The Last Judgment, by Hieronymus Bosch Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44
The Season of Advent begins at the end and it ends at the beginning. Advent Sunday begins the new church year, and yet we focus on the “last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty, to judge both the living and the dead.” At the end of the season, we will celebrate that “he came to visit us in great humility,” in Bethlehem. So Advent goes backwards, from the Omega to the Alpha, from Z to A, as if to say, Keep watch for the morning, and when your patience fails, remember his birth in the night. One of you told me this week that you love the Season of Advent because it reminds you that “this is not forever.” Whatever your “this” may be—the burdens of your job, the arrangements in your life right now, or the powers that control the world right now—this is not forever. Nationalism is not forever, socialism is not forever, capitalism is not forever, Humanism is not forever, and in a real sense, Christianity is not forever. There is a boundary—on everything, a boundary in the future, the boundary of God’s final righteous judgment when Christ comes again. It’s a relief that this is not forever and will end, even if we are not told the hour, and only vaguely told what will begin.
I’ve been thinking about endings and beginnings, as I’m ending my time as your pastor, and I’ll soon begin my retirement. How will I work out these last seven months? And then, how will I spend my life with more free time and far less money? Can I find a decent part-time job? How tightly will we have to live? Will we have enough to be able to travel? First world problem, I know. How long will I be healthy? How long do I have before my new beginning becomes the beginning of my end?
I dreamt about my death the other night, which I’ve never done before. In the first dream I had six hours to live after my heart was removed from my chest, and the doctor put it on the table and there was no blood, and then he chopped it in half like a unripe melon, and he said that it looked pretty healthy, so it wasn’t heart disease that I was dying from. In the second dream we were having dinner with a group of friends, and none of them knew that I had only a few more days to live, so I was thinking maybe Melody should tell them, or I’d have to, and then what would they all think.
Is it because my life is so good right now that my dreams are telling me that I’ve repressed a fear of death? What if my life were full of suffering, wouldn’t I desire my death as my release? I remember my Grandma Meeter, in her last weeks of cancer, how she looked forward to dying and going to be with the Lord. It was Rabbi Weintraub who told me that Jews know how to suffer, but Christians know how to die. I’m not sure that’s true for me. And then, you have heard it said that the reason that people resist change is not from what they will gain as from what they stand to lose.
The traditional picture of the Return of Christ is Doomsday, the Day of Judgment, Dies irae dies illa, when all the souls that ever lived go either up to heaven or down to hell. We call it Doomsday because of what we stand to lose, even if we’re saved. By gaining heaven we lose the world, and to hell with the world.
This picture began with St. Augustine, and it’s partly why so many Evangelicals don’t care about climate change. It’s assumed to be taught by the New Testament itself, assumed as much by liberal and progressive scholars as by conservative ones, and it taints the writings of the current popular books about the Bible that you will find in Barnes and Noble. But as I study the New Testament, I’m convinced that the apostles saw the Return of Christ not as the end of the world but the beginning of the world. Not as the loss of the world but the gain of the world—this world, as it was meant to be, when the Lord Jesus returns, and God renews all things.
This means that our future hope is not to escape this ruined world by fleeing into heaven, but that heaven comes down upon this world to redeem it and renew it. It means that instead of us praising God upon the clouds we will be praising God as we work in our vineyards and our fig trees. It means the full and final answer to the Lord’s Prayer, “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” The apostles saw the return of Christ as the beginning of the world as much as the end of it.
Did you ever see that movie from 1959, On the Beach, with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner? It takes place after World War III, the nuclear war that ruins the world, and all humanity is dead. Only Australia has survived, but the nuclear fallout is drifting there too, and they’ve only got a few weeks left until the end. You see some people partying with abandonment, and other people crowding into churches, standing on lines make their repentance before the end of the world. But what if repentance is to prepare not for the end of the world but for the beginning of the world? What if repentance is not to escape a punishment, but to get you better fit for what’s to come, by cleaning you and trimming you and training you? Remember our Reformed theology, that all of our sins are forgiven us already, thanks to the cross, so repentance is not to get forgiven but to enjoy the forgiveness already applied. Your repentance comes after your forgiveness, not before it. You repent, not to escape a penalty, but to renounce your bondage and to claim your freedom. You repent to prepare for the beginning of the world, not for the doomsday but the great birth-day.
Protestants don’t do penance, but a Roman Catholic once told me that there was nothing better than going to confession and coming out clean. But the penance was saying thirty Hail Mary’s and fifty Our Father’s. Like writing lines. They probably don’t do this anymore in school, having kids stay after and write lines, like “I won’t shoot spit-balls in class. I won’t shoot spit-balls in class.” I saw a cartoon once, with a girl at the blackboard and a stern nun standing by, and the girl is writing, “I am personally responsible for all the sufferings of Christ. I am personally responsible for all the sufferings of Christ.”
What if repentance is less like writing lines and more like handing in your homework? You do your work and you hand it in to get corrected. Repentance is saying, Correct me, teach me, train me, discipline me, disciple me, show me, let me rehearse this so I can learn it and do it better. It’s good that this is not forever, because your time of trial is a time of testing and proving, like in a laboratory class. Your repentance is not to get you out of a penalty but to prepare you for your future. At least for Advent repentance. We have two penitential seasons, Advent and Lent, and they differ. Lent approaches a death, with its pain of sorrow and remorse. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Advent approaches a birth, with its pain of pregnancy and a poignancy of expectation. It’s a positive penance of costly investment, sacrificial creativity, old life generating new life. It’s like physical therapy, discomfort made bearable by the comfort to come.
Jeremiah 23:1-6, Benedictus, Colossians 1:11-20, Luke 23:33-43
When visitors come into our sanctuary, they often ask, “Where’s the cross?” I tell them that actually there is one, almost hidden, and then I show it to them. (It's in the Pilgrim's Progress window.) So, why no cross in a Reformed Church? No, not a Roman Catholic crucifix, with a dying Jesus on it, but maybe a nice empty cross? Well, because the Lord Jesus told us that the symbol of his death should be the bread-plate and the cup. But when the cross in whatever version was put upon the battle flags of the empires and kingdoms of Christendom it was not to symbolize his death, but to claim the endorsement of his sovereignty, the Kingdom of Christ. And so the ecumenical lectionary has appointed the crucifixion story as the Gospel for the Sunday of the Reign of Christ, the Feast of Christ the King (invented by the pope). And when Pontius Pilate posted that inscription, “The King of the Judeans Is this Guy,” Pilate was humiliating Jesus and the Jews, but he was also paradoxically enthroning Jesus upon the cross.
Now in Reformed theology we’d prefer more Biblically to celebrate the Reign of Christ on Ascension Day. That’s when the Lord Jesus entered heaven to sit at the right hand of his Father, in the seat of universal power. It’s an injustice to Our Lord’s accomplishment to keep him on the cross or even to make the cross our primary symbol of his Lordship. And that’s why some of us prefer to use a different name for this last Sunday of the church year: we call it Ingathering Sunday. And the theme of gathering-in fits nicely with our other lessons from Jeremiah and Colossians.
And yet, this gospel lesson does have value today by showing us the kind of power that the Lord Jesus exercises even on the throne of heaven. It’s not a kind of power that any worldly power would expect or respect. It’s not coercive power but persuasive power. It’s not a forcing power but a forgiving power. It’s not a condemning power but a reconciling power. It’s not a conquering power but a gathering power. The Lord Jesus wields his power in heaven no differently than we see him wield it on the cross, as Jesus gathers the thief in. That thief is our man, he stands for all of us.
He doesn’t ask for much, he doesn’t argue his innocence, he accepts his punishment. All he asks is that Jesus remember him when he comes into his kingdom. It’s a very Jewish request, to be remembered, more so than in Christianity. But to be remembered properly required an honorable death and an honorable burial. Which this thief will not get. His death on a tree was accursed by Jewish law and the Romans will let his body hang there until it putrefies. He’s dying a shameful death, so all he asks is that someday Jesus will remember his partner in their agony. That’s crazy. How does the thief imagine that Jesus will ever come into his kingdom? At this point it looks obvious that Jesus will never have any kingdom at all. He has failed as the Messiah. It’s over. What could this thief be seeing in Jesus? Or has he just got nothing left to lose?
The answer of Jesus is just as crazy. “Amen, today you’ll be with me in the paradise.” What does that mean? If it's “today,” then not going to heaven, because Jesus won’t be going there for another forty-three days and the next three days he’ll be stone dead. A “paradise” was something more specific back then, it was a royal garden. Jesus uses that word not to convey so much the bliss of the place as its status: Today you will be with me in the White House Rose Garden! Or better, in my new Garden of Eden. Which in the circumstance was laughable. This wasn’t any paradise, it was a killing ground. The only fruit in this garden is the strange fruit hanging from the Roman trees.
Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze; Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
The Jewish Jesus is on a lynching tree, the union of racism and anti-Semitism. And when Christian Nationalism reveals its racism and its anti-Semitism then you know it isn’t really Christian.
Now, if these strange fruits are in a Garden like Eden of Our Lord’s vision, then Jesus is the new Adam, the firstborn of that new humanity that is a theme of St. Luke’s Gospel, that new humanity that Jesus has created right within the glorious and powerful old humanity of Roman civilization, which will try to exterminate the new humanity within it. And if this paradoxical paradise is the Rose Garden of the Kingdom of God, then this thief is a cabinet member in that Kingdom. He got there by being pardoned. He got a royal pardon from Jesus, and pardoning is what kings do.
As Colossians says, “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” And that’s not just for the thief. The Lord Jesus pardons them all when he issues his general amnesty, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” the chief priests, Pilate, the soldiers, the other thief, and in them everybody—the whole world, as Colossians says: “Through Jesus God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.” The pledge of God’s peace upon the symbol of Roman violence. Everybody is forgiven, but it’s the thief who believed it. Everybody standing there was stuck in their hostility and fear, but the thief acknowledged his guilt and his predicament and was free to accept God’s forgiveness. Everybody standing there was in the circle of the Kingdom of Jesus, but the thief envisioned it as a member of the new humanity. That’s what you get too, you become part of the new humanity when you accept the forgiveness of your sins and when you believe the vision of Jesus. It can be hard to see, as it was for the other thief, and the whole thing looks like a cruel joke that can only be derided. But you are here today because you want to see it and you want to believe it. And I can tell you today that in order to see the Reign of God you have to look for it with a double vision. First, envision the Kingdom of God as out there in the future, majestic, cosmic, impending, over-arching, all-inclusive, the life of the world to come, the future always pressing down on us, judging everything, keeping us always discontent. In the light of this Kingdom you examine everything and question everything. The cross judges everything. You may never be content with any human system. Every advance in church and society must be analyzed and criticized. The Kingdom demands nothing less than radical change. The Kingdom is a revolutionary magnitude that we cannot measure, and its holiness reveals the vanity of all we do. This is the source of the revolutionary vigor of our faith.
But also envision the Kingdom as already present in the world—the leaven in the loaf, a seed in the ground, a treasure in the field, the fruit on the tree, a mustard seed, the faith of children, working quietly within the world and changing it mysteriously. See the signs of it no matter how strange the fruit, as you yourself are a sign of fragile life. So you can be open, you can be patient, you can be humble, you can be joyful, you can be confident that God is working in the world right now, in fragile ways, and doing it through you, as God gathers all that you do into God’s final victory.
You keep these two visions together so that you offer a double witness, and you do your actions in the world with reference both to the future, which we cannot achieve but do receive, as it is given us by God, and to the hidden present, where God keeps revealing God’s self in your all-too-human attempts at love and mercy and welcome, so that even the hill of The Skull may be a Paradise.
You don’t have to be a strong believer, or a hero of the faith, or a soldier of the cross. Maybe all you’re doing is answering a subpoena and you’re afraid of a penalty. But this government of Jesus does not punish—it gathers, it gathers you even at your worst. In the vision of Jeremiah, God is the shepherd who gathers your wandering on the mountains so wonderfully that you end up at home.
So this is how Jesus conquers Rome and all the empires. This is how he wields his power—by his speech and in his grace. He does not use his power to manipulate events, not then, not now, even from his throne in heaven. By his Word he offers, by his Word he invites, by his Word he pardons, he rehabilitates, he promotes, he appoints, he welcomes, and by his Spirit he comforts and enlightens. This power that he wields is never other than the power of his love.
Isaiah 65:17-25, Canticle: Isaiah 12, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19
The gospel lesson takes place a couple days before Good Friday. The disciples have no idea that Jesus will so soon be dead. He is momentarily pausing from Messianic actions; here he’s not the prince but the prophet. And with that prophetic mix of human smarts and divine inspiration he is predicting what’s bound to happen to Jerusalem, given the seething unrest of the Judeans together with the brutal habits of the Romans. Forty years later it happened—the Romans destroyed the temple.
How many temples to the gods have been erected and then demolished over time? How many churches have been built and then torn down? This congregation has erected and demolished four buildings so far. Our first one stood from 1666 to 1776, 110 years, then our second one for 31 years, our third for only 28 years, and our fourth, a great grand temple, for just 51 years to 1886. We’ve been in this one for 130 years, which makes it our longest-surviving building. But how long before this one too comes down, in the words of the Lord Jesus, not one stone left upon another?
From an old photo we have a good idea of what our fourth building looked like on the inside, but of our first three sanctuaries we can only guess. But those beakers know. On the silver surface of those beakers has been reflected every one of our interiors, the gleam of windows, the glow of lights, glimpses of furniture, whether humble or impressive, and faces, one by one, the faces of those who have lifted up those beakers to drink the Holy Wine from them.
The silver of those beakers is worn thin by all the hands that have lifted them. They are what we call thin places, thin places between the spiritual and physical, and they carry an enduring spirituality and they draw out our souls, and as the Lord Jesus says, By your endurance you will gain your souls.
Buildings are built to endure as long as they can, but our beakers symbolize something more enduring, which is communion, that connection of our souls through Lord’s Supper to Lord’s Supper before it reaching back to our first communion service ever, the date of which we do not know, but God knows, because the Lord Jesus was there with them. Our lamp was lit before the throne of God, and it does not go out. With those earliest members you share an unbroken communion in the timeless sight of God. If you look behind you, under the balcony against the back wall, you can see the baptismal font from our fourth sanctuary. We used it a few times in the Lower Hall. In just a few minutes we will gather around that other font, there, that was made for this sanctuary, that we have now restored to use. And there, in the words of Isaiah, we shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation and baptize Pierre and John, and, as Isaiah says, they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord. Our first recorded baptism was of little Helena Brouwer, 359 years ago on October 31st, 1660, before we had a building, when we were worshiping in a barn, and she was probably baptized from somebody’s bowl, as I was. How long she lived, I do not know. The next two infants baptized both lived only a few days. Their parents did not see Isaiah’s prophecy come true.
The prophecy of Isaiah has been speaking for 2700 years, more than seven times 365, and even though it’s metaphor, still, when will it ever come true, and how much of it will come true? What is the horizon of this prophecy, how far off into the future must we imagine it? And how does it serve us in the meantime, while the sounds of weeping continue and the cries of distress?
And how shall we understand the prophecy of the Lord Jesus—as about the end of time, or that time was up for the temple? Or both? And for every temple that we build? Should this discourage us from building and from restoration? Not if Isaiah’s right, that we shall build houses and inhabit them, and we shall not labor in vain. As long as we don’t depend on them for our endurance, or in them we will lose our souls. We place our hope in that future city coming down from God, the New Jerusalem, whose builder and maker is God. The horizon of our time is very long and our personal lives are short, but we need to meet with God in the present moments in between, and so we gather our congregations to seek God and talk with God, and before we call God will answer, and while we are yet speaking, God will hear. In the same way, the scale of Isaiah’s prophecy is cosmic, with new heavens and a new earth, and our personal lives are small. And in between we build our buildings to make the space where we can be with God, especially when we baptize the smallest among us, and when we commune with the whole church on earth and all the company of heaven. In between the vast and the small we make space to meet with God.
I’m offering you perspective here, as on this morning we contemplate our peculiar congregation and our peculiar place in time and space within the mystery of God in history, and what’s our mission and our business as a church. We do soul business. We make momentarily visible some great unseen realities. We make tangible some cosmic truths. We touch things that we cannot fully grasp. That’s what we do here, and we keep on doing, and by our endurance we gain our souls.
That’s not all we do here. For my next point, let me direct you to the second lesson, to the Thessalonians. They were a small church, like most of them Saint Paul planted. At the time there was confusion about how soon the Lord Jesus would return, and what would happen when he did. And some of the believers were just stopping from their ordinary lives. So Saint Paul is telling them not to be so indulgent of the slackers and the disorderly busybodies among them. What this tells us is that the Thessalonian congregation must have been kindly and generous, even to a fault. As you are, Old First, and I skip the fault. Last Monday I came home from our Deacons meeting, and as I was unwinding with Melody I said to her how just plain generous so many of you are—generous with your time, generous with your labor, with your money, with your sympathy, and generous with your concern. More generous than you have the resources for. And I want to bless you for your generosity. This is my last anniversary sermon among you, and may I bless you for your generosity?
As Melody and I kept talking, she said how much we’re going to miss this congregation, and she said it was also because you all just know that you need this spiritual connection, that from all the different places that you come from you believe in this spiritual connection with God and with each other, and you keep working at it even beyond the resources you can muster. For that I bless you too, and let me encourage you with the promise that by your endurance you will gain your souls.
It’s a strange turn of phrase, to gain your souls. Don’t you have souls already, aren’t you already souls? I’m guessing that Saint Luke means that you are gaining your full humanity, that new humanity of Jesus’ resurrection that you already are and are not fully yet. Your congregation is a laboratory of the new humanity, a fully spiritual humanity, with your souls with full capacity for the habitation of the Holy Spirit of God. Just by your endurance you are a quiet testimony to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and to the faithfulness of God, both for you as individuals and for you together as a community of Jesus extending through the many years. Thick walls and thin places. A big space, and a long thread through the years. Baptisms and communions, a body expanding and contracting, a community of Jesus enduring, and as Jesus says, not a hair of your head will perish. Which seems to contradict what he had just said, that some of you will be put to death. What, put to death with full heads of hair? Well, his logic is prophetic logic, which holds words in tension, and, also, he’s speaking of himself, because in a couple days his own hair will be matted with blood upon a cross, and then three days later he will rise again. And that too is our business and our mission, to testify to him, who died and rose again, and testifying not least by doing our work quietly and earning our living and not being weary in doing what is right, for however long it takes for his prophecies to come all true.
I know you. I know that your endurance is powered by your love, and I watch you gaining the souls fully to bear the love of God—the love of God that has called you, and gathered you here, the love that sustains you, and inspires you, and challenges you. And that’s the last thing I bless you for today, I bless you for the love of God that you desire and for the love of God that is within you.
The gospel lesson takes place one day before Palm Sunday. Six days after this Jesus will be dead. But at this point his campaign still looks triumphant, and tomorrow the Messiah will make his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and he should take the throne of David and kick out the Romans and all their collaborators and proclaim the Kingdom of God. But of course he gets crucified instead.
That’s the tragedy, but this morning it’s still comedy. The story of Zacchaeus is comic by design. But our translation gets it wrong. Our translation makes it a conversion story, by having Zacchaeus promise to give half of his possessions to the poor, and promise to pay back fourfold whatever he’s defrauded. But he’s already doing that. What Zacchaeus actually says is this: “Look, half my possessions, Lord, I am giving to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I am paying them back fourfold.” I am giving, I am paying back. He’s already doing it. It’s not a conversion story, it’s a blessing story.
But then why do the people grumble? It’s not against Zacchaeus that they grumble but against the Messiah, that he’s going to this sinner’s house. Zacchaeus is a sinner no matter how generous he is, because he works for the Romans. His generosity only softens the system but doesn’t change the system. To change the system they want the Messiah to get the Romans out, and their collaborators.
Drain the swamp. Lock him up. The crowd displays the politics of grievance. Grievance can be powerful. You see it with Donald Trump, and with Putin in Russia and Le Pen in France and Orban in Hungary and with Brexit in the UK. But the power of grievance is destructive power. This crowd that praises Jesus on Palm Sunday, in six more days will demand his crucifixion. Their grumbling is a subtle intimation of the coming tragedy right within this morning’s comedy.
It’s classic comedy in the anti-grievance that Jesus recognizes and honors in Zacchaeus—the anti-grievance that while all governments are corrupt and compromised, yet government can still use the money from taxes directly to assist the poor, and even though all governments defraud their people, yet government can still have practices to control its natural corruption with realistic feedback-loops, and make its reparations, and provide restorative justice to people it typically defrauds.
Today salvation has come to this house. What’s salvation here? Economic policies and practices, yes, but more, or why would Jesus have to die. For Zacchaeus, salvation means the person and presence of the Lord Jesus seeking him. For this sinner, this compromised person, salvation is the presence of the Lord Jesus in his life, sitting and eating with him, with his disciples too, no doubt, a community of Jesus. Salvation is Jesus accepting Zacchaeus and blessing him. So, crowd! Stop your grumbling, stop objectifying people as sinners. The great joke and problem of the Kingdom of God is not who is out, but who’s let in! The Lord Jesus keeps letting the wrong people in. It’s a comedy. The Lord Jesus does not ask Zacchaeus to quit his job. That is telling, and a message for politics: that our governments are responsible to use some of our taxes directly to assist the poor. Not just for the grumbling middle class, and not just to stimulate the economy yielding better jobs, but what Zacchaeus did, directly to the poor. Also that governments are responsible to correct and make reparations for the inevitable unfairness that economic power generates. What Zacchaeus did. It doesn’t matter which system of government is at work, whether Roman, Jewish, capitalist, socialist, it’s all the same obligation. These are the values of Our Lord’s political economy in the Kingdom of God. Here’s what it means for all of us spiritually. The Lord Jesus does not call you out from all the corruption of the world, but keeps you in all your situations of ethical ambiguity and compromise, and even in social and economic tragedy. You could act bitter, sarcastic, or cynical, and be tragicomical, like the crowd. But the tragedy of the cross of Jesus Christ rises up again into the comedy of hope, and you shall be joyful. The world is worse than we think, but you shall be joyful in it anyway.
The comedy of the Lord Jesus is a comfort when you face the truth that everything that you do in your Christian life has some fault or flaw within it and always some complicity. Nothing you do is pure. Every good thing that you do has some measure in it of self-interest. And so you repent and you laugh at yourself, and you build into your life some realistic feedback-loops, some intentional actions of selflessness, especially of economic justice. You build into your life some sacrifice, not because God needs your sacrifice, but because you do. Not just to keep you humble, but to keep you tuned in to the grace of God. Life requires sacrifice. New life requires sacrifice. Ask any mother!
One of our feedback-loops is tithing. Speaking of comedy, it’s a bit of a joke how every year on this last Sunday before Consecration Sunday I’m supposed to squeeze the topic of tithing into whatever else my sermon might be about. But Zacchaeus really does apply to tithing. Not in the amount that he gives back—he does more than tithe—but why he does it. He does it to limit the grip and power of money in his life, to push away from himself the love of money, and to redeem in real terms the corruption of the money within his morally more-than-ambiguous situation.
Why do you give to God? To support the church? Well, that’s good. And you should, when you consider all that it gives you. You’ve heard the examples the last three weeks. But that gets calculated on what the church needs. Those are donations. Donations have their place. But tithing is subtly different, tithing is calculated not on what the church needs to receive but on what you need to give. For your own spiritual reasons, for your own self-discipline of freeing yourself from loving your money and resisting the power of your money on you. Tithing is your economic feedback-loop.
You start at one percent of your income, and you make the first break with the hold of money on your life. Every year that you can add another percent till you get to ten is how you get more free of the power of money in your life. You tithe as the cost of your freedom—that’s why you do it for yourself; and for God you do it for thanksgiving, your tithing is a sacrifice of thanksgiving.
You need some money in your life because money is power. The taxes of the Romans were used to pay the expenses of keeping them in power. And they used their power for further wealth and aggrandizement and exploitation. It was their right as the conquerors and the purpose of their Pax Romana. It was understood as only right. And into this normal humanity the Lord Jesus introduces a new humanity, to which Zacchaeus belongs.
This new humanity has power but it uses its power for the poor, and not for self-aggrandizement, and not for its own wealth but on behalf of those who have been defrauded and exploited. This new humanity is not pulled out from the corruption of the world but is kept fully in the world, so that its members cannot help but still be sinners, like Zacchaeus, like us, but what makes us holy and justified and qualified for the Kingdom of God is the presence of the Lord Jesus among you in the Holy Spirit. Your entry into this new humanity is just your desire to see Jesus, no matter how short your stature may be. Just climb the tree to catch a glimpse, and salvation comes to you.
Daniel James Meeter grew up in Manhattan, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Jersey, and Long Island. He was ordained to the Reformed Church ministry in 1980, and has served churches in Jersey, Michigan, and Ontario. He earned a Ph.D. from Drew University in 1989, and has published two technical books in theology as well as many articles. He is married to Rev. Melody Takken Meeter, the Director of Pastoral Care at the Lutheran Medical Center of Brooklyn. They have two married children.
The Old First Mission Statement:
Old First Reformed Church is a community of Jesus Christ in Brooklyn. We welcome persons of every ethnicity, race, and orientation to worship, serve, and love God, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We embrace the following missions:
1. To offer God's word, prayer, the sacraments, and discipleship; 2. To offer outreach, education, fellowship, and music;
3. To offer sanctuary to anyone seeking spirituality and hope;
4. To offer hospitality to community groups and the arts; 5. To care for the gifts we have been given through our Reformed Church, including our historic sanctuary and building.
