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January 30, 2005
The Gift of Sight
The Gift of Sight
Psalm 23 / Isaiah 42: 6-9
John 9: 1-7
January 30th, 2005
You and I come from the week just past, with all that we have done and seen and thought, to focus our attention on Jesus. The seven verses which we just read are part of one of the most interesting stories in the Gospels.
The two main figures in the story are Jesus and the man who was born blind. We don’t know his name.
There are three stages in the story of the man born blind. The first stage ends with him recognizing Jesus as the man who healed him. In the second stage he sees Jesus as a prophet. Finally he sees Jesus as Lord and he worships Him. The more he looked at Jesus the better he came to know him. He ended up worshipping him.
But others who saw the same miracle were blind to who Jesus was, and their blindness intensified at the same time the blind man’s vision became clearer. It all had to do with the difference in how they looked at Jesus. The blind man looked at Jesus with trust. The others looked at Jesus and saw only someone who violated their traditions. It is a built in flaw in a kind of religion whose strength is found primarily in its tradition. What we pass along is vital, but there is a freshness that we need to maintain in looking at Jesus or our faith will become stale, lukewarm, and then become dead.
We read the letters in the second two chapters of the Book of Revelation where already early in the story of the Church, within the first century in fact, lethargy had set in even when Christians were willing to die for their faith. To the Church at Ephesus the Lord says, “I have this against you, you have abandoned the love you had at first.” To the Church at Pergamum the Lord says, “I have a few things against you, you have some there who hold the teaching of Baalam—that is, who dabble in idolatry and immorality. On and on Jesus assessed the churches until he came finally to the Church at Laodicea about whom he spoke most harshly because it was prosperous and had no sense of need. It was lukewarm, neither hot nor cold. “I will spew you out of my mouth,” Jesus said, in words that seem so unlike him to us.
Nearness to Jesus does not always have the same effect. Remember all kinds of people were around Jesus physically, and not all were drawn to Him. Some hated him. Some, undoubtedly, were simply indifferent. But happily some were like the man in our story who was blind from birth, who grew in a short space of time to recognize that Jesus was not only the man who healed him, not only a prophet, a man who spoke for God, but was the Lord Himself, whom he worshipped.
Let’s briefly remember a few of the important details of the story. Jesus and His disciples met a man who was born blind. It may have been common knowledge that he was born this way. Unlike blind Bartimaeus who sat beside the road in Jericho and called out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me,” this fellow didn’t ask Jesus to heal him. Maybe he’d been told he deserved to be blind.
There was a theory going round that all birth defects are due to sin. Jesus’ disciples asked, “Who sinned this man or his parents that was he born blind?” They didn’t ask Jesus to give him sight. They just asked what sin was the reason he was born blind.
Some thought birth defects were the result of the sin of the parents. Others that the fetus sinned somehow in the womb, and still others, that it was sin in a previous life. These last two assumptions had no basis in the Hebrew scriptures.
Jesus told His disciples neither this man sinned, nor his parents. Though it is true the Ten Commandments include the statement that God “visits the sins of parents on the children to the third and fourth generation of those that hate me,” later Scriptures reveal a development in God’s ways. The prophet Ezekiel gave the word of the Lord to those who blamed their misfortunes on earlier generations, “What do you mean by repeating this proverb . . . ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge?’ as I live, says the Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel . . . the soul that sins shall die.” We are responsible only for what we do. Only in a mechanical sense do our children suffer from our sins as parents, perhaps as drug addicts pass on their addiction, or as we fail them as we bring them up.
Jesus said “He was born blind that the works of God might be manifest in him.” What works of God? At first, it was Jesus giving him the gift of sight. But the greater work followed, as he could not only see Jesus, but also recognized Jesus as Lord and worshipped Him.
What fascinates many folk is how Jesus healed this fellow. It seems so uncouth. He spat on the dust, made some mud and smeared it on the man’s eyes and said, “Go wash in the Pool of Siloam and come back seeing.” He was not being crude. The spittle of a distinguished man was seen as good medicine. The dust on which Jesus spat may have been symbolic, as the Creator reached for fresh dust to heal a man who was made of dust.
He was still blind as someone led him through the city and down thirty-three steps to the pool of Siloam. He washed his muddy face and then stood up to a whole new world, a world of sight. Whereas he made his way down gingerly, I wonder if he came back skipping—though being able to see was a brand new experience he may not have known how to handle immediately.
The story is far from over.
When we read the whole of the ninth chapter of John’s Gospel we see that this fellow wasn’t the only one who was blind. He was physically blind but a worse kind of blindness afflicted others. When his neighbors and others saw him walking around no one shouted, “How great, he can see!” They were blind to gratitude, we might say. Some were blind about the obvious. “Maybe it’s not really the blind guy.” But he let them know, “I am the guy. A man healed me.”
These neighbors and friends took him the religious teachers for closer scrutiny. The teachers grilled him and then drew his parents to an inquisition about him. His parents knew these teachers had threatened to boot out of the synagogue anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Christ. Fearfully his parents said, “He is of age, ask him who healed him.”
So the learned teachers of religion grilled him again and again, “Describe exactly how it happened.” Again he told them the simple details of spittle, mud on his eyes, and a good wash in the Pool of Siloam. The space where they stood began to buzz. Some argued that Jesus couldn’t be from God because he healed on the Sabbath. It was a matter of logic. Someone from God would obey God’s law! They broke down the steps of what Jesus did and found three technical violations of their traditions about working on the Sabbath. They believed these traditions were implicit in God’s mind when God gave Israel the Ten Commandments.
But others of them countered by asking, “How could he heal if he were a sinner?” Again they asked the man, “What do you say about Jesus?” hoping to hear him disqualify Jesus in some way. He said, “He is a prophet.” This was a remarkable claim because the days of the prophets were long gone. It was four hundred years since the last of the prophets lived.
As the grilling continued the man once blind finally looked these learned teachers in the eye—far his social and religious superiors, but now mere bullies, “I have told you already and you would not listen.” Then, sarcastically, “Do you too want to be His disciples?”
How remarkable! You do not know where Jesus comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners . . . If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.
With great irritation the teachers replied as no teacher should ever speak to a student, “You were born in utter sin and would you teach us?” And they cast him out.
They thought they were doing right; they were blind. They were allies of the one who prayed in the Temple, “I thank You, God, that I am not as other men are, adulterers, unclean, or even like this tax collector-who prayed beside him, asking God’s mercy.” What utter blindness! Like this proud man who prayed so arrogantly they had forgotten that their Bible taught them humility before God was the essence of true religion. So now, equipped with the hostility to Jesus, and the unfounded idea that this man was born blind because of sin, they were blind to their own bigotry and unbelief—as they pressed this man with religious fervor.
Jesus would sometimes tease such people about their blindness. Once he described some people zealous in discovering sin in others. “You have logs in your eyes and you’re alarmed at the splinters you see in the eyes of other people.” “You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel,” he said to some others. But they couldn’t recognize their blindness. It’s a blindness endemic in some serious people.
We know well and quote Robert Burns final remark in his poem, “To a Louse.” The poem pokes fun at a prim and proper lady sitting in church. She knows how fine she looks. What she doesn’t know is that a louse is crawling along a hair protruding from the back of her bonnet. So he says, “Wad some power the gift to see ourselves as others see us. It would from many a blunder free us and foolish notion.” Good advice we may more frequently apply to others than to ourselves.
But others cannot see us perfectly. Some far over estimate us, blind to our faults, and others estimate us unfairly, blind to what is good. You remember what God told Samuel, as he searched for a king to replace Saul. Samuel looked at Jesse’s first handsome son and thought for sure this was Israel’s new king. But the Lord tugged at his conscience, “Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart.” Beauty is skin deep, we say. We are blind to what is in the heart.
Jesus healed the eyes of the man who was born blind, and then he healed his soul. Within a short time he came to really see Jesus. At first, Jesus was just a voice, a kindly voice I suppose. And then after he was healed, he was recognizable as a man. As questions were asked of him he realized Jesus was more than a man; he was a prophet. A prophet was as high as he could then imagine. But finally, he recognized Jesus as the Lord and worshipped him.
Each of us has a progress too in how we see Jesus. Perhaps you see Him as a good, an exemplary man whose teachings we should consider. Maybe you view Him as a prophet, a man who spoke for God. But until we see Jesus as Lord and worship Him, we have not recognized Jesus as He is.
Worship is presenting to Him our bodies, fresh when sun rises, fresh at sunset too. It goes on and on. I trust it is our desire to worship Jesus as Lord.
Let us pray: O Lord, help us like the man born blind to look at you, and to pass beyond seeing you as a man, as a prophet, and finally to see that you are the Lord, and then to worship you. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
January 23, 2005
Jesus Christ—of the same essence of the Father
Jesus Christ—of the same essence of the Father
Isaiah 35: 1-4 / John 14: 8-11
January 23rd, 2005
This past week President Bush took his oath of office for a second term. Part of the interest of this was seeing his dad in the background. Because his father was also a president we cannot help comparing them.
We call a boy “a chip off the old block,” meaning he sure reminds us of his dad. I have a niece who is so much like her mother—a mother we all love to bits that we eagerly look forward to the kind of woman she will become. But there is an ebb and flow from one generation to the next. As Samuel Butler remarked quaintly in his novel, The Way of All Flesh,
We are as days and have had our parents for our yesterdays, but through all the fair weather of a clear parental sky the eye of Fortune can discern the coming storm, and she laughs as she places her favourites it may be in a London alley or those whom she is resolved to ruin in king's palaces.
While we are all interested in this kind of thing as we watch the generations unfold, there’s not a lot at stake in what we discover.
Now I have a point in all this talk about parents and children. And it goes beyond encouraging all us parents to live well before our children. The Bible tells us that Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus is “the author and finisher of our faith.” That means Jesus was the model that we look at and He and the Father were one.
Jesus was not just a man who lived an exemplary life. Jesus was also God. Even though Jesus was God made flesh, He prayed to One whom He called, “Father.” In fact, Jesus called this One to whom He prayed, “Abba,” which was an intimate term like our term “Daddy.” What was the relationship between Jesus and this One to whom He prayed? Jesus said to His disciple, Philip, “The one who has seen me has seen the Father.”
This morning I want to speak to the question of the relationship between Jesus, who was God the Son, to the One to whom He prayed, to God the Father.
What does it matter to understand this, you may wonder. Is this just another word-game? Or does it matter for some practical reason? I believe it matters for very practical reasons.
First, perhaps is that to think about this is to elevate our minds and hearts simply by focusing on Jesus. If all you and I think about is the day to day grind of life, stuff about home, about work, about money, about sports, about our health, about who said what to whom, about what we’re going to do when we grow up or retire, or the like, then our lives will focus only on our own little world. And you and I are reduced as people. We become small.
We become larger by thinking of Jesus. It’s part of loving God to think about Jesus. We become in some small way consciously a part of God’s enterprise when we expose our minds deliberately to God.
But there is more to thinking about Jesus than this. I use the name Jesus and God interchangeably on purpose. Our faith needs to know it has a sure anchor in truth. Truth may not be entirely within our grasp when it comes to matters about God, that is, God is much greater than we can understand. But what we do understand we want to be true. And we have to work to try to understand what is true about the big stuff.
The reason why Sunday School matters, why such activities as Confirmation class for young people matters, and why Inquirer’s Class for membership matters, and Bible studies matter is that we are training our minds to think about the “big stuff.” It’s not beside the point that we also get to know and care for each other.
A day is coming to each of us when it will be clear that it has never really mattered what kind of house we live in, or how large or small our financial resources are, or what our education is, or whether the Boilermakers are winning or not.
Every now and then we come to moments when there flashes before us that we’re playing in a much bigger arena than the little world of every day life in West Lafayette, Indiana. This week I met a man I’d not seen in a while. He looked strangely different. I asked him what it was. He told me he had only a few months to live. He asked me to pray for him. Or perhaps you are driving along and you realize you’re about to be hit by another car, and thought flashes before you, “I might be in tomorrow’s obituary.”
When two jet airliners plunged into the twin towers of the World Trade Center four years ago, suddenly a lot of self-confident people felt very vulnerable. I used to think 911 was a number that represented help in time of emergency need. Now I think of it as a number spelling “how totally vulnerable the strongest nation in the world is.”
When safety is no longer possible, what lies beyond the present life? We need to feel that our faith is anchored in truth and not in some fashionable religion. I’m convinced that what we “know” about Jesus is influenced by what we “feel” as well as by the ideas we think. And what we feel is nurtured by coming together often to study together the great matters. And Jesus Christ is the greatest subject we can study together. I am fortified in what I feel by seeing the deep interest of others in the group with which I meet on Wednesday evenings. I am fortified in my faith by being in the presence of those I get to pray with on Wednesday morning. The feelings we have help us to appropriate the big stuff. Our feeling of trust in God grows in community.
So what about Jesus, God the Son, and God the Father?
When Jesus was born and lived out His brief life here, the Bible teaches us “in Him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” This means that Jesus was all that God is. God became a human being for a reason: in order to rescue us from a terrible predicament, the predicament of sin—the human blemish that is a fatal flaw. Sin wrecks everything. Sin makes ugly what is beautiful. Sin ruins friendships. It destroys trust between people. Sin pollutes personality. Sin is a principle of corruption that sours the sweetness of life. Sin isn’t fun at all. Sin is total yuk.
The Apostle Paul told us, “He became sin for us who knew no sin that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” This seems impossible, but it is true.
It was obvious to those who saw Him that Jesus was a man. It gradually dawned on those who saw Him that something was going on in Jesus that defied definition. Jesus’ disciple, Phillip, said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied.” Jesus replied, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
Phillip and others who cared about these things knew about God the Father only in bits and pieces. Israel in Moses’ day saw the lightning and thunder and dark clouds surrounding Mt. Sinai when God spoke to Israel the Ten Commandments. They saw the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night that led them through the wilderness. They knew this meant God was with them. Phillip knew about all of this from his Bible.
In Exodus 24: 10 we even read that Moses, Aaron, and seventy elders of Israel saw the God of Israel.
Later on we read that Moses set up the Tabernacle outside the camp of Israel in the wilderness. The people saw a pillar of cloud standing at the door of the tabernacle. People would kneel at the opening of their own tents and look at that distant tent where Moses met with God. We read: “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face as a man speaks to a friend.” It is a strange and awesome passage. Moses actually says to God, “You have found favor in my sight.” What an odd thing for a man to say to God, “You’re doing OK, God.”
Moses then asked God to go with them. “Is it not in thy going with us, so that we are distinct, I and thy people, from all other people that are upon the face of the earth? God was with them, but they could not identify with God personally.
Four hundred years later the prophet Isaiah told Moses’ descendants who were clutching for survival, “Behold your God will come and save you.” You and I read this and think this means something like “God will take care of you.” But when Jesus lived those thirty or so remarkable years here, there were those who realized that what Isaiah wrote was no remark about God’s general care. “God will come,” meant just that. God would show up.
People in Jesus’ day knew the rest of the passage from Isaiah from which we read the first few words this morning. It went on to say, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb will sing for joy.”
They had seen Jesus literally open the eyes of blind people. They watched as he fixed the ears of someone that didn’t hear. They heard Jesus tell a man crippled from birth, “Get up and walk.” He did every detail of these words from the prophet Isaiah—which the prophet said after saying, “Your God will come and save you.”
How was this Jesus one with the God mentioned in the Old Testament, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
At the Counsel of Nicea in AD 325 they debated this question because an elder from the church in Alexandria was teaching that Jesus, though divine, that is, God-like in some uncanny way, was only a man. Jesus had a beginning like every other person had a beginning. “There was when He was not,” this man said boldly. His name was Arius.
Arius taught before Jesus was born he did not exist as God the Son.
When we say Jesus was the only begotten Son of the Father we’re talking about a relationship unlike the earthly relationship between fathers and sons. Arius taught that the Son was not only subordinate in function—as Jesus told us, but that He came into existence at the will of the Father, just as every child is the result of an act of the parents. Jesus was not the eternal God born to human mother.
Arius didn’t talk about this over coffee in private conversations with friends as some of us might discuss a big theological problem. He taught it boldly, even arrogantly. Arius had an aggressive personality. He is an example of how to think badly, without submission, without listening. He showed us how NOT to discuss great matters. How we listen is as important as how we speak. Attitude matters in how we talk of God.
In the debate that followed in the Council nearly everyone realized there was something fundamentally wrong with Arius’ position. If Jesus said, “I and my Father are one,” then what described the Father also described the Son. Since the Father was eternal, the Son too was eternal. Isaiah had given among the names of this Son who would be given, “everlasting father.” “He was in the beginning with God and was God,” as John’s Gospel put it.
This was hard to understand. Some said Jesus was like the Father, not the same. But others remembered Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” This meant that they were not just alike, but “the same.”
In the end when they voted, the only way to settle the problem, the majority realized that to say the Son was only of “like” the Father could be interpreted to mean there was only seeming unity in the Godhead. But Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” This doesn’t mean that the Father is the Son. It means, as Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Of Jesus, the Son, it was said as it was said of God the Father, “He was full of grace and truth.”
So what? you ask. So everything. Because Jesus was actually God, He represented the deepest investment in humanity that our Creator could make. When God became man we see in Jesus God’s idea of humanity, image of God reflects on God. Our idea of humanity is a flawed idea. Our ideas from watching each other allow us a lot of slack that messes things up for us. We copy flawed models. Study Jesus, God made flesh.
I have tried to understand with you today the truth that what God is, Jesus is. If you and I will study Jesus we will come to know God better—the God who loves us, before whom we live every day, and before whom we will all stand one day. It matters then, to ask not only what is God like, but how can I come to be more like His Son, Jesus—so that when we stand before God, as we all will, God the Father will recognize in us the ways of the family of God.
I urge you all to study Jesus together. It will strengthen your feelings that help you appropriate the truth that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. If we study God we will come to know Him, and thus become our God-designed selves. Jesus said, “The one who has seen me has seen the Father.” And He gave us the challenge, “Let it be that when people see you, they see me.” We can become God’s message of hope and in the process find hope ourselves.
Let us pray: Heavenly Father, we think you for showing us what you are in showing us Jesus. Help us to know Him. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
January 16, 2005
God and the Tsunami/Jesus Christ, Begotten not Created
God and the Tsunami
Jesus Christ, Begotten not Created
Psalm 32 / Psalm 2
Luke 2: 26-27, 30-31, 34-35
January 16th, 2005
The theme of my message this morning hovers around a statement in that very old Christian document, the Nicene Creed. It describes Jesus Christ, the Son of God as “begotten not created.” There is an exclamation point after this phrase. The big issue for those who hammered out the Nicene Creed was, who was this Jesus of Nazareth?
If Jesus was just another man, a great religious teacher, His whole benefit was as a role model or teacher. But nothing was done about the human condition. All the miseries of life are unaffected. We’re no better off than a common oyster, as a great cynical Scots philosopher put it. Life has no significance beyond trying to make it through with as little misery as possible.
But the Gospels made clear Jesus was not just a great teacher and prophet. He was God fully entered into the human predicament as a man.
But how can God become a man? Nobody can say how. But when Jesus said, “I and my Father are one,” and “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” and when the events surrounding His birth and death were filled with such mystery and majesty, it’s clear something too marvelous for exact description was going on. It mattered that those who trusted in Jesus know “in whom they believed.” This is why we find in the Nicene Creed this string of strange statements describing Jesus, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, and now, “begotten not created.”
Only the Creator was uncreated. This fit too. Of Jesus the Gospel says, “By Him all things were made that were made.” The New Testament goes on to say of Him, “In Him all things hold together.” This is the stuff God does. Jesus Christ was God entering His creation.
This was the idea behind Mark Twain’s story “The Prince and the Pauper.” Prince Edward Tudor, son of Henry VIII, sees Tom Canty, a poor boy living in squalor in London’s Offal Court in Pudding Lane, being roughed up by palace guards. The prince stops them. To make a long story short, they trade places. The Prince says to Tom Canty, “Doff thy rags, and don these splendors, lad! It is a brief happiness, but will be not less keen for that. We will have it while we may, and change again.” They can pull it off because they look so much alike that nobody can tell the difference from appearances. And so the prince wanders in London’s unfamiliar streets, to the degraded slums of Offal Court on Pudding Lane. And there the noble lad discovers what life is like as the poorest of the poor in his city, while the pauper discovers how out of place he is in the palace.
Many of you know the story, but had you thought of it as an illustration of what happened when Jesus was born? Now the Son of God did not trade places with man on the spot but made it possible for us to be children of God. But on the spot the Son of God came to Offal Court in Pudding Lane, only it was called Bethlehem. Now a great mystery found full expression. The Immortal One became mortal, the Author of Life could see and feel what life for us was like, and what death was like and the fear of death, in fact, the worst kind of death—full of humiliation and pain.
Why? To rescue us from the full human predicament. The human race was reeling in the grips of a natural disaster—a disaster that hit human nature worse than anything happening outside “in nature.” Something was terribly wrong that needed repairing. God should do something about nature. God went to see the disaster personally.
When a natural disaster hits we expect our high government officials to go on location. Very often a president will go to see the flooding to see in person the mud slides, to stand amid the ruins after a series of tornados. It is an encouragement to know he cares.
But a president or a governor can go only so far. The most powerful man in the most powerful country on earth cannot bring back to life one person who drowned in a Tsunami. I wonder if this sense of futility made President Bush pause before responding recently.
The most recent Tsunami killed at least 155,000 people. The earthquake that caused it, exploded with destructive energy comparable to 23,000 atomic bombs the National Geographic reported. A lot of people think this was not only an unfriendly act of God, but also irresponsible, if not criminal.
When someone has been drinking and gets into her car and drives straight towards some motorcycles coming down the other side of the road, maiming two people for life, the courts throw the book at her. Many people would like to throw the book at God now for permitting the monster tsunami that wrecked havoc beyond what we can imagine on December 26th.
The shock of this sudden disaster leaves us numb in more ways than one. If God is good and in control of the universe, why such dereliction of duty? Others think God had nothing to do with it because tsunamis are beyond God’s control, if indeed there is a God.
John Wesley preached a sermon after a similar earthquake and tsunami hit Lisbon, Portugal on November 1st, 1755. Some reports were that 60,000 people died in Lisbon out of a population of 230,000. Ten thousand more died in Morocco from the tsunami it caused. Seven years earlier a monster earthquake and tsunami hit Lima, Peru. Wesley spoke to a London congregation:
“Why should we not now, before London is as Lisbon, Lima, or Catanea, acknowledge the hand of the Almighty, arising to maintain his own cause? Why, we have a general answer always ready, to screen us from any such conviction: “All these things are purely natural and accidental; the result of natural causes.” But there are two objections to this answer: First, it is untrue: Secondly, it is uncomfortable.
First. If by affirming, “All this is purely natural,” you mean, it is not providential, or that God has nothing to do with it, this is not true, that is, supposing the Bible to be true. For supposing this, you may descant ever so long on the natural causes of diseases, winds, thunder, lightning, and yet you are altogether wide of the mark; you prove nothing at all, unless you can prove that God never works in or by natural causes. But this you cannot prove . . . Therefore, allowing there are natural causes of all these, they are still under the direction of the Lord of nature: Nay, what is nature itself, but the art of God, or God's method of acting in the material world? ...
A Second objection to your answer is; It is extremely uncomfortable. For if things really be as you affirm; if all these afflictive incidents entirely depend on the fortuitous concourse and agency of blind, material causes; what hope, what help, what resource is left for the poor sufferers by them?
What defense do you find from thousands of gold and silver? You cannot fly, for you cannot quit the earth, unless you will leave your dear body behind you. And while you are on the earth, you know not where to flee to, neither where to flee from. You may by intelligence, know where the shock was yesterday, but not where it will be to-morrow,-to-day. It comes! The roof trembles! The beams crack! The ground rocks to and fro! Hoarse thunder resounds from the bowels of the earth! And all these are but the beginning of sorrows. Now, what help? What wisdom can prevent, what strength resist, the blow? What money can purchase, I will not say deliverance, but an hour's reprieve? Poor honourable fool, where are now thy titles? Wealthy fool, where is now thy golden god? If any thing can help, it must be prayer. But what wilt thou pray to? Not to the God of heaven; you suppose him to have nothing to do with earthquakes.... But how shall we secure the favour of this great God? How, but by worshipping him in spirit and in truth; by uniformly imitating Him we worship, in all his imitable perfections? Without which the most accurate systems of opinions, all external modes of religion, are idle cobwebs of the brain, dull farce and empty show. Now, God is love: Love God then, and you are a true worshipper. Love mankind, and God is your God, your Father, and your Friend. But see that you deceive not your own soul; for this is not a point of small importance.
I wish I might have been there to hear Wesley preach that sermon. But other matters come to mind having to do with that realm of nature we call “human nature.” What are our expectations of God with regard to human nature?
I find it remarkable that we are accustomed to the millions of people in sub-Sahara Africa whose lives have been devastated by AIDS for many years now. Their situation is made worse by famine, and by governments that oppress them instead of helping them. But who is asking about God’s role in this immense disaster—because we know how AIDS is transmitted?
We respond with questions for a while when disasters on a large scale happen suddenly, or when tragedy hits close to home, but we become numb to on-going disasters that cruelly crush far more people elsewhere, for generations.
Or think of this: Each time I am with someone whose freedom has been taken away by the courts for some misdeed, I am struck by what an awful thing it is to lose freedom. To be locked in a small space for years on end, or for a lifetime—what a hell! Yet I don’t hear people asking, “Why did God let that person commit that crime?”
I don’t hear people asking, “Why has God allowed alcohol to become a menace to society so that even “respectable people” get drunk and get behind the wheel and make their cars into weapons of mass destruction. Instead we sell alcoholic drinks by the case in our grocery stores. People can, if they want, pop a lid and drink on the way home. The very one who arrests or tries in court someone else caught drinking and driving may do it himself. If anyone suggests prohibition, we scorn the idea. Let me be free! Is God to blame for how we use our freedom?
I never hear people asking why God permits various kinds of habits that destroy the body? I have stood by the bed in a hospital more than once watching someone die of suffocation after years of polluting his/her lungs. Nobody asked, “Why did God allow this?” The one dying and I both knew the connection between the cause and the effect of death. Where is God in all that we do in which we insist on the freedom to make choices we know are bad? People seldom challenge God’s responsibility even though far more people die more miserably every year than died suddenly during the recent tsunami.
Or when I follow the course of marriages after they begin before me in front of a church, and discover that the many pairs who pledged their life-long love to each other and then went to expensive receptions, have exchanged that brief fond attitude for life-long selfishness, so now multiple married pairs live in misery, who challenges God for letting this happen? Who asks “How can God allow this?” when people freely choose to act with gross incivility to each other in the home and society? We have freedom of speech – but how tragically we freely use our freedom! We insist on separation of God from real life except as we choose His role.
Who can calculate the damage done by untamed tongues, or by untamed tempers, or so many other foibles we defend as “human nature,” that in their consequences far exceed the damage of a tornado, a flood, or a tsunami.
We so easily ask questions of God related to nature “out there,” but don’t ask questions about God’s control of human nature. Oh, we may ask about God’s responsibility when a great tyrant like Hitler unleashes the Holocaust against all whom he hates, but who asks the question of God when, from person to person, whole populations of people live in painful desperation, the result of their own choices?
We see so selectively the misery of life. We see large or momentary tragedies and lay the blame on God, and fail to see how far larger the scale of damage is from the ordinary miseries we inflict on ourselves and on one another. Is God to blame for these miseries too?
So we pastors preach monotonously, “Submit your life to your loving Creator. Accept Jesus as the Lord of your life. Acknowledge and confess your sins. Accept the forgiveness of your sin and then move on claiming Jesus’ authority over your often foolish will. Let His loving authority govern your impetuous and unreasonable will.” And people may yawn and ask for more interesting thoughts on a Sunday morning, and claim their right to do as they please.
I believe that God has something to do with natural disasters that happen, but I have no means to know what or why. Did God send the tsunami that hit Indonesia and countries all around the Indian Ocean? I believe God is the Lord of creation. Perhaps he sent this tsunami for a purpose. Why there? Why not elsewhere? If God did, is it our place to challenge the Almighty God’s morality, particularly when all the damage of that tsunami was only to the body? Jesus said to His followers, “Don’t fear the one who can kill the body, fear the one who can do in your soul.”
God is merciful. I don’t know, neither can anyone, how merciful God has cared for the invisible souls of all those who suffered death and destruction this past month. All we can see is what took place outwardly.
I believe you and I are to be reminded how altogether fragile is physical life so that we respond wisely. If in the death of 155,000 people, and in the destruction of the means of life for millions more, more multiplied millions of those who remain find their lives re-ordered in wisdom, we might even say the sacrifice was worth it.
After all, we send thousands of young soldiers, in the flower of their youth to the battlefield to defend the freedom of millions with their bodies. In our world wars all nations cruelly sacrificed millions of their young people for the sake of the freedom of older and younger who stayed at home. For sake of freedom soldiers obey the order of their superior.
If we waste our thought on impossible-to-answer questions accusing God, while clinging to the imprudence of selfish living, we show our hypocrisy and waste much of the good that might come of this recent tragedy.
In the New Testament we read, “It is appointed unto people once to die and after this the judgment.” We know we will die, everyone of us. For some it will happen sooner, for others, later. When death approaches we realize that all of life has been a preparation for this moment.
I can offer you no better wisdom than to freely give your life to God, who created you, who cares for you at the deepest part of you. Jesus was God become a human being to take the rap for my sin and yours, and then to give us life better than we can dream of. But you and I must accept this gift of life, and then turn over our lives to the loving authority of Jesus to receive the benefit.
You and I must study Jesus to know how he governs us, because Jesus will never violate the freedom we claim. I invite you to begin this life, if you have not, by freely giving your life to Jesus. And if you have begun, but have lost sight of what it is to want to follow Jesus, begin again and keep on. Let those who have died and suffered in the tsunami not suffer in vain. Wake to the serious meaning of life.
Let us pray: O Lord, we pray for those who still suffer in the lands hit by the tsunami. We pray for that greater multitude that suffer from natural disaster within. Help us, O God, to accept your relief, in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
January 09, 2005
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Daniel 7:13-14 / Colossians 2: 6-10
January 9th, 2005
It seems to me that Christmas flew by this year, barely stopping to say hello on December 25th. Here we are in the thick of a new year—2005, if you can imagine it. You can almost see time fly. This week on the plane back from seeing our daughter and her family in Annapolis I read much of Harold Bloom’s recent book, Where Shall Wisdom be Found? The title caught me as I browsed in Border’s Book Store in Annapolis.
I think a lot about the questions, “Where can I find wisdom?”, “How can I live my life as my Creator intended and help guide others in this way?” There are so many distractions. I look at the busyness of life, the focus on buying and selling, on maximizing our pleasure, on the trashing of the glory of our bodies, pop music & entertainment industries, on hiding the effects of over-indulgence and time on our bodies, on trying to find success—only to realize as I get older that success is a totally elusive goal.
I look at the confusion in the church, the cacophony of voices, the strutting, fretting, disagreements, disappointments and posturing. The church gives me a lot of almost sleepless nights. Where can wisdom be found? I need wisdom. Bloom wrote of the trickle down effect into society of great minds as found in the biblical Books of Job and Ecclesiastes, in Plato, St. Augustine, Freud, Marcel Proust, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and others.
He suggested one idea I have found to be right. He recommended memorizing great literature and repeating it, letting it influence our minds. Psalm 119: 11 suggests the same idea: “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against Thee.”
The reason why I began thinking about the Nicene Creed with you last year and continue now is that here is one of the great bequests of the past. It is worth fixing in our memory banks and trotting out to ponder. The Nicene Creed is a deep statement of what is most basic to your life and mine if we have trusted in Jesus Christ. It ponders God, the triune God “in whom we live and move and have our being.” If I am a Christian, the most important focus of my life is Jesus Christ. I’m tempted to major on many minor things, but Jesus is the major focus of my life. “My life is hid with Christ in God.” My life. Your life too if you are a Christian. I need to think of Jesus Christ often, and so do you, to look at Him, to turn Him over in our minds.
This morning before us is that small phrase in the Creed describing Jesus Christ, “true God from true God.” Or as an older form of the Creed has it, “very God of very God.” Why this repetition of phrases, “God from God, light from light, true God from true God?” What does each new phrase add to what we know of Jesus? While it may not add to what we know, when we probe to understand Jesus Christ as the Creed leads us, we come to realize that we can’t describe Him once over lightly. We are hunting for the wisdom of God when we stretch out these phrases probing someone indescribable and mull on these phrases as a means of focusing on Him.
I want us to focus on the Apostle Paul’s words in Colossians 2 this morning. The Creed tries to capture in a few words what Paul writes here. But first let’s look briefly at the Apostle Paul who wrote this remarkable passage.
His parents named him Saul, after Israel’s first king. His life began in a devout Jewish family in southern Turkey. He grew up in a province of the Roman Empire so he was a Roman citizen as well as a Jew. His religion was more important to him than his Roman citizenship, but he was proud to be a Roman citizen.
As a young man Saul was like some other young people I know for whom their faith is the most important thing in life. For some it’s a stage of life they pass through and then maybe become jaded at the disappointment that comes so often in the church. People disappoint us. Maybe we think too much about our disappointment. But for Paul it was no passing stage.
Somewhere along the line he learned a trade, making tents, but it was only because he had to earn a living. His greatest interests were God and his Jewish faith. He went from his home city of Tarsus to Jerusalem to study with Gamaliel the Elder, heir to the great name of Rabbi Hillel who was Gamaliel’s grandfather. Gamaliel was the most highly esteemed rabbi of his day. He is quoted a number of times in the Mishnah, the core of the Jewish oral tradition. It was said of Gamaliel, “When he died, the honor of the Torah ceased, and purity and piety became extinct.”
Saul was Gamaliel’s prize student. He was probably in Jerusalem when Jesus was tried and crucified. Saul detested Jesus. In those early days he shared the opinion of the men who accused Jesus of blasphemy and breaking the Law of Moses.
So it must have been a great shock to the leading Jews of Jerusalem when Saul of Tarsus suddenly changed. Saul not only came to believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah of Israel, but he devoted his life to spreading this Good News, this Gospel as widely as he could. He even changed his name from Saul, the name of Israel’s first king to Paul, which means “small” in Latin.
From then on Paul was interested in three things: First, Jesus Christ. He wrote at one point, “I determined to know nothing . . . but Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Second, how to bring every aspect of his life under the lordship of Jesus Christ. And third, presenting Jesus Christ to other people so they would trust in him--in particular the kind of people he once despised, non-Jews.
I want to explore briefly each of these three new aspects of Paul’s life, but first it is important to realize that Paul did not just change one kind of “fanatical” interest for another. Very often the most intense “religionists” are converts.
I watch the Catholic TV station sometimes. I am interested to see the program where former Protestant ministers who have become Catholics try to persuade other Protestants who might be watching to “come home.” They are the most devoted to Mary who before spoke against the place Mary has come to have in the Catholic church. They are the most ardent in submission to the pope who before rejected papal authority. They become zealous in adoring the Eucharist who before spoke against the “bloody sacrifice of the Mass.” This was not Paul’s way.
Paul did not transpose his fanatical Pharisaic Judaism, which lashed out against Jewish converts to Christianity, into fanatical Christianity that lashed out against fellow Jews who didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah. The pride that he had felt in being correct as a Pharisee didn’t change into pride in being correct as a Christian. His pride was subdued. He became modest in his view of himself. Jesus filled his mind and his heart. He diminished in importance to himself as Jesus Christ filled his focus. He was taught this by looking at Jesus who was so modest.
I wish with all my heart that this were the picture we Christians would present to the world. If only this is what the world would see because this is what we are—“crucified with Christ, nevertheless we live, yet not us, but Christ who lives in us.” What a difference it would make in the appeal of the Gospel. Paul believed it when he said of himself, “I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle.”
It all has to do with Jesus Christ who is the center of everything. How is this so?
Paul described Jesus in a way that he knew that Jesus had been hinting at when He said modestly of Himself, “I am my Father are one.” And “If you knew me you would know my Father also” While this was the basic truth, Jesus left out all the amazing details of what this meant. Jesus didn’t spell out this unity of identity between Himself and the Father, but Paul dug deep into Jesus’ confession and saw what was going on.
Paul recognized the paradox that Jesus “though He was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself.” Yet at the same time, “In Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily;” and a few verses earlier, “in him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Finally, “He is the head of all authority and power.” But who could see this as Jesus walked the dusty roads between Nazareth and Jerusalem?
He looked so ordinary. But does not true greatness always look ordinary? People create glamorous exterior ornamentations to give the impression of greatness. We go to fancy colleges & big name seminaries, concoct fancy titles, honorary degrees, and the like—all outward stuff. But God “looks on the heart.” God in becoming a human being did not festoon Jesus with outward signs people would associate with the idea of God. As God looks into our depths to see our hearts, so God filled the Man Jesus from the inside. “In him the fullness of Deity dwells bodily.”
Who can imagine the fullness of deity in a man? All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge—the reservoir from which was conceived quarks, DNA, galaxies, and all that is larger than large, and smaller than small in this intricate system around us? The epitome of authority and power in all the universe—not in the tiny atom that can explode, but in Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever. All of this in the heart of someone who looked like an ordinary man. That’s pretty heavy-duty praise. But Paul was not praising Jesus. He was not just reaching for superlatives; he was simply describing Jesus.
Paul’s purpose in writing this was not merely to say the right things about Jesus. In Paul’s day people were used to Roman emperors saying all sorts of extravagant things about themselves. The miserable Emperor Caligula whose death Josephus described in its full, gory detail, proclaimed himself Divine. He was not satisfied that the Jews offered sacrifices in his behalf, he wanted sacrifices offered to him. As a result of his arrogant and evil life, Caligula suffered an ignoble death—which I’ve discovered was how ancient historians often depicted the end of proud, evil people.
Jesus too suffered an excruciating death, but it was not a miserable death. Indeed, it was, for all its pain, a glorious death so that we call the day Jesus died, Good Friday.
But Paul was not just trying to describe for us who and what Jesus is in order that we should hold correct ideas in our heads about Him. This is good, but it is about half of being a Christian.
Paul writes to us, “As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in Him, being rooted and grounded in Him and being built up in the faith which you have been taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” Here is what it means to be a Christian. It ends with continuous thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, a continuous sense of gratitude caps off the Christian life.
But who can possibly achieve this? Even so single-minded a fellow as the Apostle Paul confessed that in him there was an incessant warfare going on, the desires of the flesh against the desires of the spirit.
What Paul is telling us is that even though this warfare goes on inside all of us too, don’t give up on being a “working Christian.” How can we be and remain functioning Christians? How can we get out of the rut of talking about the faith, of wistfully thinking about it, singing about it, listening to sermons about it, and then returning to ordinary life full of blunders, of self-centeredness and the unhappiness that comes with a fixation on myself?
We begin by actually thinking about this Jesus in whom we say we believe. The Creed helps us in an odd sort of way. Memorizing Scripture that tells us of Him helps us. Take the time to memorize and think about these things so that other thoughts are crowded out. Then start deliberately to “walk,” to live, your thoughts “rooted and grounded” in Him. Each of us is rooted and grounded in something. Our natural rootedness is in ourselves. Our natural idea of who and what is most important is the one we see in the mirror when we wash our faces in the morning. Replace that one you see deliberately by thinking about Jesus. This is how the life in Christ must begin.
What fitting matters to think about as we ordain deacons this morning and again consecrate elders and deacons to serving in Jesus’ name! “Let this mind be in you which was in Jesus Christ . . . he emptied Himself and took the form of a servant and became obedient—even unto death on the cross.” Let this mind be in us, in me, in you. And then let’s see what God can make of this congregation, this session, this board of deacons in the days to come.
Let us determine to adopt three goals: First, to keep Jesus Christ before us personally. Second, to bring every aspect of life under the lordship of Jesus Christ. And third, to present Jesus Christ to other people so they will trust in him. I pray that our lives may be the greatest argument for trust in Jesus Christ, walking, living rooted and grounded in Him.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we have tried to see something of Jesus this morning. Help us to see Him and to keep on seeing Him, and to walk in Him, rooted and grounded in Him. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)