« November 2004 | Main | January 2005 »
December 26, 2004
Jesus Christ, Light from Light
Jesus Christ, Light from Light
Psalm 43 / Isaiah 42: 5-9
John 8: 12
December 26th, 2004
Newsweek magazine’s final pages of the last issue were called “Final Bows.” Last year, President Reagan took his final bow at the ripe age of 93, after a long spell with Alzheimer’s disease. Had he been able to see the way ahead as an undergraduate at Eureka College, in Illinois, to glory days as a beloved president, if he had had any choice I suspect he might have bartered that painful, private decade for the love he evoked from our country. He would have smacked his lips. “Can’t wait!” But of course, he had to wait, and also of course, he could not see ahead.
Christopher Reeves also died, though far earlier in life, as a consequence of one day’s horse ride in 1995 that changed the course of his life. He went from playing Superman to being a real-life helpless paraplegic. He couldn’t see the way ahead to a destiny that now seems to many the definition of his life far more than his movies as Superman.
I mused as I read those familiar names and others that none of us can see into the darkness ahead. It might make us over-confident if we could, or it could be pretty scary.
We read together this morning the 43rd Psalm. It was a prayer as much as a Bible reading when we said together, “Oh send out thy light and thy truth; let them lead me, let them bring me to thy holy hill and to thy dwelling.”
Those words begin with the little exclamation, “Oh!” But the Hebrew doesn’t include the word “Oh!” There it’s a command to God. The translators tapered down the command, making of it a plea, out of courtesy to God. We cannot command God. So we say, “Oh, please, God, send out your light and let it lead me. Let me see the way ahead, and please let it be good.”
There are a number of Scriptures I would have liked to have us read and listen to this morning, but I could only choose three to remind us that God has shed light on the way ahead. In the chapter before our Old Testament reading, God speaks to us as He told ancient Israel, “I have chosen you and not cast you off; fear not, for I am with you, be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.”
In the chapter following the one Sergey read for us God reminds us that when we go through the deep waters or through the fire, two very opposite kinds of trial, He is right there with us. We will not drown. We will not be consumed by the fire. He is there. He promises us He will be there.
Then you heard Sergey read for you, “I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind . . . Behold the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.” I remember that Sergey and his family now look to God to show them the way ahead. I hope you hear God’s promise to you, “I give you light for the way ahead.”
We read aloud together Jesus’ words, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Oh, so we have to follow such light as we are given. Light can be wasted.
Earlier in John we read of Jesus, “The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.” We wonder what that means. The Quakers accept this teaching of Jesus that puzzles us as a cornerstone of their theology. Most of us don’t know what it means. How did Jesus enlighten Saddam Hussein, or Joseph Stalin, or Scott Peterson? They must have wasted their light.
More personally, I wonder how has Jesus enlightened me? I sure don’t feel enlightened often enough. I look ahead to my ministry here and I pray, “Lord, show me the way. Show us what you want us to be.”
A cornerstone of my faith is that there’s more going on than any of us can see. Light comes in particles or wave lengths imperceptible to my eyes and yours. God leads us through dry times and these are part of the way. When Israel wandered forty years in the desert, this was in the plan of God for them. God’s way is not always through “shady green pastures.”
I chose to speak of these things this morning because I decided last year to let the Nicene Creed guide our thoughts for a while. And with interesting timing the next phrase before us describes Jesus as “light from light.” I didn’t know my duty would be to speak of Jesus in this way on the threshold of a new year.
The early Christians who described Jesus as “light from light” lived in days when their destiny seemed much brighter than it had been fifteen years earlier. Christianity emerged from the darkness of persecution into the light of being the most favored religion of the Roman Empire. But I don’t think this was in their minds when they so carefully described Jesus as “light from light.”
They had one purpose for sure, to define Jesus as the “true light,” because this was the kind of light He was. As we read in John 1: 9, “He was the true light.” They called Him, “light from light,” to make clear He was different from that false light, the disguise that Satan adopts as an “angel of light.” Satan’s “light” came from darkness. Satan’s light was a luminous veneer spread on a very dark heart. The kind of light the powers of darkness shine before us doesn’t reveal terrible consequences from following its allure. How many people wring their hands and say, “If only I had not!” as they think of what they did in response to what seemed a bright, golden opportunity.
In Proverbs we read, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.” “The way of the wicked is as darkness.” But this darkness seems like light at the moment. Opportunity seems to blaze with light at the moment, but oh, the consequences of following that false light.
Jesus was not that kind of light, a light hiding darkness. He is light from light. His kind of light appeared in this world at the beginning when God said, “Let there be light.” John wrote of Jesus as this kind of light, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”
There is an instructive mixing of the verb tenses as John wrote this. Jesus as the light “shines,” which means that this light is always shining--in the present. “The darkness did not overcome it” seems to describe a past action.
But it means something different from that. Practically speaking we might realize this because darkness is always trying to overcome the light. You and I can testify to this in the way that we see the battle in ourselves between light and darkness, good and evil, a dark side battling a light side. With Paul we admit, “The good I want to do, I don’t do, and what I don’t want to do is what I do!” The Gospel is telling us that the darkness will never win over the light of Jesus.
The early Christians who wrote down this so-detailed description of Jesus, wanted to make sure that we would distinguish between the seeming light that really is a disguise of darkness, and the real light, the light that can never be overcome by darkness—that is Jesus.
But this was more than a definition of Jesus, based on the Scriptures statements about Him. It was also an expression of hope. I think of them looking ahead into an unknown future.
They didn’t know that after four hundred years of the penetration of the Christian faith into North Africa and even into the barbarian West that a new religion would arise in Arabia that would threaten to stamp out Christianity. In the early 8th century Islam swept across North Africa, once the most vigorous region of the Christian faith. If Charles the Hammer had not pounded successfully on the Muslim armies in France in AD 732, the light of the Gospel would have faced a real challenge to fulfill the words of the Gospel—the darkness did not overcome the light.”
These early Christians didn’t think about a political, military challenge to the light of Jesus. They had seen how the Faith of Jesus Christ grew in brightness during the darkest days of persecution. Its apparent powerlessness was stronger than the mighty religions favored in the Roman Empire. As we have seen in our generation the resurgence of the Faith in China and Russia demonstrates that the light of the Gospel will not be extinguished.
But I wonder if there was something deeper than this that these early Christians had in mind, something more personal. When you and I come to Jesus by faith, I doubt that many of us have in mind the broad sweep of history, or the technicalities of correctly describing Jesus. We want to feel this light for ourselves.
Even though the Gospel tells us that Jesus was the light that enlightens everyone, we do not always feel an inward confirmation of this truth. Often we live in hope. As Paul tells us, faith, hope’s ally, is more like blindness than like sight. How often the turn of phrase comes to me, “faith is a special kind of blindness.” I trust in God though I cannot see ahead.
The anxieties that affect our faces, changing the optimistic brightness of youth into the pessimism of later years, writing fear and sometimes anger across our foreheads, and putting distress into the lines of our faces, and into our very eyes--are the effect of the darkness we cannot penetrate.
It’s well and good that Jesus is light from light, the true light, and all of that, but I cannot see the way ahead, and I’m scared. There are clues that come to us all that the way ahead isn’t all a spiral upward into glory.
I notice a couple changes in my body that the last decade has brought. I used to be a nearly tireless runner. I could run for miles, and stopped mostly because it was boring. I passed on this endurance gene to our son who has run the Chicago Marathon. But now my knees threaten to quit on me. I can’t run. Gimpy old knees, you know. My eyes once could read fine print. Now I can’t seem to get glasses that really do the trick. Cataracts have begun to form, the eye-doctor tells me. In some ways I feel like I’m still in my thirties. But I have a few reality-check points.
We all know the last advice in the book of Ecclesiastes: “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw nigh, when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them.” It goes on to describe how our body parts fail us, one by one. First our eyes, then osteoporosis, and then our teeth drop out, our ears fail, and finally, “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the Spirit to God who gave it.” All of this happens to us, who have an insatiable appetite not only to live, but also to be forever young.
A lot of plastic surgeons are getting rich promoting the make-believe that a scalpel, a hypodermic needle, and a suction tube can turn back the body clock. Health clubs rake in many people’s extra dollars as they buy memberships they hope will make them slim and trim. If only buying a membership could do the trick!
At midnight next Saturday, we put up a new calendar. What will the year bring? We don’t know any details. Maybe it will go well for us. Maybe ill will come to some of us. But the light Jesus shines into our lives offers a hope more sure than any passing detail of life can extinguish. The Apostle Paul wrote, “I have learned to be abased and to abound. I have learned in whatever state I am therewith to be content.” We’d not like to reproduce personally many of the situations in which he learned to be content. We hope for better than this.
Come what may, train yourself to look steadily at the light of Jesus. You and I cannot actually see light. We just see what light makes it possible to see.
John Henry Newman’s life-story was of great influence on me in a pivotal time of my life when the way ahead seemed very dark. He could be helpful to me because his way seemed very dark to him. I have had since I was a young man a deep sense of longing for God that made life feel like wandering through a labyrinth. It was while returning to England from a trip to Rome in which He searched for God’s direction and peace that he prayed words that many people have sung as a plea to God:
Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom. The way is dark and I am far from home. Lead thou me on. Keep thou my feet. I do not ask to see the distant scene. One step enough for me.
We should probably all learn this hymn. Its tune is not the kind many people favor today. When we cannot see our way ahead, God lets us look through the prism of other peoples’ life experiences. We see they made it through times as perilous as our own. And they show us that blind faith, hope, and trust in God is actually shining a light before us, even when all light seems to have faded before us.
I pray that God will give you and me enough eye-sight to see the ray of light He shines before us all, just enough for the next step. We must leave to God’s care the steps after that. Let us move on together into the year before us, trusting God to show the way individually and as a congregation.
O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come. Be thou our guide while life shall last and our eternal home. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2004
God is Great
God is Great
Psalm 110 / I Samuel 2: 1-10
Luke 1: 46-56
December 19th, 2004
The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art recently bought this old painting of the Madonna and Child for $45,000,000. An artist from Siena, Duccio de Buoninsegna, painted it in the early fourteenth century. The picture portrays one of the great themes of medieval art. “Madonna” means “my lady.” We know what “child” means. But what a lady, a virgin mother. And what a child, the Incarnate Son of God, seated on the virgin mother’s lap. It is no wonder the theme gripped so many artists. It’s no over-payment that $45,000,000 should be given by a secular art museum.
It is hard to calculate the greatness of the Virgin Mary. $45,000,000 isn’t quite the right category for measuring her worth. That an archangel, one of the two highest angels closest to the heavenly throne should say to her, “Hail, highly favored one!” is very suggestive. I’ll be thrilled just to hear, “Christ died for your sins. Come on in.” Mary heard, “Hail, highly favored one.” Why did the angel say this? Was it because she merited the favor for her extraordinary worth?
We humans are preoccupied with the idea of comparative greatness. It has to do with our desire to be significant that we look around and create a hierarchy of significance. We dub some people more significant than others. We call them “great.” We have halls of fame in lots of categories that people aspire to get into. We give awards that folk get teary eyed to receive—some committee in some organization thinks I’m valuable. They voted me “great.”
The ancient church got fascinated with the idea of great Christians when persecution started to weed out the dabblers from the really serious. The really serious Christians, who were so close to their Lord that they could do miracles like He did, came to be called “saints.” Saints were a cut above ordinary Christians. In fact, the idea got going that they had special powers even after they died. They had tons of merit, far more than they needed to get into heaven. So they could share their merit. It was deposited in a kind of heavenly bank, a “treasury of merit.” Guess who had the most merit to share. The Blessed Virgin Mother of Jesus.
It is wholly appropriate that Mary should receive lasting admiration. But things got out of hand in the Church when it let its imagination fly about her. While she was venerated highly in the early years, being rightly called “the God-bearer,” Theotokos, in more recent times far more specific honors were claimed for her.
On December 8th, 1854, Pope Pius IX pronounced that the Virgin Mary was conceived without sin. That is, her conception was different from every other human being. This view was founded on two mistranslations of Scripture.
The first is the Latin translation of Genesis 3: 15 where the feminine personal pronoun, ipsa is in place of the appropriate neuter pronoun, ipsum, that refers to the seed of the woman. Thus devout Christians for a thousand years heard in church that God said to the serpent, “she (ipsa) shall bruise your head.” The woman rather than the seed of the woman would deliver the knockout blow to the devil, the author of sin. If she would do this, she had to be sinless. Therefore she was born without the sin everyone else inherited merely by being born. The seed of the woman referred to someone who would yet be born. We see this as a prediction of the birth of Jesus, who crushed the devil, conquering sin and death.
The second mistranslation is from our New Testament reading this morning. The angel said to Mary, “Hail, highly favored one.” This is an accurate translation of the Greek words. But the Latin translation of the Greek in which the Gospel was written, was gratia plena, means “full of grace.” There is a difference between being “highly favored” and being “full of grace.” How important it is that the Bible be translated right. Christians for a thousand years read something about Mary that the angel did not say. They believed that Mary was full of grace. If so, then she could have had no sin, ever. Therefore she was immaculately conceived.
Then, on November 1st, 1950, Pope Pius XII sent out an authoritative message with his seal (bullus) that declared as a truth to be accepted by all the faithful. Not only was Mary immaculately conceived, she went directly, bodily to heaven when she died. This idea dates back to legends that got going in the fourth century, but the Bible says nothing like this about her. In fact, Mary fades from the scene after Jesus’ resurrection. We read nothing about her role in the earliest Church in the Book of Acts.
Mary was a great woman. There is no doubt that God thought her great. But when we create a greatness surrounding her that is wrong—by creating tributes to her that go beyond what the Bible teaches, we miss seeing the greatness we should. Mary was great because despite the amazing role she came to play in God’s plan of salvation, she did not become proud. She was not self-conscious in her piety. She saw herself as what she was,” the handmaid of the Lord”—just doing what God gave her to do. She believed that God was great. She was amazed that God found her of use. She was just a lowly peasant girl, after all. She said, “From now on all generations will call me blessed.” Who can be proud for being blessed? Grateful, sure, but not proud. She saw everything in perspective: “He who is mighty has done great things for me.” God did it.
But none of the things Mary mentions in the Magnificat call attention to her personally. Mary kept perspective. The last glimpse we see of Mary with Jesus in His early life is when Jesus is twelve years old. He has given the first big clue that His business is God’s business. After Mary gently chided Jesus for making her worry when she and Joseph couldn’t find Him as they returned home from Jerusalem, He told her, “Didn’t you know I must be in my Father’s house?” “My father’s house?” Wasn’t that in Nazareth just beside the carpenter’s shop? No, not at all.
The last picture of Mary in the Gospels is of her standing quietly at the foot of the cross.
Mary “kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” It is this picture of Mary that is beneath all the excessive things that have been said about her. She was not just resigned so that she passively played her part in the great drama of redemption. She was hardly a limp instrument in God’s hands. She heard the angel’s announcement and recognized the importance of what was happening. She asked the appropriate question, “How shall this be, since I have no husband.” She was engaged to be married, but she had not shared the intimacy with Joseph that God intends to be reserved for marriage. She had no reason to be pregnant.
The Gospel of Matthew lets us know that Joseph did not just take all this in stride—that Mary, his fiancée should be pregnant before marriage. He planned to divorce her. It was a matter of honor for him. But he would do it as gently as possible.
One of the very early Christian “novels” about the birth of Jesus describes how distressed Joseph was. When he came home and found her very noticeably pregnant, “he smote his face, and cast himself down upon the ground in sackcloth and wept bitterly, saying, ‘With what countenance shall I look unto the Lord my God? And what prayer shall I make concerning this maiden? For I received her out of the temple of the Lord my God a virgin, and have not kept her safe . . . Who has done this evil in my house and has defiled the virgin?’
Then the angel told Joseph what had actually happened. But who would believe this? The story goes on to say that both Joseph and Mary took the test the High Priest gave that would reveal their sin. They drank the ‘water of conviction,’ a vile-tasting kind of poison that invariably wreaked havoc on peoples’ innards. Both of them passed the test. Then the priest said, “If the Lord God has not made your sin manifest, neither do I condemn you.”
We read this story with interest because it suggests details that we could see happening when Mary was expecting a child before she was married to Joseph. But these stories, as entertaining as they are distract us from Mary’s true greatness—the kind you and I can see as an example that we can actually copy.
Mary’s greatness was to recognize the greatness of God, and show it in a way that we too can proclaim the greatness of God.
First, I see that there is much about Mary before these events about which we know nothing. Throughout the course of her young life she prepared herself, though she did not know she was preparing herself for anything. All she could have known she was doing was being faithful with the kind of faithfulness to God appropriate to her young life. She did the things a good young woman would do in the home and in society without ostentation.
Those who would have noticed her would have been the kind of people who notice goodness more than genius. It was a goodness that grew in her in a very ordinary, quiet way. Here is a model for us all who grow through the stages of life. I speak to you who are children, young people. Obey your parents. Follow their teaching. Do your work well. Be kind to other people. Adults, be ordinarily good—faithful, loyal, moral, gracious, forgiving. This is the noticeable stuff of following your Lord. This was Mary’s ordinary way.
Second, I see that Mary knew her Bible. She knew the ways of God taught in the Bible. The 104th Psalm begins, “Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God, thou art very great.” Did these words flash to mind when Mary said, “He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name.” The 103rd Psalm says, “The steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him.” Mary echoed the psalm, “His mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation.”
Mary saw what was happening in terms of the sweep of God’s work throughout the generations of her people.
Third, Mary recognized that what was happening in her then was the work of God. She was just “the handmaiden of the Lord,” someone God was using. How important that she keep this in mind. “Let others see the work of God. Let me not get in the way. Let me keep on being useful.” It is a paradox that Mary’s greatness depended on her keeping in mind that she was only the handmaiden of the Lord. Mary wanted no credit for her humble faithfulness. She didn’t get in the way when she realized her usefulness to God.
Here is perhaps the hardest part of Mary’s greatness for us to follow. How we are tempted to become aware of what we do in the church and society! Perhaps you do more than others do, and you start to recognize it is so. You think someone else should notice and credit you with being so fine a person.
People in my trade are tempted to look at outward signs of success. As churches we form strategies for achieving the kind of success that captures our attention. Let us cultivate what God can see.
God quietly and secretly fashions true greatness in hearts that are absolutely unimpressed with themselves. They keep on and on, enduring whatever comes their way of presumption of others on their faithfulness, having only in mind that they be faithful to God. This is greatness.
So often people like this are women. Someone I know well has told me of a father, a humble man, who had a trade few think of as glamorous. His role in his congregation was to be probably the first one there and the last to leave on a Sunday morning. He cared for whatever needing cared for—year after year after year. He served in leadership but his greatest role was behind the scenes. In his home this man’s humble faith bore fruit as his children grew up under its influence. People of all sorts found cheerful welcome in this home. The great doctrines of the Christian faith were given simple and believable dress in the life of this man. His children all share deeply this father’s faith.
His name will go down in no history books. I don’t know if there is a plaque in his honor anywhere in the church building. But anyone who is apt to notice will notice the effects of his life’s offering for usefulness to God. This is greatness. Many people we may call famous. But this is greatness.
The fundamental key to greatness is unselfconscious placing our lives into the hands of God, come what may, for any usefulness He would achieve through us. When you and I are convinced of the greatness of God, who alone does wondrous things, greatness emerges in the common, daily outworking of our lives. The moment we notice this, we risk blowing it.
With eyes fixed on God, focused on Jesus Christ, let me live out my days, aspiring to be useful to Him. With eyes fixed on almighty and merciful God, with the focus on Jesus Christ, let us all choose to live out our days—useful to God. Let us be as Mary was, a handmaiden of the Lord. What spell will God cast on the world if we follow where she has led? Who cares if anyone notices? The moment we care about this, it will be because we’ve lost our focus. Maybe it will be helpful to keep Mary in mind. She didn’t lose focus.
O Lord God, give us grace to forget ourselves, to see only Him who was born for our sakes, and who died for our sakes. Grant to us to be your faithful handmaids and handymen. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
December 12, 2004
Jesus, the Light of the World
Jesus, the Light of the World
Isaiah 9: 2-7 / John 8: 12
December 12th, 2004
The Christmas story we know and love is set in a time of darkness. Isaiah had written prophetically, “The people walking in darkness saw a great light.” The Jewish people had been living in dark times for six hundred years. They were now under subjection to Rome. They seethed with a spirit of revolt. Those were dark times.
Then, from what Luke tells us it seems night was approaching when Mary and Joseph arrive in Bethlehem looking for a place for Jesus to be born. How distressed they must have felt to be forced to make do with a cattle stall, particularly with Mary about to give birth.
That night shepherds were in the fields keeping watch over their flocks. Matthew’s Gospel includes in the Christmas story the dark, brooding fear of King Herod who tried to kill little Jesus. He plunged many Jewish homes into grief as he killed all baby boys two years old and under who lived near Bethlehem.
We are to see that Jesus came into a time of darkness. Perhaps this was important for later generations to see because so many dark times would follow. Skip over the long years that are sometimes called “the dark ages,” after the barbarian hordes had done a number on the Roman empire. Think of our day. Wars and rumors of wars. Our televisions show us images of starving children in the Sudan, AIDS orphans throughout sub-Sahara Africa. It would be possible to paint a very dark picture with gloomy colors from many places even in our own land. There are people in this very city, maybe in this congregation this morning, who might say, “it is the worst of times.”
But God has shined light into all this darkness. The Bible passes before us images reminding us of this. In the first act of creation God said, “Let there be light.” This was before the sun was created on the fourth day. I wonder was this light a ray of hope that there was promise in the chaos, the abyss of nothingness before God separated the water from earth, and brought into being plants and animals and then people—made in His image and likeness?
On Christmas Eve night light penetrated the darkness. Angels appear to the shepherds with radiant light. “The glory of the Lord shone round about them,” Luke writes. Matthew tells us Wise men from the East star a bright star standing over the place where Jesus lay. I know that this bright star didn’t appear on the night Jesus was born, but it was part of a whole project of giving light that God spread over Jesus’ infancy.
In the course of His three years of ministry Jesus shed light into many dark lives. A widow-mother whose only son had just died was plunged into grief. He was not only her son, he was her social security system. With him gone, as a widow she was destitute. Jesus told her, “Don’t cry.” He went to the bier on which he lay and said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” And the widow’s dead son sat up and began to speak. People said, “God has visited his people.”
Jesus is well known for the forgiveness He spread wherever he went. You remember the story of the woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. In those days adultery brought the death penalty. She was dragged into a clump of her accusers before Jesus. Her accusers wanted to accuse Jesus too so they could kill him as they intended to punish this woman. If He rejected the Law of Moses he was a blasphemer. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger in the dust. He stood up and said, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.” Her accusers melted away. But the light Jesus shined into this dark moment in her life was not just sparing her life. He freed her of the feeling of obligation to keep on sinning. Such confidence in her that Jesus should say, “Go and sin no more.” Jesus gave her hope for a better life, and hope is a powerful force.
So when Jesus said, “I am the light of the world,” we have some sense of what he meant. John wrote of Jesus, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not over come it.” The reason why John talks about darkness overcoming light is because this is what always happens.
In the correctional system in which I play some small part I hear talk about the rate of recidivism, the rate at which people who get out of jail go back into it. The downward pull of dark habits together with what sometimes to me an excessive energy in discovering people to be flawed works against the hope that lies in the hearts of people to move on to a good life. Darkness fights against the light of hope.
But it is into the very real darkness that the light of Jesus shines. First, Jesus’ light shines in the message of the Gospel itself. If you and I trust in Jesus, accepting for ourselves the gift of His forgiveness, and then start to live as forgiven people, His light shines on us. Many people who think of themselves as Christians give evidence that they don’t accept that their sins are forgiven, washed away. They linger with feeling of entrapment in their sins. It’s as though they were trapped in a dark room. Jesus’ voice echoes through the centuries, “I died to forgive your sins. Receive my forgiveness. Now live as a forgiven person—let your gratitude now move you.” This forgiveness is the lingering ray of Jesus’ light.
But then I remember Jesus said to His followers, “You are the light of the world.” He told funny stories about people lighting a candle and then hiding it under a bushel basket. He said, “Let your light shine that people may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” I remember at Pentecost little flames of fire were on the heads of 120 people gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem. We usually think of the symbol of fire as the sign of the Holy Spirit. But I wonder if it was the Light of Jesus that settled on each person to reproduce what He had done in His short life.
The Gospel this morning tells us that if we will follow Jesus we will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life. It’s remarkable how much light can be thrown by a small candle. Russell Conwell told of a little girl in his church in the early days of his ministry in Philadelphia. This took place in the early 20th century. Her name was Hattie May Wiatt. The church was drawing so many people that people actually had to rent a place to sit in advance to come to Sunday school. It was a very small place. So there was this Sunday that Hattie May was waiting outside hoping she could buy admission. Pastor Conwell saw her on the way in and picked her up and carried her into the Sunday school. The next day Pastor Conwell was walking by her house and heard she was very sick. He came to pray for her, and told her cheerfully that they were going to have to build a bigger building for their Sunday school. She had saved up 57 cents, which she gave him. It was the first contribution towards the new Sunday school. Time doesn’t allow me to tell the whole story, but that 57 cents swelled so that it became the sum needed to build Temple Baptist Church, and then Temple University that started as a place to educate those who could not afford an education, and Samaritan Hospital.
Hattie May died, but her little flame shined an immense light. The Wiatt Mite Society was formed in that congregation in her memory, that took small gifts and made much good of them in that city.
I tell this story because it illustrates how even the smallest light can have great effect. Jesus illustrated the same truth when He took a school boy’s lunch of five loaves and two small fish, and fed 5000 men plus women and children. John said of Jesus, “He was the true light that lightens everyone.” And Jesus says to you and me, on whom He has shined His light, “let your light shine so well that others may see it and glorify God because of you.”
Are you letting your light shine? Or is your light hidden for reasons you think are good. The darkness is always trying to blow out the light. There are so many kinds of darkness: anger, envy, despair, worry, financial need, temptations that have the best of people. Light your candle from Jesus, the Light of the world. Jesus offers you light—forgiveness, a sense of worth, a sense of hope. Now let your light shine.
I see our call here at Faith Church, as in every such place, to encourage the shining of light, big lights as some of you may have, and small lights. But let your light shine. It reflects Jesus’ light, and will lighten your darkness, whatever it may be, and shed light on the darkness of others too.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2004
Elijah’s Second Coming
Elijah’s Second Coming
Malachi 4: 1-6 / Matthew 3: 1-12
December 5th, 2004
I would guess that more than one person here this morning has thought or said, “If I had it to do over again, I would do it differently.” There are words we wish we had never spoken. There are hasty decisions we made that changed the course of life. If only we had a second chance.
Built into the fabric of God’s work with this world it seems has been a series of pivotal second chances. When the world reached such a depth of depravity that humanity was a disgrace to itself God sent a great flood, wiping out everything. But instead of totally eliminating the human race, God saved one family and from them began again. Humanity got a second chance.
Once upon a time there was a strange man named Yohanan ben Zechariah, whom we know as John the Baptist.
He wasn’t a Baptist, as an old lady in a nursing home once insisted to this Presbyterian pastor, informing him of her more proper Christian roots. John was dubbed “the Baptizer” because he practiced baptism, a new ceremony. John’s baptism was a sacrament of a second chance.
John the Baptist was an innovator. John put people fully under the water as a sign of drowning their old sinful ways, before bringing them up to a new and better life. His ministry was to give people a second chance. It began with a symbolic act reflecting what God did in the days of Noah. They had to drown the old person and start again.
John’s baptism was available to Jews and to non-Jews alike, to pagan Roman soldiers and Jewish Pharisees. This was how God began to open up second-chances to the whole world. John put all people on a level playing field before God.
I wonder what made Pharisees submit to John’s scorching sermons side by side with tax collectors and Roman soldiers. “Brood of vipers,” he said to the spiritual elite of his day, “who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Pharisees, who were the morally superior sect of the Jews, had to swallow John’s harsh words and they did. They stood in the hot sun listening to John’s harsh words, recognizing that for all their care in outward observances, their motives were not pure. They stepped forward with everyone else to say to John the Baptist, “Drown my old self; let me begin anew.”
Who was this man, John? We know nothing of John’s childhood except that he was born to an elderly mother and that his father was a priest. At some point in his young manhood he left home to live in one of the most barren regions on our planet. He wore some sort of garment made of camelhair. It was sturdy but collected grime. John ate grasshoppers and wild honey.
Though you and I think of John the Baptist as the immediate forerunner of Jesus, people in his day couldn’t figure out who he was. John spoke of himself, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’.” “What does that mean?” people must have asked their rabbis. Perhaps their rabbis reminded them of the words of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 40.
Isaiah wrote of the time this one would come, “Every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill be made low.” When Isaiah spoke these words people no doubt envisioned valleys miraculously rising to meet mountaintops that were sinking down, so that there was a flat plain—like Indiana—where formerly there were hills and dales. But Isaiah referred to what was happening in the hearts of people who came to John the Baptist. Those who thought of themselves as morally outstanding were brought down, and those who thought they were incorrigible sinners were lifted up. John persuaded them that we are all on a level field before God.
But John must have wondered, “Who am I that this happens through me?” We know he was not proud. He said of Jesus, “I’m not worthy to undo his sandal thongs.” He did not use his power for personal advantage.
John was thrown into a dungeon by one of the sons of King Herod the Great to shut him up. When he was in the dungeon he sent some of his disciples to Jesus asking, “Are you he who is to come or shall we look for another?” John preached, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” and seems to have understood when he baptized Jesus who this humble Cousin of his was. But locked in the dank dungeon he became confused. “Are you the one?”
But Jesus had a clear idea of who John was. Jesus said, “If you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come.”
Jesus had in mind the last words of the prophet Malachi who said, four hundred years earlier, “Thus says the Lord of Hosts . . . I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers.”
The prophet Elijah was a second Moses. Moses had promised hundreds of years before, “The Lord your God will raise up for a you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren, him you shall heed.” Israel didn’t listen to Moses. The Bible doesn’t blush to tell how Israel bucked Moses’ leadership. But Moses said, when this second Moses comes, you will listen to him. Israel waited to be given this second chance. How would they know when it came?
Then Elijah burst onto the scene many years later in the days of the wicked King Ahab. He was the one Moses pointed to, whom the people would listen to. But when this prophet like Moses came during the reign of King Ahab, the very worst of Israel’s kings, he didn’t wear a sign saying, “I’m the one Moses promised you would listen to.” They did not listen.
Elijah told King Ahab there would be neither rain nor dew in Israel for three years. Why? Because Elijah echoed Moses. “If you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God . . . the heavens over your head shall be brass, and the earth under you shall be iron.” No rain meant draught, no food, no water. Nobody saw a connection between the draught and what Elijah had said to King Ahab. God has nothing to do with this.
So Elijah said, in effect, “Let’s be a bit more clear.” He proposed a showdown with the priests and prophets of Baal, the Sidonian deity that Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, had introduced to Israel.
Elijah set the stage for a contest that would clarify once and for all who was the God Israel was to serve. The prophets of Baal sacrificed a bull, laying it on the altar they built. They began formally to utter their prayers. Nothing happened. Soon they screamed to Baal, and fussed, and carried on liturgically. But nothing happened. Elijah taunted them, “Maybe Baal is asleep, or on a trip, and this is why he doesn’t burn up your sacrifice.”
Then Elijah stepped up and laid on the altar the bull he offered to the God of Israel. He had his opponents drench the altar with water once, twice, three times. Then he prayed, “O Lord, God of Israel, let it be known today that thou are God in Israel . . . and that Thou hast turned their hearts back.” Then we read, “The fire of the Lord fell . . . and when the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, ‘The Lord, he is God; the Lord, he is God’.” They had a second chance.
Mendelssohn, in his oratorio, “Elijah,” splices in the appeal we find in the prophet Joel, but Elijah may well have said it too. “Return to me with all your hearts.” Half-heartedness is the plague of our faith.
Israel did not take its second chance. And the years went by. It wasn’t long before their land was conquered by the cruelest nation in the ancient Near East, Assyria. The people were taken into exile.
But God provided an echo of this appeal down the corridors of time. The last words of the last of the Jewish prophets, Malachi, promised, “I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers.” I will give my people another chance. John the Baptist was this second coming of Elijah.
We always remember John the Baptist at this season of the year because he announced the first coming of the Lord Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
But we now live after Jesus came so why do we keep remembering John? Jesus didn’t tell us, “Remember John, Elijah, and Moses at Advent. He said, “Come follow me.” This appeal has echoed in Christians’ ears for nearly two-thousand years. But the standard of following has been reduced as we have rehearsed the words over and over again. Until following Jesus really may look like nothing in particular. I sometimes wonder, “What’s become of intensity of love and gratitude to Jesus?”
Now we are asked to remember that Jesus said, “I am coming again.” But this isn’t really a second-chance kind of second-coming. When Jesus comes again it will not be as a baby born in an obscure village in Judea, but in a much more awesome way. Then will come a great sifting of peoples, to see who has listened and who has not.
The Table of the Lord stands here before us, with bread and wine beneath that white linen cloth. Here we see emblems of the level of devotion to us of the Son of God. God does not ask many of us to die for Him. Instead, He appeals, “Live for me.”
We are accustomed to thinking of a “professional ministry” as the ones with principal responsibility in God’s work. But God looks for ordinary people, sold-out to serving in the name of Jesus Christ to be the mini-Elijah’s and mini-John the Baptists—saying to their friends and neighbors, “You can be reconciled to God.”
When ordinary people accept this role the life of faith surges for them and the church is stirred to life. We are preoccupied with other things. It is because we have lost the main agenda. Fifty years ago the Scottish pastor, James S. Stewart wrote, “To confront a bewildered and disheveled age with the fact of Christ, to thrust upon its confusion the creative word of the Cross and smite its disenchantment with the glory of the Resurrection—this is the urgent, overruling task . . . if the Church can indeed say, ‘It is not I who live, it is Christ who lives in me,’ then the dark demonic forces of the age have met their match.”
What is lacking is intensity of expectation of ourselves. I have come to know in recent weeks a few young folk in whom the fire burns to be useful for God. It is a welcome thing to feel this warmth. I pray God may kindle in our hearts a fire again, that we may not only enjoy the fullness of life in Christ, but may be His agents in our day, to offer to others a second chance at life in Christ, full and rich and free.
Let us pray: O Lord, your ways are mysterious and wonderful. Your love knows no measure. Grant to us to respond indeed to your tug on our hearts, and to be in your hands as your servants Elijah and Moses were, agents of grace in a troubled world. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)