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Tyndale University presents a series of recorded chapel services from Tyndale's very own faculty and guest speakers.
GEORGE SWEETMAN: Welcome friends. Welcome to our community chapel. Today. We're only days away from Thanksgiving here in Canada, and I know that this weekend, many of you will gather with friends and family to celebrate and to think with gratitude and gratefulness to God for all the good things that He has given to us, gifts that are innumerable, and gifts that very much we sang about this morning. When I think about the things that I'm thankful for, I know that you might think that I'm paid to say this, but I do genuinely, I'm grateful for this community, for the opportunity to gather here week after week in this place, this beautiful place that's just filled with voices and music that is pretty overwhelming. I'm also grateful that the Toronto Blue Jays are up 2-0. Yeah, there you go. Dr. Eric Krauss probably isn't here today. Dr. Krauss is a Yankee fan, pray for him.
I am so grateful for Canada. As imperfect as it is, the freedom that we enjoy to be able to gather together in places like this, to worship together, to be educated, to learn together, to offer scholarship together. I'm particularly mindful of this reality, given that this is two years on from the advent of the hostilities that are so much in the news cycles right now in Gaza and Israel. I am thankful for people within this community, people like Dr. Jen Gilbertson, who will be coming to preach God's word this morning. For her husband, Lyndon, who, between the two of them, offer so much to our community in influence and impact, but more than anything, just in their gracious presence.
Dr. Gilbertson will be speaking this morning on the continuing theme of hope in a chaotic time, on this idea that hope is carried in community. In times of trouble we are not meant to endure alone, especially at Tyndale, where we endeavor to intentionally foster this community that we enjoy so much. Hope is sustained through the hospitality, mutuality and peace of a Christ shaped community.
The words from Scripture this morning are taken from Romans 12, verses 9 through 21 that I'll read right now, "Let love be authentic. For us that means shunning what is evil, but holding on to what is good, loving one another with familial love, honoring one another more than ourselves, not withholding eagerness, being fired up in the Spirit, serving the Lord, rejoicing in hope, enduring in suffering, persisting in prayer, sharing in the needs of the saints, pursuing hospitality to the stranger. Bless those who harass you. Bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. This means thinking together with one another, not thinking presumptuously but being associated with the marginal. We do not reply on your own thinking. It also means not repaying anyone evil with evil, but attending to what is good before all people and- so far as possible on your side- being at peace with all people, not enacting judgment yourselves, beloved, but yield to the wrath of God. As it is written, 'Judgment belongs to me. I will repay,' The Lord says, 'But if your enemy is hungry, feed; if she is thirsty, give her drink. For when you do this, you heap coals of fire on their heads.' Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good."
Let's pray. God, this morning, we're just so filled with gratefulness and gratitude that as we sang in our first song this morning, we just want to behold Your Son, to look at His face that is etched with pain, but with a deep and abiding love that is given to us and that we are invited into. And God, this morning we pray for Dr. Gilbertson as she breaks the Word of God open to us through storytelling, through excellent exegesis. God, for the words that she has for our souls, may we be ready for them, and God, may we be blessed this day and all days, in Jesus' name, Amen.
DR. JEN GILBERTSON: All right, sorry, I just need to be able to see this. Make myself at home. Ah, it's lovely to be here with you all. Oh, thank you. Welcome to chapel, where we gather together as God's chosen people. As we sit here in the semester, where we contemplate the theme, as George said, of hope and waiting, here we are in the in between. The in between between Pentecost and Advent, the in between of the already and not yet, of God's Kingdom, where we can hope as community. But sometimes hope is hard, so very, very hard. At least it has been for me at times, and so let me tell you about one of the seasons of my life when hope was hard.
I really didn't believe Romans 5:5. It really felt like my hope was shaming me. In 2012, I moved across the Atlantic Ocean to start my PhD studies at the University of St. Andrews. Now, 2012 was a very different time. Skype was how you video chatted, and Facebook was actually necessary if you wanted to have any social life at all. And it was also had less conspiracies in your feed. And so many of you undergrads were, in fact, still children. I lived right in the heart of a beautiful, medieval coastal town attending a prestigious university while it was celebrating its 600th anniversary. I went to a chapel service with Rowan Williams, and Jane Goodall, and Hillary Clinton all in the same room. And these cathedral ruins, yes, you see it up there were part of my neighborhood. I would walk through them just to get to the North Sea, where I would walk, run, stroll and pray at beautiful beaches, my lungs full of that beautiful ocean air being chased by angry seagulls. I knew it was an incredible opportunity to just to be there.
Now I've spoken a few times in chapel and a lot in classes about how the season of my PhD was at times, a deep, dark valley. It was like the perfect storm of factors that just chipped away at my hope. My first couple living situations were really difficult, so much conflict and stress and a little bit of mold as well. It took a while to make friends, and I was lonely quite a bit. The Canadian dollar kept tanking, and so my expenses kept going up, and it really felt like I was never going to finish my PhD and that I would actually return home a failure, and I just couldn't feel God's love. So I really had no hope that things would turn out okay.
But one thing that helped is eventually I found my church community, All Saints Episcopal Church, and I found myself praying with this community much more than I intended. So I would be here in the roundel, this was my office building. I was settled in for a day's work, like going to be really productive, and the next thing I knew, I'd be up on my feet, and I would be running down this street. This is Castle Street in St. Andrews, and I would find myself running into this church and to this side chapel to join the daily Eucharist service. Now, often there were only four to five people there. There was usually the priest, his wife, sometimes one of my friends and a new friend to me, a kind older man named Cameron. The liturgy gave me prayers to pray, Scripture to be read over me. Prayers to pray when I didn't know what to pray when I couldn't pray. Scripture to be read over me when I was having trouble reading my Bible and a community of hope gathered around me.
There we go. I'd stumble my way through the Scottish liturgy we did the 1970 version because we were old school, gripping my little book while everyone else murmured our parts by heart. Their voices were strong while mine was weak. Their eyes were clear when mine were full of tears, but by the end, I had more hope than when I had arrived. We'd say the Nicene Creed together and the end of the creed would just get stuck in my head like a song, and I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, Amen. And part of me believed that all would be well. Walking out, my friend Cameron and I would often fall into step, and we'd have a quick chat before we went our separate ways. He always saw me. He would never bring up my tears, but with brotherly kindness, he knew what to say. Sometimes it was a story about his connections to Saskatchewan. It seems like everyone in Scotland has an uncle who went to Saskatchewan, my home province. And sometimes a pastoral word about my academics, he'd say, "Oh, I imagine you're at this stage in your doctorate, so you're probably doing this, and you're probably feeling this." But often it was just his witness of faithful prayer and worship and community that impacted me. And I'm not sure he would have said it this way, but for me, he really carried hope in community when I couldn't.
Hope carried in community. Paul actually does paint a picture of this in Romans 12: 9-21, the text George assigned to me today, which is a big text to give a biblical scholar and expect her to be less than 20 minutes, but I'm going to try now. Paul was writing to people who, like us, felt that the world was out of kilter. People living in Rome, sitting at the heart of empire, a place where monuments to gods that are not gods stand to this day. Where tension sometimes broke out between different parts of Jesus' family. Where they were learning to live in a story that they were adopted into, people who needed God's mercies and God's people.
So to get to our text, Romans 12:9-21, we need to remember something of the structure of Romans, the shape of it in the first 11 chapters, Paul has been arguing his thesis that the Gospel is the power of God to bring salvation to everyone, bringing a righteousness that is by faith. And then in Romans 12, Paul turns to unpack how these radical mercies of God change everything in our lives together. Now the start of Romans 12, probably a lot of you could rattle off it for me because you've memorized it. It's so familiar,
I'm going to read it in a different translation. This is Beverly Gaventa's translation from her Romans commentary. I want you to hear it fresh. "So I urge you, by God's mercies, brothers and sisters, to present your bodies as a sacrifice that is living, holy and pleasing to God that is your reasonable service, and do not be shaped by this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you can discern God's will for you the good and pleasing and fully mature." Do you notice that this is an image of corporate worship and corporate transformation?
First look for the corporate worship, bodies that's plural, but sacrifice is singular, that you is plural. So this is an us thing, something we do together as God's people, but it's corporate transformation as well. We're not to be shaped by this age, meaning the present evil age, because you don't belong there. You're meant to be transformed by the renewal of your mind. This is the image of the already, not yet, that we might live in an age of brokenness, but you, my brothers and sisters, you are being shaped by the age of the new creation that is where you belong. And so this sets us up for what we see later in the chapter.
So here's a quote from Beverly Gaventa, "following this summons with its depiction of life as radical sacrifice, the remainder of the chapter promotes an understanding of that life in terms of shared generosity made possible by divine gift and characterized by love." The rest of Romans 12 really gives us a sketch of the character of our life together in the one body of Jesus. So first, Paul unpacks the mutuality and relatedness of our giftings. That's what's happening in verses three to eight. But then when we get to our passage, verses nine to 21, he's painting a picture of love.
So let's move on to nine to 21 but keep Romans 12:1,2 in the back of your brain, the image of us together as a sacrifice. Okay, so let's go on to our passage. Now, first of all, I want you to keep your eyes on the slides, and I'm actually going to read this passage to you in the NIV and see if you can tell the difference. "Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil. Cling to what is good. Be devoted in love to one another, in love, honoring one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord's people who are in need. Practice hospitality." Do you notice the difference? A lot of times, how we translate this passage, it's like really choppy and it just comes across as a list of commands. No wonder people think Paul is kind of bossy, right, when we just translated as a bunch of choppy commands. Now here's some inside info from a Greek geek, there are actually no imperatives in these verses at all.
Gabby, I don't know where you are, but you're wondering, yes, these are just participles. Okay, we can have a whole debate about whether imperatival participles exist. That's another talk. But what I want you to see is Paul knows how to use an imperative but that's not what he chooses here. So let's recast this a little bit and start to think of it not as Paul giving us a choppy to do list, but Paul actually painting a picture for us of what we're supposed to be like as a community.
So I'm going to read it again. I'm going to read Gaventa's translation, but I want you to follow the image that Paul is painting for us. So I'm going to give you a couple things to notice before I read. Notice, of course, that the first element is love. Love is authentic, literally without hypocrisy, that's what the Greek says. So love doesn't pretend to love, love actually loves. And even this isn't a command, Gaventa translates it as one, I think so that we get something of the force of what's being said. And in this section, nine to 21, love is the overarching theme. To speak of love is to speak of community. Everything that follows, after all, is about love.
Then also notice how love is impact, shunning evil, but clinging to the good. This word is like, actually, like being glued to the good. Yeah, it's stuck on you. And think back to Romans, 12:1,2. Remember God's will. It's meant to be good, pleasing and mature. This is God's will. If you don't know what God's will is, take a look at what we see here, picking up in verse nine, "Let love be authentic. For us that means shunning what is evil but holding on to what is good, loving one another with familial love, honoring one another more than ourselves, not withholding eagerness, being fired up in the Spirit, serving the Lord, rejoicing in hope, enduring in suffering, persisting in prayer, sharing in the needs of the saints, pursuing hospitality to the stranger." So even though it's not commands, the expectation is clear that this is how we should be with one another. We could spend a long time unpacking all these phrases, but I want to highlight a couple things for you that these are all things you can only do together.
These are together things. Verse 10, it's talking about familial love. It's actually the word philadelphia. That's a high commitment. How you love your family. And Paul isn't just talking family talk because that's his habit. It's because he means it. Honorary, honoring one another more than ourselves. We live in a world where everyone is jockeying for position. What destroys the church faster? Look at verse 13, where it says pursuing, that's actually the same word we translate elsewhere as persecute or harass in verse 14. And it's really that idea of just like doggedness, that doggedness to show hospitality to strangers. Where our family love, love in the family, it just overflows and it like spills out in the neighborhood. We just need to love people, and in the midst of this beautiful image of love, we find the phrase "rejoicing in hope".
So we need to pause here, because rejoicing in hope, first, that's the beautiful theme of our chapels this semester, hope. And second, because we actually need to understand what hope is. So I'm going to let one of our brothers, Gordon Fee, explain. So this is from a course he taught at Regent College years ago. "And hope, you understand, in the New Testament is a content word. I have to say that, because hope has been a watered down word in English. It's most common occurrences in something like, 'I hope so'- which means I don't have any certainty at all. In Paul, hope is absolute certainty, the absolute certainty predicated on what God has done in the death and especially in the raising of Christ from the dead. That raising of Christ from the dead absolutely guarantees the future, but not only so.
The gift of the eschatological Spirit that was promised in the future, that has now been given to God's people in the present, that also guarantees that present experience of the Spirit, guarantees the future. So Paul will say we live in hope, meaning not uncertainty with regard to the future, but absolute certainty with regard to the future. Total complete certainty with regard to what comes next." Friends, hope is a resurrection word. We're not just waiting around on a possibility. We are celebrating our certain future. Hope is absolute certainty. Jesus' resurrection anticipates our own, guarantees our own life in the Spirit now, is a guarantee of the even fuller fullness of the life to come. Hope is absolute certainty. So in verses nine to 13, Paul has painted this beautiful image of a community. Doesn't it make you want to be this kind of community? Isn't this a community where you would be loved, known and safe.
And the next verses continue to unpack this image of love in the community, but now this is where we actually get some commands. "Bless those who harass you. Bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who weep." Oh, sorry, "Rejoice with those who rejoice. Rejoice with those who weep. That means thinking together with one another, not thinking presumptuously but being associated with the marginal. Do not rely on your own thinking." So here's the main command, bless, you are blessed to be a blessing. This is how you respond to the mercies of God. It's tempting to curse, to villainize others the way that you might see in politics, or the news, or social media. But to bless is to recognize God's mercies in your own life and to choose the good out of an overflow of your heart. Notice that our hearts are so interconnected that we rejoice together and we grieve together. And key to all of this is right thinking.
Now if you've read Romans, you might see that right thinking is a theme all the way through. We have the depraved mind of Romans, one, the transformed and renewed mind of Romans 12. And here we see thinking with mutuality and interdependence, where we're avoiding the imagined superiorities that would destroy communities. That it's not about my thinking, but our thinking as we listen to God together. Okay, now Paul can anticipate your question, your what about question, "It's fine and easy to bless good people, but what about the people who do us evil?" Well, here's Paul's response to your question, picking up verse 17, "It also means not repaying anyone evil with evil, but attending to what is good before all people, and- so far as is possible on your side- being at peace with all people, not enacting judgment yourselves, beloved, but yield to the wrath of God. As it is written, 'Judgment belongs to me. I will repay.' The Lord says. 'But if your enemy is hungry, feed; if she is thirsty, give her drink. When you do this, you will heap coals of fire on their heads.' Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good." Okay, so you see, there's the recapitulation of the theme of good and evil that we saw at the start of verse nine. That's picking up on God's perfect will in Romans 12:2.
And notice that the circle widens, before it was kind of like the one another talk within the community, and now it's reaching out to all people. The circle widens, and we need to keep from enacting judgment, because that's God's job. And sometimes we get hung up on the weed, in the weeds about the heap burning coals part of the text, which is, "Does it mean that repentance? Does it mean punishment?" But that's really not the point. We got to stick with the fact that you're just meant to do good. So here's a quote from our brother, Augustine. "Do you want to overcome evil with evil? To conquer malice with malice? Then there will be two wicked people, both whom have to be overcome." Goodness is a response to grace. Goodness is an act of love as the love of the community overflows and impacts all peoples. So when we talk about this phrase from the transformation of the renewal of your mind, you notice in this section.
There were actually very few imperatives, but a lot of implied expectations. Followers of Jesus, who have been transformed, who know the mercy of God, will love in this way, will hope together in this way. And this is going to be really difficult if you're thinking individualistically. It's overwhelming if you think you, singular, need to do this on your, singular, own. Remember, it's about we, we do this together. It's, and it's not just something we do. It's, it's actually who we are. So I'm just going to read these verses over you one more time, and I want you to ask the Spirit to shape your imagination for how we in our churches, in the community, here at Tyndale, and all the places where we're with God's people, we can be this kind of community.
"Let love be authentic. For us that means shunning what is evil, but holding on to what is good, loving one another with familial love, honoring one another more than ourselves, not withholding eagerness, being fired up in the Spirit, serving the Lord, rejoicing in hope, enduring in suffering, persisting in prayer, sharing in the needs of the saints, pursuing hospitality to the stranger. Bless those who harass you. Bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. That means thinking together with one another, not thinking presumptuously but being associated with the marginal. Do not reply on your own thinking. It also means not repaying anyone evil with evil, but attending to what is good before all people and- so far as possible on your side- being at peace with all people, not enacting judgment yourselves, beloved, but yield to the wrath of God. As it is written, 'Judgment belongs to me. I will repay,' The Lord says, 'But if your enemy is hungry, feed; if she is thirsty, give her drink. For when you do this, you heap coals of burning fire on their heads.' Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good."
So here I am in 2017, back in St. Andrews with my dad for graduation. I survived. I was still struggling, but I was much more secure in hope. Now, most of my beloved brothers and sisters from All Saints St. Andrews, they've actually gone ahead of me and are with Jesus now. They're like my own personal Hebrews 11 of faithful followers of Jesus. They may be gone for now, but the hope we hold together, the hope we rejoice in, that hope is still absolutely certain a resurrection hope. They rest in peace, but we know they will rise in glory. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
And that includes my friend Cameron, who long knew his death was coming. His hope in Jesus was so strong that when my friend Esau and I visited him in the hospital one last time, it was Cameron who comforted me in my grief for him. His main concern was for his beautiful wife, whom he was leaving behind, and I comforted him by promising to pray for her, and I still pray for Maura.
And now let me pray for you, brothers and sisters, because maybe hope is hard for you. Maybe you've been waiting on God for a long time. Maybe when I said hope is absolute certainty, your heart did not leap for joy at all, and maybe it actually sunk. Maybe you staggered into chapel today feeling that you don't have hope. But I know that each step was a choice of hope, and we as a body, can hope for you. We hope for each other, no more than that, we actually rejoice in hope. Alright, so please pray with me.
Lord God, in the chaos of our lives and all the things that we are grieving and all the things that feel wrong in the world, amidst all of the wars that we long to be finished, we affirm that You are on the throne. Jesus, You are our hope, our certainty. Your resurrection is the ultimate word of hope. And so Lord, I pray for my brothers and sisters, that we together could rejoice in hope that we could be a community that bolsters each other as we seek out to be faithful to You by being a community that operates in love. So we pray these things in Your name. Amen. And as we would end the services at All Saints, "Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord."