Redemption - Joining With God

Here is a sermon I preached last week at a church in West Chicago. I invite you to watch the first 11 minutes of the sermon, and to download the entire file as an MP3.


Redemption Intro from Kevin J Bowman on Vimeo.

Download Audio File Here

Can A Balloon Change The World

I ordered 3 bags worth of balloons today for our Memorial Day retreat programs. They are Fair Trade balloons! Seriously! You might laugh at me, being naive enough to believe that a balloon can change the world. Yet the truth is, I DO believe a balloon can change the world. In order for them to change the world, we have to change the minds of people, the heart of Christians, and even the connotation of certain words.

Let's start be redefining the connotative implications of a word. Sacramental. Classically, this words pertains to any object created by the church to aid in devotion. Items meant to assist the user in preparing their heart and mind to receive the sacraments. Catholics would place holy water, the rosary, and saint cards in this category. Evangelical churches have sacramentals as well, they just do not refer to them as such. In our church we use music and a meditative thought, and even some iconography occasionally. In both of these cases this word sacramental is disconnected from everyday life. I "GO TO CHURCH" and use an object or an activity to prepare my mind and heart for the Communion meal.

This is the idea that needs to be changed. Recently the phrase a "sacramental lifestyle" has been used in many missional and emergent conversations. This idea, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is that we are called to live in such a way that our LIFESTYLE is constantly engaged with God in his redemptive work. The sacramental lifestyle understands that we do not prepare to participate in a sacrament of atonement bust instead we are perpetually participatory as the incarnation of God's atonement.

Buying a balloon is a sacramental decision! The decision of where I spent my fiscals resources is FUNDAMENTALLY SACRAMENTAL! I can not be honoring with God in my heart as a eat a piece of cracker and take a shot of grape juice, if I am not honoring to God in the places where I buy my food, my clothing, and all my purchasing. When Christ states that the love of money is the root of all evil, he challenges the distribution of all our resources! Am I searching for the "Best Deal Available" at the expense of ignoring the slave labor in it's manufacturing, or am I purchasing responsibly to participate with God who "hears the cries of the oppressed."

There is SO MUCH available now that one can buy responsibly. Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, Fruit, T-Shirts, Socks, Flowers, and more I am forgetting. Yet, this is only the beginning! For love to change the world EVERY PURCHASE must be God honoring! The more products we the people of God insist on buying only when they are life affirming rather than life destroying, the more products that will be available.

I recently heard Rob Bell point out that Solomon's great mistake was to use forced labor to build the temple to the God of the slave and the oppressed. Once Solomon lost sight of the identity of his God, and his identity in God's Kingdom, his own kingdom was on a ripcord toward collapse.

Our hearts and minds must be changed. We must understand that our God is not a god like the corporate demigods of comfort, convenience, and consumption! He is the God of the bruised reed and the smoldering wick. He is the God who hears the cries of the slave, who feels the pain of the orphan, who longs for the release from bondage to the sex addict, the alcoholic, and the crack whore. He is the God who proclaim Jubilee, the redemption of all that needs to be restored.

A sacramental life can change the world because it is in that lifestyle that we align with God in his redemptive work, even in a purchase as simple as a pack of balloons, or maybe your mother's day flowers.

SOME FAIR TRADE LINKS:

Trade As One
Bright Hope

Shocked By God

One of the cool honors in my life is to live with two amazing prayer warriors. Although only six, I am often amazed at the things my oldest remembers to pray for. Her prayers often inspire me to be more mindful of the things I consider important in prayer. I am literally floored by her quite regularly when we pray together. This is obviously genetic, because in the few months since my God rescued my wife from her addictions she too has impressed me with the vast depth and urgency to her prayer life. Although God has had a tendency to drop people with a great deal of emotional pain into our path for many years, recently she is learning that God has called her to reach deeply into the wellspring of prayer for people's healing and freedom. She is meticulous and dutiful to pray for the release from bondage of the people God has placed in our lives.

Without revealing any details at all, there is a particular situation between a few people that we both love deeply that seemed to me to be to hopeless for even God. It was not that I did not think God could intervene, I just did not think these friends could choose to respond. Yet God has placed it on my wife's heart to claim bold prayers of deliverance in this situation. I love these friends deeply, and have felt called to join her in claiming release through Christ for their situation. Over the last two to three weeks I would say we have cumulatively spent several hours praying together for redemption.

So the other day when we received a call from one of the people involved, the conversation was humbling. God was healing the situation, and both people knew that God wanted to bring redemption into their mess. The initial reaction was, "I don't know what's going on..." Yet then I was humbled, literally brought to my knees in my daughters room as I realized the foolishness of such a crass statement.

After HOURS of prayer, I would have the ignorance to wonder the reason for the break in the situation. I was shocked! God was answering the very prayer he led us to pray! These were his children, and he wanted to speak healing into them all along! Now here, in this time, in this place, as we responded to his call to prayer, heaven' floodgate was opened, and the holy salve of God's intervention was being shown more powerful than the situation I could only see as hopeless.

I am more inspired, to pray more bold prayers. I want to be a warrior healer, like God has called my wife to be. I now understand just a little more what Jesus means when he says, "On earth as it is in heaven"

Jacob, Israel & the Incarnational Church

Jacob, the father of the Hebrew clans, was loved by God. However he was deceptive and arrogant and in need of being humbled. God loved Jacob, but was not content to leave him who we was. God wrestled Jacob, crippled him with a limp, and gave him a new name as a symbol for his true identity. Israel, one who wrestles with God, would become the name of God's tribe on earth.

Through out the prophets God addresses his people by both the name Jacob and the name Israel. Many people ignore this as if they are only synonyms used for literary variety. However, on closer study it becomes clear that God is addressing his people in one of their two states before him. Jacob is the condition of God's people when their mind is set on the carnal things of the kingdom of man. Israel is name used by God to address the heart state of people when their mind is set on the Kingdom of God.

As I was reading Isaiah 9, this idea seemed to break down:

Isaiah 9:8 The Lord has sent a message against Jacob; it will fall on Israel.

At first it seems like both Jacob and Israel are about to receive God's wrath. However after reading and meditating on the chapter several more times, it meaning begins to take shape. There is responsibility placed on Israel for the fulfillment of God's Kingdom on earth.

Let's look first at the 3 promises God gives Isaiah in this prophecy:
Isaiah 9:4 - End of Oppression
Isaiah 9:5 - End of War
Isaiah 9:6-7 - God physical presence on earth

So then did Christ end oppression, end war, and establish an eternal physical presence on earth, or is God a liar? It takes only a very short look at a daily newspaper to know the answer to these questions. Sex Trafficking and the Iraq Conflict stand as testimonies that oppression and war are still among us. As far as Christ physical presence, that is up for debate too. Of course the church is stated to be the physical incarnation of Christ, yet it only seldom seems to reflect the same business and priorities that Christ has in his personal ministry.

This is where verse 8 and following began to make sense. Christ is judgment against all the Kingdoms of man. War, oppression, disease, and poverty are defeated. "It is finished" Christ said in his last words on the cross. Yet as Isaiah 9:9-16 points out the kingdoms of man keep moving onward. Though defeated by God the dark kingdom keeps it's engine spinning, continuing the work that it has always been about. Since we are citizens of a parallel kingdom, this judgment falls on the citizen's of the God's Kingdom to proclaim and act out this defeat in every place we are present. Where Christ is physically present in the words and actions of his church, there is no war, there is no oppression, there is no disease, there is no poverty. The power to be present in healed Kingdom is waiting to be spoken and waiting to be acted upon.

It is our commission to enter the places of filthy darkness. It is our calling to goto the places of disease and oppression. Redemption is realized when we the community of Christ ACTS in the world . Where Christ's church is living out the Kingdom of God, the consequence of sin is redeemed. The church as the incarnational presence of God among the world, is the only hope for darkness to be renewed in light. I want to be living in that Kingdom reality!

A 100 Person Family

• How do you take a band of 100 orphans or more and turn them into a family?
• How do you teach a motley crew of ragamuffins to be a house of God?
• How do you redeem the ignored causalities of a plague into an incarnational tribe of healers?

I don't know the answers to these questions. At least not on a functional level. I do know that through the power of Spirit I will learn the answers to these questions and others as we attempt to build a sense of family into the "orphan village" in Nsoko, Swaziland.

Here is a blog post by Gary Black, about the Nsoko orphan village, where our family will be moving to serve. This place is a haven of food, education, safety, and family for a group of the fatherless we will partner alongside the Swazi moms to knit into a family.

Dreaming big dreams are great to inspire us and set a goal even if their results are never practically realized. I see these orphan villages as being the redemption point of the disease of AIDS.

AIDS is a blood born disease. AIDS is DEATH in the blood. In the word of God BLOOD is always a symbol of life, "there is life in the blood." (Leviticus 17:14) So this epidemic of death is an attack on God's symbolic life. This attack is devastating. One needs not slide far down the slippery slope facing Swaziland and the rest of the southern African continent to see that a nation of orphans will be a people raised with no authority, no moral structure, and no hope. This disease decimates the people of Swaziland physically and also spiritually and emotionally. The very fabric of faith, the future of hope, and the participation in love ceases to exist as there is no example of these truths modeled and instilled into the kingdom's children.

DEATH and AIDS must be REDEEMED in Swaziland. Satan has used this plague to advance his kingdom. Yet, the Blood of Christ waits to make good what Satan has intended for harm. These orphan villages are redemption. Not in a macro way, not now at least, but in the lives of those who can be touched and can be trained, and can be taught to experience REAL ABUNDANT LIFE in Christ: the end of faith, the end of hope, the end of love that Satan intended through this pandemic of death can be reversed. The redemption of the plague of AIDS is when the causalities of it's consequences become the FAMILY of GOD knit together into a new tribe that will be EMPOWERED to take God to the nations.

That is the vision we hold onto, that is the future we claim, that is the truth we believe, though now it may be only hoped for, and in our lives it may remain unseen, we believe it in faith. God will REDEEM this pandemic of AIDS through fostering in these children a new future, a new family, and a new love!