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April 24, 2005
Jesus, Crucified for our Sake
Jesus, Crucified for our Sake
Psalm 22 / Isaiah 53
Matthew 27: 11-26
April 24th, 2005
Good Friday came just last month but it is time to think again of the cross. I chose to preach on the cross today because we have come to that part of the Nicene Creed, which tells us, “Jesus was crucified for us also under Pontius Pilate.” But it wouldn’t matter if I had preached on this for the past fifty-two Sundays in a row because Jesus crucified is at the heart of our faith.
In fact the Apostle told the people in Corinth, “I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Nothing but this? Wouldn’t this get a bit old? Paul knew the Old Testament well. He said it was written for our benefit. What about “the whole council of God,” good expositional sermons that we were taught in seminary were needful for the nourishment of the faith of our people? “Unlock the treasures of the whole Bible,” we were taught.
Yes, but if we all become encyclopedias of knowledge about the Bible and miss the message of the cross, the Bible has become a red herring to us. The heart of our faith is found in Jesus Christ crucified—for me. This message is at the core of my faith, or our faith.
If you and I remember that Jesus was crucified for our sake we may well be overcome with horror at the brutality of His death. This is a natural feeling. But the lasting response I need is to remember it was my sin that put Him there. The great Swedish New Testament scholar, Kristor Stendahl responded to Jews who believed Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” incited anti-Judaism: “No, what that movie stirred in me was awareness of my sin that made Jesus suffer on that cross.”
What is my sin? The Westminster Catechism defines sin as “any transgression of or violation of the law of God.” And so it is. But sin lurks in that unconquerable view of the centrality of myself that now presides in the Western world. Hidden under our demand for rights and personal gratification that we protect with great determination is a self-centeredness that undermines the effect of the Gospel. Let me take stock of this self-centeredness in me, this insistence on being personally gratified, so that I do not deliberately hang on to what compelled Jesus to hang on the cross.
Thus, from person to person a church can be made up of people aware of why Jesus died, and grateful for His grace so lavishly displayed—so that we may lavishly live under the spell of grace. Grace should be on dominant exhibit in the life of a congregation.
The Apostle Paul wrote, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me.” It is the only workable foundation for the Christian life. It tells of what God has done that we could not do, but also of what we can do as a consequence. “The life that I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Here is the Christian life explained, a life lived in gratitude for the love of God to us exhibited at such cost on the cross.
We don’t have a cross in this sanctuary not because we don’t believe the cross is relevant to our faith, but because it is at the heart of our faith.
Our Reformed forebears lived in a day when images festooned the churches. There were crosses with garish statues of a dead Jesus in every church. Statues of saints stood on pedestals everywhere. And all at great expense paid for by poor people who gave their meager income, afraid of hell. The cross was a magic shape for them to be traced in the air, across the chest, or worn around the neck.
Perhaps in over-reaction, the Reformers in whose heritage we come set out to cure the problem cold turkey. No crosses. No images. Nothing ornamental to distract from the majesty of the grace of God that operates within the human heart. Though the cross has deep attraction to me, and to many of you, this is the reason why there is no cross prominent in this sanctuary.
The Reformers who launched our sector of the Reformation were convinced the cross was so important it should never become a religious ornament. The meaning of symbols easily fades when they become commonplace. Perhaps there will be a cross in this sanctuary some day, but not because it is a popular ornament for churches.
The cross was God’s antidote for sin. Sin has been a dreadful blight on humanity since the beginning. Before the foundation of the world God planned to send His Son to absorb the sin of all people of all time. The Son of God spent His short life on this earth experiencing the sin of people. He saw it. He saw its effects on personality, on communities, on synagogues, on religious leaders, on nations. He experienced it in its most cold and brutal form in the ways of the Romans who occupied Palestine. And then, having experienced the sin of others, fellow Jews and Romans, He died by crucifixion as though He were guilty of having committed all those sins, even though He never did, said, or thought one wrongful thing.
Today sin is a dreadful problem. We have airbrushed it but behind nearly every problem you and I have personally, or in society, or in the home, or in our communities, or between nations, or in church sin is the cause. It is a disease of the soul spread by unprotected self.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth words that have kept echoing down through the ages of the church. “I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” That simple message has echoed down through time’s corridors as the great corrective when Christian community life lost focus. If this were the subject of every sermon, maybe we’d catch on eventually.
Let me trace the line from the prophet Isaiah, through the Gospels, the life of the Apostle Paul, and the Creed so that it may find its way into my heart and yours.
Isaiah 53 at first lured many people to Jesus in the days after He suffered and died. Jewish people who knew their Bibles read this chapter, wondering what it meant. Then the disciples of Jesus pointed out that what happened on that Passover during the tenure of Pontius Pilate was foretold by Isaiah. We don’t read in the Gospels that Jesus ever called this to their attention before He died. Sometimes Jesus told how He was fulfilling a prophecy, but He let the most forceful prophecy speak for itself at the time it was fulfilled.
The prophet began by asking a question I read from the Jewish Publication Society translation: “Who can believe what we have heard?” It was a question laden with shock. “I can’t believe it!” We sometimes say this in shock.
The prophet went on: “He was despised, shunned by men.” Who was so despised and shunned? Why was he despised and shunned? What terrible offense made him a disgrace to the nation? Was this one a traitor perhaps?
Nobody, not even the prophet knew to whom he referred. Isaiah was treated badly by his people, but it wasn’t him. So was Jeremiah but he wasn’t the one. The prophet repeats himself, sick at heart, “He was despised, we held him of no account. Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing, our suffering that he endured.”
The picture painted by Isaiah brims with injustice. “It was for our sickness that this one suffered?” What kind of sickness? Not cancer or leprosy; something much deeper. It was a deep sickness of soul, a disease infecting the soul.
When the disciples of Jesus pointed out these words to people in light of what all knew happened to Jesus, it hit home. In Acts 8 we read of a Jewish visitor from Ethiopia reading Isaiah’s words as he rode in a chariot. He asked Philip what it meant. When he realized the prophet spoke of Jesus who was crucified not long before, he trusted his life to Jesus and was baptized on the spot.
Those words that Isaiah wrote about Jesus echo in my mind. “He was wounded because of our sins, crushed because of our iniquities.” Such correspondence between a specific prophesy in the Hebrew Bible and the life of Jesus!
All four Gospels have been called Passion narratives with long introductions. The Gospel of Matthew from which we read this morning shows us Jesus standing before Pilate. Pilate asked, “Are you the king of the Jews?” We cannot hear his tone of voice. Was he mocking? Was he curious? His wife had dreamed nightmares about this moment. She told him, “Have nothing to do with this just man!” Pilate tried to wriggle out of the problem by offering to release another man named Jesus, whose last name was Barabas, a well-known very bad man. Perhaps they would for their own safety choose this Jesus instead of the Jesus of Nazareth. When they wouldn’t allow this he tried to wash his hands of responsibility. He claimed innocence by washing his hands. The people yelled, “His blood be on us and on our children,” in the frenzy of a moment as political appointees among the Jews who hated Jesus incited them.
Many Jews have been tormented because of that line. But Christians who persecuted the Jews diverted their attention from their own sin that put Jesus on the cross. They violated the Gospel in turning on the Jews, forgetting the warning of Scripture addressed to Christians that in doing this they “crucified the Son of God afresh.”
The Apostle Paul wrote Christians in Corinth who had given him fits, ““I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Forget this and the fabric of the faith dissolves. Forget the cross and the Christian faith dissolves into just another philosophy, a world-view about which all sorts of clever, opinionated people can express an opinion.
The church in Corinth was ridden with strife and immorality. It reflected the life of the bustling city in which it found itself. It was a sports-conscious city, well to do, a great trading center situated on an isthmus with an overland route to pull ships across. It was intellectually alive. Paul had to warn the Christians there, “The wisdom of God is the wisdom of the cross that is foolish to people who think they are wise.” In the church there folk sure had their opinions—about speaking in tongues, about who was the best leader, about how to keep one another in their place, even about how deeply one could go into sexual sin and get away with it.
Things had become so distracted from the basic fact without which Christianity is nothing at all that Paul confessed to being afraid, feeling weak. He felt tongue-tied. “How did it come to this, when it began with the simple preaching of the cross to which you were drawn because of the sheer grandeur of the love of God poured out in Jesus?” “He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” And you want to concentrate on the things that are tearing you apart, shredding your character, and destroying your credibility in Corinth?!!
A like setting faced the Christians in Alexandria, Egypt three hundred years later. One of the clever and out-spoken elders named Arius claimed to know better than the historic teaching about Jesus. The One on the cross on Good Friday was not really God at all. He was a good man, to be sure, a very honorable man, in fact, given a high task by God. But he was just a man. The divisiveness of this unruly elder who had lost the irreplaceable quality of humility, stopped listening, and began speculating on things no one can comprehend, led to a crisis that reached far beyond the city. And so the emperor had to call a worldwide council to solve the problem.
But thank God at this Council of Nicea they pieced together the Bible’s teaching and claimed again its teaching that the Jesus who died for our sins on the cross was indeed God, indeed man. Here was the capstone of God’s remedy for the problem of human sin. And thus Christians ever since have confessed, “He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate.”
One of the questions from the Heidelberg Catechism we ask often here during our morning worship is, “What is true faith?” And the answer to that question pinpoints that true faith applies to me, to you, to each of us personally the truth of the gift of salvation. This salvation offers my life now that re-ordering grace that it needs, so that I can live my life exhibiting the kindness, the mercy, the justice, goodness, and truth of God.
I pray that each of us may not only stand looking up at that cross, aghast at the cost of God’s love displayed there, or even that it was our sin that put Jesus there. Rather let us probe with all our hearts to understand the wisdom the Apostle Paul understood when he said, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
O Lord God, how do I speak adequately of the wonder of Your Holy Son Crucified for me? Take and seal to us this great message of love, and grant that its claim on us may not be lost. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2005
Jesus: How much God? How much Man?
Jesus: How much God? How much Man?
(For us and for our salvation he . . . became truly human.)
Daniel 7: 9-10 / Revelation 1: 9-18
April 17th, 2005
These are really remarkable times. I’m tempted to keep each copy of Newsweek because in ten years I’ll wish I had done so. “These are the best of times and the worst of times.” A Scottish novelist wrote those words in the 19th century about an earlier time.
Has there been any period in the story of humanity when it was otherwise, the worst and the best of times? Augustine of Hippo thought the end of the world was at hand as the Barbarians crushed the last breaths of life out of the Roman Empire in the early fifth century. In the thirteenth century Thomas (Aquinas) was writing his masterpiece about God while “Tarter hordes” were galloping on their ponies through Europe’s heartland slaughtering every man, woman, and child. My mother will ask me when we talk on Saturday mornings in this twenty-first century, “What is the world coming to? Surely the Lord will come soon.”
Well, it was into such a world that the Lord was born. He was this one “whose raiment was white as snow,” who was served by thousands, of whom Daniel wrote in pre-recognition of days to come. In the days this Son of Man was born things were pretty raw too. Crucifixion was as common then as jail terms are today. Seventy-three years before Jesus was born, a slave named Spartacus led an unsuccessful revolt of slaves against Rome. He was defeated. The Romans lined the Apian Way leading into Rome with six thousand of Spartacus’ followers, nailed to crosses to remind anyone who needed reminding not to meddle with Rome. On crosses these wretched men ended their lives in agony without mercy.
It was at such a time, into such a world that God did something most wonderful. He became part of human existence. He became a man. Why? “For us and for our salvation.”
The Nicene Creed was composed about three hundred years later. Then the triumph of the cross of Jesus Christ finally seemed to give promise of a Kingdom of God on earth. The emperor was a Christian. He put an end to crucifixions and other legal torture. His mother, Helena, who loved Jesus and was largely responsible for her son’s becoming a Christian, searched everywhere to find every last splinter of the old rugged cross on which Prince of glory died. It was said she found enough splinters of the true cross to build Noah’s Ark. She had churches built in many places throughout the empire where people could worship Jesus.
But in one of the oldest churches in Christendom a tempest started to blow. An elder with a strong personality in Alexandria, Egypt was teaching that Jesus was only a great man. The elder’s name was Arius. He didn’t listen to his teachers. He told them, “Listen to me.” His attitude turned his speculation into a great problem that divided Christendom.
Though the Gospel of John said of Jesus that “He was in the beginning with God and was God,” Arius said this could not be because, after all, wasn’t Jesus born as everyone is born?
He may have read what we just read of the exalted Jesus of whom John wrote in the first chapter of Revelation. Jesus, as John saw Him in this vision, looked far different from the Jesus who walked the dusty roads of Palestine. Arius was annoyed by those who had so played up this image of Jesus Christ that they forgot He was a real man, Things had gotten out of hand in thinking about Jesus after He left them.
Some influential and pious Christians, desiring to honor Jesus, taught that Jesus had only the God nature, and no human nature. Others said He only seemed to be a man. Some thought that the very idea of God going through the birth process was a horrid and evil idea.
As often happens, one mistake bred another mistake that tried to fix the first one. Arius emphasized that Jesus was just a human being. He argued that to say Jesus was divine was only an honor ascribed to Him, a bit like saying Pope John Paul II is a saint. But this understanding of Jesus rejected everything that the Bible teaches about Jesus’ God-ness. “Before Him every knee will bow, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” “Lord” was the name of God. What God is Jesus is, the New Testament makes so clear.
So the thoughtful and wise pastors and bishops who met at the Council of Nicea hammered out words to make sure we understand that Jesus was really God. He was “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made.” It very nearly seems they tried too hard to make the idea clear, but it was a truth that could not be too clear. It is half the heart of the Gospel.
The other half of the Gospel is that Jesus Christ was really man too. He did not just seem to be a man. He was really and truly and fully a man. Human nature and the Divine nature were both in Jesus, not all mixed together like some Divine-human dish of scrambled eggs, but distinct in His humanity and in His Deity. Does that sound pretty impossible to you? Well, maybe paradoxical, but not impossible.
Actually, it was just one word in the Greek language in which this creed was written. The Son of God was enanthropesanta. That sounds like Greek to you, but it sounded to them like English does to you and me. Some know the phrase from the English word formed from the Latin translation, incarnatus est, which means, “He was in flesh.” Our word “Incarnation” comes from this simple, stark statement. The Latin is more stark than the Greek. He became flesh sounds more radical than “having been made human.”
(I feel self-conscious to use Greek, Latin, or Hebrew words as though I’m showing off. But remember that over the centuries the Gospel was taught in many languages. Once Greek and Latin were as ordinary as English. It was in these languages that people first heard these great truths. And we do well to remember as clearly as we can how they understood the great truths, and then passed them on to us.)
This is a remarkable truth. God became a human being. David asked in the 8th Psalm, long before Jesus was born, “What is man that thou art mindful of him or the son of man that thou visitest him?” It is a good question. David asked this question, it might be, because he saw the dark side of human nature, and not just the wonder that human beings are created in the image of God.
He knew his own heart. At one time he could write rhapsodic psalms praising God, and at another time he drooled with raw lust, leering at the body of his neighbor’s wife—to the point that he had her husband killed to claim her for himself. Maybe this was in his mind when he asked, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?”
But humanity is pretty grand too. What you and I know of humanity is a flawed creature. We see the double-mindedness of our own hearts that contributes to our suspicion of other people. People who have the capacity for amazing acts of self-sacrifice may live driven by greed, never being happy with what they have because they suppress their God-like nature to share. People who have the capacity to love suppress their love because they are fearful. People who yearn for acceptance judge others for the silliest things. People who are equipped in body, mind, and spirit for the greatest happiness, cling to ways guaranteed to make them unhappy. They major on what is minor and treat as least important things of the heart.
I flick the channels on the television when my coffee is brewing in the early morning and I see program after program about how to get in shape, how to eat right, how to have a great sex life, how to get rich. And all the while the people who watch the programs live so as to make sure they stay overweight, use their money badly, and are loveless towards their spouses. These programs flaunt their misery before miserable people who can’t sleep.
It was because of what we can be that the Son of God actually became a human being. “It was for us and for our salvation.” Salvation is not just being rescued from eternal hell. Salvation is being healed to the very core. We are made in the image and likeness of God, and He is not willing to consign what is made in His image to the trash-bin of this life or of eternity. God became a human being so we could be lifted to claim the fullness of what God intended in creating us in His image. He took our image to restore this image.
If only all who claim to be “born again” were as saved as God intended! Turn your thoughts inward and see what Jesus came to remake! See inside where a gracious heart lurks, longing to infect your mind. Look inside at that generous person who longs to act. Look at yourself as you are disappointed with yourself and have turned that disappointment against other people. Look at your fears, at the dreams you are gradually thinking cannot ever be realized. Accept that Jesus came to dissolve those fears and help you to aspire to and fulfill your best self.
There are aspects of God reflected in every part of creation. The beauty of God is reflected in flowers. How intricate is the beauty of the lilies and phlox and roses that surround the homes in which we live. How lavish is the beauty of a magnolia tree in the full bloom of spring. How fragrant are the gardenia and lemon blossoms. The elegance of the dolphins as they swim through the oceans reflects the power, symmetry and elegance of their Creator. Think of the soaring eagle, strong and beautiful. We could go on and on describing the majesty of the tiger “burning bright in the forests of the night” whose fearful symmetry proclaims God’s handiwork.
But nothing in all creation compares with a human being. God became a human being to show what a human being is as God intended. For some reason people hated that beauty when they saw it in Jesus. They couldn’t stand Jesus. He was too good, too kind, too noble, too forgiving. So they killed Him. We say we love Jesus. People just like we are sometimes despised what they saw Him.
We are so confused. We don’t know whether to desire beauty or ugliness. We are torn between admiring decency and being drawn by the culture we live in to what is indecent. The privacy and opportunity we have lures us to do in secret what we would claim to despise. I see the young people on campus wearing T-shirts that read on the back, “Go Ugly Early,” and know it has to do with a popular spot for hanging out. But I muse on the idea that such a term could be so intriguing for them. Why not, “Come Beautiful Early and Late?” Every co-ed that has on her back “Go Ugly Early” wants to be thought beautiful.
How grand a thing it is to be a human being, but we miss seeing it. God doesn’t, and that’s why He sent His Son as a complete human being. We cannot comprehend that God could ever stoop to taking on our botched humanity. But I remember that we represent God’s finest creative impulse. We are the capstone of creation. And it matters to God what happens to the finest exhibit of His creative impulse—the part onto which He stamped His image and likeness.
This is why God became a human being. Jesus was completely human first, to bear the consequences in His body of what we have done in distorting the Divine image in us, and then, second, to lead the way to our reclaiming all the wonder of being created in the image of God. That’s why we sing, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus.”
Ponder this. Thing on this as you think of yourself. You are a promise, a possibility, as our children have sung in days past. Think on this as you think of others—if you are more impressed with their flaws than of the wonder that they are created in God’s image.
I remember that C.S. Lewis wrote of what he thought when he looked at people—candidates for divination. One day I will look at you and remember what I knew of you in this life. I will be amazed. “So that was what God had in mind when He created you,” I will think. Why then did I not treat you with greater regard? We will wonder, “Why didn’t our life together blossom with all our possibilities for God-likeness?” It still can.
I pray God will, by His Holy Spirit, remind us as we look at Jesus, the author of our faith, what it is that He created us to be. And then I pray we may press on to enjoy to the fullest, in the way of Jesus, this life for which the Son of God was born a baby, suffered death, and rose again.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we cannot comprehend the mechanics of how you sent us Your Son to become a man for us, to become even sin for us, that we could truly live. But we thank You that You did. Help us to accept this favor with a trusting heart. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2005
The Scandal or the Wonder of Jesus?
The Scandal or the Wonder of Jesus?
Psalm 100 / Isaiah 7: 9-11
Matthew 1: 18-25
April 10th, 2005
I would guess that the season that warms our hearts the most is Springtime. Winter can be beautiful when the ground is covered with snow and the air is crisp. Summer can be wonderful, particularly when you are swimming or canoeing at a lake, or enjoying the smell after a summer rain. Autumn for me is a close competitor to Spring.
But Springtime! Life bursts out all over, and it happens gradually. Each morning I go out to inspect the trees I planted seven years ago, to see how the buds are coming. Rabbits are running all over. Finches are at the bird feeder again. Life bursts during the Spring.
I think there must have been more than one thing in God’s mind in having Jesus’ death and resurrection take place at springtime. First, God wanted us to see and feel the burst of new life in nature itself as we remember that Jesus came out of the tomb alive on Easter morning. Maybe it would not have gripped our hearts nearly so much if it happened in the cold of winter, or as leaves were falling from the trees, or when the days were hot and humid during summer.
Second, Jesus rose from death at springtime because the Jewish Feast of Passover described in the Bible came during the Spring of the year. Then the sacrifice of a lamb prefigured Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
It was a miraculous event we say when Jesus came alive on Easter morning. Each of the ways that God interacts with us for our good involves both a very ordinary aspect of life and something extraordinary.
Two weeks ago we thought of the extraordinary event on Easter. This morning I want us to think particularly about Christmas when Jesus’ life began on this earth. As the resurrection of Jesus’ body took place when all of life was bursting forth at springtime, so Jesus was born as every baby is born, but with strange, miraculous new twists.
The first Christian statement of faith described Jesus’ earthly beginning this way: “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.” There are four parts to this statement. First, it was for us and for our salvation. Second, Jesus was in heaven before He was born on earth. Third, this happened by a special work of the Holy Spirit of God. Fourth, Jesus was born of a virgin mother. These are the four unique aspects of Jesus’ birth.
Jesus was born because you and I who were born needed to be rescued from a predicament that starts at birth. This predicament is called sin. How do we know about sin? Look at how we hurt each other. We say things we shouldn’t. We forget to say what we should. And that’s just the start of how we hurt others.
We offend God by misusing His wonderful gifts. For some people their misuse of these gifts result in very unhappy lives. Sin is a total yuk! Jesus was born, died, and came to life again to lead the way in undoing the curse of sin. This is what salvation means. It was for our salvation that Jesus was born, lived, died, and rose again.
Second, Jesus came down from heaven. Before you and I began we may have been a twinkle in our parents’ eyes, as they say, but we did not exist. We were a hope, a dream. When we get married and think of having children we imagine having a little girl or a little boy and dream of what that little one will become. But there is nothing there until we came together in that loving embrace that begins a human life. Wonder fills our hearts as young parents when we realize that we have done something very God-like. Our love “created” a new human being where there was no one before.
I remember so well when Bonnie and I were told we were going to be the parents of our first child. We had been married four months and fully intended to have no children until I’d finished school and we could afford the expense of all those diapers and formula and all the other expensive paraphernalia that goes with having babies. I worked from mid-night to eight in the morning to earn our keep, while carrying a full load of graduate school credits. We were scraping to make ends meet. Now this!
We lived in a tiny one-room efficiency student apartment. Our couch pulled out to make a bed, and the kitchen was so slight that only two newly weds could fit into it at the same time comfortably. Now, we learned we were to add a third person to our little nest, someone much smaller than we were who would occupy a lot more space than we did!
But we forgot the hurdles to be overcome. We were ecstatically happy. All the complications this little being would bring could not compare to the joy he would bring—not only in his birth, I might add. It seemed a miracle when Bonnie gave birth and I held this little guy in my arms. And it was a miracle, but one that takes place very often. He didn’t exist before. Now he existed—as he reminded us every hour of the day and night.
But before Jesus was born and made Mary and Joseph happy, He already existed. He was the Son of God, existing before time began with the Father and the Holy Spirit in heaven. The Creed says He “came down from heaven,” because we always think of heaven as up. We may as well say that heaven is up because it is a mysterious realm inaccessible to us just now. We have cartoon-like images of angels sitting on fluffy clouds in heaven, strumming harps, but these are only ethereal ideas suggesting how heaven is different from earth.
The Apostle Paul tells us that, “God is not far from each of us. In Him we live and move and have our being.” Heaven is where God lives, and He is not far from us. This makes me think that heaven is not nearly so much a place far away as it is a perfect state of existence that inter-penetrates this world and who knows, perhaps all space. Because God isn’t limited by space and time as we are.
When the Son of God started to form into a human baby in Mary’s womb, He didn’t have very far to go. He was “in the world, and the world was made by Him,” and “in Him all things were holding together.” In a mysterious Divine act the Holy Spirit moved the Son of God at the loving will of the Father so that He entered our time and space in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
From there on Jesus’ birth was like every birth.
The passage from Matthew’s Gospel tells us how things looked from Joseph’s perspective. I wish there were time to look through Joseph’s and Mary’s eyes and follow the course of this extraordinary birth. There were some who thought it a scandal because they weren’t married. Others realized the pertinence of what the prophet Isaiah wrote--that Ken Wark read for us--this was a wonderful new act of God, who was doing something good beyond our ability to understand—something with long-range effects. This morning we celebrate something very wonderful that God is doing many years later as we baptize a dear young man, Cory Wettshurack.
What happened in the birth of Jesus is like what has happened in Cory’s heart and life. What happened when Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit was a figure of what happens inside of us when faith is born in our hearts.
There is nothing harder to change than the human heart. We call people “stubborn” who will not change from some terrible behavior or attitude. But when we see a person change from being a bitter, cynical, angry sort of person into a person filled with kindness, cheerfulness, and goodwill, we recognize that something has happened inside. But there is more to it than this.
Naturally, since we can’t see God, we’re tempted to think that God doesn’t exist. Naturally, since we did not see Jesus born and were not witnesses to the miraculous events surrounding His birth, we are tempted to think that Jesus was not the extraordinary person the Gospels tell us, even born in a unique way. Naturally, since we didn’t see Jesus die for us and rise again, and since there is no way we can imagine that such a thing should mean that God was taking care of the problem of sin in this way, how are we to believe it?
But when our natural Inability to trust that these things are true somehow changes and our hearts are filled with trust, it is because the Holy Spirit has caused something to happen in us. The Holy Spirit doesn’t force us. He simply makes it very plain to us that there is something to all of this to which we feel compelled inwardly to respond.
The Holy Spirit uses various means to give faith to us. If you were born into a home with parents who trusted in Jesus, who were loving to you, the Holy Spirit used them to teach your heart about Jesus. Or sometimes God the Holy Spirit lets us be in the company of people who show us in how they live and by what they say to us that there is something mysteriously more to life. And they become the means to trusting in Jesus, and being “born again.”
We’ve all heard that term, “born again.” Jesus used it in speaking to a Jewish teacher who was as puzzled at the idea as you and I might be. He thought it meant something physical, like a grown up climbing back into his mother’s womb and then coming out again.
Jesus used this term because what happens when our hearts are changed is every bit as unique and radical as being born the first time. When God changes our hearts, it starts very small, the way a baby begins very small it her mother’s body. And gradually, over time that little human zygote turns out to be a full-fledged human being. And after God plants the seed of faith in our hearts, it grows until we discover we are “new creations in Christ.” It is the Holy Spirit who makes this happen in us—as He made Jesus start in the body of His mother, the Virgin Mary.
When Cory stands before us and confesses his faith in Jesus, and I place the waters of Baptism on him, we are celebrating the work of God’s Holy Spirit who put the seed of faith in His heart. And Cory is publicly baptized to claim that what God’s Holy Spirit planted in his heart has grown so that he trusts in Jesus.
Trusting in Jesus brings to us God’s gift of eternal life in a mysterious way we can’t understand. But this shouldn’t surprise us since all of life, physical and otherwise, is mysterious to us. But this is a mystery of a different kind because it has to do with what we do and what we let God do with our lives afterward.
We read in the Bible, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,” and again, “You are not your own, you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body.” From now on, Cory, like each of us who has been baptized and confessed our faith in Jesus Christ, has a new purpose in life. Our purpose is to use whatever we are, whatever God has given us as gifts of mind and body, to please Him. God is pleased when we enjoy His gifts in thankfulness to Him.
Baptism and trust in Jesus is only a beginning, like a new birth. Every Sunday morning at the close of our worship service you see me raise my right hand, place my fingers in an ancient sign of the Holy Trinity, and pronounce a charge and blessing to you that is drawn from the Bible. “Now the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you what is well pleasing in His sight.”
Here are the marching orders of every baptized child of God. Let God work in you what is well pleasing in His sight. Let God perfect in you and me every good work. Let go and let God. God’s goal with you and me is like the aspirations we parents have when we are granted a little one into our home. We aspire that our children will be healthy, happy, good, and useful. We want them to know we love them, and that this love will be like a wind in their sails, as they sail through life joyfully.
Jesus said, “I am come that you may have life and have it more abundantly.” Jesus plans for you, Cory, and for each of us who has come to Him in trust, an abundant life—a good life, better than we can imagine. Let us then thoughtfully plan to live our lives to the glory of God, loving Him with all our hearts, loving one another with a full heart, faithfully, and all our neighbors as ourselves.
If any of you know you have not begun this new life perhaps God is stirring in you this morning the desire to find for yourself this new life He promises to those who trust in Him. Please speak to me if I can help show you the way. In any case, don’t let pass the moment when you recognize something new tugging at your heart. It’s probably God whispering to you, “Come to me and I will give you a new life.” God has put a certain twinkle of light in the heart of everyone who is born, by which we can see that life is more than a physical event. God promises you and me, “I will give my Holy Spirit to plant the seed of faith in your heart—and you will know what that “something more” is. Now respond, let that seed grow until you find the abundant life.
Let us pray: We are amazed at the wonder of a newborn child, Lord. But we are more amazed at the wonder of Jesus’ birth, and to know it was for our sake, that we could enjoy the kind of life that gives most joy. Help us to trust in Jesus, and to live in trust, day after day. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 03, 2005
After Easter, What?
After Easter, What?
Daniel 7: 13-18 / Matthew 28: 16-20
April 3rd, 2005
Perhaps your heart was heavy yesterday, as mine was, as I watched the story of the Pope’s final hours unfold. I was recently in Poland, as you know, teaching in a Baptist seminary. The regard I felt among Baptist faculty and students for the Pope was intense. We might expect this because he is a favorite son in Poland. He was born there and educated there. He stood up to the Nazis as a young man. He served as a gutsy Archbishop in Krakow during the communist era.
The esteem for this man crosses not only Protestant/Catholic boundaries; he has won the admiration of non-Christian folk worldwide. The media that seems to be so fascinated with the misbehavior of celebrities had a subject to study who fascinated them with his virtues.
But when I think of this pope another attribute comes to mind. As “post-modernism” has replaced truth with personal opinion, Pope John Paul II steadfastly held to the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Gospel kept him humble, as he knew the eyes of everyone watched him with admiration. He demonstrated the outlook of the Apostle Paul who wrote, “I am crucified with Christ . . . the life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
This Gospel was the reason why the Pope apologized to the Jews for the Holocaust. This Gospel compelled him to apologize for the sins of the Medieval and modern Church, not just the Catholic Church, as it used its power badly, hurting those it was its calling to serve. How beautiful and rare were the Pope’s honest apologies.
This Gospel that is at the heart of the Christian faith made him reach out to Muslims and to Jews. The Gospel tenderized his heart making him risk making these gestures beyond the safety net of approval of his peers.
Last Sunday people packed the pews across our land to hear again that Jesus came out of the tomb alive two thousand years ago. We began our worship service with the confident declaration, “Jesus Christ is risen indeed.” We all said it, and then we sang it, “Christ the Lord is Risen today, Alleluia.” This sanctuary rang with the sound.
But the Gospels confess that not all Jesus’ disciples were proclaiming this on the first Easter. Matthew tells us that when His eleven disciples saw Him some doubted.
Mark’s Gospel says Jesus “scolded [His disciples] for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen.”
Luke tells us of the disciples’ response to word of Jesus’ resurrection, “but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”
John’s Gospel tells us that Thomas, one of the twelve responded to word of Jesus’ resurrection, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
Isn’t it interesting that all four Gospels tell us candidly that some of the disciples doubted? Why report this embarrassing feature of these first pillars of the Church?
Unbelief in Jesus’ resurrection persisted in the Church. Some years later Paul addressed the problem of doubt in the Church at Corinth. I Corinthians 15 is a passionate appeal not only that belief in Jesus’ resurrection is of “first importance,” but that without it, the preaching of the Gospel is empty. The Gospel is about the love of God, but we know of it through facts displaying the love of God. Jesus’ resurrection, His actual coming to life again is one of these facts. That is why it is important.
Paul would not have written this unless in the church people who considered themselves followers of a Jesus who had not risen from the grave. It is no new thing in the Church that people doubt the resurrection.
Some people seem to believe fairly easily. They hear and are filled with wonder and gratitude. Others cannot believe so easily. The twelve disciples fairly reflected the range of people in the world to whom the Gospel would come. Some believed easily. Some did not. The Gospels include Jesus’ response to those who struggled to believe as well as to those for whom belief came apparently more easily. He did not kick out of the circle of His disciples those who doubted. Patiently he waited for them to believe.
Thomas epitomized the inability to believe found in Jesus’ inner circle. But once he faced the chance to actually touch those nail prints and the fresh wound in Jesus’ side he bowed before Jesus and said, “My Lord and my God.”
Jesus replied to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” Yes, such people are blessed. But this blessing does not come as easily to some as to others. Indeed, belief was a new wrinkle in religion for Jesus’ disciples.
Part of the problem for the disciples was that belief in Jesus’ resurrection was a completely new “required” ingredient in their life before God. As Jews, their life did require an element of trust in God, but Judaism was largely a way of obedience to God. Moses gave God’s commands to His people that included offering sacrifices, observing three great feasts that celebrated the work of God in their behalf, and living obediently to the Ten Commandments. These were duties they could do regardless of what was going on inside their minds.
So when Jesus spoke of the importance of belief, His disciples had to fit this into a new scheme of life before God. It was a scheme that began when God told Abraham, “Leave Haran and go to a place I’ll show you.” But Abraham didn’t identify his trust in God as an ingredient in the process. God did, but he didn’t. Abraham didn’t see God standing before him as Thomas saw Jesus standing before him. Abraham heard a voice and his contribution to the world was that he believed it was God whom he heard was from God.
Time doesn’t permit us to remember how simple trust factored into the religion of ancient Israel. But it is the unseen ingredient all along the way, as later generations trusted the truth and significance of what they received, that it was from God.
After Jesus rose from death, belief, trust in the truth of Jesus’ resurrection became a key ingredient in a right relationship with God. Why? Because essential to receiving the Gospel is a recognition that we can’t on our own please God by obeying His law. Essential to our relationship with God is trust Him. Essential to our life with God and one another is being aware of the requirement that we appropriate this Gospel by personal trust. We must trust in the Good News of Jesus to appropriate it to ourselves.
Why then does belief come to some people with difficulty and to others apparently so easily? Is it automatically a good thing when people believe easily? Is it automatically a bad thing when they can’t believe easily?
Beyond question part of the reason for uncertainty for many people is how many competitors there are in the marketplace of truth. Coming to God almost looks like coming to a job fair at Purdue. The mall is filled with booths with smiling, attractive hawkers saying to Purdue’s finest, “Come work with us.” Likewise you and I see not only Christians who emphasize their own special take on God, but also many non-Christian religions saying, “We’re the real God-approved religion.” Some people retreat behind a wall of agnosticism. How can anyone tell which is the real product?
Others have been hurt in the church. Indeed, if I allowed myself to be overcome by the hurt I endured as a child, or even along the way as a pastor, I could say, as others have, “The Church is full of hypocrites,” and be done with it. The New Testament teaches us that we can’t love God whom we cannot see if we don’t love our brother whom we can see. When our brother or sister whom we can see hurts us, we may feel towards God the pain caused by this hurt. We’re not always logical in our thinking. When people ask God the question, “Why?” Sometimes their question was stirred by a person who hurt them.
Because hurt feelings are such a part of church life I must say that those who are hurt have to realize that they also hurt others. This is why mutual forgiveness is essential to the life of the Church. It matters that the Church be internally strong, a strength created by a network of forgiveness, because this strength plays an important role in helping people to trust in God.
Jesus warned those who would place too much confidence in their belief alone, “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of my Father in heaven.” Jesus said this for good reason. There are those for whom faith is a head-thing that doesn’t affect the life. Jesus expected that this remarkable Gospel would have life-transforming effect as we live under its spell.
But try as we may, we fail, do we not, to achieve this life-transformation. The Apostle Paul poured out his labors in the work of the Gospel concerned that after having preached to others he should be a castaway. By “a castaway,” he meant that God might cast him away for his failure to live up to the standard of the Gospel. In a way, it almost seems that his feelings and his theology were not in line. Paul’s theology said, “I am saved by grace not by works.” But his feelings said, “So much is expected of me because of the Gospel, and I’m not achieving it.” Our feelings and our head-knowledge are not always well coordinated.
He was confident in the Gospel, committed to a fault, but slender in his self-confidence. He saw at the same time that he was justified by faith, “as though he had never committed a single sin or ever been sinful,” but that he had to say as well, “Woe is me, for I am undone. Who will deliver me from this body of death? I do what I don’t want to do and don’t do what I want to do!”
This Paul whose knowledge of the things of God was so great that generations of Christians have studied him to understand the ways of God, wrote, “If I have all knowledge and have not love, I am nothing.” So Paul recognized that God intentionally keeps us off balance. The only reason we have for confidence is in Christ crucified for our sake. Which means that I must see myself as I am, needing such a sacrifice of so holy a Victim because in myself is no good thing.
All of this describes faith—a helpless grasping onto something God gives us. The gift is secure, but we who receive it are often insecure. No wonder that in faith there should be an element of doubt—self doubt, doubt to trust that what God offers me is actually offered me, because how am I even worthy of such a love from God? When this aspect of faith is lost we run the risk of forgetting the fact of our need. We may become proud that we believe, and this is hurtful to us and to the Gospel.
Jesus had both kinds of people in His chosen band of twelve disciples. Jesus kept both kinds of disciples. What makes a disciple of Jesus is not the confidence that brims in the mind but the faithfulness of the life in following after Jesus.
I learned when I was in Wroclaw, Poland a couple weeks ago that this was where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on February 4th, 1906. Then the city was part of Germany and was called Breslau. Outside one of the churches near the seminary where I taught I stood before a monument in his honor. My new faculty friends took me to see it. It was a bronze trunk of a man with evidence of a severe whipping on the body. Bonhoeffer was hanged at the command of Heinrich Himmler on April 9th, 1945, shortly before the fall of Berlin. It was a final gesture of contempt before the collapse of the Third Reich.
What a waste. So good a man. Such devotion. Such an exemplary life. So courageous and strong. Apparently so strong in his faith. Yet Bonhoeffer testified of himself a far less secure person. He wrote this poem in prison awaiting his execution:
“Who am I? They often tell me
I would step from my cell’s confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They also tell me
I would talk to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I would bear the days of misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself . . .
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.”
Whatever you think of yourself, the foundation of your faith is not your capacity to be self-confident, but in God whose love was poured out to you in a way no one can understand. The final act of God’s love was to raise His Son from death, ending the curse of sin and death. Perhaps your difficulty in believing is a benefit in that it will keep you from pride as you dare to trust God. In the final analysis, trust is response to our helplessness. A drowning person grabs in utter need for the floating doughnut of life tossed her way. Thus I respond to God, grasping helplessly to the resurrection of Jesus that floats above me on the surface of the water in which I am drowning.
A great part of the purpose of our life together is that those for whom faith comes hard should find help from those whose faith comes more easily. Very often people who struggle with their faith try hard by acts of service to find the sense of security they lack in deliberately serving God. Perhaps this was how Jesus’ little band of disciples lived together.
Jesus taught them that together they were His body. Not just after He was gone, but while He was with them. His Body was made up of those for whom trust came with difficulty as well as those for whom trust came more easily.
As Bonhoeffer served the underground Church in Germany that Hitler tried to suppress, he came to realize how “Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ . . . We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.”
Jesus Christ calls us to Himself with our various capacities, the weak with the strong, the confident with those lacking in self confidence, the doers with the thinkers, and we keep on keeping on, in every way that we can, keeping our focus on Him.
Let us keep on keeping on.
O Lord, in our various stages of trust and unbelief we come, thankful for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, whose love for us and whose death for us is our only hope in life. Help us to hold on to Him. In whose name we pray. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)