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February 27, 2005
How to Catch God’s Notice
How to Catch God’s Notice
Psalm 27 / Jonah 2: 1-6
Matthew 21: 28-32
February 27th, 2005
In our Wednesday evening study and fellowship group we are memorizing a couple verses in Isaiah that are very reassuring. “Fear not, I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.” “When you pass through the waters I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy one of Israel.” Your are precious to me.
We are memorizing these verses together because they build in us a view of ourselves essential not only to Old Testament religion, but also to faith in Jesus Christ. He told us, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
This last promise comes to us just after urging us, “Be content with what you have.” The promises and commands of God are woven together through Scripture. We often remember the promises of comfort, and this is good. But it is needful to remember the commands as well. Part of the honor that Jesus extended to His followers was that He expected much of them. The God Jesus showed us is not only tender and compassionate, slow to anger and quick to mercy, He also expects a lot of us.
During the week after Palm Sunday Jesus went into the Temple and taught those who gathered around Him. Matthew doesn’t tell us what Jesus was teaching. But the Gospel tells us that the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching. They asked Him by what authority He taught. Jesus replied with some questions of His own. He ended with the question, “What do you think?”
Sometimes you and I ask that question and get the reply, “Think about what?” Well, Jesus anticipated their question, “about what?” with a parable of a man who two sons. It is one of the most thought-provoking parables in the New Testament.
It is a parable that came to my father with some force during his first term as a missionary in India as he observed the way of life of the Hindu pundits who taught him Hindi. They were extraordinary men. They were well-educated, humble, honest, kind, patient, devout, and moral. In fact, he was troubled as he compared their way of life with the way of life he found among a number of missionary colleagues. Dad told me this late in life as he opened more vistas of his early life to me. Dad believed and taught that we are saved by grace through faith, and not by works. But he also remembered that Paul wrote in Ephesians 2: 10 that we are saved “unto good works that God has prepared before hand that we should walk in them.” The Gospel is not only about salvation, rescuing us from a Christless eternity, but also about a way of life now. To be a Christian is to be summoned to an extraordinary way of life.
His Hindu teachers would have politely answered, “no” if he asked them “Have you trusted in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” But Dad found among some colleagues and in himself who had professed faith in Christ an expectation of quality of life far inferior to the way of life these men cultivated. They were justified by faith not works. Attitude of “works not necessary but recommended, as it were.”
And he had come to mind, in that free association that sometimes comes to us, this parable of the man who had to sons. The first son said, “No,” when his father told him to go work in the vineyard. But he then repented and went to work in the vineyard.
The second son replied to the same command, “Go work in my vineyard,” by saying, “Yes, sir, right away.” But he did not go. Jesus asked the chief priests and the elders who gathered around Him, critical of His teaching, “Which of the two sons did the will of his father?” They replied as we would, “The first.”
The concern that began to brew in my father, and which he taught to me, and which I have thought about an awful lot in the course of my years as a pastor is this. In the spread of the Christian faith we have placed a very high premium on saying, “Yes” to Jesus.
But what happens after saying, “Yes” to Jesus? But what about the working in the vineyard afterwards?
Saying “Yes” to Jesus is to open up a vista of life rich with unfolding possibilities. Jesus taught us, “I am the vine, and you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.” Changing the order of Jesus words we read just before this, “Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away.”
Jesus did not intend the Church to be like a vine loaded with fruitless branches. We attach ourselves to Jesus—the vine by saying, “Yes” to Him. But then what? It is here that Jesus’ parable of the man who had two sons presents itself to us as Jesus’ opinion of fruitless Christians. Are we are like the second son who said, “Yes, sir, I go to work in your vineyard,” but then do not go? Or are we like the first son, who said, “no” but then got to work in obedience to his father?
Two sobering questions.
These are two questions that bear reflection during this season of Lent. What a high quality of life you and I have been called to live—we who have said, “Yes” to Jesus. It is useful for us to ask ourselves, am I working in the vineyard?
Let’s back up and look at those to whom Jesus told this parable. It was to the chief priests and elders of the people. The chief priests largely made up the Sanhedrin, the supreme court of the Jewish people in Jerusalem. They were chosen mainly from the Sadducees, the strict constructionists of the Bible’s laws. So the priests not only offered sacrifices, they were the Supreme Court of the Jewish the people.
The “elders” were the scribes and Pharisees. The scribes were important because they copied the Torah scrolls. Painstakingly they would copy the Bible letter by letter, and had to do it perfectly. The Scribes also were authorities on the Bible. They explained what it meant.
The Pharisees were the thoughtful interpreters of implications of the law. They did for all the laws what Jesus did when he said that “Do not commit adultery” means as well, “Don’t look lustfully on a woman,” and “Do not kill,” means, “Don’t hate someone and don’t destroy their character with what you say about them.”
So Jesus was talking to the religious cream of the crop, at least in some formal sense. If anybody knew the score, they did. The reason Jesus asked them the question with which the story ends, “Which of the two did the will of the father?” was that the chief priests and elders believed they had said, “Yes” to God.
What Jesus said next must have bewildered them as much as it does us. “Truly I say to you, the tax collectors and harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” Certainly Jesus was not endorsing their way of life. Tax collectors robbed the people and harlots seduced them. Both were like sons who said “No” to God. But then they repented. Jesus stood in line with tax collectors and harlots to be baptized by John. Their lives changed. John told them what Jesus would later say to a woman caught in the act of adultery, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”
And these who were forgiven much were overwhelmed with gratitude. They lavished on God their gratitude. Zacchaeus, the short tax-collector who climbed a Sycamore tree to see Jesus and then invited Him to dinner restored to those he had robbed more than he took from them, four times more. He had lived a life saying “No” to God, but then he repented and did the works that please God lavishly—giving to the poor, restoring what he defrauded fourfold.
We can imagine what the harlots did whom Jesus forgave. Perhaps they blossomed in works of love and mercy to the wretched of the earth. We don’t know. The Gospels show us one picture of a woman whose life Jesus rescued. Her gratitude is so lavish it is almost unseemly. Jesus said they entered the Kingdom of God before the people well known for saying, “Yes” to God.
Jesus’ disciples were more than eavesdroppers as Jesus told this parable to the chief priests and elders. Jesus intended them to listen because they would become apostles. As apostles, their task would be to urge people to say, “Yes” to Jesus.
Part of our dilemma in reflecting on such a sobering parable is that the Apostle Paul taught us that in Christ we are free from the Law. And as Americans who treasure our freedom we put two and two together and think that Christianity is a way of life without demands on us. It is all optional. No one, not even Jesus Christ, will tell me what to do. And in a way this is true. Because the whole basis of our obedience to Jesus is not the coercion of a society we belong to, but friendship with Jesus. It’s an attitude thing. If I love Jesus, it matters what He said. Jesus said, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.”
This puts a little different wrinkle on our freedom, doesn’t it? You are my friends if you are like the son who said, “No” at first, but then went to work in the vineyard. It does matter what we do.
Some sects of Christianity have created demanding systems to ensure their members disciplined their lives to obedience to Christ. In Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, the Roman Catholic order known as the Opus Dei is described as a heavy-handed dictatorial system demanding explicit obedience of its members. It includes an assassination conspiracy at the orders of the top brass of the order. A recent article in Commonweal by a former member lets us know that this is a caricature. Opus Dei is a much better organization than Brown’s novel suggests. It is one of many societies that have developed as Christians saw how laxity set in, making of Christianity a ”Yes sir” kind of faith, where the child of God is not expected to work in the vineyard.
Jesus calls us to follow Him from the heart, not because of some humanly devised system of coercion. Perhaps the Lord would be pleased if you were to ask, in this season of reflection, “Am I at work in the vineyard of the Lord?” How many vistas open up to us when we ask that question.
There is so much to do. If you just look around you, in the station of life you find yourself, whether old or young, you find plenty to do. There are people to love. There are deeds of mercy to do. There is financial need to respond to. There are people who doubt who need to hear you say simply and humbly, “I trust in Jesus.” There are lonely people who hope you may invite them with you to church on the Lord’s Day. There is work in this church waiting to be done by those eager to do the Father’s work in the vineyard.
The boundaries of your vineyard are yours to discover. And if you will find them and get to work in that vineyard, you’ll never be at a loss for a sense of worth, a sense of being a part of the society of Jesus. It much more pleases Jesus, and it much more pleases you and me, when we have done this from a loving and grateful heart rather than under the coercion of some system that Jesus did not ordain.
My people in this church let us be like the first son. You and I may have said, “No” to God in the past. But we can change. Let us get to work in the vineyard. Let me not be like the second son.
Let us pray: O Lord Jesus, help us to escape the bondage of indifference, and to find the door to your vineyard where we may prove to be your friends. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2005
True Faith in God
True Faith in God
Job 38: 1-12 / Matthew 21: 18-22
Heidelberg Catechism, Question and Answer 21
February 20th, 2005
Today we formally and publicly welcome a number of people as members of this church family. It is good to remember what it is that attaches us to the family of God. The basic essential for membership in the family of God and the basic essential for membership in a congregation-family is faith in Jesus Christ. I will ask a couple of other questions, but the one at the heart of it all is, “Who is your Lord and Savior?” What distinguishes a Christian is the willing and happy confession of faith, “Jesus Christ is my Savior and He is Lord of my life.”
John Shively asked us this morning a question from the Heidelberg Catechism, “What is true faith?” Not merely what is faith? but “what is true faith?” That might seem an impertinent question no one has the right to ask. Faith, after all, is something that happens in my heart and yours and who has the right to challenge whether it is true or not?
But the question might have been asked differently, in a way that is not impertinent. We might have asked, “What is living faith?” And here we can tell a difference. Living faith is a faith that shows itself in what it does, not merely in what it says is going on in a hidden recess of the heart.
Living faith is the opposite of dead faith. Dead faith is real faith the way a dead body is a body but it isn’t the kind of faith that attaches us to God. Dead faith is the kind of sincere belief the devils had who looked at Jesus, trusting fully that He was God made flesh—their mortal enemy. Jesus was not their friend. They liked it best when He wasn’t around.
Living faith, by contrast, not only makes a person like to have Jesus around, it makes a person live as though in the presence of Jesus. This is how Jesus is our Lord, when we not only say but act as though we believe we are in His presence.
Live faith puts us in the company of the disciples who had left everything to follow Jesus and one day found themselves with Him on a hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee. They looked up the slope and saw 5,000 hungry men with their wives and children. Jesus multiplied five small loaves and two small fish so that they were enough to feed those people. But as far as the hungry people were concerned the great moment was when the disciples arrived where they were sitting with food.
How glad hungry people were when Nathaniel, or Bartholomew, or Thaddeus, or one of the other nine bent down with a full basket and said, “Have some lunch.” Jesus could have spoken a word and filled every tummy with food, I suppose, the way He stilled a storm or healed a cripple. But He wanted His disciples to see that they were to do more than sit and watch Him.
We know the disciples believed in Jesus because they left everything to follow Him. But they needed to help feed the hungry crowd as much as the hungry crowd needed to be fed. It was in sharing Jesus’ task that their faith came alive, we might say.
And so it is with us. You and I need to be doing the deeds of faith as much as people need to receive the deeds our faith prompts us to do in obedience to Jesus. But there is more to it than this.
True faith has ripple effects. I want to speak of two of these ripple effects that are particularly of interest as we think of what happens when we “join” a church. Here let us allow the faith of Job instruct us.
The first ripple effect of true faith is to enable us to be a blessing to each other. A second ripple effect of true faith is that it helps us to endure when we are not a blessing to each other.
Many think of the Book of Job as opening the question, “Why do good people suffer?” But I think it also, and perhaps more pertinently illustrates the two questions, “How can we be a blessing and encouragement to each other?” and “How should we endure when people are not a blessing but a bane, a pain in the neck?”
Job was a good man. He was such a good fellow that he caught the attention of the members of a gathering that hovers above ordinary human life, and is occupied with watching what’s going on in ordinary life. The Bible tells us that there are angels who are God’s ministering spirits for our good. But as in every group of people, not all angels are equally positive.
One of the members of the heavenly court was a surly chap named Satan. Satan means adversary. Though we associate the name Satan with the devil and demons, the way the story of Job starts out it seems that Satan is just a very grumpy, ill-tempered pessimist among the company of angels. The Lord asked him at one of their assemblies, “Where have you come from today?” And he replied blithely, “From going everywhere on the earth.” Since the job of angels was to take care of particular people maybe this means he wasn’t doing his job.
The Lord replied, “Have you noticed Job, a blameless and upright man who honors me and turns away from evil?” Rather than accepting Job for what he was this ill-tempered angel said, “Yes, but it’s only because everything is going his way. If things start to go wrong for him, he will curse you to your face.”
It is at this point that people wonder about the goodness of God in letting Satan put Job to the test. Because the testing Job had to suffer was awful to demonstrate to Satan how genuine was his faith in God. Here was his test. First, Job lost all he owned. Second, he lost all his family except a wife who wasn’t all that much of an encouragement to him. He responded to this second loss saying, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Third, he lost his health. It must have been like having shingles. He scraped his scabby skin with broken bits of pottery, surely making it hurt worse. Still he didn’t blame God. His wife said, “Curse God and die.” But he wouldn’t.
But the most painful part of Job’s testing however came from his pious friends. They comprised a sort of church. Maybe a Bible study group. Judging from what the friends had to say to Job, they had clear ideas about the ways of God. And it is from them that we learn how to be good church members by how NOT to be a fellow member in the church.
Job had three devout friends who just knew that bad things don’t happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. Bad people who have bad things happen to them should acknowledge it, confess their sins, and hope God will take away the bad things that happen to them. It seemed very reasonable to Job’s three friends.
The third chapter of Job shows us how badly Job felt when he sat with his three friends who had come to comfort him. They began well. They saw him and realized it was their friend Job. They cried, and sat with him and didn’t say a word. They listened to Job tell how bad he felt. “Let the day perish wherein I was born. Why did I not die at birth? Why is life given to those who long for death? The thing I feared is just what came to me.” They visited him. That was good. They listened to him. That was very good.
Then Job’s friend Eliphaz starts out just as every friend should do. He reminded Job that his life had been a blessing to others. “You have instructed many and have strengthened weak hands.”
But then he started to think theologically and everything went down hill from there. “Job, think about it. Who that was innocent ever had things go wrong? As I have seen, those who sow trouble reap the same.” Reading chapters four and five of Job you see eloquent reasoning, and a lot of it isn’t all that bad. And he says words we might well quote as good advice, “Happy is the man whom God reproves; therefore despise not the chastening of the Almighty.” Job’s friend Eliphaz ends his advice, “Hear, and know it for your good.” (II Rom. 8:28)
Job does not disagree with Eliphaz, but tells him there is something more useful than this good theological examination of a situation he really knows nothing about, “He who withholds kindness from a friend forsakes the fear of the Almighty.” Job quotes words from Psalm 8 in a way we don’t usually intend, “What is man, that thou dost make so much of him, and that thou dost . . . test him every moment?”
Job’s second friend, Bildad, then breaks the silence he should have kept. “You’re just getting what you deserve,” he said with a righteous smile. “If your children have sinned against God He has delivered them into the power of their transgression.” By contrast, Bildad explained, “God fills the mouth of the blameless man with laughter.”
And all the while you and I know there was nothing at all that Job or any of his children did that had anything to do with what was happening to them. And Job knew it. He did no wrong to feel bad and to say he felt bad.
Finally, Job’s third friend, Zohar, tightens the screw this circle of friends turned in their suffering friend. “Know that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.”
I must skip over the rest of Zohar’s words and Job’s reply. What I hope we see is how unhelpful were these three friends who thought that Job needed good theological counsel when he was suffering.
Who knows what particular things Job or his family may have done once upon a time, that they knew about, which they expanded into the kind of evil that deserved the misery Job now suffered? Maybe Zohar remembered the time he was sitting in the shot-gun seat as Job was speeding down Lindberg Road at 30 MPH and didn’t get caught. Zohar then said, “You’re going a bit fast aren’t you?” And Job said, “Oops! I guess I better slow down.” And Zohar, years later remembered Job’s un-discovered speeding—no speeding ticket and thought, “There must have been a lot else that Job did that didn’t get caught. And he expanded Job’s guilt from his heedlessness of the speed limit to moral blunders. “You are getting your comeuppance now.” No doubt Job, like everyone of us made his blunders, moral and otherwise. But his flaw had nothing to do with God and his suffering.
But sitting where we do, we know Job’s friends knew nothing about what was really going on—as we seldom do of others.
And I wonder if a good piece of the lesson of the Book of Job is that we should think carefully before we say things to each other that we think necessary for them to hear.
It is true that the Apostle Paul taught us to approach a Christian brother or sister who is doing something that is obviously wrong. If you know that I am having an affair, you do well to come and tell me this is wrong. And I’d better listen to you. Paul writes, “If a person is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted.” But this isn’t at issue in the story of Job. His friends could not point to anything wrong he had done. And even if they could, they had no business telling him his misfortune was because of what he did wrong.
The Apostle Paul wrote to our earliest Christian brothers and sisters, “Knowledge puffs up but love builds up the church.” Love here is agape, self-giving love.
Self-giving love is very imaginative, it thinks of what I could do to make things better and is the principle gift God puts into our hearts for building the church. It “suffers long and is kind,” Paul writes in the great love chapter, I Corinthians 13. This means, love is very patient. Love puts up with a lot!
Had Job’s friends sat with him in silence, bathed his hurting body with pain-easing balm, or brought to him cool water to drink and food that tasted good to one suffering as he did, of course we’d never have had the Book of Job to read. But Job would have found in their faithful friendship a redeeming factor in his misery. He might have looked back at that time as a uniquely good time in his life.
Job’s friends were very religious, but they were not faithful friends. God calls you and me to be faithful friends to each other in the Church. Faithfulness to each other is faithfulness to Jesus Christ, in fact. Do not tear one another down with advice when they hurt, even with pious motives. Build each other up. We don’t know very much about each other. Let your love bloom imaginatively toward one another especially when ones are hurting. We hurt in many ways. This is one lesson we derive from Job by contrast with what his friends did.
The second lesson I will state very briefly. How do we survive in the church when others tear us down? How do we endure unfair rebuke? How do we keep on when friends fail us? The answer is brief. Keep on keeping on.
Job did not curse God. He did not even curse his friends. We don’t read of the aftermath, whether he invited these three friends to his home when his health and property was restored and he had a new family. But I can visualize Job graciously hosting them for dinner, and they had occasion to learn from his endurance and from his refusal to get even, that they had done wrong in the way they spoke to him. And perhaps they learned from their error not to be “Job’s comforters” to any others who suffered.
Endurance, faithfully keeping on when you’ve come to the end of your rope, enables the church to keep on being the church. Because we do fail each other. We hurt each other in what we say, in what we don’t say, in the way we ignore one another in times of difficulty, in the way we don’t take part, by not doing our fair share of what needs to be done. But when someone quits after being hurt, then the Body of Christ suffers at that point. Because at that very point we demonstrate that we will not accept Jesus’ basic teaching that we forgive one another because we know God has forgiven us. Keeping on demands of us that we forgive.
Keep on. Keep on keeping on. Do not let the great adversary of our souls take delight in the normal, every day human trait of quitting when we are hurt. This I learn from Job. He did not blame God. He did not quit. He kept on. God blessed him. And God will bless us if first, we prove to be faithful friends to Him by being faithful friends to one another, and if we keep on when we have endured suffering at the hands of those who should be our friends in Christ.
Let us pray: O Lord, Grant to us a living faith. And grant to us to build this Body in which we are members with works of love and grace. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2005
Our Hospitable God
Our Hospitable God
Psalm 8 / Isaiah 56: 3-8
Matthew 21: 12-17
February 13th, 2005
There is a line in the 8th Psalm that resonates with anyone who ponders the idea of the Creator of everything being interested in us. “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou visitest him?” I quote it in the old King James Version because those archaic words give added dignity to this amazing idea. It requires all the dignity I can muster.
It expresses the wonder I feel every morning when I go out to get the paper and look up at the sky before dawn, “How odd to be a preacher! How awkward that I should presume to speak for the One who created all that!” It is far from a false modesty that I should think this. It is a reasonable modesty that we should be amazed that the Creator of all that should take notice of us, weak, self-preoccupied bits of animated dust.
David is amazed, but there is no hint that it is condescension on God’s part.
It is one of the central themes in the Bible. Not only is God mindful of us, which means, aware that we’re here, but far from being condescension on God’s part, He delights to stoop to us. Furthermore, God loves the ones we’d consider the least valuable. I get this not from the 8th Psalm but from the passage in Isaiah we just heard.
In the prophet Isaiah we read the Lord’s encouragement to people to whom Israelites would barely condescend. Israel was a nation of relatives. It was one great family unit, an in-group of in-groups. To be an alien in Israel felt like what many people feel who come to America and hear about the “problem of illegal aliens.” Our Statue of Liberty proclaims, “Give me your tired, your poor,” but we’re clamping down on driver’s licenses being granted to the wretched refuse of other teeming shores. Illegal means, “You don’t belong here. It’s against the law that you are on our turf. Go home.” Thank God, my grandfather William didn’t hear that when he came here in 1924. Neither did some relative of yours, who made it possible for you to live as an American.
Isaiah reported to Israel’s in-groups that the Lord said, “Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people’.” Notice that we did not read, “the foreigner who has joined himself to Israel,” but “the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord.”
Here was fulfilled the blessing that God promised through Abraham, “In your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” How? What blessing? By being welcome to the God who created heaven and earth. But Israel had forgotten their role in the grand scheme of making other peoples know they were welcome to God. It’s not hard to tell when you’re really welcome.
Actually, the laws God gave Israel regarding the treatment of aliens were very strict. Treat them even better than you would your own people. Why? Because remember when you were an alien in Egypt how they treated you!
The prophet doesn’t stop with welcoming foreigners. “Let not the eunuch say, ‘Behold, I am a dry tree’.” Eunuches were slaves who had been mutilated for the benefit of their masters. They were not sexually dangerous to women.
There was a particularly harsh but subtle prejudice against eunuchs in Israel because they could have no children. They had nobody to carry on their names. To be a “dry tree,” was a curse, an insult, and if you happened to of the priestly tribe, it meant you couldn’t go into the Temple.
This was a religiously enforced prejudice that was worse than the kind of segregation African Americans suffered in our land before Civil Rights became our rightful passion. It was worse because in our country segregated bus stations and restaurants and schools were offensive to many whites. But in Israel, everyone agreed to prejudice against the mutilated.
The Law of God given in the Book of Leviticus laid down the rules that forbad people mutilated in any way to come to the Temple. “He shall not come near the veil or approach the altar, because he has a blemish, that he may not profane my sanctuaries; for I am the Lord who sanctify them.”
But the prophet opened a new day for those who suffered segregation in any way in Israel. “Let NOT the eunuch say, ‘I am a dry tree’. For thus says the Lord: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name which shall not be cut off.”
But there was one hitch in this blessing. The alien and the mutilated had to accept a further blessing from God. They had to keep His Sabbaths. The prophet said Sabbaths rather than Sabbath because there was more than one kind of Sabbath. There was the Sabbath of the week, which insured one day of rest every seventh day. And there was the kind of Sabbath that relieved poverty in Israel and kept the fertility of the fields.
So this was the catch in God’s promise to people in Israel who were segregated and apt to be treated badly by home-grown Israelites: you’ve got to keep my Sabbaths. You’ve got to rest. Living healthfully is central to living faithfully before God.
The one thing God insisted was “You must rest on the Sabbath.” What a kind God we worship!
When Jesus came into the Temple the week before He would be tried there and crucified, He made a point of welcoming the blind and the lame where they were forbidden before. Strangely we don’t read of any protest at their being there. Then Jesus healed them, which meant they were no longer blind, no longer lame—no longer unwelcome.
Jesus was not practicing random acts of kindness. He was fulfilling prophecy intentionally. He had in mind the section of the Prophet Isaiah we listened to this morning. It is in this section that the Lord says, “With everlasting love I will have compassion on you.” And, “”Ho, every one who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat.” And, “For you shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” And, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”
Jesus brought to a focus in the Temple God’s purpose with humanity. The Apostle Paul spelled this out so clearly. Jesus Christ has broken down all the barriers, not only between us and God, but also between people. Instead of the old situation where foreigners and people with bodily defects were not welcome in Israel’s place of worship, there is now no distinction between slave and free, male and female, Jew and non-Jew. Indeed, Paul said we don’t even have to worry technically about Sabbaths. They were only a shadow of things to come. We have come out from the shadow and into the sunlight of God’s intentions.
The question I lay before us all then, is, what kind of life fulfills the sunlight of God’s intentions for us? The Apostle Paul presented the Christian manifesto of life in Romans 12. “I beseech you therefore brethren, in light of the mercy of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God. It’s the only reasonable kind of worship.”
When he said “bodies,” he made sure we don’t get caught up in some foggy notion of God claiming our minds and hearts, unseen parts of us. Our bodies are US. Present everything you see in the mirror to God. And the sum of all these bodies offered to God in gratitude is a living sacrifice—with amazing effects.
Tomorrow is Valentine Day, a day when we remember the wonderful chemistry of the heart between man and woman. It is natural, this instinct that makes us guys woozy over you girls. But love is not just giving vent to this wooziness. In fact, an awful lot of people mistake the chemistry for love. Chemistry soon fades, but love only gets more expressive with time. When you and I love someone, the greatest effort is offered with delight—and we don’t keep track of what we’ve given or done.
I began this morning showing how our gracious God welcomed the alien and the deformed people into the ranks of those He loved, but insisted that they respond by keeping the Sabbaths. Keeping the Sabbaths was essential to the identity of God’s people in ancient times.
Essential to our identity is responding to the love of God in Christ with a devotion that takes in our entire bodies. This is not a bondage. It frees us from the bondage of our wills—that don’t know what they want to do, but they crave, “Let me be me.” “I did it my way.” What a pathetic boast! As Christians, we claim a different outlook.
“Take my life and let it be consecrated Lord to Thee,” we sing. And this is a good song. We sing another good song often at Communion, “Love so amazing so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” Such wonderful, motivating songs.
But what can we offer to demonstrate we have responded in fact to the kindness of God with our bodies?
Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. It is a religion that requires a lot of Muslims. They must pray five times a day. Their women must dress in a certain way, no matter what the popular styles are. The most fanatical Muslims lose perspective and do awful things in their devotion. They respond to an idea of God that is demanding. Despite the outrageous terrorism Islam is growing. It stands for something.
The Mormons too are growing rapidly in numbers. The majority of their young people spend two years of their youth in mission work. They go, two by two, into our neighborhoods and spread their message. Mormons all tithe their incomes. Mormons attract a lot of Christians who find it a listless life with the grace of God requires nothing of them.
We say we believe in the grace of God. So there are no obligations put on us by our religion. As a consequence, we offer our optional service to God. We call the church a “volunteer-driven organization. And we keep track of what we do, and call ourselves good Christians if we reach some standard we think is higher than the average.
We politely refrain from speaking about Jesus. We participate as little or as much as we care to. And for some reason we fail to persuade people hungry for meaning in life that we have much to offer. And our numbers dwindle because optional Christianity ought to die.
But what if we responded differently, in fact, in keeping with how we sing and pray. What if out of sheer gratitude we sang quietly and lived out fervently, “Take my life and let it be consecrated Lord to Thee.” And you followed up those words with all the imagination and drive you have, so that in the church, as one after another of us brings our best to God, we become a seething center of loving, imaginative self-giving! When love motivates you, you can’t give enough. When gratitude moves you, you can’t do enough. The Christian faith is driven in its response to God by gratitude, by love. It should overwhelm the world. “What is the victory that overcomes the world, it is our faith,” John writes in his first little letter to Christians.
But we’re not overwhelming the world with our optional Christianity. And so I ask you, how might this change for you, and for us, so that we enjoy the blessings of God, and bring to our world the healing our gracious God delights to offer?
If I spelled out how I think this should look, it would only limit you. But I have put before the Session some ideas—as some of them have too. I hope we will rise as a congregation to the challenge as one by one-we offer our bodies to God. So I ask you, as I ask myself, how can we say “Thank you” to our hospitable God, our gracious God, our loving God? Ask that question, and start to answer it from body to body, from mind to mind, and from heart to heart. Then our possibilities are limitless. What good we might offer this troubled world, and find peace in our own hearts!
At times I’m overwhelmed to think of the possibilities before us. I pray that God, by His Holy Spirit will give us the energy to say thank you with all our bodies. And that this congregation will explode with the effects. Let us pray:
O Lord, Thank you for your welcome and for your hospitality. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2005
Jesus Christ—from Heaven
Jesus Christ—from Heaven
Psalm 104: 1-4 / Hebrews 1: 1-8
February 6th, 2005
This morning we again partake of the Lord’s Supper. We don’t do this as often as some churches do but more often than others. But nearly all churches remember Jesus with some regularity in this way because we must remember that Christianity is about Jesus. Jesus told His disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me.”
Things we don’t remember regularly we forget. Students review before writing an exam. Reviewing is practice in remembering. The best students refresh their memories often as they go along.
Christians who don’t remember Jesus often forget that Christianity is about Jesus. We say of Him, He is the head, and we are the body. Cut the head from the body and you know what happens—a dead body. It matters what we remember of the Head, of Jesus Christ. This is why we say we should read the Bible often as well as take the Lord’s Supper often. They remind us of Jesus.
Over the past twenty years or so there has been a lively discussion about Jesus prompted by a group of New Testament scholars called “the Jesus Seminar.” The Jesus Seminar is interested to discover what we can know for sure about the Jesus who worked in a carpenter shop in Nazareth, who walked the dusty roads of Palestine, taught, healed, and in the end was crucified and then was reported to have been seen by numerous people afterward. This seminar has pressed very hard on a challenge that arose after the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
This challenge was that there is a difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. This challenge raised a big question: Did Jesus grow in peoples’ imaginations so that He changed from being a wise, inspirational faith-healer, but just an ordinary man, into a God? In other words, have Christians remembered Jesus all wrong?
The movie Mel Gibson created about the last twelve hours of Jesus’ life tried to turn the clock back two thousand years so we could visualize as precisely as possible Jesus’ last twelve hours. Even Martin Scorscese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” tries less reverently to bridge the gap between the One in whom Christians believe and the Jesus of Nazareth.
The Jesus Seminar has walked across this bridge in a way that specifically challenges what the New Testament tells us about Jesus. On the basis of the vote of twenty-four committee members, the things Jesus actually said have been whittled down to about eighteen percent of the words the New Testament tells us Jesus said. The rest, they say, was made up and put into Jesus’ mouth.
Similarly, the Jesus Seminar assumes that Jesus’ reputation has swelled from the peasant sage of Nazareth who was born in the ordinary way and crucified by Pontius Pilate into the Son of God and King of Kings and Lord of Lords born to the Virgin Mary—who could literally walk on water.
Who was this Man, Jesus? In past weeks we have remembered the words of the Nicene Creed that was written three hundred years after Jesus left the visible scene. It says, “For us and for our salvation He came down from heaven.” Did He really? If the astrophysicists and even ordinary people now know that the words “down” and “up” don’t really fit when talking about the universe, what does it mean to say Jesus “came down from heaven?”
There are no bad questions. But it matters if we ask questions with the assumption that we won’t accept the answers unless they fit within boundaries we understand, that we’ve set before hand.
And it matters if we understand something of the larger picture within which the answer can fit. One of my good tennis friends is a sub-atomic physicist. I asked him one evening in the locker room what he studies. He chuckled and told me, it’s sort of like following rabbit tracks in the snow to find a rabbit when you don’t actually see the tracks but know they are there. I may not have got his answer quite right. But he wanted me to know his work wasn’t all make-believe. After all, he’s paid good money for snooping into those unseen rabbit tracks. And money is tight for universities these days.
This morning we read together the opening lines of a letter written nearly two thousand years ago that describes Jesus with these words: “He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power.” I have the inkling that what the writer is telling us is a bit like what my physicist friend was trying to tell me about his work. Only, the rabbit tracks in the snow in studying Jesus are His footprints in the dusty roads of Palestine, and the memory of his words to the people He met on those roads.
But the “rabbit” making these tracks in the snow is far more amazing than the intricacies of the physical world that my friend studies so brilliantly.
We don’t know who wrote this letter we call “The Epistle to the Hebrews.” At first they thought it was the Apostle Paul, but now almost nobody thinks this. Some think it might have been written by Priscilla, a very wise woman well known to Paul. But more than human wisdom was needed to penetrate the “space” between the ordinary and the extraordinary source of our creation and salvation.
The author begins with what all devout Jews and Christians knew from reading the Bible. They knew about the prophets, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. These were strange men often enough. But their strangeness was due to their extraordinary task, to speak from God. Often their messages were cryptic, hard to understand.
But there came this one in the prophetic heritage, of whom they spoke and wrote, who was different from them all. “In these last days God has spoken to us by a Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He created the world.” Jesus lived as close in time to those who read these words as John F. Kennedy lived to our time. My grandchildren will learn the details of this president’s life as I learned the details of the First World War. But there was this difference. There was something about Jesus more mysterious than President Kennedy or World War I. With Him it wasn’t just a matter of remembering what He said and did. There was something more about Jesus, something connected not only to the history of the Jews, but even beyond that.
The author of this letter wrote more explicitly than any other New Testament writer in describing the link between Jesus and Israel’s sacred history. We are lured back, not just beyond, but also behind the words of the prophets to the realm of God. You might think that people would have tossed out this letter as imaginative nonsense for saying of Jesus, “When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.” They knew about the crucifixion, and that Jesus died for our sins. But now they read of grandeur beyond what they could have dreamed.
What did it mean to say that Jesus “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high?” It is the language of mystery we would say, but to write such things in actual words plunged into the fog of mystery to describe something like real facts. The right side was the side of honor. In some way, Jesus who was crucified, the greatest human indignity, not only had a place of honor with God, but He was the one “through whom God created the world.” And by “the world” they didn’t just mean our planet.
We read in the 104th Psalm, that the Creator “stretched out the heavens like a tent.” If we follow the rabbit tracks doubling back through the forest of this New Testament book of Hebrews, to the Old Testament book of Psalms, we get images of unspeakable grandeur. God is one who “covers Himself with light as with a garment.” We don’t see light itself. We see by means of light. Light begins to break on the world in the morning. As we say “the morning light breaks on the eastern sky, or the crack of dawn.” I look out the window in the wee hours of the morning and gradually I can see the outline of trees out there and the shape of houses, whereas before I could “see” only darkness. God, whom we can’t see, wears the light.
Our minds drift to Psalm 8 with its sound of wonder, describing the heavens as “the work of God’s fingers.” We say this is metaphor. God has no fingers as we do. But the idea is there that the grandest things that we can see, the sky, for example, are small potatoes to God.
And when we think of Jesus, we have to go far beyond the tiny metaphor of the things He did with his fingers in breaking and distributing five small loaves and two small fishes to feed 5,000 men plus women and children, to His real greatness. By metaphor I don’t mean just a figure of speech. Jesus, I believe, actually turned water into wine, and actually fed multitudes with a tiny lunch, but these were merely the fringes of His compassion and power. They were all anyone could see and recognize. But they pointed to something far greater even more than a metaphor refers to a great idea.
And so we read that Jesus is superior to angels. Some people today think that angels are imaginary creatures. I don’t. All of us believe there are some things that really exist that we can’t see. Some things are too small, like quarks, for even electron microscopes to see, but we trust the scientists who say they are there. Some things can’t be seen for other reasons—like angels. We know that animals are aware of things we humans are not aware. There is an invisible realm of the spirit that far from being merely imaginary is beyond the imagination. Who Jesus was exceeds this imaginary realm.
We read in the Bible of the connection between Jesus and this beyond-the-imagination realm. Hebrews 1 reminded us this morning of the second Psalm, “Thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee,” as though they are written to an Israelite king. But even the great (adulterous) King David didn’t qualify—though in a way he did. The prophet Nathan told David that God said to him, “I will raise up your offspring after you . . .and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son.”
But these words never fit with anything in the boundaries of David’s lifetime or even the lifetime of his descendants. David’s dynasty seemed to end in 597 BC. The words of the psalm pointed to something beyond. But nobody dreamed how far or much beyond it pointed.
When my physicist friend tells me about rabbit tracks in the snow it’s a bit like what the Bible is telling us of Jesus. All that the Bible tells us of God as the ancient Israelites knew of Him it tells us of Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth.
The second chapter of Hebrews begins, “Therefore we must pay the closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.” How easy it is to drift away from remembering who this Jesus is who is represented in the bread and wine before us on this table. Some well-meaning scholars tell us that what the New Testament tells us about Jesus is pious imagination. And thus they mysteriously reduce Jesus to the creation of pious folklore. And in doing so, they step away from the One of whom an eyewitness said, “We saw His glory the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
There are some things no science can study. There is a point at which questions fail to find the right words and faith has to take over. Faith does not believe in spite of the evidence. It trusts as true what no evidence is capable of showing. We do the Christian faith no disservice when we admit that we have arrived at a boundary we cannot cross by inspecting the records of the past with even devout skepticism. With Thomas who doubted we either will say “My Lord and my God,” or we will dally all our lives in whimsical dithering.
I present to you this morning Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” He invites you, “trust in me and I will save you in every way that matters.”
Let us pray: O Lord, enlighten our hearts to trust what our minds cannot possibly know, that out of great love You sent for us and for our salvation Jesus Christ; that He came down from heaven to be born of the Virgin Mary, to live for us, and to die for our sins, and to rise again on the third day according to the Scriptures. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)