idea of an arbitrarily angry, lightning bolt wielding, God who needs us to debase ourselves before He’ll stoop to dialogue.

One by one, every story of rebellion in scripture shows us that sin or “our sins” do not push God away. He is a relentless pursuer.

He does pronounce judgment, but the judgment is inherent in the fallout.

Punished "by" our Sin #2

We like to focus on particular sins.

• If I stop doing “this thing” I will be cool with God.
• If I do “this thing” I better pray afterward so I will be forgiven and God won’t smack me.

If you’ve ever seen The Sound of Music, you probably remember the song where Maria sings, “somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.” This song is her way of explaining how she’s ending up with the newly repentant and kind Christopher Plummer who has come to his senses and swept her off her feet.

What’s inherent in the song is the other side of this erroneous theology. She just as well could have sung a different song if she had been captured by Nazi’s and forced to marry Colonel Klink. “Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something really, really bad.”

So, a popular notion is our individual sins either stack up or we do something so incredibly bad that God decides to punish us with whatever he dreams up. As if we are puppies. Do good, get a cookie. Pee on the floor and get the crap beat out of us.

We focus on individual sins.

One of the things I love about AA is it never says “alcohol is your problem. Stop drinking. Drinking is dumb. Every time you drink an angel cries. Do you want to make angels cry?”

(As a kid, I heard the saying that every time someone masturbates, God kills a kitten. Not a cat—which is no big deal. A helpless kitten).

No, AA takes you back a bit and makes you think through the larger issue. The deeper problem. The symptoms of that problem.

A better rendering or understanding of the Exodus passage we read may be:

Yahweh—Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love to a thousand [generations], forgiving wrongdoing, rebellion, and sin. But He will not leave [the guilty] unpunished, bringing the consequences of the fathers' wrongdoing on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation.

Few can argue with the consequences of our wrongdoing. Fathers (and mothers) who have horrible habits and toxic choices will see effects in their children that will cause them great internal turmoil and pain.

The Bible doesn’t negate individual transgressions by any means but it always refers to the “things” as the symptoms of something much larger.

It’s not about the “rules.”

And, furthermore, it’s not about keeping rules to somehow gain brownie points.

It’s not about towing the line for an eternal reward—if I just do enough good, it will balance out the bad and the legal ledger will balance out.

It s not just about AFTERlife. It’s about an ALTEREDlife.

Punished "by" our Sin #1

We are in a series entitled, “Sin Monkey” at Westwinds. In a nutshell, we are likening sin to a monkey you bring home as a cute, little, harmless pet that grows and takes on a mind of its own—flinging poo at your kids, wrecking the furniture, and eventually ripping people’s faces off (which, by the way, actually happened as you all know . . . about the third of fourth week of our series).

Kill the monkey. Fix the furniture. The mantra.

Last week, we looked at scripture and discussed how we are punished “by” our sin as opposed to being punished “for” it. A few of you asked for some notes so the next series of posts will be bits from that message.

We’ve been watching American Idol. I try not to get sucked in but I do. Every time. This season, there is a very talented young man named Scott MacIntyre. Scott is blind. He’s got a great sense of humor—such as the time Ryan Seacrest went to high-five him and wondered why he didn’t return the favor—he laughs that stuff off. Scott probably won’t go all the way. There are more talented, or at least more popular kids on the show this season.

Now, how weird would it be if Ryan Seacrest put a mic in this guys face and asked him what he “did” to deserve the punishment of blindness. Not only would it be rude, it doesn’t feel right. Something says—that’s not how it happens.

But, that situation and that logic is sometimes how we view sin and the penalty for sin. We somehow think that’s how it works. We do something bad and God brings the pain.

As a matter of fact, in John, chapter 9, we meet a blind man who is much like Scott. Normal, everyday guy. Just blind. Blind from birth. Jesus and the disciples are walking along and one of them asks, “Rabbi, who sinned? This guy or his parents? Because, he was born blind” (ummm, first off, he’s blind, not deaf. He can hear you).

The disciples are curious. It’s a riddle to be solved. They are really just looking for the gossip. They are not motivated by compassion.

Jesus, however, is. He heals him and turns his blindness in to something good. People now have another opportunity to see the healer in action.

Even after the man is dragged in front of the people who hate Jesus and questioned. They cast him out and label him a man who was “steeped in sin at birth.”

The disciples and Jesus accusers demonstrated a basic biblical misunderstanding that still demonstrates itself in contemporary religion. It shows up in early rabbinical writings and may go back to a misunderstanding originating with Moses.

Exodus 34:4-7

4 So Moses chiseled out two stone tablets like the first ones and went up Mount Sinai early in the morning, as the LORD had commanded him; and he carried the two stone tablets in his hands. 5 Then the LORD came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the LORD. 6 And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, "The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation."

Their belief was that this meant God was somehow vengeful, mean, we owe him big time, he’s gonna get what’s due him, etc. If that is true, what do we do with the whole setup to this verse that describes God as compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin?

We'll come back to this passage in a later post.

The bible takes a different approach to sin than many folks—even Christians who say they are in the know. We might ask how that could be, since our thoughts on sin come from . . . the Bible . . .

Cyber-Confessionals

Today was a great day at The Winds.

We opened up with The Who’s “Join Together” which, I must say, is a great call to worship. We also covered Eddie Vedder’s “Rise Up” from the “Into the Wild” soundtrack. Great tune. Vocal and mandolin. Period.

We are in the middle of this series entitled, “Sin Monkey.” The idea is that sin is like a little pet monkey you buy and bring home. He’s cute and cuddly and a joy at first but, as he grows, and you begin to lose “control” of him, he thrashes your furniture, claws up your family, pees on everything, and flings poo at your kids. Pretty soon, none of your friends wants anything to do with you because of your little pet.

We showed this video today (below) which is spooky macabre, and looks like something Tim Burton might produce. The video is a good picture of the effects of sin that is enjoyable for a season but has long lasting damaging effects. The music is creepy cool—it’s the song that plays in my head when my daughter’s porcelain dolls run around the house in the middle of the night.



Today’s highlight for me was the first-time use of our cyber-confessionals. Five booths were built in back of the auditorium space where “confessors” could go behind a curtain and confess sin anonymously to anonymous “confessees” on the other end of a terminal. We used Yahoo! Messenger and set up profiles for confessor1,2,3,4,5 and linked them to confessee 1,2,3,4,5 respectively. So, when a confessor went in to a booth and started typing, their confessee was ready to listen and pray with them. The confessees were from Michigan, California, Tennessee, and other states. We will have the booths up for a few more weeks.

Stay tuned for more interactive worship confession ideas. This series is full of them. We have some creative and meaningful things planned that I can't wait to share with you!

Dave is a Big Fat Jerk

Not really. I love him more than life.

BUT . . .

While filming this promo for our new series, "Sin Monkey" I told him I thought it would be funny for me to sneak into the shot with a Darth Vader mask on. He agreed.

Then, he punched me.

I didn't know it was coming.

This is not camera trickery or Hollywood magic. We don't have the budget or the time.

This is Dave punching me in the face.

The molded plastic on the inside of the Dark Sith Lord's mask pounded my cheek bone leaving me bruised for a few days. He apologized--Dave, that is, not Vader. Just like that time he hit me in the groin for fun. And then apologized--after the doctor appointment.

All in all, the sin monkey is a great metaphor and this video is a great metaphor for the sin monkey. Any connection between sin monkeys and David McDonald are entirely your own conclusion and not my words.

Love you, Dave. Thanks for allowing me to take one for the team and demonstrate the love of Jesus as I forgive you publicly.

Jerk.