« October 2004 | Main | December 2004 »
November 28, 2004
The Benefits of the Fall
The Benefits of the Fall
Genesis 3: 1-15 Romans 5: 12-21
November 28th, 2004
First Sunday in Advent
Every year our Christmas Eve service of Lessons and Carols begins with the passage from Genesis that Donna just read. Traditionally a child reads this. Isn’t it odd that at so happy a season we should read this opening tragic story of the Bible?
Why do we listen to a young voice read this passage? I wonder if it might be because there is a point-counterpoint to hearing what we think of as an innocent voice read of how humanity lost innocence. We hear the little voice ask God’s question to Adam, “Who told thee that thou wast naked; hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee not to eat?”
There is a hint of shock to hearing that question from a child’s lips in elegant King James English. It introduces the drama of the whole Christmas Eve celebration. Something that ended in grand humility in the birth of the Christ Child began with the serpent’s successful temptation of our first parents. A child reads of the first parents’ fall from grace. Jesus was born to lift us up by grace to grace again.
Of course, the reason why we read this lesson is because it was Adam’s sin that made Christmas necessary. Sin spread like a disease with a dreadful imagination. It took everything good on earth and polluted it. In the end it twisted the momentum of life itself, so that in thirsting for life, we look in the wrong places so that we head toward death. “The wages of sin is death,” Paul reminded us. So God introduced His remedy at Christmas. Over the next three weeks we’ll remember again the preparation God made to introduce this remedy to the problem of sin on Christmas Day.
Christmas is glamorous once a year, but sin has been glamorized throughout the year. The tabloids, put indiscreetly, deliberately where we wait at the counter in our grocery stores, lure us to read the seamy stories of the steamiest sins of our unhappy celebrities. The headlines promise tales of exquisite degradation. Why are these interesting?
Sin is rewarding financially. I was startled to read how many millions Howard Stern is paid to produce his sleaze. Sin toys with our imaginations, hiding its destruction behind ingenious disguises. We are lured by attractive images of power, raw sex, and wealth so that we don’t recognize what hides behind these façades. We never learn from the sorrows of others. The end of sin is death after death after death. It’s not only physical death that sin brings, but also the death of civilization, of decency, of happiness in homes, of personality and character, of hope itself.
Our government budgets billions of dollars annually to help undo some of the effects of sin. Anti-alcohol and drug abuse programs, a judicial system that clutters our land with prisons, and so many other costly attempts to cope with the effects of sin are unavailing. Something else is needed to cure sin’s tarnishing effects on life. Even those who work to mitigate the effects of sin add to the momentum of sin. Christmas begins to offer the answer to sin.
So we plead, “Keep Christ in Christmas,” as though Christ can be taken out—as we queue up in the shopping malls to buy our mountains of gifts for each other. How subtly sin has deceived even those who plead to remember the “religious” reason for this holiday season.
But hidden amidst the sin is the Savior. Paul wrote, “He became sin for us who knew no sin.” Even in the glitz and longing of the holidays Jesus is here to fill the empty heart.
Jesus was born to save us from our sin. God thought this was necessary.
But when we say “necessary,” I wonder what we mean. Seen from our side, if we were to be rescued from our plight, God had to do something.
But God, seen from God’s side, might have done nothing to save us from our sin. God could have left us to suffer the results of the momentum of our sin—unceasing, spiraling vengeance, never forgiveness, the desecration of everything good. Every violent evil epitomized in the Holocaust might well have been the story of our race until we simply died out, victims of our own sinful nature, gone like the dinosaur. But God said, “No.” He wasn’t through with us.
What is so grand is that from God’s view it was necessary to reach into our predicament to rescue us from ourselves because He loved us. I feel odd to presume to speak so easily of God’s mind—who created everything in the vastness of the “multiverses.” But it seems this is how God thought.
Theologians who are concerned with figuring out the mind of God have pondered the question of whether God planned our redemption before the Fall or after the Fall. If God foresaw all that would happen in human history, did He not also see ahead that after creating man and woman perfect, they would choose to fall from their perfection? So, God must have planned our salvation before there was any need for it.
The Book of Revelation refers to Jesus as “the lamb slain from before the foundation of the world.” This suggests that not only before the Fall, but before creation God saw the event that took place on Calvary so surely that it was as though it had already happened. John Calvin went so far as to propose very explicitly that God decreed every sin that every person would commit. This in no way exempted anyone from responsibility for sinning.
There are times I think brother Calvin tried to explain too much. I am much happier to let some things remain unexplained that are not explained in Scripture.
The Apostle Paul was taught by the Holy Spirit the plan God had to resolve the problem of sin. He summarized this in the great resurrection chapter, “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” In our reading from Romans 5, Paul explained how this worked. “For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.”
So the story at the heart of the Christmas story is how God fulfilled a plan to undo a terrible moment that happened when the human race was very young. Christmas is inseparable from Good Friday and then Easter—that complete the work of grace.
Martin Luther reminded us that the wood all around the infant Jesus as he lay in the little barn behind the inn prefigured the wood on which He would die on Good Friday. This beautiful season of Advent and Christmas is not only about the birth of Jesus, but about the death He came to die to spell the doom of death itself. As the cheerful Christmas carol puts it, “He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.”
So this season is about God’s plan to bless the earth. In fact, so great was the blessing that there have been Christians who thanked God for the sin of our first parents.
St. Augustine encapsulated the mystery of suffering in his famous doctrine of “blessed fault”--that God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil at all. Francis de Sales, a seventeenth-century Catholic Bishop of Geneva, quoted St. Augustine, applying it rhapsodically, “O blessed fault, which merited to have such and so great a Redeemer!". . . that is, ruin brought us profit, since in effect human nature has received more graces by its Savior redeeming, than ever it would have received by Adam's innocence, if he had persevered therein.”
It is strange to refer to sin as a “blessed fault,” but maybe you can understand his sentiment. If we try to imagine how life would have gone for the human race without sin in the picture, perhaps life would seem far less interesting.
Think of the matters that fill our learned books and novels. There would be no murder mysteries had there been no murders. We’d not have Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, or Churchill’s remarkable landmark of prose, the History of the Second World War. We must eliminate every war and all the industry produced for warfare. We must eliminate lust, and the industry that promotes lust, and the novels that depict it. We must eliminate drugs, alcohol abuse, national and ethnic rivalries, religious controversies, and so much else that occupies the attention of the great writers and newspaper editors. We are so fascinated by the effects of sin that it is hard to envision much interest in a world without it. But we’ve not had a chance to see how beautiful would have been the world without sin’s defacement of what is good, true, and beautiful.
Somehow, as a truly happy home is truly pleasant, with mother and father speaking and acting toward each other lovingly, so there might be an entire civilization, or an entire world populated with those who cared for each other unendingly. We get hints of joy from watching those who experience joy in this life.
But the most bliss-filled home is never untarnished with sadness. I discover that every family has a soap-opera somewhere. We have to stretch our imagination to think of untarnished happiness. We need a Savior, one to save us from this dreadful pollution that afflicts us.
Gibson’s recent movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” has captured the attention of a lot of people. Shofar, the journal of the Midwest Jewish Studies Association is devoting an issue to this movie that will come out in the Spring. Its violence has caught the imagination of many people, Jews, Christians, and even non-religious folk. Many Christians learned to cry when Gibson taught them how brutal was Jesus’ suffering for their sake.
For me the most spectacular episode in the movie comes when the serpent slithers over to the heel of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. We hear the sound of a stomping foot that represents Jesus crushing the serpent’s head. The scene depicts the fulfillment of God’s words to the serpent in Genesis 3: 15, “you will bruise his heel, but he will crush your head.”
During the Advent season we remember that God remembered His promise to destroy sin at the very root. The moment this promise began to be fulfilled was when Jesus was born. But sin is still with us. Over-arching all the beauty, the beautiful carols, the beauty of Christmas ornaments, the happiness of homes with excited children is the great fact of God’s plan includes a second kind of Christmas—the Second Coming of Christ. Then there will come the end of war, of sadness, of death itself.
You and I need to make a practical response to all this. I am mindful as I share my life with people who are incarcerated that there is not only an over-arching beauty in life, but also an under-arching sadness that overwhelms many people. It is a painful thing to be locked-up by imperfect people for wrongs that very often were most hurtful to the ones who did them. This Christmas when you gather happily around the tree in your living room, there will be hundreds of thousands of very sad people in institutions intended to induce sadness. I am so grateful to see that Jesus Christ not only offers real joy to those who hunt for joy in many fruitless places, but He also offers joy and peace to those who are haunted by the effects of past sins.
I pray that you and I may demonstrate our gratitude to God for the wonders of His grace at Christmas by being agents of joy to others. You can always tell someone who is really grateful. There is a lavishness to the response of someone whose heart is filled with gratitude.
I wonder if this Christmas season rather than spending a lot on giving to those who expect to receive lavishly from you, you would consider copying God so as to make a lavish expression of love to someone who is really in need. I know of several.
This week I received an email from a young man in Zambia who was one of my finest students when I taught there three years ago. I had asked him how things are in his ministry, and without complaining he told me the rent on the building in which they worshipped was doubled, and they would have to find another place if they could not pay the increased rate. One of the predicaments of having had a ministry in other parts of the world is that I know first hand about the need. It stares me in the face, particularly as I serve here in a land of plenty. I would be so pleased to be the agent to connect God’s supply through you with some persons in great need.
Let us pray: O Lord God, thank You for giving to us Your Son, Jesus. Amen.
Stuart Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2004
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Psalm 103: 1-6 / Psalm 86: 1-10/ Acts 17: 22-32
November 21st, 2004
I think some of you who patiently listen to my preaching these days may wonder why I keep on with the Nicene Creed, a very old statement of faith, when the world is in such turmoil. My own conscience tells me I should be explaining how to trust God in spite of all the problems.
Perhaps you are thinking, as you sit out there so patiently week after week, “Give me an idea of how to think when a selfless relief worker who gave twenty years of her life to helping people in Iraq is shot in the head in a cold-blooded act of murder. Explain to me how God is good when nineteen-year-old daughters and sons from our country are being killed in Iraq.” Visions of what’s happening in the Sudan, the violence, the poverty, make you numb. “Remind me of the goodness of God with good illustrations, images that will stand up against the terrible things I’m seeing on the TV news.”
For some reason I’ve found myself drawn to things people were writing back during the days of the First World War. It was one of the cruelest, most senseless wars. Barbara Tuchman proposed that World War I was a result of what she called fin de siecle, an end of the century sickness. The world fell apart at the seams when the nineteenth century passed and the twentieth century arrived. The cruelest icon of this falling apart at the seams was when millions of young men charged at each other in brave nineteenth-century warfare, only to be mown down like grass by twentieth-century machine gun bullets.
I look around me today and often feel the world is falling apart at the seams, too. Even that wonderful diversion of sports is demeaned with violence. Self-control is hostage to unfettered self-expression in the arenas that seem to hold our country in thrall—sports, money, and sex.
Maybe it’s the arrival of the twenty-first century that is to blame. Not only the world, but also the Church is falling apart. The cover story of the most recent issue of Commonweal, a thoughtful Roman Catholic journal, addressed the question whether the Catholic Church could survive the sexual scandals that have cost it far more than the money to pay lawsuits. Trust is evaporating from devout Roman Catholic people.
People are fleeing our denomination that preserves a rich heritage, like rats from a sinking ship. The PCUSA has such a rich history that I refuse to give up on it.
The word “relevant” has replaced “obedience” in our idea of worship. New denominations and independent churches with powerful personalities in the pulpit are springing up. People are flocking to these churches hoping to hear a word from God, having given up on the traditional denominations that faithfully handed down the Gospel for centuries. Good theology is leaking out of the mainline denominations in many places.
But the divorce rate in the Bible belt is the highest in our country even where this new fashion of worship thrives. You’d think that where the Bible is preached most fervently Christian life would reach its peak. Not so. More than 75% of the sexual immorality charges among pastors come from churches most conservative in theology. What bothers me the most is that the most vocal followers of the Prince of Peace are not the most avid in longing for peace.
In days such as this, when the heart is really weary, I find my thoughts burrowing down deeply into the bedrock of our faith. What I really need to hear is a reminder of the Great Truth. “Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today and forever.” I find the words of a great old hymn going through my mind, “My faith has found a resting place not in device nor creed. I trust the ever-living One, His wounds for me shall plead.”
In times like these, to focus again on the Nicene Creed is to be reminded of what is most basic to our faith. Who was this “ever-living One” whose wounds on the cross are the basis for our hope?
The second part of this ancient statement of faith addresses that question. Our forebears in the faith wrote, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-born Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” It seems an over-statement. Wasn’t it enough to say of Jesus Christ that He was God made flesh, as the Gospel of John tells us? Why not just quote the Gospel’s statements about Jesus and leave it at that?
Detailed statements like these that seem over-kill, respond to drifts of thinking that watered down or changed the Gospel’s simple statements about Jesus. Heresy, a word that today conjures up images of raving fanatics pointing fingers at those who disagree with them, once referred to ideas that undercut the very foundation of Christian identity. If thoughtful people had accepted with awe and reverence the words the Gospels use to describe Jesus, we all would have had a heritage of wonder, of speechless wonder as we thought of “the glory of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” How do you go about defining “glory?” How can anyone define the content of God’s grace and truth impersonated in Jesus?
There were two kinds of thinking about Jesus Christ that, if they had prevailed would have stripped the heart out of the Christian faith. There were those who said Jesus wasn’t really a man, but only seemed to be a man. Then there were those who said Jesus was only a man, an extraordinary man to be sure, but just a man. The Christian faith hinges on the trust that Jesus was both God and man.
Briefly put, this conviction comes from reading in the Gospels that Jesus really was a human being—He was born as we all are. He ate food. He wept when He was sad. He had flesh that bled when He was beaten and crucified at the end.
It was also clear that the Gospels taught unmistakably that Jesus was God. He wasn’t just “divine,” that is, a person inspired as the prophets were. When Peter said to Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus became very excited because He realized that at least for a moment, someone in this pivotal little group of people who were so important to human destiny really understood who He was.
“Son of God” was a new idea relating Jesus Christ to God the Father generically. Father and Son were in the same category of Being, different from anyone else who could say, with reverence, “God is my heavenly Father.”
Jesus said of Himself, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” “The Father” was the way the Jewish people knew to refer to God. The Creator of heaven and earth was personal to them. He was “our Father in heaven.” Either Jesus was a lunatic with hallucinations, or He was telling the most basic information about Himself.
When those who knew Jesus best watched Him closely, echoes from their Bible, the Old Testament came strangely to mind. I wonder who read the 86th Psalm, that we read this morning, and found themselves thinking, “That sure describes Jesus?” They read, “Thou, O Lord, art good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call on thee.” As they watched Jesus tenderly forgive the woman accused by self-righteous men of adultery, did they realize that here was on exhibit the love of God, good and forgiving to this woman who lay in the dust before Him, waiting to be stoned by her accusers? “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more,” Jesus said.
As the disciples were packed in the room where Jesus was teaching in Capernaum, and saw a man lowered on a stretcher through the ceiling, debris falling over them, they heard Jesus say to the paralyzed man on the stretcher, “I forgive your sins.” And they too wondered, “Who besides God can forgive sins?” But they had never seen a God, a real God before. You can’t see God, after all. The words of the Psalm echoed in their minds, “There is none like thee among the gods, O Lord, nor are there any works like thine . . . For thou art great and doest wondrous things, thou alone art God.”
And so the followers of Jesus slowly came to see that this Jesus of Nazareth, though a man, was no mere man. Something new walked with them, ate with them, slept next to them, laughed and cried with them. This something new was God in human form. He was no less God for being man, no less man for being God. Only God could do what He did. To think of Him as anything less than God just didn’t fit. To think of Him as not really a man didn’t fit either.
At the Council of Nicea in AD 325, the thoughtful men who gathered from many places in the Roman empire faced the challenge of a very persuasive man from Alexandria, Egypt, who was convincing people of what seemed more naturally plausible about Jesus, that He was just a man, however remarkable a man he might be. This is the view of much popular theology today. It doesn’t work. Christianity is not Christianity if Jesus was just another great human being.
Each of these phrases that seem to go beyond necessity in making the point about the identity of Jesus Christ, answers a particular challenge to His identity as both God and man.
“God from God” answers the challenge that the God Jesus was, came from some curious thoughts about God that made God seem less than God. Maybe this idea of God was some lower celestial being responsible for creating the earth, a place full of evil. No. Jesus Christ was the only God, who was with and who was the One who created all things, things seen and unseen—all of which were good.
“Light from light” answered the view that Jesus Christ was a light that shined as the result of God turning on some light that did not exist before He turned it on. You hold a flashlight in your hand as you walk a path at night. Until you turn on the flashlight, it produces no light. But when you turn it on, you can shine it on the ground as you walk. The light comes from the flashlight. But Jesus Christ was light, not from some heavenly flashlight, but He was the Source of the light as well as the light that shined.
The first thing God did in creating the world was to invoke His light into visibility. When God said, “Let there be light,” it meant “let there be light in the world.” Till then, all was darkness in the created order. The light that God shined in the world was from the True Light that existed before there was any world at all. The Creed says of Jesus Christ, that He was “Light from light.”
Then, “true God from true God.” This was to clarify that in calling Jesus the “only-born Son of God,” it didn’t mean He came into being in terms of time in the way that a human child comes to life from her parents. “Son of God” and “true God from true God” were equally correct in describing Jesus Christ.
Now, whenever I try to understand these things I wonder why I should do this. Isn’t it true that God will be God no matter what any of us thinks about God? God does not need us to define Him in order to feel good about Himself. You and I might like to hear flattering comments said about us. “Joe is a very intelligent, creative man,” feels good to hear for Joe. “Sandra is a very bright, kind person” makes Sandra feel good to hear it. Particularly if the ones making these complimentary remarks are people of high standing, the compliment feels good. A Nobel Prize seems good to get because everyone thinks the prize comes from a source that makes valid judgments of worth in people.
But what advantage can the Creator possibly get from our saying nice things about Him? It is for our sakes that it is important to think rightly about God. It is important for us to preserve the refined perception the Gospels give us about Jesus for two reasons at least.
First, because ideas tend to get watered down with time and much familiarity. After a while the most sublime ideas can lose their punch, reducing to ordinary platitudes. The closely defined words of the Creed preserve for us what is truly extraordinary.
Second, our hope in God, the confidence we have that sustains us in troubled times, rests on the truth of what Scripture teaches us about Jesus Christ. If Jesus was not really a man, how can He possibly understand the predicament of my humanity? If Jesus was not really God, what did He have to offer me beyond a good example -- that I can’t hope to follow?
Jesus Christ showed you and me the heart of God. Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Jesus wept at the death of his friend, Lazarus. Jesus reached out to outcasts, to people judged unredeemable sinners by people who classed themselves as uniquely good in God’s eyes. In all this profound compassion, Jesus Christ showed you and me the heart of God. So I can trust Him with my life, and so can you.
When we think of God we naturally think of a Being wholly other than we are, beyond us, our Creator, but how in the world can we think of Him as friend? Jesus showed us how friendly God is. All that Jesus was to people, because He is eternal God, He still is to you and me.
In a way, this is just a lofty idea, you might say. But it is a well-founded lofty idea. And lofty ideas are the ideas that move us, that shape our thinking and our behavior. We live in a very troubled world, but so did Jesus. In fact, His world was even more troubled than ours in some ways. There was no anesthesia before surgery in His day. Today we are aghast when we learn of torture taking place in prisons—as well we should be. But in Jesus’ day, men and women were crucified by the thousands. Jesus shined into that dark day, and He still shines into our dark day.
He shines, but you and I have to open our eyes to see Him. I hope that your eyes see more than the surrounding darkness of our day. This Jesus of whom you hear so much, is alive because it was a property of His life not to die. He was not just divine, a great man, but God from God. He was not just a source of radiance, but Light from light. He did not just come from God. He was true God from true God. These things we cannot understand, but we can accept them—knowing there is very much we cannot understand.
And then, trusting in Jesus Christ, we can live out our pilgrimage in this life in hope no matter how life seems to be coming apart at the seams. I pray that we all will turn our eyes Jesus’ way, and remember who this One is, in order to rightly and successfully find and enjoy His healing, His salvation.
Let us pray: O God, we bless You for being present with us in Jesus Christ, our Savior and our God. Amen.
Stuart Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2004
Jesus Christ—Begotten from the Father Before All Ages
Jesus Christ—Begotten from the Father Before All Ages
Psalm 2 / Isaiah 25: 6-10
John 1: 1-2, 14.
November 14th, 2004
Last weekend Bonnie and I were in Jacksonville, Florida to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday. She read to us a brief summary of her life, with some details of how things have changed since she was a little girl. Think of all that has changed in the past ninety years. My mother rode a horse to her early piano lessons. Can you young folk picture that? Does your piano teacher’s house have a hitching post? Her country home as a child didn’t have indoor plumbing or telephone. Imagine going to an outhouse in mid-winter! Do you all know what an outhouse is? Imagine a world without telephones. Radio wasn’t very common yet. But one thing that has stayed pretty much the same is human nature.
My mother was born the year the First World War began. This was then called “the Great War.” The machine gun was introduced in World War I. It mowed down young soldiers like grass because the military still used the old-fashioned battle tactics, waves of soldiers charging at the enemy. Two of my Scottish great-uncles were among the millions slaughtered in France in 1915, clad in their Gordon Highlander kilts. Wouldn’t it have been better if we kept getting places on horseback, and outhouses, and changed what makes for war.
We’re used to the idea of war now, and can hardly imagine a world without people killing each other somewhere. But try to imagine a world where it is different than this. Imagine a world where the kind of environment you wish to live in were the common condition of all people. No war. No selfishness. No poverty. No law courts. None of the miseries people inflict on one another.
I say, “Try to imagine” such a world because you and I know that this is just an idea now. We have to adjust to the real world, and get on in it the best we can. The way people—ourselves included—really are.
We say we want to do this as Christians, that is, living a way of life as taught by Jesus. This takes some doing. We know we all fall short of Jesus’ way. One reason we emphasize the great doctrine of justification by faith alone, that we are not and cannot be saved by doing good deeds—besides the fact that it is true--is that we are painfully aware how defective, spasmodic, temporary, off again, on again our best deeds are.
Without the grace of God, His unmerited favor, we haven’t the ghost of a chance of being people God would find the least interesting to include in heaven for eternity. There are some people you and I would not want to have at our dinner table. Bad manners make for miserable dinner company. You and I would be that kind of people at God’s dinner table—miserable boors without a trace of heavenly etiquette.
We cling to songs like “Amazing Grace,” even if it means we have to sing, “that saved a wretch like me.” Why? Because we know that if we were put under God’s magnifying glass we’d all really look pretty grim. “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” King David prayed, “and renew a right spirit within me.” Others can see we need this. We don’t always notice.
Instead of seeing ourselves as others see us, we play at seeing others as we imagine God does. When your little daughter listens to your hear-beat with her toy stethoscope in the play-doctor kit she got for her birthday, you think it’s cute. She puts the plastic thermometer in daddy’s mouth and tells him to keep it under his tongue and not talk—just like the Dr. said to her at her last check up. We love to see children playing games like this that might result in a career as a doctor. It’s cute to see their impressions of what a doctor does.
But it’s not in the least cute when we presume to know the innermost secrets of the hearts of others, judging even their intentions. In our attempt to play God, we have short-changed loving as God loves, forgiving as He forgives, and giving with His lavish generosity. We who are not God, play God-games badly.
It was something like this, I think, that must have been in the minds of the men who hammered out the words about Jesus in the Nicene Creed. Aware of the grievous problem afflicting us human beings who play God with each other in all the wrong ways, they stressed how God “played” being a human being to teach us how to play the game of humanity right, which is our real game.
We have come to the section of the Creed that hones in on who and what Jesus Christ really was. This second section that tells of God the Son starts out: “And [we believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only born, the one born of the Father before all ages.” Three times the Creed stresses the idea that Jesus was born—He is Son, only born, born of the Father.
These ideas do not correspond to what really goes on in heaven because there is no marrying and so no being born in heaven. These are ideas that have to do with this world. “Born” is a word that only makes sense in earthly life. You and I all were born. We are sons or we are daughters.
In being born, in starting life as everyone does, God began “playing the game of human life.” He would play it exactly as we ought to, beginning with the very beginning as a baby. I proposed to you how you and I play God in condemning even the innermost motives of people—and doing a pretty bad job of it. Well, God turned this project on its head, playing at the game of humanity. He Who always was started from the very beginning with birth.
The Gospel lesson this morning made this clear. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Here is the basis of the Creed saying, “before all ages.” John is talking about Jesus, the one born to Mary in Bethlehem, who had an analogous relationship in the Godhead to the Person we call “the Father.” John makes clear something Matthew and Luke’s Gospels left to him to stress. “He was in the beginning with God and all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” This is the God-stuff that people had no way of recognizing when looking at Jesus.
What could be seen, that John wants to help us understand is that God really began playing the game of humanity. He writes in verse 14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” How did He become flesh and not just seem to be a babey, with baby skin—such a crude way of putting it, really? Underneath the skin we see is flesh. We don’t want to see the flesh. It’s the baby’s skin we love to touch.By being born a baby.
The word “dwelt” comes from the word “tent,” in Greek. He “tented” among us. You who love to go camping leave your comfortable homes and put up a tent out in the forest somewhere and love to rough it away from civilization. You pretend you are frontier folk again. This is similar to how God “played” our game.
We try to play God and fail badly. God played the game of humanity and did it well. John describes the impression Jesus made: “We have seen his glory as of the only Son of the Father.” There was no mistaking Jesus had flesh and blood. Cut Him and he’d bleed. “But boy! how magnificently he lived real life before us, “John says.
What was this “glory” of which John wrote? Jesus didn’t have a halo around his head calling attention to him. He didn’t use “King James Bible” kind of language, different from how others spoke. What John saw was “grace,” that is, unfailing graciousness toward others, and truth—personal honesty to the core.
We tend to “theologize” these two comments and think John meant that Jesus’ displayed a loftier kind of behavior than we can imagine when we say, “a gracious person.” Perhaps we want to imagine that the “truth” of which John wrote was of a higher sort than the honesty we expect of one another. But I don’t think this is necessary.
Jesus “played” the role of human being better than we play the role of God. Jesus, God made flesh, played man at his best, gracious, truthful. Why? Because beyond doing the big work of grace, dying to pay the penalty for your sin and mine, He needed to show us how to play the game of life. Scrap the idea of trying to play God. Instead, take up the ways of grace and truth.
I proposed that we read two passages from the Old Testament as well as John’s well known statement about Jesus as God who became flesh. First, in Psalm 2 we read David’s words describing God’s view of the world, with its ambitious nations that each one thinks it is the reason for the existence of the world itself. “He that sits in the heavens laughs.”
We who live in the most powerful nation in the world should remember that God laughs when He sees any pretentious nation thinking it is the reason for everything. David may have thought he was writing about himself, since God appointed him to the heavy duty of being King of Israel with long-range task. But he wrote of someone else in writing God’s remark, “I have my king on Zion, my holy hill . . . He said to me, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession.”
David died and his dusty remains are in a Jerusalem graveyard. But someone was born into his family line to whom all of this pertained. Isaac Watts summarized this in his great hymn, “Jesus shall reign where e’er the sun does its successive journeys run. His kingdom spread from shore to shore, till moons shall wax and reign no more.”
Isaiah wrote of this one in a section of his prophecy where he peers into the future with great hope. “It will be said in that day, ‘Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
How would anyone recognize this One to come? Because He was born a man. He entered life, he played our game. He came to us who play God with one another so badly, and played the game of humanity perfectly—so winsomely. “Perfectly” probably sounds cold and sterile. But Jesus’ perfection was winsome.
We are apt to think of Jesus as “man” at Christmas and on Good Friday. We picture the humble baby boy and all the charm of the manger scene. We picture Jesus suffering excruciating pain on the cross. But in between Jesus birth and death, and upon His resurrection, we have styled Jesus as being more God than man. Indeed, the temptation for devout folk is to so stress the Deity of Christ as to make insignificant Jesus full humanity.
But the Creed emphasizes Jesus’ birth—stressing that he was son, a human category, and twice that he was born. When we say “God the Son,” we are dabbling in describing an eternal relationship within the Godhead for which the terms “son” and “father” are the best analogies in human language. But when we speak of Jesus as “son” we are accepting as well as we can a fact actually true: Jesus was a son, a born human being. Jesus played the game of human life, starting at the very beginning. Why? Because we human beings were playing so badly the game of Deity, judging, condemning, underplaying tragically the Divine roles of love, forgiveness, and grace.
As I think about the Nicene Creed that Christians have taken so seriously for the past seventeen-hundred years, I realize that God does need us to explain to Him what He is like. But we need to try to understand what God is like because He went to such effort to make Himself known to us and in a way that shows how we should live—who were made in the image of God. If we think of God aright, we will live not only by faith, but by gratitude.
I am grateful that God did not impose on us some crazy mythology, mystical “cartoons” such as the ancient Greeks and Romans had as they tried to probe the heavens and got no farther than Olympus. Their gods behaved like the worst human beings. We don’t think of God as the Incas did, who slaughtered their most beautiful daughters and sons in rituals that tried to give their best, costliest offerings to God as they thought of him.
Instead we think of God most accurately when we take in the fact that He became as we are, to lift us up to life together and life with Him. As Clement put it, “He became as we are, so we could become as He is.” Jesus was really born so we could see Him in human terms—the only terms we can really understand.
“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, only born Son of God, born of the Father before all ages.” And all this for you and for me. I pray that we may remember this and be thankful, and thoughtfully live out our gratitude.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we bless you for creating us in your image, and then for taking on our likeness in Jesus Christ, born for us. Help us to trust in Him, and so to find life. Amen.
Stuart Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)