BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 21 JANUARY 2024 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH
Good morning, everybody. It’s good to be with you. It was recently pointed out to me that I get up here each Sunday and begin with exactly those same words: “Good morning, everybody; it’s good to be with you”… and that this might be an indicator that either I am, in fact, a robot… or that I employ robots to do my writing for me. However, I want to clarify that that is not the case! And, actually, this morning I’m saying precisely what I mean to say: it is good to be with you.
This turns out to be our topic today: how–and why–it is good to be with each other. This morning, we’re in the third week of our series Together on Purpose, and in the previous two weeks, we have explored how the community of the church exists for God’s sake, to be a source of love and purpose and delight for our Maker, and also for your sake, as a person who needs other people to be most fully and truly yourself. And now, we’re going to look at how the church exists for our sake, not as individuals but as a group together.
We only have two verses from Scripture to look at today, and I’d like to get them in front of you here at the start. They’re both well known, and we’ll circle back to each of them here in a bit. The first comes from Proverbs, and it reads:
As iron sharpens iron,
So a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.
Proverbs 27:17 (NKJV)
The second is found in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and it goes:
Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.
Galatians 6:2
I want to explore how each of these verses can inform the lives we live with one another in this church community. But first, I want to introduce you to one of my favorite puzzles. What do you know about semiotics?
If the answer is “absolutely nothing,” that’s okay! I only learned about semiotics in graduate school, and even there, it was a fringe topic I stumbled upon in a British literature course. But I fell in love with it! Here’s the gist: semiotics is the study of language sign systems. A “sign system” is the apparently-arbitrary vehicle humans create to ferry meaning between the way things exist in our minds and how they might exist in the minds of others. Here’s a practical example: if I have in my head an idea of a particular tree, and I want to communicate that idea to you, we both need to have access to a common sign system that can help me get what’s in my head into yours. The word “tree” is that sign, it is that vehicle, and when I say it–although it is not the actual thing I want to share–we exist in a community where you can hear what I say, understand it, and then turn it into an idea in your head, too. In fact, we just did this: I said “tree,” and all on your own, you imagined a tree. The word isn’t actually the thing–it’s an entirely arbitrary set of sounds!–but still, by some miracle, it moved the idea over to you.
What semiotics investigates is why this seems to work. Because here’s the trouble: in truth, the tree you’re now thinking of is not the same one I am thinking of. It can’t be, right? I mean, it’s not a car or a dog… but it’s not my tree, is it? It’s yours. Which means that the word we’re using–the sign–isn’t enough to move that idea completely. There’s a gap in the word, an insufficiency, that we just… sort of ignore. “Well,” you might be thinking, “you could give us more words to create a clearer picture, couldn’t you?” Yes… but what a semiotic way of thinking reveals is that those additional words must have gaps, too. I can say, “it’s a dark green pine tree”… but “dark,” “green,” and “pine” are all insufficient signs themselves. So, logically speaking, if using more words means multiplying gaps, we should actually be getting less clear as we go along, shouldn’t we?
The puzzle, the riddle, is that this doesn’t actually seem to be what happens. When we add more words, the images do get clearer… even though they should be getting fuzzier. So, semioticians are people who try to understand why: why does language work? Where does it come from? What other things are languages doing beyond attaching ideas to groups of letters? Because there must be more going on… or the 700 words I’ve now said this morning would have just led all of us to mass confusion!
Maybe they have! But here’s where I’m going with this: just like a language, a church community really shouldn’t work. Like the letters in a word, we are a more-or-less random group of people, most of whom would have no real way of even knowing each other if Revolution didn’t bring us together. And, like the words those letters create, we are all also insufficient: we say we’re here to “be like Christ” in the world–we even take on the name “Christian” to try and communicate that idea!–but not one of us is all that much like Jesus. Wouldn’t putting a bunch of broken people together in a room multiply the confusion, multiply the gaps between us and Christ? How is the world around us supposed to see, in us, a clearer picture of God’s love and generosity? It shouldn’t work! But as we’ve already established in this series, this does seem to be God’s plan for revealing himself: the Church is Christ’s living, breathing, loving body in the world.
So, what does God know that semioticians don’t?
I really just have one point to make this morning, and it’s this: the Church shares change. It’s not about who we are. It’s about the light that sparks off our becoming.
Let’s go back to that verse from Proverbs:
As iron sharpens iron,
So a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.
Proverbs 27:17 (NKJV)
I’m using an unusual translation for this today because it helps draw our attention to something in the original Hebrew that it’s easy for us to ignore… and, if this is a verse you already know and love, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to brace yourself for these next few minutes. Because here’s the thing about this verse: is this actually how it works? Does iron sharpen iron?
Last summer, my son Graham went to Cub Scout camp and he earned his whittling chip. One of the requirements for this was that he had to learn how to sharpen a knife. Do you know how it’s done? Well, you don’t take one knife and scratch at it with another! What you do is scrape the edge of your blade against an oiled whetstone. It’s the difference in the materials–particularly, the grit of the stone–that actually removes the burrs from the knife blade and creates a sharper edge. The hard truth here is that you can’t use an iron blade to sharpen another iron blade: in fact, if you try it, what you’ll end up doing is chipping what you’re trying to repair.
I’m sorry about all of this. I know we all love this verse! But here’s what I think it’s actually getting at (and what this translation can help us see): just as one knife blade would make jagged the blade of another knife blade, so a man–trying on his own to “chip at” another man–will make jagged the “countenance” of his friend. What “countenance” means here is his face: the same Hebrew words used in other contexts to mean something like “to set his jaw on edge” or “harden his face.” The big picture doesn’t seem to be an improvement for your friend… it is to irritate him.
Now, on the one hand, perhaps we can understand how this outcome is more likely: when you criticize someone, how do they typically take it? In my experience, attempts to “sharpen” my friends do, in fact, create friction. Things spark. Sometimes it works out well in the end… but it’s not smooth or easy at first. I can see that blowing up a beloved verse on a Sunday morning is doing just this for some of you!
But what is God getting at? What ideas are these words trying to put in our heads? Here’s my take: I think we need a whetstone. We need something different than just another iron blade to actually be improved. And the whole system will work better if what’s used to sharpen us is oiled a bit, too. I’ve read commentaries on this passage that suggest, at least in the broader context of the other Proverbs, the “whetstone” that actually improves our edges is Scripture: God’s words change us in ways the words of other people will not. There’s something more about them–a power and meaning they carry within them–that does deeper work. And if that’s true, what is the actual responsibility of a real friend who sees a problem, a dullness, in their friend’s life? It’s not to be abrasive and critical! It’s to lean in together towards real meaning and change. To seek wisdom. To allow ourselves to be corrected… and to model that willingness, that softness and eagerness for improvement, so that our friend might see in our hearts what could be cultivated in his own. You can go to the whetstone… and, in being sharpened, serve as an encouragement and example that the whetstone works.
Can “iron sharpen iron”? Not exactly. But can iron be sharpened? Always. If this church is (at least, in this metaphor) a knife drawer, what is distinct about us in the world is that we can be a drawer of knives who long for sharpness… and, through finding it in our relationship with our Creator, prove the case–carry the meaning–that transformation is possible.
So, what about that verse from Galatians? How am I going to ruin that one for you? Well, the good news is that I don’t think I am! As with many things in Scripture, a problem that is described in the writings of the Old Testament finds new answers and deeper resonance in the life of Christ. Paul writes to his friends,
Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.
Galatians 6:2
But what is this law? Well, it comes directly from Jesus:
My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.
John 15:12-14
This is… pretty clear! But how, in Paul’s mind, does the meaning of Jesus’s command turn into “bearing one another’s burdens”? Is this love? Let’s take the original image, the “tree” in Jesus’s imaginings, and see if “bearing one another’s burdens” is a set of words that can move that tree into our own minds. What is Jesus thinking about here?
In this passage, Jesus is trying to prepare his disciples for his coming crucifixion. He understands that they are following him, at least primarily, because they believe he is the Messiah in the way they have always conceived the Messiah would be: he is a Man of God who will confront corruption in Israel, overcome the tyranny of Rome, and reestablish the Jewish people as leaders in the world. This, in their imagination, is the only thing God could possibly have meant when he described his Kingdom on this earth!
But what does Jesus know? He knows that, in fact, the “tyranny” people need to be delivered from isn’t Rome, it is the legacy of fear and sinful rebellion that passes through all of us, generation to generation. And he also knows that the way we can be delivered from this isn’t through a military victory, but through an act of sacrifice that will atone for our sin, and then a miraculous resurrection from the dead which will deliver us to new hope, new life, and freedom from fear. He has tried to explain this to his disciples–to ferry this meaning through his words and into them–for years at this point. But it hasn’t worked: the disciples love him, but they don’t see what he’s doing. And so here, what Jesus is trying to do is to take the idea in God’s mind–of real deliverance–and incarnate it, first in his own living body, and then in a commandment that will help his friends learn how to imitate his incarnation themselves:
Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
“Greater love” isn’t a political or military victory. “Greater love” isn’t a championship celebration. “Greater love” is laying down one’s life for one’s friends: it is an extreme act of generosity, at the expense of oneself, for the benefit of another.
As we know, Jesus will go on to do this: he will become the sign through which the idea in God’s heart is communicated. But how does Paul turn this into “bearing burdens”? I think the answer stems from his belief that real Christian living has to share Jesus’s heart as much as it shares Jesus’s behaviors. Paul can tell the early Christians to do all sorts of Jesus-things: give money away, house the homeless, feed the hungry. But the actual idea that leads to those behaviors in a natural way starts with empathy.
If we’re going to “bear one another’s burdens,” we have to actually recognize one another’s burdens. Like Christ before us, we have to see what our friends’ deepest problems really are. If we can do this–if we can know each other, and be known by each other–all those Christ-like behaviors stop looking like a checklist and start looking like natural reactions to what we have discovered in others.
To put this practically: it’s easier to buy your groceries for you if I know money is tight in your household. It’s easier to volunteer to go with you to an AA meeting if I know you’re struggling with addiction. It’s easier to meet you for coffee if I know you’re feeling lonely.
So, how does the Church help with this? Well, if we make the heartbeat of Revolution one of acknowledging our weaknesses–of humility–then this becomes a community of free and eager generosity. It is safe to be broken here! You need to know this! And honesty about that brokenness leads to a deeper understanding of God’s heart and Jesus’s commandment. This room is full of burden-sharers… but, too often, we don’t know where there are burdens.
The church exists for our sake: it can facilitate knowing and being known. And when that happens, we crack the “semiotic code” we started with today: how do insufficient words (or people) add up to a clearer picture? Because there is a spark that travels between words that enriches what they mean together. When I say “Charlie Brown Christmas tree,” we might have different ideas of those four distinct words… but, together, they resonate with a separate image we both share. You can get it!
As Christians, the spark, the resonance, the miracle that gives life and fullness to the words and solves the puzzle of meaning when we try to communicate, is God himself. We know him. More specifically, it is the Holy Spirit who lives in us, who lives in Scripture, and energizes every Christian’s life. When we lean into the whetstone together, when we bear each other’s burdens, we are embracing something mystical in our relationships that words are insufficient to share. We become vessels for an idea–God’s idea, about who and what we are–that we can’t carry on our own. When we say that the Church exists for our sake, what we mean is that the Church gathers us together so that we can become more, mean more, live more, love more than a person who doesn’t share that God experience. When what we have in common transforms us, we testify–as a broken-but-being-made-whole community–to a greater dream.
I said I just have one point to make this morning: the Church shares change. It’s not about who we are. It’s about the light that sparks off our becoming. Our messiness tells the story.
The beautiful thing is that this light we are sharing–not by our own power or because of how wonderful we are, but rather because of our willingness to admit and even embrace our limitations–brings brightness to the world. It is attractive and illuminating and marvelous! More than that, it encourages change. It encourages trust, which is something real change requires. When you choose to be vulnerable, it doesn’t just benefit you… it benefits everyone.
So, together!, let’s make that choice: be the dinged-up blade that you are! Be a person who can see and acknowledge their burdens! And, because you are safe in the community God has drawn you into, share who and what you really are. Talk to someone; be honest with someone. There’s a whetstone here for you that will not chip you or set your “countenance” on edge, but will lovingly restore you to what you’ve been made for. And the more we lean into this–the more we love each other and help each other and encourage each other–the more clearly we will share God’s hope with the world.
We are God’s people: may he, in his goodness, fill us with meaning beyond ourselves. And may that idea move from his mind–through us as his church–and fully into the hearts of others.
Revolution Words 