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May 29, 2005
Jesus Ascended to God’s Right Hand
Genesis 28: 10-14 / Acts 1: 6-11
May 29th, 2005
This morning the matter about which I speak may seem very far removed from real life. We are used to thinking about Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection. But what is there to think about Jesus ascension to God’s right hand when His ministry here was over?
This seems in that mysterious, mystical realm like Elijah’s ascent to heaven in a chariot of fire. The Jews have a highly developed kind of spirituality called Kabbalah mysticism that develops Elijah’s ascent to heaven. But this is a totally mystical idea. Christianity as most of us know it is a practical faith. “Help me know how to get through next week,” you ask. “Let the mystics talk about their imaginative subtleties.”
I thought about this. And I come to the conclusion that the reason why I want to talk about the ascension of Jesus to heaven is to help you and me make it through tomorrow and next week. Because tomorrow and next week, you and I are living in a vestibule on the threshold of what God holds beyond this life.
Not long after Easter the theme of the morning service was again Jesus’ resurrection—as we had arrived at that subject in the Nicene Creed. We sang that morning, “Because He lives I can face tomorrow” and “I serve a risen Savior; He’s in the world today.” These hymns reminded us how relevant to today and tomorrow Jesus’ resurrection is.
At our Christmas Eve service and then on Christmas Day I invited you to come with me in heart and mind to Bethlehem. And you came eager to kneel in heart and mind at the side of the manger, looking on the miracle of God’s love embodied in that little child. It brought you refreshment to do this.
But forgotten in our celebrations of Jesus’ life is His ascension at the end. I looked to one of my treasured sources for understanding Jesus, Bishop Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God, and discovered he didn’t mention the ascension of Jesus. Why, when it was the capstone of God’s victory in Jesus Christ?
Jesus’ birth and His ascension to heaven are like two bookends that provide the explanation of the meaning of life. Jesus was born like we were with a body in order to know life as we know it. He ascended to the Father bodily to let us know what will happen to us.
At funerals I will sometimes read the promise in I Thessalonians 4: 16-17:
For the Lord himself will descend from heaven . . . and the dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.
This picture of what will happen to us follows the model of Jesus’ ascension.
So a subtitle to this morning’s message might be, “Our bodies really do matter.” “Glorify God in your body,” the Apostle Paul tells us. Here is why. It is because this life we now live is a vestibule for heaven. Here as we live as unto the Lord we are carved into the kind of people enjoyable to the God who made us. Then, one day it will be for us as Paul describes in that beloved passage in I Thessalonians. We will “rise” to be with Him in heaven.
We face this odd dilemma that we now are more interested in what happens to our bodies now than in anything else. Our senses are very insistent. So we obey the bodily senses, sometimes exploit them, sometimes unwisely and even sinfully because they are so insistent.
But in some reflective moments, maybe after having exploited our senses, we sense this didn’t satisfy us, no matter how much we spent. Or, we realize it wasn’t wise or good. So we try to correct our thinking by musing that our bodies are only temporary and don’t matter. But this is the wrong corrective, and I think we all know it. Our bodies matter. And we can live enjoying them in a way that glorifies God; if we remember that we live this life in a vestibule to heaven.
Try to imagine what it will be like one minute after you die. The nurse just put her stethoscope on your chest; she listens and discovers there is no heartbeat. Those who love you are gathered around your hospital bed. They begin to cry as though your life had ended. But you are still in that room—as Catherine Marshall told us she realized when she made it to her husband Peter’s room shortly after he died. You want to say something to your loved ones, but you can’t. Your lips won’t move. You will realize then, as you look down at your shell how important your body was to life, but in a different way than you do now.
Whereas you used to think that things like politics, the Indianapolis Cols, Purdue Boilermakers, or your golf handicap, or your car, your home, your love life, your bank account, your career, retirement and all of that were fundamentally important, suddenly you realize that all of this was just ornamental.
What was really important you barely noticed, the life inside you where you made your way on a wavelength created by God. You were on a pilgrimage through life but you didn’t realize it. You thought it was just one thing after another until you retired and could do what you really like to do—and discovered you weren’t sure what you really wanted to do.
In the moments after death it will flash before us that all along we were on a pilgrimage in these bodies, and all the things that charmed us most were like wickets in a game of croquette. They were things to get through on the way to hitting the stick at the end of the game. This morning I hope I can encourage you to remember the stick at the end of the game. The stick at the end of the game is going to heaven to enjoy life with our Creator. That’s why it’s important and wonderful to glorify God in our bodies now. We easily lose sight of what is really important.
I’m reminded of a scene in the wonderful PBS movie of Delderfield’s novel, To Serve them All my Days. David Powlett-Jones, the hero in the story and a survivor of three years of battle at the front of the bloody battlefields of France, is talking with two young students in the hall of the main building of the boarding school where he teaches. The two boys are supposed to be busily polishing “Founder’s Oak,” as punishment for being late for chapel. Up comes Mr. Cordwein who tells Powlett-Jones not to distract the “late boys” as they polish Founder’s Oak. Powlett-Jones tells his older colleague they were discussing the war—the First World War which was then in progress—a topic the boys had more interest in than the teachers at the school. After all, they might have to fight in that war. But Old Cordwein, much too old to fight in a war, sarcastically replies that he has no control over the war but he does have control over polishing Founder’s Oak—which is the reason why there are wars to begin with, to preserve such important things as late boys polishing Founder’s Oak.
In remembering Jesus’ ascension I want to lure you into thinking that polishing Founder’s Oak is not what really matters.
Forty days after Easter, ten days before Pentecost, was Ascension Thursday. Christians once would not go to work on this day. They would attend special services to bless God for this day. There was good reason for this. It’s a subject mentioned often in the New Testament. But let us remember how it describes the event itself.
Luke tells us at the end of his Gospel: “Then Jesus led [His disciples] out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. And they returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God.”
Luke tells us in Acts 1:9, “He was lifted up, and a cloud took Him out of their sight.” They stood there looking up, as dumb-founded as you and I would be when two men clad in white robes appeared and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who has taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” This was the reason why they were happy. They would join Jesus again.
My favorite NT professor in seminary, Bruce Metzger, remarked about Jesus’ ascension, “no other story of the New Testament creates for the modern reader a greater sense of conflict between what he knows of astrophysics and what he thinks the Biblical account necessarily implies.” Even though Jesus’ disciples knew nothing about modern astrophysics, what they saw tells us something about what happened. My impression is that they actually saw Jesus rise and then disappear in the clouds even though heaven was no more up there than now.
Tom read this morning the story of Jacob’s dream of a ladder reaching to heaven. The Lord stood at the top of that ladder in his dream. “Up” was not only the ancient imagery of where God lives. We somehow think this way too. We find it more difficult to image God as everywhere present than to think of a place for Him, as earth is a place for us. God’s place is “up.” Our place is down to earth. The Bible accommodates itself to our intuitions and speaks of heaven as up. And when Jesus ascended my sense is that God accommodated to the disciples’ understanding—even though Jesus would continue to be present with them. “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” Jesus said. Even though He said, “I go to the Father,” this did not mean He went from them. But now there was the moment of closure on Jesus’ immediate physical presence as He disappeared, going up to heaven.
This gives us a clue to the greater reality in which we live our busy little lives. Jesus is with us as we strut and fret on the stage of what we can see in this life. He is with us in our dithering about this and that, calling us to live in terms of a larger and grander picture. This larger picture has to do with heaven. See life as a vestibule for heaven. All of this is wrapped up in Jesus’ ascension—the moment when He left our vestibule and went home.
We’re told that Jesus is at the right hand of the Father where He intercedes for us. That’s not far away. If only we could see! But we can’t see this that is beyond our capacity. Faith requires trust not sight. But maybe you can you picture Jesus here in this place praying for us, that is, talking with the Father about us, willing that we should win in the battles of life that we are fighting. Because what we do now in this bodily life matter eternally.
Jesus wills us to win some battles that we would prefer to lose—because it momentarily feels so good to lose some of the big battles of life. I imagine when we’re on our death bed we’ll not feel quite so good as we do now at some of the battles we chose to lose. When we ascend to heaven we will remember with gratitude God’s forgiveness of the battles we chose to lose.
The great Apostle who learned to follow Jesus after a very earnest religious life of rejecting Him tells us, “Seek those things which are above. Where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” The special imagery gets all mixed up because Paul urges us to do something, which implies we are not in this life, while we know very well that we are. We think of Jesus being with us now, but we’re right where we are—no getting around that. So of what use is it to us to think of Jesus’ ascension to the Father even as He is here with us now?
It is helpful to me to think of this life as in a very real sense a vestibule of heaven. Jesus ascended from this vestibule to the Father, and we wait our turn. But He is still with us, though not seen. We are to win these hard battles now—with all sorts of temptation.
When the great Apostle tells us, “Make every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,” he describes a struggle you and I are to engage in every day. Scrutinize your thoughts, your intentions, and your automatic reflexes. You and I who live in this vestibule to heaven are engaged in a cosmic struggle. There is a place “below” us as well as a place “above” us. Hell appeals to us ever so seductively; making seem glamorous those instincts that arise in us that we know would seem miserable in the presence of Jesus.
Heaven not hell is our true home. One day, the Bible tells us, we will ascend to heaven. In this earthly vestibule in which we live now, it is our privilege to live so that when we ascend to the heaven, we will discover that it was good to live in the sense of being in God’s presence all along.
Jesus, in the course of His life continually asked the Father, “What is your will?” He told His disciples, “My will is to do the will of my Father who sent me.” When He ascended to the Father He had finished His time in this vestibule we call “life,” obedient to the will of the Father. God will not impose on us His will. But it is the way of life of the Christian to ask to know the Father’s will, so that when we one day follow Jesus in His ascension, we will recognize how like heaven earth can be.
I find my mind moving in many directions in applying this truth to life. It affects my marriage, my ministry to you, and my relationship with friends. I cannot think of an aspect of life untouched by this sense. I pray we may be responsive to the voice of the Holy Spirit who politely prompts us to desire to live in this vestibule of earthly life in such a way that we will be glad when we see Jesus face to face. This will happen at our ascension. I’m convinced we have an atrophied understanding of how good is this life, how filled with joy unspeakable and full of glory, when we deliberately present our bodies to God, to live to His glory.
We celebrate Jesus’ birth, when He began life as we all do. We thank God for His death on the cross to bear our sins in His body. We rejoice at Easter because then Jesus overcame the death that one-day will tag us. Each of these details of our trust in God finds its capstone in Jesus’ ascension to His true abode as God, to heaven. You and I still live in the part of Jesus’ life that we call “the earthly life.” But this is not the whole thing. We now live in the entryway, the vestibule of heaven. I think you and I have probably had moments when we thought we saw some glimpses of something more. They were hints God provided of what will be.
We will ascend too as Jesus did. I pray God’s Holy Spirit will lure us successfully to live our days in this vestibule so that our ascension will be a time of great joy.
Let us pray: We ask that what we have pondered in the past few moments may guide us to live so as to be pleased to see Jesus when we follow Him in due time. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2005
The Descent of the Dove
Joel 2: 21-29 / Acts 2: 1-4, 14-21
Matthew 3: 16-17
May 15th, 2005
Pentecost
One of my favorite ladies in this congregation asked me when I visited her the first time, “Tell me about the Holy Spirit.” I replied, “Do you have a minute?” I don’t remember what I told her, but she told me very kindly when I finished expostulating, “”That was helpful. I always wondered about the Holy Spirit.”
I would guess that very many people would say they don’t know very much about the Holy Spirit. But it’s not because a lot has not been said of Him.
Maybe you think it odd that I should say “Him” rather than “it” in referring to the Spirit. A basic courtesy we use is to refer to the Holy Spirit as Him rather than “it.” We say “it” when referring to an animal but either “him” or “her” when referring to a person.
Actually the word “spirit” is a feminine word in both the ancient languages of the Bible. But word gender is not the same thing as “sex.” One of the interesting aspects of the Hebrew language is that all the body parts that appear in pairs except one are “feminine.” The one pair that is distinctly part of a woman’s body is masculine in gender!
We stray into something that is simply not intended if we speculate on masculine and feminine in the Trinity. God is not some sort of composite of masculine and feminine as creation enjoys this wonderful divide. God made up this idea for the world to enjoy.
But already I’ve strayed from what I should be saying. What I should be reminding us all, myself very much included, is that it is far more important that the Holy Spirit be granted the directing authority in our day-to-day life than that we know all about Him. “Walk in the Spirit and do not gratify the desires of the flesh,” Paul urges us Christians in one of his letters.
Why, when the flesh is a pretty fascinating gift God has given us? Because “the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit.” The “flesh” is just a bundle of impulses. They are like electric currents that can run wild. When we follow only these impulses that arise within us the result is this: “sexual immorality, impurity of mind, sensuality, worship of false gods, witchcraft, hatred, quarrelling, jealousy, bad temper, rivalry, factions, party-spirit, envy, drunkenness, orgies and things like that.” Turn on the TV and you see just what the Bible means.
By contrast, if the Holy Spirit has found within us a home what we will see is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, fidelity, adaptability and self-control.” For the fruit of the spirit to find a place on our branches we’ve got to say “no” to a lot of impulses of the flesh. That’s hard. Real hard! It’s not something every Christian realizes and no one does easily.
What is important is not how much information about the Holy Spirit we know, but how completely our impulses are under the Holy Spirit’s authority. His is a gentle and good authority.
Since day one Christians have not been lacking in ideas about the Holy Spirit, but it is sure, experiential knowledge that we need. Find the church where love binds one to another throughout the church, there the Holy Spirit is at home. Find the community where joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, fidelity, adaptability and self-control make the place a hospitable climate for human beings, and you can know you are enjoying the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Oddly, Christians have squabbled a great deal about the Holy Spirit. Partly this is because it is hard to nail down “facts” about Him.
Indeed, as the term “spirit” implies, the Holy Spirit is mysteriously beyond us. You and I live in bodies. Though we are aware we are more than bodies, we are in the realm of mystery, of what we cannot experience with our five senses when we think and speak of the Holy Spirit. It is no wonder then, that many books have been written about the Holy Spirit. Alexander Pope observed that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” And Christian scholars rush in to write about the Holy Spirit who is most elusive to understand.
Very often those who write about the Holy Spirit divide their comments into two parts, first, the Person and second, the works of the Holy Spirit. I begin with the work of the Holy Spirit.
When Christians think of the work of the Holy Spirit they are easily led into thinking about outward exhibits of an unusual nature. Last Sunday I briefly mentioned speaking in tongues, the ecstatic speech that takes place mainly but not only in Pentecostal churches. Or you have seen on religious programs on the TV healing services where at least the claim is made that people are healed of many different bodily problems. Some churches focus on “the gift of prophecy,” where a person believes she has received a direct message from God, sometimes about the future.
Each of these outward works of the Spirit is mentioned in the New Testament and I do not doubt that they may be faithful expressions of the Holy Spirit’s presence. But they have very often not been faithful expressions of the Holy Spirit’s presence. Sometimes they are blatantly false. Sometimes people ambitious to gather a following will pretend to have these gifts in order to fool trusting people. In recent years we have seen a few TV preachers reveal how out of control of the Holy Spirit they were by engaging in sexual and financial sins.
A far greater clue to the presence of the Holy Spirit in a church is found when the fruit of the Holy Spirit hangs from every limb, so to speak. This fruit is the deep work of the Spirit.
Paul wrote in a famous passage—as Phillips translated it, “
If I were to speak with the combined eloquence of men and angels and . . . have not love I should do nothing more. If I had the gift of foretelling the future and had in my mind not only all human knowledge but the secrets of God, and if, in addition, I had that absolute faith which can move mountains, but had no love, I tell you I should amount to nothing at all.
The Holy Spirit is much more identifiable by deep changes that come about in us than in any kind of outward exhibit. There is no showing-off about the Holy Spirit. He has often been referred to as “courteous.” As our bodies are animated by something mysterious deep inside that we call our “spirit,” so the Holy Spirit occupies a mysterious presence deep within us if we have invited Him into us. He has to be welcome. In order to be welcome we have to say NO to a lot of impulses that stir and rage inside.
But I must propose some specific details the Bible gives of the Person of the Holy Spirit. We confess the Holy Spirit is the third Person of Trinity. After Jesus was baptized by His cousin, John, in the Jordan River, the Gospels tell us that the heavens opened and He saw the Holy Spirit descend on Him in the form of a dove. John’s Gospel tells us that John the Baptist saw the dove come down. This was how John knew his Cousin Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit.
I have called my message today, The Descent of the Dove. This was the title Charles Williams, a friend of C.S. Lewis, chose for his brief, and very suggestive history of the Church. The descent of the dove gave the spark that ignited Jesus’ followers from dispirited believers into witnesses who launched a world-changing work that we think of as the Church. Christendom should be more dove like then.
How odd that a dove should be the image for the Holy Spirit. The dove is usually thought of as the gentlest of birds, and actually not the brightest. “Harmless as a dove” is a term we use to describe someone totally without aggression. Power is not what you think of when you think of a dove.
But we think of God as all powerful. Wouldn’t the eagle be a better symbol for the Holy Spirit? In Genesis 1 when we’re told about the Spirit of God hovering over the surface of the waters, the word for “hovered” (marachephet) is used elsewhere to describe the eagle as it flutters over its young (Deut. 32: 11). Isaiah promises us that those who trust in the Lord will “mount with wings like eagles,” not like doves. The eagle seems a more fitting bird to stand for the third Person of the Trinity, of Almighty God. But it’s the dove that is the sign of the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Holy Trinity.
When the Bible tells us of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ, there is no mention of power as we think of power. Isaiah wrote about Jesus, “As a lamb before its shearers is dumb so He opened not his mouth.” The Son of God stood seemingly powerless before Pilate who ordered His crucifixion. What’s going on?
Part of what’s going on is this, that God’s idea of power and our idea of power are very different. Our idea of power is shortsighted. We think of short-range objectives. Often our idea of power is self-centered. It has to do with getting what we want.
God’s power works for lasting ends for the good of the world and works out the love and holiness of God. With this in mind let us look at what happened at Pentecost, the great day we celebrate today.
Today is Pentecost Sunday. This is why we have draped from the pulpit the beautiful red pulpit fall Kathleen Kirsch made. Red is symbolic of Holy Spirit. We remember that the Holy Spirit of God came on the assembled disciples who waited in an upper room in Jerusalem. Pentecost was the second great Jewish festival that drew the faithful to Jerusalem. Passover was the first, and the Feast of Booths that comes usually in October was the third great feast. When the Holy Spirit came it was an uncanny experience. There was the sound of a mighty rushing wind, but no wind. Had there been a wind it would have blown out the flames of fire that rested on top of the heads of the disciples.
The little tongues of fire must have been an eerie thing to see. What would you think if this happened here this morning. What did this new sign mean, they wondered? How helpless we would feel in the presence of such a strange sequence of events if they happened here this morning.
Peter who was the leader in the Jerusalem fellowship did not tell all the people to do what they did next. It was seemingly a spontaneous act that sent the people into the streets. Were their faces aglow under an obvious anointing? When Acts tells us that they spoke in other languages as the Spirit gave them speech, did they speak on different street corners at the top of their lungs? Or did each one find himself or herself drawn to this or that person in the streets?
You could tell where people in the streets came from by how they dressed. On the Purdue campus you can tell the young women from an Arab country by her modest dress and head coverings. So in Jerusalem back then it would have been evident who was from North Africa, who was from Spain, who was from Persia, etc, by how people dressed. Each spoke a different language.
To each of these someone from that upper room came speaking his or her language, explaining the Gospel of Jesus with convincing fascination. Their faces were aglow. They must have been irresistible rather than annoying fanatics because they were personally interested in those to whom they spoke.
And thus began obedience to Jesus’ command, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the uttermost part of the earth.” How decentralized and international was this command. The more international is our sensitivity as Christians the more we are into the spirit of Pentecost. The disciples did not batten down their hatches and focus on the importance of their little Galileean gathering. They went global. Little did they realize that in one morning the farthest points of the known world were given the Gospel right from the streets of Jerusalem!
Here in West Lafayette, in this very international community, let our kindness, our hospitality, our personal warmth and our global cove be the means God can use for us to communicate the Gospel—first in deeds and attitude, and then when the door is open, in words young folk from every nation can trust reflects the loving faith of Jesus Christ by which we live.
Jesus said to His disciples, “You shall receive power after the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” What kind of power? It was the kind of power that came from being “baptized in the Holy Spirit,” as John the Baptist used the term.
It seems an odd term, to “baptize with the Holy Spirit.” What does this mean? It means, I think, to be dipped in the Holy Spirit so that you come up wringing wet head to toe. The wetness comes from being soaked with each aspect of the fruit of the Spirit Paul outlines in Galatians 5. You are dripping wet with the Holy Spirit when it is obvious that you are loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, adaptable, and self-controlled. How beautifully wet is a person baptized in the Holy Spirit!
Now there are other aspects to the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit that we might mention. John’s Gospel calls the Holy Spirit the “Paraclete,” the Comforter. He offers guidance. He stirs good ideas by which the work of the Church flourishes. He stirs the conscience. He is usually present with us usually gently, and can be quenched by stubborn attitudes. I could go on and on about what the Bible teaches and about what Christians have experienced, but not today.
I would conclude by saying again what is most important. Regardless of how much you and I know about the Holy Spirit we can experience His gentle power in us. His principal problem in us are the impulses of the flesh, all those self-centered instincts that are short-sighted and very insistent. If we want to follow Jesus we’ve got to learn to say “No!” very forcefully to these impulses inside of us in order to say, “Yes” to the Holy Spirit. Christians have discovered that they must “yield” to the Holy Spirit.
To yield is let loose the desire to control others and to open ourselves to His work. But we know the tendency of His work. It will be to stir in us love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, adaptability, and self-control. This list is like a recipe for us. When we intentionally move in the direction of these traits, we are following the leading of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray that the Holy Spirit, that dove-like, courteous, powerful, mysterious Person may find Faith Church a very home-like place.
Heavenly Father, give to us again and again Your Holy Spirit and may He find in us again and again a true home. In Jesus name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
May 08, 2005
Jesus Arose As the Bible Said
Psalm 16 / Isaiah 53: 10-12
I Corinthians 15: 3-4
May 8th, 2005
Today is Mother’s Day. Few ideals can touch the heart like “mother.” I wonder how many soldiers have had “MOM” tattooed on their arms when far from home. They look down and see those three letters and think of the one who holds them in her heart no matter what.
How did Mother’s Day get started? In the 17th century in England the practice began of keeping the fourth Sunday in Lent as “Mothering Sunday.” The working poor folk who lived away from home serving in the homes of the wealthy got to return home for Mothering Sunday.
In 1872, Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” helped organize Mother’s Day meetings in Boston. Thirty-five years later, Ann Jarvis from Philadelphia persuaded her mother’s church in Grafton, West Virginia to celebrate Mother’s Day on the second anniversary of her mother’s death, which happened to fall on the second Sunday in May. She began writing to pastors, legislators, governors, and to others who could spread the idea. It caught on.
By 1911, Mother’s Day was an established day in most of our states. Three years later President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May national Mother’s Day. We bless you mothers who gave us life! Bless you all who were born to mothers. You reflect not only the features you inherited from your parents. You are made in the image of God.
This Mother’s Day our theme is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Easter and Mother’s Day have this in common that they both call our attention to a burst of new life. You came from your mother a baby human being. You will rise from the grave a new being never to die again.
The reason I draw Easter into our thoughts this morning is because you may remember the Nicene Creed is guiding our thoughts. We have come to the phrase in the Nicene Creed, “The third day he arose according to the Scriptures.”
It is a nearly exact quote from part of the passage in I Corinthians we just heard. Paul wrote, “I delivered to you of first importance, and that I received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.”
The whole Gospel is summed up here. It is the primary interest of every Christian. It is the bond and glue that holds us together. Here is the look to the past that gives us hope for the future. It is no wonder that Paul wrote, “I delivered to you what is of first importance,” because the church to which he wrote was being torn apart by matters that were not of first importance. These words leaped out at me. It was and intentional emphasis.
The chapter just before this contains the most Presbyterian verse in the Bible. In the last verse Paul tells us, “Let all things be done decently and in order.” He wrote this because of two matters that had gotten out of hand. Both of these things have modern counterparts. The first was speaking in tongues, something not too many Presbyterians do, but which a lot of Christians do in some sectors of the Church. The second matter had to do with the role of women in the Church.
Speaking in tongues became a very important part of early Christian experience after Pentecost. Before that, in the fifty days since Jesus was crucified, the only issue was that Jesus died and rose again. These two concluding events in Jesus’ ministry were the glue that held His followers together. Jesus insured they would actually stay together by telling them to wait in Jerusalem until they received the promise of the Father. They didn’t know what that meant, but they found out in no uncertain terms.
On Pentecost morning the room in which they were together was filled with the sound of a mighty rushing wind. The usual word “wind” and the word “Spirit” are the same in the language of the New Testament. But here we find a different word for “wind” (biaios) which means a strong or violent wind, not just a breath-like wind, which is the word used for the Holy Spirit.
Looking around then each saw what looked like fire on each other’s heads. They burst from that room into the streets of Jerusalem speaking the Gospel in languages they’d never even heard. Some people in the city thought they were drunk when they heard language not their own. They were, in a sense--drunk with the Holy Spirit. How their hearts must have burst with this new wine, this Divine energy surging in them!
It is no wonder that after this ecstatic speaking should have found some place in the church. The speaking in tongues that happened on Pentecost was the speaking of actual languages. But these languages came with feelings of great enthusiasm as people spoke. The church grew in a huge thrust. Three thousand people in Jerusalem were baptized that first Pentecost.
But as often happens among people, some got side-tracked and thought of the tongues-speaking, the ecstatic speech, as the thing of importance. So speaking in tongues became a problem. It got out of hand. Speaking in tongues became a sort of test of spirituality. If I can do it and you can’t, guess who’s the better Christian? Not everyone could speak in tongues. In I Corinthians 14 Paul set down rules for speaking in tongues during church. There has to be an interpreter or it would only sound like gibberish to the rest. One should speak at a time (14: 27) and only two or three at most should do it during a service. Just because it got out of hand, let no one for that reason forbid it in the church.
Speaking in tongues was dividing the Church instead of building it up. Paul needed to remind them what was of first importance.
We don’t understand what Paul was getting at when he wrote that women should keep silence in the churches. In other places in the New Testament women had speaking roles. He must have been addressing a particular problem at Corinth.
In 14: 36 he asks some women who were causing difficulty, “What! Did the word of God originate with you, or are you the only ones it has reached?” Sometimes when people have a moving experience they are so fascinated with their experience that they impose it on others, expecting them to see right away how specially anointed by God they are. When others don’t recognize this immediately, things can get sticky.
Both of these issues could have risen to the top of the heap, making Corinth a seething church, seething not with the power of the Holy Spirit but with tension and division. So Paul wrote, “Here is the Gospel in which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it fast—I delivered to you as of first importance—Christ died, was buried and was raised on the third day all according to the Scriptures.”
This church, so important to the spread of the Gospel, so privileged to receive some of the most basic ideas of the Christian faith, fought a lot. This is one of the great puzzles of early Christianity. They had received so much. They were squandering their good fortune by divisiveness. Each said the other was the reason.
Internal strife was the first problem Paul addressed in this church. Why speak to the problem of strife, which is only natural when people have different points of view? Because if Jesus taught anything that should characterize His followers it was this, that they should be known by their love for each other. Continuing to love doesn’t happen easily. If anything makes this teaching of Jesus seem out of place, we have a problem.
Jesus prayed to the Father that we would be one even as He was one with the Father. Jesus prayed this referring to those who were yet to come, that is to you and me, and not only with regard to His twelve disciples—one of whom would betray Him.
So Paul appealed to these folk, “I appeal to you brothers and sisters by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same judgment (1: 10).” It seems an unreasonable expectation. How is it possible to get people with different and very earnest points of view to agree.
“OK,” some seem to have said, “We’ll all agree so long as we follow Peter.” Peter was one of the twelve. Paul was not. Perhaps Peter had come to Corinth too and impressed some of the folk who had become Christians more than they were impressed with Paul. Paul probably rubbed some people the wrong way. So they went to hear a “real apostle” speak when Paul was speaking in another assembly in the city. They liked him better. “Peter’s the one,” they said. Others disagreed. They would follow Paul. He was the one who got the whole thing going. He was their spiritual father. Besides, Peter had botched things pretty badly when Jesus needed him most.
Still others said, “No, do you not see that we’ve been blessed with this great orator from Alexandria, Egypt—Apollos? He is God’s fresh gift to us. Paul and Peter are of the old school. Apollos has the fresh anointing of God’s Spirit. When he speaks the air is alive. People could not help but call out “Amen, brother!” when he spoke. They would break out in applause, interrupting his eloquent message. They went home feeling electrified after church. No one ever felt like that when Paul spoke.
Perhaps the most divisive of all were those who said, “Jesus only.” They were impossible. They wouldn’t listen to anyone, only their own fertile imaginations as they thought of Jesus. All who fostered strife in the church in Corinth had a spiritual reason for doing it.
In the second chapter we discover that the church had become sophisticated. The city of Corinth had inherited the wisdom of the great Greek philosophers. Greek paideia, the educational system that formed the character of every well-established Greek person, rubbed against the simplicity of the Gospel.
I remember in seminary trying to figure out how to apply Whitehead’s idea of “process in history” to the Gospel as was popular in those days of Process Theology. I remember trying to get the hang of Paul Tillich’s existential theology. Karl Barth’s very appealing theology of crisis seemed to collide with the commonsense, logic-based ideas about the Bible that dominated in the surging evangelical community. And thus the church stumbled over its own cleverness during the years I was in seminary. We were lured into identifying ourselves by which school of theology we agreed with.
This is how it was in Corinth. So Paul, though highly educated, poured out his soul. “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
It is quite something to imagine this courageous man who could stand up to Roman authorities fearlessly, now tongue-tied before the people in Corinth to whom he had introduced the Gospel. “I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom.” This hardly sounds like the Paul we have in mind. It can be very odd to try to preach the Gospel into strife. I have sometimes found that nothing is quite so inhospitably received as the clearest things Jesus taught, when this message collides with a different spirit at work in the church. This was Paul’s experience long before me.
What did he mean when he spoke of his message being reduced to “a demonstration of the Spirit and of power?” He had been like the birth-mother of this church. Perhaps in his quietness, his tongue-tied silence, it was evident that what surged in his heart was authentic, and the tense lines of controversy in the church could then appear as simply human contentiousness.
It seems that a significant number of those at Corinth must have recognized their problem. They saw themselves as others saw them and were alarmed with themselves more than with others. They were again hungry for the truth that was at the heart of their faith. And thus this letter which Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth came to be a treasure to share. They did not tear it up and throw it away. They preserved it so that every church afterward that faced the problems that had rendered their fellowship and worship sterile could find an antidote and get back on track.
I hear very often these days about the problem in our denomination. People are transferring to non-Presbyterian churches in bunches. Our rolls dwindle every year. Why, our leaders ask? We think of this or that remedy. Let’s go modern. Drums and guitars will replace the classic organ. Our songs will be like the songs popular in secular culture, only with Christian words. We’ll cut out the formality. We must appeal to the youth. They are our future. So many answers address particular problems.
But the secret to our success, the secret to the success of the Body of Christ in this tormented world, is for us to remember what is of first importance. So long as anything but what is of first importance is at the focus of our attention, we will be focusing on what is secondary or maybe even not important to the cause of Christ at all. For sure, the moment humility and a contrite heart evaporate, God does not find us a homey place to be.
When what is of first importance grabs our hearts, we are filled with gratitude. Gratitude is a wonderful stimulus to a kind of life that cannot be planned. Gratitude incites to a kind of action that no program can bring. Gratitude is very liberating. It moves the imagination. We love to sing, “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” That’s a grateful song. Sometimes I freshly encounter a person whose life seems to be moved by gratitude and it is beautiful.
Last Sunday I helped to ordain three deacons at the Korean Presbyterian Church. One of these I have had occasion to watch for quite a while. She has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and has done first-rate research. But I didn’t learn this of her right away, and it was clearly not important to her. She is happiest when doing what you and I would consider menial service in the church. I felt so privileged to take part in her ordination, to preach and then to lay my hand on her head as Pastor Kim prayed.
I met her one day down on the floor laying tile in the bathrooms of their new facility. I’ll not soon forget that picture in my mind. She had such a radiant face. She bursts with kindness. She is happiest, her pastor told me, when doing something for someone. She is first on the doorstep when someone is ill and needs a meal. She delivers it giving the sense that she is lucky to get to do this. Why? Somehow I hope you may come to know this remarkable, simple lady. There seethes in her heart a spirit of gratitude to God. This is the real thing. It is so beautiful.
Paul wrote, “I have delivered to you what is of first importance, which I have received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, and that he rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures.” Because of this you and I have hope in this life. And we know that when we trust in Jesus, when we die we will go to heaven. And that’s a pretty good deal—“Amazing grace that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” That’s a happy song.
Charles Wesley put it equally touchingly: “And can it be that I should gain an interest in my Savior’s blood? Died He for me who caused His pain? Amazing love! How can it be that Thou my God should’st die for me.” A pretty good deal, I’d say.
My people, my friends, my fellow Christians, this is of first importance.
Let us pray: O Lord God, heavenly Father, thank you that Jesus died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2005
Jesus Suffered Death and Was Buried
Q. 60, Heidelberg Catechism / Isaiah 53: 1-6/Matthew 27: 57-61
May 1st, 2005
This morning I would like to speak about why Jesus suffered death and was buried. I think that we customarily think of Jesus’ death as the means God used to take care of the problem of sin—as far as He was concerned. We may fail to see how Jesus died to take care of the problem of sin as far as we are concerned. I would much rather stand before the bar of God’s justice than to stand before a human court. God’s mercy, after all, is everlasting on those who fear Him.
The holy God looks at your sin and mine and says to us who ask forgiveness, “I forgive you for Jesus’ sake.” He bore in His body on the cross your sins and mine. But a human court looks on the offending person and thinks one thing: punishment.
We carry this outlook over into ordinary life. We notice one another’s faults and find it very hard to forgive. We who sin are hard on the sins of others. How keen and indiscriminate is the gift of memory. We who are forgiven live maintaining crossfires of condemnation that can make of life a very painful experience. Depression and anxiety are major causes of physical illness because we have perpetuated guilt before one another.
Jesus died not only to grant us peace with God, but also in order to give us peace with one another. After God has cared for sin at such cost, have we not tried to perpetuate the sense of being offended?! This is why Jesus suffered death—to put an end to this problem between people as well as before God.
In a way it seems odd to say Jesus “suffered” death because probably nothing is less painful than death itself. But I have taken this term, “He suffered death” from the Nicene Creed as we have it in our Book of Confessions. In the sentence before this in the Nicene Creed we read that Jesus was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate. The crucifixion was the painful part.
Again we heard today the stark words of Isaiah 53 that remind us of the ancient prophet’s words that it was “incredible” it was that this perfect One should suffer. “Who can believe our report?” The Gospel of Matthew lays out the details of the incredibly grim day of Jesus’ suffering and death. From noon until 3: 00 o’clock PM there was darkness enshrouding Jerusalem. At 3 o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Then, after refusing a sip of vinegar from a sponge—offered, some think, to relieve the pain, but perhaps it was pressed to His parched mouth when He had no longer the energy to turn His head away from it to revive Him and prolong His pain, Jesus cried out again and yielded up His spirit.” That is, He died.
At that moment the veil in the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. There was an earthquake and many tombs were opened in the city. A number of us here have seen those ancient graveyards in Jerusalem, one of which has the tomb of King David. Did he rise that day? I wonder. Many bodies of holy people came to life and walked into the city. Imagine the consternation in those who saw this! The centurion who administered Jesus’ crucifixion was filled with awe. He said, “Truly this was the Son of God. A number of women watched this from some distance. We don’t know how long these events took to unfold. Perhaps within the space of a few minutes. And then silence settled over Golgotha where Jesus was crucified. Three hours or more passed with Jesus hanging there dead.
Evening came and a rich man from the city named Joseph a follower of Jesus who Mark’s Gospel tells us was a member of the Sanhedrin went to Pilate asking to care for Jesus’ body. Perhaps it was a guilty conscience that compelled Pilate to command that this rich man be given Jesus’ body. I wonder how Joseph and his servants cared for Jesus’ body. Did they lift the cross out of the hole in which it was planted, laying it flat on the ground. Or did they use ladders to reach his hands? They had to get those spikes out of his hands and feet—which must have been hard to do because they were pounded deep through His hands into the wood.
Joseph wrapped Jesus’ body in a clean linen shroud and had it carried to his own tomb which had been carved from rock in a hillside. He had a large stone rolled in front of the tomb, perhaps to keep Jesus’ enemies from desecrating it. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary stayed behind, sitting in front of the sepulcher. We don’t know when they left to go home. Perhaps they stayed through the night till the Temple guards arrived the next day. They were sent to guard the tomb so Jesus’ disciples wouldn’t steal it and then say He was risen.
Why all of this? During Holy Week we pass through these details so fast, mostly remembering the general effect of that dreadful Friday before Easter’s joyous victory. But the Gospels spell out the details of Jesus’ death first. Why did Jesus suffer like this? We think the answer is theological—to satisfy a holy God who so hates sin that the only way He could love us was to expunge our sin at this kind of cost—the Incarnate Son of God’s body.
I have many questions. Our questions are legitimate.
Why all of this? God could have taken care of the chaos of sin as swiftly as He took care of the chaos before creation, with a word. “Let there be a separation of sin from humanity,” and instantly Pilate and the Sanhedrin would have been changed to become saints, as holy as St. Francis of Assissi. Jerusalem would have changed into a gracious city with all the wealthy people immediately caring for the street people, inviting them home, sharing those extra rooms that stood vacant, letting them feast in their dining rooms. And all who were in prison released—the criminals instantly reformed, the political prisoners no longer with the cause that made them hostile to Rome. Why did God not accomplish this reordering of society with a Word?
God made His Son suffer, die, and be buried so as to include the sequence of life to its end as miserably as any human being can endure it. Because God, for reasons known only to Him, needed to take on Himself the sin and its full misery that afflicted the human race. He recapitulated in the life of Jesus the full possible misery of human life—injustice, abandonment by friends, physical pain, and then death.
The Apostle Paul summed it up: “God made Him who knew no sin to become sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” We usually think of sin as category of offense to God, little realizing how offensive you and I find sin too. Jesus died to take care of the sin problem that bothers us as well as the sin problem that bothers God. Because it is the sins that bother us that are the cause of so much distress in this life.
We imagine God to be angry with sinners. But are you and I not angry with the sins of others?! And how many are the categories of offenses that we maintain!
Paul Tournier, a Swiss Christian psychiatrist, wrote a report of his clinical experience with this problem in a book he called Guilt and Grace. He wrote, “All people are continually making mutual accusations.” “A guilty conscience is the seasoning of our daily life.” He summarized how burdened we are with guilt for so many “sins,” many of which are not sins at all.
A child who grows up in a home with parents who were sharply critical carries with her through life a feeling of guilt for not measuring up to their expectations. She is eating at the dinner table. She asks for the butter, and when it is passed to her, rather than cutting from the end that has already been cut, she cuts from the uncut end. And father chides her, “You should cut from the other end.” Then silence. No happy conversation. And so meal time breeds indigestion.
For some young people it comes naturally to study and to do well. But not for all. It may surprise you to know I was not at first a good student. I know I’m perceived as a scholar with this spiffy doctoral robe and all that—but that came later. I’m grateful that in America we have an educational process that gives second chances.
For reasons I think had something to do with moving from one culture to another, from one school to another the first fourteen years of my life, I never found stride in grade school and high school. It was hard for me. So I can sympathize with those who are afraid of report-card time. While some are getting their valedictorian pins and National Honor Society commendations, you lurk in embarrassment at Cs and Ds on your report card, maybe even an F or two. But you don’t know how to do better. And in a society that rewards achievers, you feel guilty.
I have known young people who feel guilty simply for showing up, so accused do they feel. They hug the shadows, desiring not to be seen. Their complexions embarrass them. They cannot love themselves because they have learned to feel condemned—not by God, but by their peers and by grown-ups. Some children so cringe before criticism that they never find their way in life. They imagine criticism to add to their burden. Other children rebel. They are protesting against the guilt they can stand no longer.
What is the source of eating disorders? I feel guilty because I’m fat. Even if I am lean as a beanpole I may be suspicious I’m fat, so I eat and purge. I feel guilty for not looking like the model of good looks established by society. Or I am taught to feel guilty for being of the “wrong” race. In our religious differences we hold others to account for not seeing things as we do. Sometimes we speak to each other in ways that we intend to arouse guilt as a means of making them do what we think they should do. All of this should not be!
There is valid guilt, of course. It is a wholesome guilt that comes in response to doing wrong—violating trust, telling lies, hurting someone by word or deed. But even for legitimate guilt God offers us such a simple solution: confess your sin. Acknowledge you did it. Be forgiven. That’s it, accept that you are forgiven, then pass along the forgiveness and be on with life.
But all guilt is not valid guilt. And in so far as we maintain a society of false guilt, as Christians, we have failed to enjoy the benefit to us of Jesus death on the cross. He died that we could live to Him who loves us that much, in order to create a community of forgiveness in which we embrace one another.
There are times when I think the Christian faith and the Church are the most wonderful things possible in life. I certainly had this in mind thirty-three years ago when the idea hit me that I should spend some time serving in the church. I thought it would maybe last two years, a sort of tithe of my life the way Mormon missionaries do.
The Christian faith, after all hovers under the spell of the Gospel. The Gospel is God’s love poured out for the world. The Gospel provides you and me a context in which to think about everything and everyone. God’s love at huge cost—on His part. His love in me—on my part. The Christian faith is spelled out vividly by the Apostle Paul when he wrote, “He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” What a possibility. The perfect goodness that God approves and that you and I long for, given to us—handed to me on a golden platter of grace. All you and I have to do is to accept it with a grateful heart.
The Church is the society of those who have received this grace. It is the community of all people throughout time who have received the favor of God. It is homes like this. It is Bible studies like this. It is congregations like this.
But you and I have not always found it this way. How often we live accused, and accusing. And each of us is right. When I am found wanting, I must agree. The one who accuses me has hit the target. If only that one knew the full extent of my fault!
The Apostle Paul wrote, “Who shall lay any charge against God’s elect?/ It is God—but then God justifies, declares us to be as though we had never committed a single sin or ever been sinful, having fulfilled myself all the obedience which Christ has carried out for me.” We live unforgiving, and unforgiven, accused and accusing. How far this is from the Gospel life!
Why did Jesus suffer death and was then buried? To take on Himself the complete burden of our real guilt, to take it to the grave where it could decay. Jesus bore our sins in His body to free us from them, to make it unmistakably clear how much God loves us. He did this to create in us a clean heart and to renew a right spirit. And it is the Christian way to live basking in this forgiveness, and then spreading to others the blessedness of this way of life.
Thus may our children be nurtured in such a way that they know how God loves them because of how we love them. Thus may we nurture each other, building up one another. Let us lure each other into the grace in which we believe we stand before God. Here is the antidote to false guilt, to that insidious disease that makes of life such a miserable thing for so many. Here is the love of God manifested in a way that we can see it and feel it. This prods us to good works, to works of mercy, to works of blessing—all out of gratitude for the grace of God shed abroad in our hearts.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we are astounded at the magnificence of your mercy. Give us the grace, now, to accept your mercy, and to enjoy it fully. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)