Luke 11 - Deleted Scenes

I just preached on Luke 11, the first bit where Jesus again teaches the disciples about how to pray. He gives nearly the same model prayer that he did in his prior public teaching (recorded by Matthew). As before, I’m including some “Deleted Scenes” that were prepared for the sermon, but didn’t make the Final Cut. Now when I do this, I’m not – at all – implying that the information in these Deleted Scenes would make it into the “Director’s Cut.” Some of this was cut for time, others because they didn’t relate directly to the main message, even if it was initially interesting to me.

Before we get into looking at this verse by verse, I want to acknowledge that I get lots of help when I prepare a sermon. I say this because not only do I want to teach and preach to you about what’s in the Bible and what it tells us to do. But also because I want you to see a bit into how I come to these conclusions. Now, I don’t always do this as well as I should. But I thought I’d just take a minute to acknowledge help that I do get. After I study a passage on my own, I’ll then go to reliable commentaries to check my work and see that I’m on track. One commentary that I’ve been using a lot of is this one by Darrell Bock, a professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary. This thick book covers only the last half of the single book of Luke. The full commentary on Luke is two books this size. I’ll also use other commentaries to give me some other input. Here’s a commentary (The Interpreter Bible) that we had in the church library – I think it was donated – and I found it’s not that helpful. You just learn these things. Commentaries can be helpful to keep you on track – after you do as much as you can on your own – as well as pointing out things that you might have missed: which is mostly what is valuable to me.

This sermon was uncharacteristic of me because I dove into the Greek a bit. I try NOT to do that (even though many preachers do) for a variety of reasons. But in this case it was helpful. As you’ll see, I was tempted to put in much more “Greeky” stuff than actually went into the final sermon…

The language can fail us so we’re going to get all Greek-y. The phrase is “One day;” actually, the language gives more the meaning, “It unfolded…” giving this as more of an episode that played out. And that is much of the ‘feeling’ of Luke’s gospel; we get the feeling that we’re walking along with Jesus, seeing events as they unfold.

More Greek: “Lord~” is a ‘vocative’ – a calling, address; take a noun and use that to call out to someone. It’s like: “Ushers, would you come down?” or “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup!” or “Private, you come here!” or “Lord, please teach us…”

Now there is this odd Greek grammatical structure of a past-tense combined with a command, or technically known as the Aorist-Imperative. Doesn’t that just bless your socks off? This grammatical structure is actually used as request to superior in this word: “teach us.” Usually an imperative is a command, but telling God, or any superior, what to do is not wise! So it seems that the Greeks showed respect by putting the command in the past. So a command, “you taught us” was understood to be “Please teach us.”

I spent some time talking about the New Testament use of the word “Abba” as ‘Father.’ I’ve discussed this before in this blog (http://ericmesselt.blogspot.com/search/label/father). In retrospect, it would have been helpful to clarify what I was trying to get across – something like this…

When we see that God tells us that he is our Father, does that mean that God is not our “daddy?” Certainly not! It is fully appropriate and supported in the Bible (think of some of the Psalms) to cuddle up in our heavenly Father’s lap, nestle into him, and have a good cry. This kind of casual or informal relationship with God is, it seems to me, clearly supported in scripture. But, again, what is NOT supported in scripture is this idea that God is our “buddy,” our “pal,” or our “mate.” There is much in the Bible that talks about what a proper and healthy Father-child relationship is like and none of implies that the Father and the child are peers. Any time we make God out to be that kind of he’s-just-like-me relationship, we’ve got it wrong.

At the same time, Jesus does say that he is our friend. But in any earthly friendship between two people, there seems to usually be a dominate person in the relationship. With our friendship with Jesus, he’s always the dominate person.

So, yes, a healthy relationship with God as our Father includes both intimacy and respect, affection and honor. God is our Father.

As to the point of our relationship with God as our Father…

I had a chat with my son, Theo, recently. One of the points I reminded him of was that I was extremely invested in his happy and successful future. That is, I cared a lot more for him than any – ANY – of his current friends at school or even here at the church. There is no one on the planet who loves Theo more than Barb and I. At the end, I hope it was clear to Theo that I had his long-term happiness and success in life in mind – and that is just not true of any of his friends in school or church. That’s a small part of the nature of God’s fatherhood of us: he is vitally interested in our lives and he knows what will make us truly happy in the long-term

I got to the section where Jesus says that if we ask, seek, or knock – we’ll get good things…

But what about this language? Is God a genie in a lamp and gives us whatever we ask? That seems very contrary to the flow of this story. That potential misunderstanding is corrected for us in Jas 4:2 – in our day, we must look at the whole Bible to formulate our theology. And, if we look carefully at the language, it is not saying that God will give you exactly what you asked for, but that God will graciously respond in terms of the request.

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So that's my Deleted Scenes. Again, it's probably more helpful for you to listen to the sermon first (www.lbchapel.org/media.php?pageID=24) and then you'll understand the context of these 'scenes.'

Easter 2009 (Deleted Scenes)

I’d mentioned last month that I was trying to figure out how to restructure my blogging activity. I came up with one thought, which was also confirmed by my friend, Doug, of writing on “deleted scenes” from sermons I would deliver. The idea is that there are several thoughts that I developed in preparation for my eventual sermon that, for various reasons, didn’t make it into the ‘final cut.’ Some of these ideas aren’t completely thought out so are a bit raw.

This blog is on the ideas that didn’t get into the Easter sermon.

Easter Isn’t About “Church”

One of the things that people get confused about Easter is that it’s a ‘holiday’ rather than a “holy day.” Easter, properly understood, is not truly about clothes, candy, or even “church.” For most Christians, they can see the first two points but get confused about the last: “Wadda mean, Easter isn’t about church?” Well, the first thing to get straight is that Christianity itself isn’t about church, it’s about Jesus. Once I put it that way, nobody’s going to disagree.

But here’s where Easter becomes “religious.” There are make-believe “Christians” who have no living relationship with Jesus (though they for bizarre reasons still call themselves “Christians”), who really believe that if they merely attend church on Christmas and Easter, that’s “good enough.” This is so mind-boggling to me that I don’t even know where to start. Christianity is not about attending church. While authentic Christians do attend church, their relationship to God is not about their church attendance but their relationship to the real savior, Jesus. So called “Twice-A-Year ‘Christians’” are not real Christians. That’s what I mean when I say that Easter is not about “church.”

Pagan Easter

There’s a lot of virtual ink spilled on the web about the pagan influences upon Easter. Several will spout the party line that Christians just glommed on to pagan springtime festivals and created Easter from whole cloth. Unfortunately, they just don’t have the historical facts. While it is true that the church took the then-nasty “Saturnalia” festival and redeemed it into a celebration of Jesus’ birth [see blog post on 10Dec2009], the exact opposite occurred with Resurrection Day.

Now it is clear that there are pagan Vernal Equinox celebrations. And it is also clear, in hind-sight, that some of the elements of those celebrations have made their way into the holiday we now know as Easter. As with Christmas, there are both pagan and Christian elements associated with the holiday. But no thoughtful Christian will say that the centrality of Easter lies in the Bunny, eggs, flowers, or mere “rebirth of nature.”

It is a clear fact when Jesus rose from his death by execution. It was early morning on the first day of the week after the Passover. The calendar for the Passover was very clear at that time and relied on the Vernal Equinox for its calculation. The date for Jesus’ resurrection is a very specific day of the week and season of the year. What has been annoying is to see a variety of pagan practices worm their way into this celebration. I am frequently tempted to refer to the pagan-secular part of the holiday as “Pseudo-Easter” and the authentic Christian celebration of Jesus’ resurrection as “Resurrection Day.”

Prayer

One of the things I’m surprised still occurs in church life is the weird way people pray. they don’t pray as if Jesus were real. There are people who still pray using “King James” pronoun language: Thee, Thou, Thine, and other phrases. It is as if the people who pray in this way believe that unless they use these kinds of ‘special words,’ God will not be pleased with them. This is very much like the thinking behind magical incantations: if you say the right words, in the right way, in the proper sequence, then you can manipulate the spiritual world.

If we believe that Jesus is real, then it seems to me that should change our “prayer language.” Prayer, for the child of God, is not magical incantations but family talk. The pagans, who don’t know God as Father, have every reasonable expectation that God is not happy with them. Pagans live in fear of a capricious god who needs to be appeased and may Zap them if they do the least little thing wrong. Christians should see God as their Father and talk to them as such. That was the instruction that Jesus gave his disciples about their prayer life: “Our Father, who is in heaven…”

Never in my life did I ever approach my own father, Warren S. Messelt, with words like this: “Oh my father, that thou would live forever! I beseech thee for thy good grace to bestow upon me thine favor and that thou wouldest bless me with thy good gift. I petition thee that thou wouldest grant me thy blessing and permit me to operate thy automobile this evening that I mayest fellowship with my companions. So be it.” If my dad heard me say something like that, he’d be pretty ticked.

I think that our prayer life indicates our relationship with God. Now I am not advocating disrespectful prayer such as: “God-Dude – I need a car!” When Jesus said we should pray to God, we should address God respectfully. But to use language that is foreign to us is to slip into an attitude about prayer that is very un-Christian.