Fairytale Landscape of Grace

In Ephesians 1:15-16 Paul says

- 5 For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, 16 I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.

§ In our modern time we tend to view faith as this thing that I think, something that is going on in our minds. Now this is part of it but faith in the Bible is as one pastor puts it

· “Faith means to have full allegiance and clinging onto for dear life. Faith in Jesus is full allegiance to him which is going on in brain but it is clinging to Jesus for all I have”

· It's a lifestyle that Paul then says flows right into love. This love is a love that views the needs of another above my own.

o In our modern world we are really good at create this mystic version of faith, we view it as this separate thing in my life that I read the Bible to grow more morally superior, morally righteous, whatever it may be. This could not be further from what the Bible says. Following Jesus is a whole new way of life. So when Paul says he has heard of their love, defined as thinking of another’s needs above my own. Paul is saying a lifestyle of love, not once in awhile giving money to a houseless person on the side of the road because you feel guilty and the pastor said something about love. Love requires having eyes to see people so that we may meet the needs they have, whether they speak them out or not.

As we come down the home stretch of Man Challenge I want to kick us off with the idea of faith and community. With winter coming around, seasons changing. It's easy for us to slip back into individualism.

- We also need to understand that this is a community effort, there is a modern idea of spirituality that is hyper individualistic. Revolves around the individual, what they feel, what they want. Following Jesus is a communal offer

Spirituality, for a Christian, can never be an individualist quest, the pursuit of God outside of community, family, and church. The God of the incarnation tells us that anyone who says he or she loves an invisible God in heaven and is unwilling to deal with a visible neighbor on earth is a liar since no one can love God who cannot be seen if he or she cannot love a neighbor who can be seen. Hence a Christian spirituality is always as much about dealing with each other as it is about dealing with God.” Ronald Rolheiser.

As we move forward, as we look into what Revolutionize is going to be about we do it together. Individual Christianity is not Christianity, there is no such thing.

Nazi party began in 1919. With the foundational belief that there was one race superior to all others, therefore they needed to be eliminated.

Hitler soon emerged as a charismatic public speaker and began attracting new members with speeches blaming Jews and Marxists for Germany’s problems and espousing extreme nationalism and the concept of an Aryan “master race.”

In addition to Jews, the camp’s prisoners included members of other groups Hitler considered unfit for the new Germany, including artists, intellectuals, Gypsies, the physically and mentally handicapped and homosexuals.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was a German theologian and pastor during the reign of Hitler. He stood in vast contrast to the beliefs of Nazi Germany. This is interesting because this was a huge issue back then.

- Now in Germany at this time was a community called “Bethel”. “Bethel” was started by the dad of a guy named Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, Bonhoeffers friend. It was a community that served hundreds of people with disabilities.

o The author of Bonhoeffers biography describes Bethel as “the antithesis of the (Nazi) worldview that exalted power and strength. It made the gospel visible, a fairy-tale landscape of grace, where the weak and helpless were care for in a palpably Christian atmosphere.”

13 Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him,and he began to teach them. 14 As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.

15 While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. 16 When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

17 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

The Sunday school way of reading this passage is to come away and think, just be friends with everyone! Just love everyone! But this is so much more than that:

“We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections… may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We would rather text than talk… When technology engineers intimacy, relationships can be reduced to mere connections. And then, easy connection becomes redefined as intimacy. Put otherwise, cyberintimacies slide in cybersolitudes.” - Sherry Turtle in Along Together.

Bonhoeffer attended services and wrote his grandmother about the people with epilepsy: their “condition of being actually defenseless may perhaps reveal to these people certain actualities of our human existence, in which we are in fact basically defenseless, more clearly than can ever be possible for us who are healthy.” But even in 1933, the anti-gospel of Hitler was moving toward the legal murder of these people who, like the Jews, were categorized as unfit, as a drain on Germany. The terms increasingly used to describe these people with disabilities were useless eaters and life unworthy of life. When the war came in 1939, their extermination would begin in earnest. From Bethel, Bonhoeffer wrote his grandmother: “It is sheer madness, as some believe today, that the sick can or ought to be legally eliminated. It is virtually the same as building a tower of Babel, and is bound to avenge itself.” (Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, p. 184)

“Most people know they are broken. When they find a group of people that are humble and admit to being broken as well, youll be amazed at what people talk about.”

- People only share issues of brokenness with a friend

Man Challenge - teaching on Eph. 1:15-16 and Mark 2:13-17. Questions for table time: read through Mark 2:1-17 at your table, use what you have learned from Observe, Interpret, Apply for the text. Think about specifically context of what the pharisees says about Jesus and it coming after a tax collector becoming disciple and a paralytic being healed? Lastly, talk at your table about how have you seen others faith become visible? How might God be moving you/table to become a “fairytale lands