Tyndale Chapel Podcast

GEORGE SWEETMAN: Good morning, welcome to community chapel this morning. As we do every week, we gather again this morning in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who draws us in together to worship our King and Savior, Jesus Christ, who then offers our prayers, our petitions, our praises to God, the Father who sits on the throne. We gather weekly because this is the truth of our lives. This is the truth of who we are as an institution. So I pray that as we enter into this time of worship together with brothers and sisters and friends, that we be mindful that God is present already, and He is inviting us into this moment together. So, someone mentioned to me this morning that there was some sort of sports game last night? Which reminds me we're closing in on about 35 years since the Blue Jays won the World Series at the point that Joe touched them all. And this morning, we are honored to have the Reverend Alex MacLeod, senior minister at Knox Presbyterian Church in downtown Toronto, with us. The title of his message this morning is "God's Faithfulness In Exile". So the Israelites, as many of you know, were in exile for 70 years, approximately double the time that this city has been in the baseball wilderness. God is faithful. Before we sing, let's pray together.

God, even in the seasons of fatigue and disorientation caused by late ending celebration or life's more complex issues and hurts, You call us to seek the good of the place we're in, in the here and now, and You promise to meet us in the midst of this disequilibrium. For our undergraduate students returning to campus from a week of rest and study, we pray that as the second half of this semester begins, You continue to sustain us by Your power and presence and that You offer us grace, healing and wonder that opens our eyes and our very lives to You. For our seminary and graduate students currently on break, give them peace and preparation as they accomplish the goals that You've set for them. And for our entire community, one place in the middle of Toronto and Willowdale, give us courage to respond to Your call for us to respond to the needs and challenges of our community, both within and outside these walls. God, this morning, may Your Spirit descend upon us and lift us up. Ready us to meet everything that You have for us to head, and that we do so head on in You. We pray in the ministry and name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

DR. KEN MICHELL: It is a gift to gather in worship, to celebrate God's faithfulness, to pay our attention, our affections on God, to God, to lean into who He is and what He does, which helps shape, help us understand who we are and what we are called to do.

This morning scripture comes from Jeremiah, chapter 29, I'm going to read from the New International Version. "This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile, from Jerusalem to Babylon. 'Build houses, settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.' Yes, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: 'Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them,' declares the Lord. This is what the Lord says, 'When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the LORD, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me. When you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you,' declares the LORD, 'and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,' declares the LORD, 'and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile'." This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

This morning, it's my privilege to welcome and introduce my brother in law, Reverend Alex MacLeod, who's a senior minister at Knox Presbyterian Church downtown Toronto. Prior to returning to Toronto, he was senior minister at Kortright Presbyterian in Guelph, Ontario. Alex grew up in Toronto, studied history philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he became a follower of Jesus. As he finished up his degree. He then went on to study theology at Regent College in Vancouver, where he met Dean Sweetman and went on to receive his MDiv from Knox College while pursuing doctoral studies, when he was at Toronto School of Theology, he also taught history courses at Tyndale as an adjunct member of faculty. Alex is married to Judith, my sister. They have three adult children. He loves to ride his bike, cheer for the Leafs and lately the Jays too, collect and consume hot sauces from around the world, drink pitch black coffee and make good use of public libraries. Alex, I'm gonna invite you up as I pray for you as well.

Father, it's a gift to gather in Your name, to be reminded that You're the one who calls us, that You are the one who speaks and so we want to lean in. We want to listen and listen well, and with the psalmist, we pray that You would show us Your ways, that You would teach us Your paths. That You would guide us in Your truth and teach us, for You are God, our Savior and our hope is in You all day long. For we pray in Jesus' Name, Amen.

ALEX MACLEOD: Thanks, Ken. Good morning everyone, let's pray. Holy Spirit, Your word is a light to our path. As we come today, from all kinds of different circumstances, would You show us once again what is true, what is good? Would You give us Your wisdom? Would You guide us in the challenges we are facing? Would You encourage us as we come together to listen to you? Would You point us to Jesus? We are Your church, Lord. Renew us, we pray, Amen.

So the question that has been looming over my preparation for this morning is, are we winners or are we losers? It's a question that arises from Jeremiah 29, but I admit it also had something to do with baseball. I watched the video of your last chapel service, and I saw the moment George Sweetman pulled the Jays cap out of his pocket and put it on his head. I shuddered. George went on to boast that we were up two to nothing against the Yankees - and I thought: oh, you shouldn't have done that, George. You see, I come from a long line of strict and serious Presbyterians from the Highlands of Scotland and I know that when a man puts on a hat in worship, especially a hat with a logo, you're asking for trouble. And sure enough, over the course of that long weekend, right after I watched the last chapel service, the Jays offense dried up and they lost the first two games of their series against Seattle. We were losing. It was dire.

But then things turned around on the west coast, and as you may know, George Springer had a special moment last night. After 32 years in exile, we're headed back to the World Series. We're winners for now anyway. Why do people care about sports? I heard a couple of people walking through the chapel saying, I don't know any baseball players, except for Shohei Ohtani, whose name we will not speak of for a while. Why do people care about sports though? I'm a big Leafs fan, as you've heard, and my wife thinks that is just dumb. And she's a Tyndale grad, so she's more advanced in righteousness than I am. But, she doesn't understand that sports fans do it for the glory. We identify with our team, and we feel something when they win. As Vladimir Guerrero Jr said late last night: it feels amazing. It's about a deeper desire for victory too, I think. We want bragging rights for something public, especially when our private lives are often disappointing. We want to be identified with a winner, and we love the drama. Two cities lined up against each other. Who will win? Will it be Toronto, or will it be Los Angeles?

In Jeremiah 29, we have a clearer picture of one city victorious over another. Babylon defeated Jerusalem absolutely. But it's a more devastating defeat than any of us could imagine. Look at Verse 11 in the passage we read, "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." On its own, that might sound a little like the prosperity gospel. It's fit for a bumper sticker. If you google "bible verse cross stitch", you will find that Jeremiah 29:11 is the most cross stitched scripture in the history of the internet. But if you read the whole chapter, you'll notice that little word "exile" appears four times before you get to chapter 11. And if you want to understand the hope at the core of this passage, you first have to deal with the challenge of exile.

I know that your theme verse for chapel this year is John 1:5: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." God's people were shrouded in the most terrible darkness when Jeremiah wrote this letter to them. God had used the Babylonian army to deal harshly with their disobedience. Jerusalem was in ruins, its people taken prisoner and sent into exile. How was Israel going to survive this enormous setback? Well, there's a clue in verses four and seven when it says the Lord Almighty carried His people into exile. It's a glimpse of hope, perplexing though it may be. Despite appearances to the contrary, the Babylonians were not the ones who were actually making history; God was still in control. His plans remained intact.

What about us? Can we relate to the challenge of exile? Of course, we haven't been through anything like the suffering of Israel, but you can draw a parallel nonetheless. As Christians today, we may feel at times like we're living in a sort of exile. Some of us remember when Canadian culture seemed mostly Christian: the Lord's Prayer was said in schools; most people went to church. It was a matter of respectability in part. Over the summer, I cleaned out my parents' house after they moved into a retirement home in May. I came across a newspaper clipping about the first student missions conference held by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at the University of Toronto in 1946 before it moved to Urbana, Illinois. The conference goal was overtly to evangelize the world for Christ. And you know who brought official greetings? The president of U of T and the mayor of Toronto. That would never happen today.

Christian groups don't have special privileges on campus anymore; they're more likely to face suspicion, perhaps even outright hostility. We're not the winners we used to be, or so it appears. We've lost power and we've lost people. But what if all of that decline that we hear as background noise, what if all of that is God's way of calling us back to our first love? What if He's humbling us in order to bless us? What if that loss provides an opportunity, one we would never have chosen for ourselves, for us to call on the Lord who says, as He does in verse 13, "you will seek Me and find Me when you seek Me with all of your heart." Do we seek the Lord when we are winning? When we're on a streak, when all is going well? No, it's in the darkness and defeat of exile that God whispers to us, "This is how you will find Me."

So how do we respond to our own experiences of exile? Well, like Israel in Babylon, in our relationship to the wider culture, we have two obvious options. The first is to conform to the culture around us. In the book of Daniel, which should always be read alongside this chapter, we read about a young Jewish man who was tempted to conform to Babylonian culture. He wasn't oppressed, no, he was offered food and wine from the king's table. He was given the best education and encouraged to use it as a passport to privilege. All he had to do was give up the idea that his God was the one true God. All he had to do was to bow down to the gods and idols all around him. The second option Israel had was to condemn Babylon. In Jeremiah 28, if you flip back one page from our reading, the prophet Hananiah promised that the exile would be short-lived; he foretold the fall of Babylon in two years. He was one of the lying prophets that are mentioned in verse nine of our reading. He told the Israelites to wait and offer resistance to the empire until God's judgment came on Babylon, and that it would come soon. We can adopt that same posture. The church can criticize and condemn the culture. We can float around in our Christian bubbles and keep our distance safely from the culture as we wait for God to judge it.

And in our polarized world at this moment, it's easier than ever to fall for the simplicity of either conforming to the culture or condemning it. But the prophet Jeremiah shows us another way. He writes to the exiles living in darkness: This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile: "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I've carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper." There's an alternative to either condemning the unbelieving world or conforming to it. We're called to embrace the culture around us with discernment, that's what Jeremiah proposes. We're called to cultivate God's goodness in the world, as the Holy Spirit leads us: to plant gardens, to plant families, to plant communities, to build houses, to create the kind of culture that Jesus has in mind when he sends us out to be salt and light in the world. We can seek the peace and prosperity of the city.

In fact, it's a command, and that peace is shalom, it's wholeness first. It's more than the absence of conflict or some kind of state of inner calm: it's the spiritual, social, economic, political and cultural well being and flourishing of our whole society. Most of the time, I think we'd prefer the quick fix. We don't want to wait 70 years. We want the two year version of the road to prosperity; but God says build houses. And that takes time. God says plant gardens. And they do not grow overnight. God says marry and have kids and grandkids, and that takes more than one generation.

My family and I came back to Toronto about two years ago. We lived here in the city all of our lives, and then we moved to Guelph in 2010 to serve a church there. We came to love Guelph. Our kids grew up there. We made wonderful friends. Coming back to Toronto was hard. We left our community behind. The cost of living and housing had gone crazy here, the traffic was worse than even people warned us about. And as we left our old house, one of the last things we did was to dig up two plants. We had this gorgeous eastern red bud tree in our backyard in Guelph that had been very fruitful in the season before our departure. And so we took two saplings with us to Toronto and kind of forgot about them in the busyness of moving and getting settled into our new life. We didn't plant them in the fall like we should have, didn't water them or even put them in pots with dirt. When the spring came, I found them in our garage, and I was going to throw them out, but my wife, she's a Tyndale grad, remember, she's smarter than me, my wife decided to plant them anyway. Why not? And it only took a week or two before we noticed little buds on what I had assumed were dead branches. And then they really took off, and haven't stopped growing ever since. For us, that was a remarkable sign of hope for the future of our family in a time of dislocation. It was a reminder that God had plans for us to be fruitful again.

In spite of how hard it was to be uprooted and sent elsewhere. Is that experience of upheaval something you can relate to in your life? Maybe you've been literally displaced: you're away from home and away from your family for school. You might be feeling like you don't belong, you don't fit in. Or maybe you're dealing with loss due to sickness or disability, or you're walking with someone you love through that. Or you're grieving in the wake of the death of someone close to you. I sometimes talk to people who feel a kind of disorientation because of a broken relationship they're in. It could be divorce, or the loss of a friend, or conflict with somebody important to you. Or maybe right now you're in between things in your life, waiting for a resolution, waiting for direction and it's not coming. That's when we need these verses from Jeremiah 29 and it's when we realize they're written for us in the hard times that they invite us to fix our eyes on the light and not remain in the shadows. In verse 12, the Lord Almighty says,"then you will call on Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you." He's saying, put me to the test. He's saying that He hasn't stopped working. That He can make a way where there seems to be no way. That He can bring hope out of despair, life out of death. He is the God who's always doing a new thing. And this is where the story of Daniel and his friends in Babylon can help us, because we see them encouraging each other diligently, creatively, thoughtfully in community.

I love the way Andy Crouch puts this. He tells us how to nurture hope in the chaos of our world. He says, "Find a community, a small group who can lovingly fuel your dreams and puncture your illusions. Find friends and form a family who are willing to see grace at work in one another's lives, who can discern together which gifts and which crosses each has been called to bear. Find people who have a holy respect for power and a holy willingness to spend their power alongside the powerless. Find some partners in the wild and wonderful world beyond church doors. And then, together make something of the world." I imagine Tyndale is a great place to make friends like that. In community with friends and in our committed involvement in the local church, Jesus meets us and sends us out to share the Gospel and embrace the culture around us. In community, the Holy Spirit also guides us in the discernment of limits involved in that embrace faithfully not conforming to the pattern of this world, but transformed by the renewing of our minds.

I want to come back to Vladdy Guerrero Jr, because I'm enjoying the moment. I'm not sure if you could tell. Last night, one reporter asked him how he was feeling after the game, and Vladdy explained it by talking about God. He must have said God 17 times. I was riveted. He thanked God for giving him the victory, and he said that during the game, he went into the clubhouse, I think, right before the seventh inning, and got down on his knees and prayed for the Jays to win. But he also prayed that if it wasn't God's will, he promised that he would give God the glory regardless. And I have to say, I got shivers when I heard that, because you see athletes do that a lot, right? They point to the heavens. They cross themselves, they make gestures. And you wonder, is it real? But Vladdy was so clearly witnessing to Christ, Jesus in us, the hope of glory. Real Glory, glory that lasts, glory forever. "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord. "Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future." That hope and that future are in Jesus Christ, He is the one who enters into our exile and paves the way to freedom.

At the cross, He redeemed us from slavery to sin and our own self centeredness. He frees us up to serve others and sends us out to love our neighbors. Truly, we're called to seek the peace and prosperity of the city. But our ultimate hope is that we have been found by God in Christ. It's by His grace, not because of any victory we've ever won. He has gathered us from among all the nations and He will restore what is lost, He will bring us home from exile. He has given us a new and eternal hope that can sustain us always. Thanks be to God, let's pray.

When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died, my richest gain, I count but loss and pour contempt on all my pride, forbid it Lord that I should boast save in the death of Christ, my God. Lord Jesus, meet us today in our victories as well as in our setbacks. Meet us in our despair or in our complacency. We praise you that through Your death, You won our salvation, and You defeated sin and evil forever. Give us faith that You're working in ways we can't always see or understand, guide us into the company of brothers and sisters who will help us perceive the new thing You are always doing in our lives and in the world, brothers and sisters who will bear with us and love us and send us out in the power of Your Holy Spirit to love and to serve the world. We pray. Amen.