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September 25, 2005
What Happens to us After we Die?
“We believe in the resurrection of the dead.”
Psalm 23 / Daniel 12: 1-3
I Thessalonians 4: 13-18
September 25th, 2005
This morning I have invited Dan Taylor from Trinity Mission to share with us something of Trinity’s ministry. He reaches out to people whose lives have been hurt badly by destructive aspects of popular American life. Drugs and alcohol attack the soul through the body. The devil’s avenue to destroy the soul is the body.
This coordination of the theme before us this morning with the ministry of Trinity mission is timely. You may remember that in these morning messages I have been exploring that great first statement of faith of the Church, the Nicene Creed. We have come to the second to last phrase, “We look for the resurrection of the dead.” It is a teaching that presumes the worth to God of our bodies.
So this morning I want to speak first of bodily life, and second of the resurrection life.
This ancient statement of faith begins remembering God as the “Creator of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen.” – or “of all kinds of bodies.” The physical side of creation, the only part we know specifically, matters to God.
The Creed ends reminding us of what God will do with us. God will bring these bodies back to life because they are worth it -- created in the image of the eternal God. How strange it seems to think, as I look at the human form in all its variety, that somehow it reflects the image and likeness of God who is the eternal Spirit, not limited by a body.
Paul wrote that Jesus was “the image, the _____, as the Greek has it, of the invisible God,” and again, “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” What remarkable words. He writes of Jesus’ embodying God because those who read this, which is a “spiritual truth,” read with physical eyes. These bodies of ours are far more significant than we realize. They are the means by which we know about spiritual things. Jesus was God coming to us in a body because what we are begins with our bodies.
Sometimes I get the feeling that Christians think the soul is more important than the body “spiritually speaking.” How fuzzy that word “spiritual” can be, a total cop-out on reality. We imagine God is more interested in our invisible souls than in these disposable bodies. Perhaps we hope this is true so that we can get away with doing things our Sunday School teachers said we shouldn’t do. But perhaps, in a more positive way of looking at it, we get this idea a bit more deeply than that because Jesus taught, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.”
Jesus did not mean the body was not important. It’s very important, so He taught us to pray for our food, “Give us this day our daily bread.” He meant that when a test comes between living in obedience to God and being killed, it is more important to live in obedience to God than to do everything possible to remain alive.
Scripture tells us, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” How broad a category is “whatever you do.” Our conversation, our friendships, our careers, our hobbies, our entertainment—our everything—to the glory of God.
I have the hunch that when you hear this you hear a word of warning. “Be careful little hands what you do, for the Father up above is looking down in love!” Of course, there is this aspect to it. There are deeds our little hands can do that they cannot do to the glory of God.
Indeed, there is a caution implied in this guidance to do all to the glory of God. We are to do all to the glory of God in this body life because corporately, as the church, our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit.
We seldom think of things this way in our heightened idea of personal independence, but it seems Paul is telling us that what we do in our bodies individually matters to us corporately as the Temple of God. Imagine a brick and mortar Temple with hidden structural flaws. You wouldn’t feel safe in it, much less offer it to God. While each of us has a private and a public life, what we are in private matters as much as public because all that we do and are contributes to the makeup of the Body of Christ.
How often when we think of privacy it has to do with evil that is done hopefully unnoticed. Tragically the misuse of God’s wonderful gift of our differences as men and women occupies a lot of the misuse of may peoples’ privacy. The whole sex thing has gotten out of hand. It has so intruded into the seamy privacy of many men that their minds are polluted. Christianity Today has reported how polluted very many so-called Bible-believing Christians have let their private worlds become. Our sexuality, though created by God as a marvelous component of society that makes the landscape attractive to us, and that eventually can bind one and one woman together in a life-producing embrace, has often been distorted and made ugly. Christians, in private we are called not to add to this pollution of the Body. We who are married, ought to make of our oneness something beautiful for the glory of God and our joy. Let our children see where joy is found by cultivating marriages that make the heart sing.
The whole personal freedom thing has gone crazy. We imagine we are so free that even the teachings of Jesus are optional—completely in the custody of our preferences. So, when we’re told to do all to the glory of God it is a word of warning not to misuse God’s good gift of life.
But there is a much greater positive incentive to this call to do all to the glory of God. Jonathan Edwards wrote a little book called, A Narrative of Surprising Conversions. He gives mini-biographies of men and women whose lives were totally chaos that came to faith in Jesus and were changed. You see a person with eyes dull with drugs, his speech slurred with drink, his body showing the effects of long neglect and think, “Nothing good can become of him?” Edwards tells of many who left behind the stupor of drink that they once craved and became thoughtful, productive members of society after they gave themselves to God.
What great benefit not only to one’s drive, but also to one’s emotions that comes with deliberately living to the glory of God.
The discipline of the heart teaches us how to live in private to the glory of God so that our lives are, in their entirely, a seamless garment of praise to God. Your body and mine matters in this great enterprise. Glorify God in your body, God tells the Church, and to each of us in it.
But now, the second benefit in knowing the promise of the resurrection. God considers our bodies important enough to bring them back to life after they die. This has always been a difficult teaching to accept. We imagine the ancients were gullible enough to accept stuff like this, but modern people know better.
The Apostle Paul asked King Agrippa, a half-Jewish client of the Jews, “Why is it thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead?”
In the second century, a Greek skeptic named Celsus ridiculed Christians for their foul doctrine of the resurrection. He thought it simply obscene that they thought their God would take decomposing flesh and bring it back to life. There are many variations of the theme of outright rejection or doubt concerning the bodily resurrection. The inability to understand or to accept that God will bring these mortal bodies back to life, to immortality, is not new.
Both the selection from the prophet Daniel and I Thessalonians speak about the resurrection of the body. The selection that we just read from I Thessalonians, telling of what will take place at the Second Coming of Christ sounds strange to the modern ear. “The dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive . . . shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
The reason why graveyards used to be built right beside churches was not only to preserve the memory of the dear departed, but also to help God with the traffic control at the resurrection. If the Second Coming took place when people were at church, the graves would open and the beloved dead would rise first, and then the sanctuaries would be emptied as the living joined them to meet the Lord in the air.
I wonder what it says that churches no longer have graveyards. In the last church I served, before we built a new building with no graveyard, in the old wooden building when folk sat in those strait-backed box-pews they saw Tiffany windows at the side dedicated to the beloved memory of deceased members. Their names were inscribed in the windows that let in the light by which we could see. Out back there was a little graveyard with those gravestones with the barely legible names of relatives of some of our flock from many years back. It also included a grave with no headstone of someone’s anonymous hired man. Why the graves next to church and the windows with names etched into them? Because we who are alive and remain will be gathered together with those who have died in the resurrection.
But the Bible gives other dues to the significance of this end time. The prophet Daniel writes of the start of the end game:
There shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time; but at that time your people shall be delivered, every one whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
It is impossible for us to understand perfectly the things God has given us in Scripture concerning the resurrection. But as we put together the pieces of the puzzle we see that there is this two-fold aspect of the resurrection. For some the resurrection is followed by everlasting life; for others it will be shame and everlasting contempt. We do not commonly speak of the second kind of resurrection. But we are foolish to ignore the fearful teachings of Scripture, or to deny their pertinence, while focusing only on what seems to give us comfort.
The Parable of the Sheep and Goats that we love to quote in part ends with the righteous Judge saying to some who stood before Him, who had ignored the needs of the hungry, the naked, the imprisoned, and the ill, “as you did it not to the least of these, you did it not to me.’ And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Though we believe that we are justified by God’s grace through faith and not by good works that we do, Holy Scripture is very clear that our eternal destiny is affected by what we do as well as by what we say we believe. Jesus said frightening words to people who are very vocal about their faith in Him, “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, “’I never knew you, depart from me, you evildoers’.”
It is after this that we read that parable that is the basis of one of our children’s favorite Bible songs—about the wise man building his house on the rock, and the foolish man building his house on the sand. I wonder how much of good, verbal American Christianity is the stuff of building a house on the sand. “The rains fall, the floods come, the wind blows, and beat against that house, and it falls, and great is the fall of it.
These are teachings of our Lord that point to the outcome of the resurrection. We are apt to think of different questions than whether there are two destinations in the resurrection. I have wondered, and many of you have expected me to be able answer questions like this: “What about old, sick people who are raised, or babies? How will they be in the resurrection?” “Will we recognize our loved ones in the resurrection?”
Of course, I know no more than you do the answers to these questions, but the Scriptures teach that what will happen is analogous to what happens in planting a seed in the spring. What you plant and what comes up look very different. I believe we will be our best selves when God refashions us into glorious, immortal bodies. I won’t have steel and plastic knees, and you won’t have scars or pace-makers or hearing aids. Our babies who have died will be in the flush of mature life, skipping over the intervening years when most of us endured being teenagers and all of the other growing pains of life. I think John Wesley may have been right that we’ll even have our pets in heaven. I don’t know this, but I think it is harmless to hope there might be pets in heaven. I think we can safely assume God will give us a good party in the resurrection.
St. Augustine wrote: God, the wonderful and inexpressible Artisan, will, with a wonderful and inexpressible speed, restore our flesh from the whole of the material of which it was constituted, and it will make no difference to its reconstruction whether hairs go back to hairs and nails go back to nails, or whatever of these had perished be changed to flesh and be assigned to other parts of the body, while the providence of the Artisan will take care that nothing unseemly result" (Handbook of Faith, Hope, and Charity 23:89 [A.D. 421]).
As interesting as this is, far more important it is for us to remember that how we live in these bodies now has a bearing on this final event. Do not be indifferent to the appeal, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” It is natural for us to become indifferent to what we have heard often. Let us hear as a congregation that what we are together, our body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit. It matters how we are together not only now, but in the end. To this end, it matters to you how I live, and how you live to me. Let us glorify God in this Body called Faith Presbyterian Church.
Let us pray: O Lord, thank you for the gift of our creation, in bodies, in your image and likeness. And thank you that you intend for us throughout our life, both now and in the hereafter, to enjoy your glory. Give us grace to live now so as to be glad in the resurrection that you will provide, through Jesus our Lord. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
September 18, 2005
Baptism and Personal Salvation
“I believe in one baptism for the remission of sins.”
Genesis 6: 13-22 / I Peter 3: 18-22
September 18th, 2005
It is not an overstatement to say these are times that try the soul. The vocabulary of distress increases. 911. Tsunami. AIDS. Katrina. Iraq. There are many people today who are asking, in effect, “What can I do to be saved?” Though not all mean the same thing. “What can deliver me from this world that is going mad?” some mean to say.
There is a story in the New Testament about a man whose life bottomed out. It made him ask this question. He was apparently a career military officer who late in his career was given a cushy assignment as a city-prison warden in a Roman city in Macedonia. Compared with guarding the frontiers, being a prison warden was easy. He could live in town with his family. Essentially all he had to do was to watch the gate to make sure prisoners stayed in. Rarely did anything disturb the routine of a Roman jail.
Then one night everything went wrong through no fault of the jailor. An earthquake hit the city. It shook the prison to the foundations. It opened the doors and broke the moorings of the shackles that held prisoners in the cells and in the inner dungeon. Any prisoner who wanted could simply walk out of the building. Any jailor who had a prisoner escape faced serious consequences—the death penalty—no matter what. This jailor drew his sword to take his own life.
But he was interrupted by the voice of one of his prisoners who must have been watching him. “Don’t hurt yourself. We are all here.” The jailor called for lights. A lantern in hand, he went and checked, and found everyone there, even though their leg irons were no longer anchored in the wall.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer soothed the cares of prison guards and fellow-prisoners in the Flossburg Prison in Germany in World War II, Paul and Silas spread calm throughout this miserable Roman jail that night. “Why did not the other prisoners escape?” he must have wondered. Was it because of the effect of these two remarkable men who sang during the night, not flaunting their tormentors but because their hearts were filled with song?
Now freed from their dungeon, rather than escaping, they responded to their jailor’s predicament in a way he would not have expected. They stood in the doorway of the prison office, looking at their tormentor now tormented. “Don’t harm yourself. We are all here.” Why should they be concerned for him? But they were concerned for him.
Their concern led to his asking the question that has echoed throughout history, “What must I do to be saved?” What did he mean? He had not listened to an evangelistic sermon. He didn’t know the term we know so well, “saved.”
He may have meant, “All is lost if one prisoner escapes. How can I get keep them from escaping?” But the answer he got addressed a far deeper need than making sure no prisoner escaped. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” Paul and Silas told him how to find peace with God, peace inside his own heart-- peace, that rare commodity that eludes so many of us.
He found his heart strangely warmed.
How could this man have known what Paul meant? All he knew was that this man Paul, and his companion Silas came into his prison with their backs beaten to a bloody pulp and spent the night singing. He could hear them from the dank dungeon where he’d shackled them. Their singing soothed the tension in the cells and in the dungeon where prisoners would usually moan and curse in their wretchedness. So when Paul said, “Believe in Jesus,” it clicked somehow in his heart.
He took Paul and Silas to his home and bathed their wounds. Luke, who wrote the Book of Acts, tells us that Paul and Silas spoke the word of the Lord to everyone in his house. By this he means they told them the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection and what this meant for him. Apparently they understood. The jailor and his household were baptized at once.
I want to speak of two matters that arise from this story. First, I’m struck at the parallels to this man’s plight and what’s going on in the lives of an awful lot of people today. Second, I must speak about this baptism that took place after the jailor and his family believed in Jesus.
There are a lot of people who dread facing another day of the stress in their homes-- in their work places. They are trapped in their jobs because they need the income. They are trapped in their homes because they can’t afford to live anywhere else. A painful question echoing with aches in many peoples’ hearts is: “What must I do to be saved?” And people mean much the same as the jailor meant. “What can deliver me from this situation?”
Some people who live in desperation, not knowing what to do, do things that make matters worse. The readily available solutions of choice for many are alcohol and drugs. How quickly life can unravel when alcohol and drugs become part of the picture!
Some people turn to petty crime to relieve themselves of financial distress. They steal from their employers, from their neighbors, from their relatives. They are caught. Ordinary people in distress act out of character and they are caught. I was startled recently to see listed on an internet site of foreclosed mortgaged many upscale homes in our town! Some facing bankruptcy respond in desperation. Some of these do something unlawful, who have no crime in their past. Thus they stand before a judge embarrassed, ashamed, lost. In a panic their hearts cry out, “What must I do to be saved?”
Then there are those people living in the Gulf states this past two weeks found themselves wondering, “What can I do to be saved?”—literally—as they saw the waters rise. People comfortably fixed lost everything—home, often family members died, their children lost, their work places destroyed. Everything gone in a few hours. “What will I do now?” How that question burns.
You go to the doctor’s office for a routine visit and discover that the cough that won’t go away means something awful is going on in your lungs. It may mean your life. “What will I do now?” It almost seems we all stand in a queue waiting our turn to hear a doctor’s fearful report.
Executives of major corporations live the high life they believe they must live in their station. They are trapped in luxurious living. Then they realize their financial empires are houses of cards. They monkey with the books to make things look better than they are. But finally they can deceive no one any longer. They are disgraced. They stand before the courts where to their disgrace is added prison time. “What must I do to be saved?”
Mike Bergmann and I go to the County Correction’s Work release facility each Tuesday evening and see ordinary people who have made mistakes with consequences most of us don’t suffer from our mistakes. In their eyes I see the haunting question, “What must I do to be saved?”
We see young people who dabbled in drugs thinking they’d never get caught. They get caught and their lives are forever affected. “ “What must I do to be saved?”
The answer more often than not does not come as they hope. It comes from God who through their misery is beckoning them to Himself so He can give them a change of heart for which tragedy has prepared them.
Paul answered the Philippian jailor’s question, “Trust in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.” It may not have been what he was expecting, but it worked. It is an answer that still works. I am surprised how often I discover that responding to this recommendation works to begin to resolve the problems of people who have come to the end of themselves. The Apostle Paul told us that the goodness of God leads us to repentance. While we all dread coming to the point where we realize all is lost, for many this is the best thing that can happen. How good to finally ask, “What must I do to be saved?” and mean it!
Reading on in this story in the Book of Acts we read that the Philippian jailor and his whole household were baptized after Paul and Silas explained to them how to be saved, that is, how to trust in Jesus Christ.
Why then did Paul baptize them? Well, of course, because Jesus commanded it. But why did Jesus command baptism? There is a link between this simple matter of deliberately going under the water and trusting in Jesus, who was God’s chief revelation of Himself to us. It was clearly a command and not a suggestion Jesus made. Why would He command an outward rite for the benefit of an inward relationship with God?
In the Nicene Creed that has guided our thinking for some time we say, “I believe in one Baptism for the remission of sins.” This reflects what we read in our New Testament lesson this morning. “Baptism, which corresponds to [Noah’s deliverance from the flood] now saves you . . . as an appeal to God for a clear conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
What do we mean when we say this? Does the act of baptism wash away our sins? You thought that it was belief in Jesus that was necessary.
What a curious thing it must have seemed to this Roman soldier to walk that night down to the riverside with his family, his wife, his children, his servants, and to be led into the water and be dipped three times beneath its surface. I wonder if it was Silas who pronounced the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” What a strange and painless initiation into this new way of peace!
But it was more than this. Faith in Jesus Christ may require us to be baptized in obedience to His command, but this is only the first stage in a deeper way of life God intends for us. It’s like wading deeper into a lake where there are depths so much beyond the few inches of water into which we wade just off the shore.
The Apostle Paul saw baptism as like being buried with Jesus in His death, and coming alive with Him in His resurrection. Some people see in Paul’s words here a virtual drama of redemption: immersion under water is like being put into the tomb; coming up from the water is like being raised from the tomb.
Paul wrote of this with another kind of picture too. “By one spirit we were all baptized into one body.” What an odd term: baptized into one body! It seems baptism is like a surgical transplant. And once so joined, one is part of this new body. Not only that but there is a finality to this act that touches heaven and earth. It’s an eternal connection, an eternal bond.
As the early Christians thought of it, it reminds me of how I’ve seen some non-citizens in this congregation go through the process of becoming citizens of this country. They stand and express their “faith” in this land and pass through an unseen barrier between not being citizens of this country and enjoying all the privileges of citizenship.
So it is with baptism. It is a sign of being taken into the family of God as a child. It is more than this. It is a sign of membership in the Body of Christ. Baptism is huge. It is not a sign we can receive thoughtlessly.
It is worth asking, “What comes to your mind when you think of so identifying with Jesus that you enter the tomb with Him and come alive with Him? What enters your mind in seeing that you are now part of a Body you were not a part of before? What comes to mind in now being part of the family of God? It’s a bit like having a citizen’s welcome in this country, of being able to vote when one minute before you had no right to be here or to vote. Suddenly it is your duty to live like a citizen.
In the early days of the Church, Christians took baptism so seriously that they were afraid to be baptized because they feared they could not, or did not want earnestly enough to live the kind of life suggested by being so identified with Jesus Christ. There are many Christians who waited until they thought they were about to die to be baptized because they were afraid that if they sinned after being baptized God would not forgive them.
But over time a different problem has arisen with baptism. When we read that the Philippian jailor and his household were baptized it seems to suggest that Paul drew the whole family into the covenant with God into which the jailor came by faith in Jesus Christ. They wouldn’t have to go through the fearful ordeal that drew him to trust in Jesus. But they would enter just as fully into this new way of life their father or master had begun.
But people got used to the idea of baptism and it lost its immense meaning. It became the way babies were introduced in the church. Or it became the equivalent of an automatic bar mitzvah for children in the church who were twelve years old.
Christians have quarreled about how baptism should be applied or when. But it began so simply as the gentle sign of claiming the promise of God for salvation. Baptism and salvation meant a new family life, a new body life, a virtual escape from death. How could anyone ask to be delivered from the old way with all of its desperation while continuing on in the very life that brought such misery?
I realize that not all who come to baptism come prompted by the fear that brought the Philippian jailor to be baptized. Many of us have been reared in homes by Christian parents. We can’t remember when we began the odyssey of faith, it started to early in life. For most of us Baptism is a public sign that we have trusted in Jesus and desire to be obedient to Jesus who said we should be baptized if we believe in Him. There are some whom I have baptized for whom it is an emotionally overwhelming experience, so vivid in their minds is the privilege of being granted entrance into the Body of Christ.
Baptism is a sign answering the question, “What must I do to be saved?” It is a reminder that no matter what may happen to us in the course of life, we belong to God. And nothing can take away this from us. Martin Luther counseled those in despair, “Remember your baptism.”
And so would I. But our baptism is not only a sign of God’s care for us, “in life and in death,” but it is also a call to a way of life that thoughtfully embraces our identity in the Body of Jesus Christ.
A young American English teacher in China during the Second World War found himself quarantined in a prison camp in Shantung when the Japanese occupied China. He mingled with two thousand other non-Chinese for two and one half years. But during those long months of confinement, when resources were low and conditions were often hard, a quality of life developed that was remarkable. They found ways of making their lives quite pleasant as they each brought to the compound their abilities and attitudes. I read of the same result in the prison camp that built the bridge over the River Kwai, as men came together for a common purpose in degraded conditions.
When we are baptized into Christ we are called apart from the world into a Body, a community of those who have asked, “What must I do to be saved?” and have found salvation in Jesus Christ. We are engrafted members of His Body. I envision what can become of people who take to heart what it means to be thus drawn together. What happened at Shantung Compound at the dreadful camp around the bridge going up over the River Kwai in Thailand are suggestive of what the Church can be.
In the wonderful old Scots Confession we are reminded that, “By Baptism we are engrafted into Christ Jesus, to be made partakers of his righteousness.” We see a lot of folk wearing bracelets with the letters WWJD on them that stand for “What Would Jesus Do?” These are reminders that we are partakers of Jesus’ righteousness, a quality of goodness that has specific ways of being noticed. What peace there is for the one who intends to partake of the righteousness of Jesus. It is the way of life, not just alone, but in community, into which we are introduced by trusting in Him.
When I dream of what the Church can be I think of us having trusted in Jesus and with delight stepping forward to receive the right of baptism, I see the remarkable community life that is produced by our common gratitude. I pray we may come to enjoy this fully.
O Lord, thank you for answering for us our haunting question, “What must I do to be saved?” Grant that we may enjoy the full benefit of our place in your family. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
September 04, 2005
Are We Catholics?
Hosea 11: 1-12 / John 17: 14-26
September 4th, 2005
As I prepared for this morning’s message I found myself wrestling inside. How can I not respond to the calamity that has hit Louisiana and Mississippi? The effects are much harsher than at the gas pump. How do the texts I selected long ago pertain to the present distress? The texts are from the prophet Hosea and the Gospel of John.
The prophet Hosea addressed the northern kingdom of Israel, which suffered because the nation was at war with Assyria—and would soon collapse. Like the streets of New Orleans this past week, virtual lawlessness left the streets of the towns of Israel in chaos. The prophet reminded them of God’s blessings in the past. God treated Israel as a son. But the more God called to them, the more they refused to listen. Still they could not undo the goodness of God. “Ephraim has encompassed me with lies . . . but I will return them to their homes, says the Lord.”
Do I hear a message from God to us here? Calamity revealed what was in the heart of many people of Israel and New Orleans. Looting and violence came from the heart of some while heroic virtue came from the heart of others. The example of great testing of character that confronted the people of New Orleans reminds me that this is what times of great testing do. Testing shows what’s in us. Adversity does not make us do bad things.
This is a time of testing. The testing you are facing may have little to do with what’s happening in Louisiana. When you and I face times of testing, rather than these hard times shaping us, they expose us. During good times we coast along with our genial personalities unchallenged. We are borne along by custom, familiar circumstances, kindly friends, and the like.
But then distress hits, and what we’re used to changes suddenly. Familiar circumstances are gone, and we find ourselves in a strangely hostile world. What we’re really like comes pouring out. And we may be surprised at ourselves. “I didn’t know I was like that!” And others are shocked.
This was what happened in Israel. The calamity of Assyria’s armies pounding pitilessly on them brought about anarchy. Rather than turning to care for one another, to defend themselves in a harmonious summoning of all their resources as our Minutemen did during America’s Revolutionary War, Israel erupted in discord. The prophet Hosea addressed the reason for all this chaos—their hearts were untamed. They had forsaken the good ways of God.
In our New Testament reading Jesus pleads for unity among His followers. This has something to do with my sermon title. I asked the question in my sermon title, “Are we catholics?” All of us Protestants caught the idea that I was playing a word-game because, after all, I’m speaking to Protestants. My question has to do with our unity in Christ.
As many of us know the word catholic, spelled with a small “c,” means universal—the whole thing. Spelled with a capital “C” it refers to the Roman Catholic Church which is only part of the whole thing. I am asking if we belong to the One Church, the universal one, the one that is bigger than the small circle of folk with whom I share a lot of ideas and customs—the Church even bigger than the Roman Catholic Church.
For there to be any kind of unity in any body there has to be profound cooperation among its members. How hard it is to maintain deep cooperation. What gets in the way of cooperation? It is when what I want collides with what you want; then comes the explosion!
It takes largeness of character to cooperate. Small character is ever out to get its own way. Small character presses hard at pressure points, stirring up strife. Look closely at what Jesus taught His disciples and you see how He was teaching the ways of largeness of heart. No body is the boss. Take the place of least distinction at the table, not the place at the head table.
Read what the Apostle Paul wrote to the churches he founded. How often the ethical part of his message urged Christians to submit to each other. That’s really hard. Particularly with some people. Submit to him?!!! To her???!!! Largeness of heart comes to us with painful effort.
I have been preparing a series of lectures to give next weekend to the Commissioned Lay Pastors class at Geneva Center. My task is to give a picture of Church history to these folk who will serve the smaller churches in our presbytery as Lay pastors. I want them to see how they are participating in something much larger than the small environment that will occupy so much of their attention. The review of the story of the Church has allowed me to see again how from the very first the character of leading personalities formed the character of the Church.
To be candid, the story of the Church is filled with neurotics and megalomaniacs. It is filled with people we call saints who were contentious and sometimes downright evil. We repeat the story of their lives in such a way that we remember only their finer points or their contributions. Many of the saints helped to fragment the Church.
The actual heroes more often than not sat and still sit in the pews rather than standing in the pulpits. The humble carpenters, farmers, school teachers, doctors, nurses, and home-makers who teach their children to love God and to be humble with others are the saints who have held the Church to some semblance of unity.
But all of us suffer from unchallenged weaknesses that keep the harmony of the Church in hostage. Do you realize how fundamental to attaining Jesus’ longing for the Church is our inclination to submit to one another? We little realize how pivotal to the development of high character is the ability to say and mean it, “you first, me last.” Listening is far more vital than talking. Aggressive behavior stirs up the mud in the depths of our hearts—even if we’re right and the other is wrong.
Now we actually may think of Church unity as a bad thing. We worry about gathering around a lowest common denominator of hollow words. The word “ecumenical” is a heretical word to many fervent Protestants. But it is a good word that Jesus would have praised. Unity is possible only when we live in submission to each other. Mutual submission requires profound character.
A verse that has kept running through my mind in the past week is “Keep your heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of life.” How we need to protect our hearts, to guard against the infection of diseased, selfish reflexes. The prophet Jeremiah exploded with vexation as he witnessed the results of diseased hearts among his people. He wrote, “The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” You and I are apt to say, “How pessimistic. Jeremiah overstated the case.” He didn’t overstate the case.
Watch what happens when severe tests come our way. How do you respond when the props of ordinary pleasantness are knocked from under you? How do you handle disagreement and disappointment?
In ordinary times, when things are good and we face nothing more than the pleasant daily routine we learn to cope with small annoyances. We can put up with the stray disappointment. When we’re not tempted greatly to do wrong, we can endure.
But given the right circumstances how very many of us show that inside we have the capacity for even great evil. Look at the exhibit of fallen preachers and other up-standing citizens who have sunk not just to adultery but grand theft and to murder to satisfy a lust that came to burn inside of them. Jeremiah was right about our hearts. I am capable of incredibly evil deeds.
Jesus told us it is not what comes into us that defiles us but what comes out of us. We can do something about what’s in us because God has given to us His Holy Spirit to dwell within us. We need to stress this far more than we do. “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.”
The glue that holds us together is the Holy Spirit. Our common purpose to worship and glorify God together points us toward fulfilling our togetherness.
Sunday mornings are very important to this goal. And especially mornings such as this when we take the Lord’s Supper. Perhaps I should repeat the instruction the Apostle Paul gave more regularly when we take this sacred feast. “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let each one examine himself and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.”
What is an unworthy manner? For one thing it is lingering with unconfessed sin which we have no intention to stop. All of us sin often, but many of our sins are reflexes arising from our untamed hearts. But there is deliberate sin—deliberate hostility, deliberate holding on to grudges, deliberate habits of life we know are dishonest or evil in other ways. If you and I keep a squeaky clean outward appearance while tolerating ways we’d be ashamed of, we’re taking the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy way and that is profaning Jesus.
So we are to examine ourselves. I don’t examine you or you me, but we examine ourselves. Paul wrote in this Communion passage, “If we would judge ourselves we would not be judged.” The prayer of confession we offer together is to help us, but self-examination must go deeper than that. We know things about ourselves nobody else knows. Some of these things may be simply weaknesses.
But some of these things may be terribly wrong, but because others don’t know about them we don’t feel pangs of conscience. We can cauterize our consciences but they never die. What weaknesses of body and mind may be traced to evil we cling to about which others know nothing—not even our own spouses or best friends.
“Keep your heart with all diligence; out of it are the issues of life.” One of the great tests of how issues of life are for us is our ability to love each other with a pure heart, fervently in the Church. Strife is an index of lurking evil. Harmony and mutual submission are indices of depth of character. What joy we feel when we have harmony. What misery we feel when we don’t! And how we distress our Savior when we insist on the ways that bring misery to us and disharmony to the church.
Are we catholics? I hope so! That is, I hope the faith we cherish and live by binds one to the other as we are bound by gratitude to the Lord Jesus. When we work at living together in unity of heart and mind we are preparing ourselves to face testing. How good it is to be fortified by the faith we share, and know we share it, because we share it in deed and word—as well as in definition. I pray we may more and more strengthen each other so we are strong in the strength God supplies to those whose hearts belong to Him in deed.
Let us pray: O Lord, by Your Holy Spirit, grant to us purity of heart, depths of high character that will keep us bound to each other as we are bound by gratitude to You—who out of great love have saved us from death and hell and granted to us the gift of eternal life. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)