No Bowls of Wrath

I remember an old Nichols and May routine from the 60s.

Mike Nichols played a man desperate to make a call on his one and only dime. Elaine May was the telephone operator.

He said to her, “Please don’t jiggle something with your elbow and make me lose my dime.”

She replied, “Sir, we don’t work with our elbows.”

I heard a preacher reading from Revelation the other day—the lines about God pouring bowls of wrath on humankind.

God doesn’t work with bowls of wrath.

I used to play the preacher game: Try to find something good to say about Revelation.

It’s in the Bible! It’s part of the canon!

Yes—and a theologically useless book. Tell it like it is. It’s a mess.

And it was not written by the author of the gospel and letters of John.

Unlike them, it is written in very poor Greek.

The worst thing about Revelation is that it contradicts the teaching of Jesus that we are to love our enemies for God loves his enemies.

In Revelation, God hates his enemies and treats them with unspeakable cruelty.

Like pouring bowls of wrath on them.

It has Jesus riding in on a white horse cutting off the heads of sinners.

We all know what Jesus does. He dies for sinners. All of us.

It is impossible to affirm the content of Revelation and also affirm what Jesus taught us about God.

The God we know in Christ is the only God there is. And God doesn’t work with bowls of wrath.

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Special Giving Week.

Help with Friday’s Word.

Jesus Got God Right

We can know God.

Millions of people have actually met God.

They have encountered God in experience.

Consider this from Bill Wilson, founder of AA. In a moment of desperation, he cried out to God to show himself:

Suddenly the room was filled with a bright white light. I felt an ecstasy beyond words. All about me and through me was a wonderful presence. I thought, so this is the God preachers talk about.

Here God answered a prayer both obviously and immediately.

I’ve had this happen to me a couple of times.

Every encounter with God gives us information about God. Every mystical event, every NDE, tells us something about God’s nature.

So, I began to wonder:

What kind of God would we come up with if we looked only at information from experiences?

I began work on my book, Discovering God. (Not yet published.)

I would set the Bible aside, set aside my own theology, and be entirely open to the God we meet in experience.

My book examines over 100 profound stories of personal encounters with God.

And what kind of God did I discover? A God of infinite love—the God we know in Christ. I even ended up at the Cross and the Resurrection.

I did not discover the rough and vindictive God of Revelation and some Old Testament passages.

That God does not exist.

In experience, we meet the God revealed in The Sermon on the Mount.

Experience tells us Jesus got God exactly right.

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Sunday, May 5, is Special Giving Day at St. Matthew. I invite your gift.

The Body of Christ

I was unable to serve Communion Sunday due to a hip problem (now gone). The assistant pastor and our lay leader served.

This allowed me to sit and watch as people knelt (and stood) at the rail to receive the sacrament. And I was struck by the spiritual beauty of the congregation.

“This is truly the Body of Christ,” I thought.

We received a new member who lives in Idaho. He was in town for the big eclipse show on Monday.

Obviously, Chris will not be driving in each Sunday for worship. He watches online and sends his offering by mail.

He is one of our faithful people, part of our church family. Now an official long-distance member.

A woman, Barbara, visited on Good Friday. She came with a clutch of these little articles in her purse. She had waited for an evening service.

Family matters make it hard for her to come on Sundays. She watches our services and will be reading this.

She loves St. Matthew.

A couple told me after worship recently, “Without Friday’s Word and this church, I don’t think we would have a church right now.”

Someone who joined recently said, “I was looking for a church that preaches a loving God.”

The people of St. Matthew know they are in a church that stands for something.

In reading the Bible, we put Jesus first. He sets the agenda as we read the rest of the Bible.

Everyone at St. Matthew is smart enough to know that gay people are just people who happen to be gay. God doesn’t care.

Give us a visit.

I’d like to meet you.

Worship–11:00 a.m.

God Hears Us

Elaine had been a member of a church youth group I worked with. I had not heard from her in 18 years. Then I got her letter.

She said she felt “compelled” by God to share her experience with me. Here’s a brief excerpt.

I wanted a closer walk with God. I prayed every day for that. And one day, driving home from church, I demanded to know why I was unworthy to know Him better.

And God came, very literally, right into my car. I was suddenly viewing specific moments of my life replayed in my mind with every tiny detail.

God replayed all my prayers of recent weeks, word for word. I was hearing them and knowing them instantly.

Then I saw and felt this overwhelming light, the most amazing light I had ever seen—a mixture of amber and rose and gold.

And it was alive. I felt an awesome power and love.

God let Elaine know her prayers were heard.

All of them.

Elaine called—and God responded.

God is accessible.

God is forthcoming.

I have known this since my own prayer experience at fourteen. I prayed and received an audible reply.

I said to myself after my prayer, “Nobody heard me.” A voice replied clearly, “I heard you.”

No, prayer does not work this way most of the time. But these events tell us that all prayers are heard.

And God will always respond in some way.

These events also tell us that God is real, God is personal, and God cares about us.

How often have I said this to you? God is an experienced reality.

A recommendation:

Worship somewhere this Sunday. For the joy of it.

Two Momentous Days

Good Friday and Easter.

Today is Good Friday—for those reading Friday’s Word on Friday. And this Sunday is Easter.

Two momentous days.

One no more important than the other.

On Friday evening, our great choir will sing, Without His Cross, there Is No Crown.

Without Good Friday, there is no Easter.

The “prop” for the Good Friday service tonight is a life-sized image of the burial shroud of Jesus.

The “Shroud of Turin,” as it is called.

(The radio-carbon dating was wrong. Two more recent dating tests are right. It comes from the time of Jesus.)

The Shroud image will be referenced as we follow the story of Jesus’ last hours from John’s gospel.

John’s gospel carries the close-to-first-hand account provided by “the beloved disciple.”

It is powerful.

Standing at the foot of the cross were four Marys: Jesus’ mother, Mary the wife of Clopas. And Mary Magdalene.

Jesus’ aunt, his mother’s sister, was also there.

And “the beloved disciple.”

That is the only way he is named in the Gospel of John. I do not believe he was John. He was not one of the twelve. We do not know his name. But his witness takes us close to both the death and the resurrection of
Jesus.

I turn to that witness again on Easter Sunday morning.

Please consider this your personal invitation to both of these services.

Tonight, we have a light supper at 6:30 before worship. The service starts at 7:00.

On Sunday the kids hunt Easter eggs at 10:00.

Easter worship starts at 11:00. Let us, too, gather at the foot of the cross.