Lantern of God

Sermon for North Hill Adventist Fellowship, Sabbath, January 15, 2011.
Ephesians 1:22-23; 2:19-22; 5:8


We were camped in an informal camping area some distance off a remote gravel road. It was cold. There was snow on the ground and snow in the air. After we finished supper, Karin crawled into the tent. I helped get the sleeping bags zipped together and hung around until she was all snuggled in. Then I went for a walk. It was magic. Because of the snow, the road was obvious, even in the dark. The longer I walked the heavier it snowed.

After half an hour I turned around. The darkness was deeper. The snow fall was heavier. I began to wonder if I might walk right past our camp.

It was not a real worry, though, because before I left I had lit a hurricane lantern and set it on a large rock at our campsite.

Sure enough fifty yards from the turn off to our campsite, through the snow and the trees, I was beckoned by the warm light. The yellow glow of the lantern advertised a snug shelter from the freezing wind, a cozy, pre-warmed sleeping bag. Ease.
Hurricane lanterns live up to their names. They work in extreme conditions. A candle works fine inside a draft-free room. A bowl of kerosene with a wick draped over the side will work in some settings. But a hurricane lantern works outside when the wind is blowing and it's pouring rain. And on snowy nights in eastern Oregon. It even works on the wintery plains of Wyoming. You can hang a hurricane lantern on a nail outside the log cabin door to serve as a beacon for a cowboy finding his way in from tending the cattle.

The lantern makes possible the magic of light from the combination of flame and kerosene. Flame is not enough. Kerosene is not enough. Of course, a lantern without flame and kerosene is not worth much. It's when we bring together lantern, kerosene and flame that we have life-saving light.


The church is God's lantern in the world. It is in the church that God's presence and grace become visible and effective.

Jesus' ministry brought light to those in darkness (Matthew 4:16).
He called himself the light of the world. (John 8:12)
The Gospel of John says that Jesus was the light of humanity, that he lit up every person who comes into the world. (John 1:4, 9)

With all this affirmation of Jesus' role as the light of the world, it is surprising to read Jesus' words in Matthew 5:14, “You are the light of the world.” You—disciples, believers, Christians, people like you and me. We are the light of the world!

Jesus is the light of the world. We are the light of the world.

Which connects strongly with several passages in the book of Ephesians.

Ephesians 1:22-23. God placed all things under Christ's feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

Notice the words, “The church is the fullness of Christ!

Now the words of chapter 2:19-22

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens,
but fellow citizens with God's people and
members of God's household,
built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,
with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.
In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.
And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

The church is the body of Christ, the very fullness of Christ! The church is the dwelling of God. We are God's temple. The church is the lantern which houses and displays the glory of God's presence and grace.

If a person is looking for God, God's intention is that they can find him by coming to church. God's intends the church to be a place, a community, where people can renew their connection with him. We can revive our faith by participating in the life of the church. And those who have never made a connection with God can begin their walk with God by connecting with the church.

The church is the medium through which God is most powerfully present in the world. It radiates hope in a hopeless world. It promises safety, security and belonging.
The church is the light of the world. Paul writes that God intends that his wisdom is to be evident “in the church.” (Ephesians 3:10). Paul prays that God will be glorified in the church (3:21). That's a wonderful affirmation. God has amazing confidence in us. It's a daunting challenge. I find myself wondering, “God, are you sure about that? Are you sure you want me to represent you?” The answer is yes. He does want me and you to serve as his representatives.

That's our job. When people meet us they are meeting God.

Going back to Paul's words about the church being the body of Christ, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way, it's natural for us to ask ourselves what we can do to make sure we are living up to this privileged status. What can we do to make sure we are truly The Light in the dark world?

In the current Adventist climate, the “proper answer” is, “We need the Holy Spirit.” Which, of course, is true. In fact, Paul says that God lives in the church through the Holy Spirit. (2:22). But this answer misses Paul's point. Paul does not say that seeking for and receiving a new measure of the Holy Spirit is the key to being filled with all the fullness of God. The key to radiating the glory of God is mentioned in several places in the book of Ephesians.

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,
may have power, together with all the saints,
to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,
and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--
that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. 3:17-19

Then in chapter 4:

to prepare God's people for works of service,
so that the body of Christ may be built up
until we all reach unity in the faith and
in the knowledge of the Son of God and
become mature,
attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. 4:12-13

In both of these passages, the key to being filled with God, filled with Jesus is knowing God. When we know God we will radiate his presence and grace in a dark world? Knowing the height and depth and breadth of God's love.

Beware of strategies that focus over much on the Holy Spirit. Human effort to “acquire” the Holy Spirit is not a major theme in the Bible. The presence and work of the Holy Spirit are promised in John 13-16. What we are called to pursue is a full, rich, true knowledge of God. The key to being filled with God is knowing God. And this is something we can actively pursue.

The first thing we can do to deepen, enrich, purify, intensify our knowledge of God is to practice daily reinforcement of the good things we already know. Most of us are Christians. Many of us have been Christians for a long time. If someone were to give us a quiz we could give the right answers to questions about God. But often this knowledge gets swamped by all the knowledge we have from elsewhere in our lives—TV, radio, the internet, friends, bosses, coworkers, family.

We can make our factual knowledge more potent, more effective in our lives by daily refreshing our awareness of the good news. Some ways we can this are:

Bible reading. There are all sorts of ways to do this.
Online devotionals. There are a variety of sources of emailed daily devotionals.
Christian music.
Books on tape or CD. Great for commuting.

A second way to deepen and purify our knowledge of God involves more in depth exploration. We can do this through:

Sermons can challenge and question our present ideas and instinctive convictions, pushing us to consider things we might not have otherwise.
Books can open our minds and hearts. Both topical books and biographies and memoirs of people of faith can feed our own faith.
With both sermons and books, it is important to seek out input that builds our faith and confidence. Avoid input that increases your fear or your condemnation of other people and churches.

A third way to enrich our knowledge of God is to engage in behaviors that reinforce our faith such as:

Attending church—the mere fact of attending, quite apart from the content of sermons or the words of the music, just going to church—tends to reinforce our faith in God.
For some of us, spending time in the out of doors will build our faith.
For nearly everyone, participating in acts of service will have a reflexive positive effect on our faith. As we participate with God in responding to human need, our own confidence in God will grow.

In addition to filling our lives with positive reinforcement, we can avoid things that erode or obscure our knowledge of God.
Limit our exposure to talk radio and TV news.
The world is actually safer than it was years ago. Children are less likely to be abducted. Fewer people are starving. I don't mean to imply the world is a safe happy place for all six billion of us, but if you are more aware of the threats and disasters than you are of the beauty and glory of the world, you need to reduce your consumption of negative input. Do not listen “to be informed.” Listen for the purpose of taking action. Listen and send money. Listen and contact your legislators. Listen and pray. But do not listen merely so you can be aware of the evil in the world. This kind of listening erodes our effective knowledge of God.
Listen to yourself. Do you speak more frequently about the trouble in the world or the blessings. Do you speak more passionately and enthusiastically about the gloom or the light? Do you celebrate goodness or decry badness more frequently and intensely?

In John 17, Jesus said, “This is life eternal, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” We do not find eternal life for ourselves or others through the pursuit of an experience with the Holy Spirit. The function of the Holy Spirit is connecting us with God. The Spirit is not seeking to win our hearts to himself. Rather he acts on behalf of the Father and Jesus.
So please, let us give ourselves to enriching and purifying our knowledge of God. Let us build on the connection God has given us and continually seek even greater intimacy with him. Let us seek to replace the defective elements in our understanding that come from our families of origin, faulty education, our own brokenness and frailty. Lets refine our knowledge through prayer, meditation, reading, worshiping, and serving.

Let's do everything we can to make our congregation a community of light. Let's be the hurricane lantern of God, the indestructible, inextinguishable light in a world haunted by darkness.

What to Do in 2011

Sermon preached at North Hill Adventist Fellowship, Sabbath, January 1, 2011


What are you going to do in 2011? My first thought is I would like a little inside information to help me make wise decisions. Some possible relevant questions:

How long before the economy collapses?
How long before the gold bubble collapses?
How long before my health fails?
When will my company downsize again?
When will Muslim terrorists stage a successful attack on U.S. Soil?
When will the Sunday law happen?
When will Jesus return?

That last one is especially important. If Jesus is coming within the next two years, I don't need to put any more money in my retirement plan. I don't need to worry about my arteries. I don't need to get out of debt. I can drop out of school. We don't need to keep pouring money into health research. If we knew time would last two years or less there are any number of long term investments we could ignore.

There would be some other short term investments that might make lots of sense.

We are naturally curious about the future. As we plan our lives, it makes sense to try to understand how much time is available to us.

Near the end of Jesus ministry, he and his disciples were leaving the temple ground in Jerusalem. The disciples remarked to Jesus about the magnificence of the temple buildings. To their astonishment, Jesus said, “You see all this? It's all going to be demolished. Completely. Razed to the ground.” The disciples were speechless. How could this be?

Jesus and his entourage continued out of the city, down across the Kidron Valley and up the other side to the Mt. Olives. Sitting there with a full view of the temple buildings and walls, the disciples asked Jesus about his prediction. “When is it going to happen? What signs will there be that it was about to happen?”

They were all ears as Jesus began answering their question.

Jesus first words were a caution: “Don't get snookered.” [That's my translation.] “There are going to be a lot of charlatans, false Christs and false prophets. There will be trouble—wars and rumors of wars, famines and earthquakes, persecution. But don't get buffaloed by people claiming special knowledge, special power or special insight.”

Wars, famines, earthquakes: Sound like any place you know? Yep. Sounds like our world. And it has sounded like “our world” to every generation of believers from A.D. 33 till now. This is the normal condition of the world as we know it. These words offer the first hint that Jesus is going to throw his disciples a curve. They asked “When?” Jesus' answer offered not even a hint of chronology. The so-called “signs” that Adventist evangelists love to preach reveal nothing about how many months or years remain between “now” and the second coming. They are merely the characteristics of all time before the second coming.

The last sign in verses 1-14 is the one Adventists often point to with the greatest confidence. “This gospel of kingdom will be preached in all the world and then the end will come.” When I was younger we carefully counted the number of countries the Adventist Church had an organized presence in (however small). Now, I'm not sure how we justify clinging to this verse as a help in figuring out the chronology of the second coming. The notion that “the end will come” immediately following the completion of the gospel going to the whole world raises some interesting problems. The first and most dramatic problem with this view is that Paul believed the gospel had already gone to the whole world in his day (Romans 1:8, Colossians 1:6). That was about 2000 years ago. In more modern times, with the advent of short wave radio, the gospel was demonstrably available world wide. People had short wave receivers even in remote villages untouched by electricity. Recently I read a novel challenge to this kind of calculation. If the gospel going to the whole world means the message of Jesus must be presented to every person in a way that could reasonably be expected to be understood, then the birth of every infant delays the second coming by a few more years. Because until that infant becomes old enough to understand the gospel, then we cannot say the gospel has gone to the whole world.
If we turn from these kinds of quibbles and ask what did Jesus plainly teach about the time of his coming in Matthew 24 and 25, the answer is unequivocal.

Jesus assures us the end will come. “as lightning flashes from the east and is visible all the way to the west so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” The end is going to come. Dramatically. For sure. The angels “will gather his elect from one end of heaven to the other.” Good news. And when will this happen? (How effective will the “signs” prove to be in working out the calendar?) “No one knows about that day or hour . . . you do not know on what day your Lord will come . . . you must be ready because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him” (24:36, 42, 44).

At this point in the sermon Jesus switches to telling stories. Which signals he is coming to the punch line, the climax, the grand conclusion. [Matthew 24 and 25 form a single teaching unit. In form they are reminiscent of the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7) and the Parables of the Kingdom (chapter 13).

In the first story, Jesus tells about a servant who is put in charge of a household while his master is gone. The Master tells the servant to be sure everyone receives their food in a timely manner. After the Master leaves, the servant says to himself, He'll be gone practically forever. I can do whatever I want. The servant acts like a jerk mistreating the rest of the household, assuring himself all the while that he has plenty of time to cover up all evidence of his wrong doing before the Master returns.

The Master returns. The servant has not destroyed the evidence. What happens to the servant is not pretty.

The moral of this story: Don't think you have all the time in the world. There will be a day of reckoning. And if you are acting like a jerk, that day is bound to come “too soon.”

What does the food in this story represent? Some preachers historically have linked the food in this story with the words of Matthew 4, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” So food is the Word of God and the way we prepare for the second coming is to provide food, i.e. the Word of God, to the world.

It's a poetic, imaginative use of Bible language, but it obviously is not the meaning of the parable. The point Jesus is making has to do with our attitude toward time. While it is true we ought to share the good news, that is not the point of this parable.

The next parable is about the ten virgins or to put it in modern idiom, “The Ten Bridesmaids.”

There is a wedding in the offing. The ten bridesmaids are waiting for the bridegroom's party to come and fetch them for the wedding. The girls are all dolled up. They have lamps because it is going to be an evening affair. The groom is late. The girls all fall asleep. Hours later the girl's are awakened. The groom is coming! The girls fix their hair and straighten their gowns and trim their lamps. Oops. The lamps are out of oil. (The groom is really, really late.) No problem. Five of the girls have brought along little flasks of oil. They fill their lamps and are ready to go. The other five however, did not bring any extra. They go to the store to get some but by the time they return from the store, the bridal party has already reached the venue and the door to the wedding is shut.

What is the point of this story? The foolish girls are those who “knew the groom was coming soon.” In the previous story, the fool was the servant who knew his Master was going to be a long time in coming. In this story, the fools are those who know the groom is coming soon. The common element in these stories: People who think they have figured out God's calendar. Long or short, if you are living your life on the basis of what you “know” about God's calendar, you are a fool.

The wise bridesmaids did not know they were going to need the extra oil. They expected the groom at the same time the foolish girls did. They brought extra oil "just in case."

When I travel around Western Washington, I do not carry a gas can in my car. But when I go on vacation across eastern Oregon, I not only carry a gas can. I carry a gas can with gas in it. I don't plan to run out of gas. I take the extra gas just in case, because gas stations in Oregon's outback can be very far apart. On my last trip (and my wife was along on this trip) for the first time, I ran out of gas. In the middle of nowhere. At least fifty miles from the nearest gas station. Fortunately, since my wife does not like hitchhiking, I had the extra gas. Saved.

So with the wise virgins. They had the extra oil just in case the groom did not meet their expectations. The foolish virgins "knew" they didn't need any extra oil because they knew when the groom was coming.

What does the oil represent in this story? Oil. It does not represent anything. It does not represent the Holy Spirit. This parable is not about the Holy Spirit any more than the previous parable was about preaching. Both parables address the question originally asked by the disciples at the beginning of chapter 24: When? And both parables drive home the point: “when?” is a distracting question. Pursuing the question of when will never bring you to wise action as a Christian.

Those who use this parable to teach about the Holy Spirit need to be honest that what they are doing is a poetic, imaginative use of Bible language, but they are not working with the plain meaning of what the Bible actually says. There is nothing in the context of Matthew 24 and 25 that supports the idea that the oil in this parable represents the Holy Spirit or that the overall meaning of this parable is somehow a message about “the reception of the Holy Spirit in Latter Rain fullness.” The use of this parable in this connection is at best sweet, holy fiction. It has nothing to do with exegesis or the proper interpretation of the text of the Bible.

So if “signs” don't give us a calendar for the second coming, if “when?” is a distracting, unhelpful question, just what are the relevant issues in view of the fact that Jesus will come again? What kinds of questions should we be asking?

Jesus addresses this in the final two stories of Matthew 25.


The Parable of the Ten Talents.

A rich man called in three servants. He gave the first one fifty thousand dollars, the second twenty thousand and the third ten thousand. Then the Master took off on a journey. After awhile he returns and calls the servants in to see what they've done with their money. The first two have doubled their money. The master is pleased and commends them. The third guy comes in and says, “You are an unreasonable man. I was afraid of you. So I risked nothing. I buried my money. Here is, all ten thousand.”

The Master blew up. “What? You knew I was demanding? Why didn't you at least put my money in the bank where it could have earned a few percent.” What happened to the servant was not pretty.

What is the issue in the story? What makes the difference between being ready for the end and being condemned in the end? What one thinks of the Master. The first two servants trusted their master and went to work. They did the best they could. The master was happy. The third guy buried his gift because he was afraid of the Master.

We prepared for the end by trusting God and taking risks. By really living. Serving others. Making a difference. Attempting to love like Jesus did. There is actually no risk in doing this, because in this story the servants are not graded on their productivity but their willingness to risk based on their confidence in their master.

The Parable of the Sheep and Goats

The final story is written especially for theologians, for those who become infatuated with their theories of the character of God.

At the end God will separate humanity into two groups like a shepherd separates sheep and goats. God will say to the sheep, the people on the right. “Welcome to the heavenly party. When I was hungry you fed me. When I was in prison, you visited me. When I needed stuff, you provided it.”

The sheep are amazed and protest. “Excuse us, but we never saw you hungry or in prison or needing stuff.”

Jesus smiles and says, “That's true. You never saw me. But you fed me any way. Because when you fed the least of these, you fed me.”

God says to the goats, “Out of here! Because when I was hungry you refused to feed me. When I was in prison, you never visited me. When I needed stuff, you refused to provide it.”

The goats begin protesting, “Wait a minute. We never saw you hungry or in prison or needing stuff. And in fact we cast out demons in your name and worked miracles. We're your people. You can't boot us.” (See Matthew 7:22)

Jesus agrees with them. “You're right you didn't see me. All you saw was lazy bums and irresponsible people. Weaklings and losers. Unfortunates. Crazy people. But when you refused to serve the bums and irresponsible people, the weaklings and losers, the unfortunates and crazy people, you refused me.”

The relevant issue for us to address in view of the end of the world is this: What do we think of God? Then those who think have gotten that one figured out can turn their test over and address the final question: How does your view of God impact the way you treat people?

Here at the end of the sermon, Jesus makes it crystal clear: figuring out time lines, prophetic charts and heavenly calendars are at best idle curiosities. The job of “last day Christians” is exactly the same as “first day Christians.” The call to holiness in the first century A. D. is the same as the call to holiness in the last century A. D. It is simply this: Trust your Master and take care of his kids.

Debates about “a perfect final generation” or how we can engineer a revival that will bring on the Latter Rain or attempts to figure out just how close we are to the end are all distractions. They never lead to wise living.

Even when people avoid setting a date in their minds, those who focus on “the time” end up setting a date in their hearts. And that date is always wrong. Either it puts off the second coming. (Jesus can't come in the next six months because our prophetic scenario for the end times requires more than six months to play out!) Or it puts the second coming too close. (I know I will see the second coming in my life time.) Either way, we are distracted from the central mission of the church: To love God and neighbor.

So what is our mission in 2011: Trust God and take care of his kids. (Let God take care of the calendar. He's going to, anyway.)