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June 25, 2006
Believing on Time
Psalm 84 / Esther 4: 1-14
John 4: 46-53
Children’s Sermon on Ecclesiasts 12: 1-7
(paraphrased immediately below)
June 25th, 2006
[1 Remember your Creator while you are young, before you grow old and no longer enjoy living.
2 It will be too late then to remember him, when the light of the sun and moon and stars is dim to your old eyes, and there is no silver lining left among the clouds.
3 Your arms will tremble with age, and your strong legs will grow weak. Your teeth will be too few to chew your food. Even strong glasses won’t help you see.
4 And when your teeth are gone, keep your lips tightly closed when you eat so food doesn’t spill on your clothes! The chirping of birds used to wake you up in the morning. But you will become deaf. And then you won’t be able to sing, or if you can a little, with a quavering voice.
5 You will be afraid of heights and of falling, white-haired and withered, dragging along. Your family and friends will know you’re about to die. And as you near the end they will watch sadly and cry.
6 Yes, remember your Creator now while you are young, before the silver cord of life snaps and the golden bowl is broken. Don't wait until the water jar is smashed at the spring and the pulley is broken at the well.
7 For then the dust will return to the earth, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.]
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Time matters. We just listened to the story of a moment in the history of the Jewish people narrowed down to a moment in the lives of two people, Mordecai and his niece Esther. If she went in to see the king of Persia uninvited, even though she was his queen, if he was in a bad mood, he could have her executed on the spot. If she did not risk going in at this moment a dreadful plan would hatch. Her people, the Jews, would be massacred throughout the land. Mordecai told her, “Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Time matters. She dare not let this moment pass.
As Christians we talk about “eternal life,” but time matters, even with regard to eternal life. Time flies. We use such terms as “Strike while the iron is hot.” We’re aware that opportunities come and go.
Among these opportunities are those moments when we consider what really matters in life. Among these moments are those when it seems the things of God suddenly matter very much, but then those moments pass and for some reason the things of God fade into the background of our thoughts.
But time moves on, and we draw near the end of life so soon I feel 32 but I’m twice 32. In my trade I am often with people as they near life’s end. And I’ve seen some look back and a far off look comes into their eyes. “If only I had” are very sad words to think.
The Apostle Paul reflected on time when he wrote “in the fullness of time God sent forth His Son.” God didn’t begin with Abraham dubbing a new gene into the human race that would cure the problem of sin, misery, and death. Instead God set in place a promise that would work out over many years. And it was important how and when people in this long heritage used their free will—a reflection of God’s image to respond to God’s nudge that would draw them into the momentum of this promise. Because the promises of God always come with a condition. We have to respond. And our responses come at particular moments in time.
Shakespeare remarked wisely in his play, “Julius Caesar,” “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune, omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
How many people look back with sadness in their shallows, realizing they did not respond when life was at high tide. This morning I want to remind you that it matters how and when we respond to the deep matters of life that God puts before us.
I have the feeling that an unfortunate residue of our Presbyterian confidence in the Providence of God is that God will make things happen very nearly without our input. Many of us don’t like “fanaticism,” which may mean simply the inclination to do something specifically for Jesus’ sake.
Calvin thought he was honoring God to report that God was sovereignly in control of literally everything, from the rise and fall of nations to the trembling of a blade of grass in the wind. Thus though it seems we make decisions, and are responsible for them, we simply work out the divine decrees.
I’m not sure the Bible teaches this, nor is it necessary to believe this if we believe that God is sovereign in the world He made. The Bible points us otherwise. Indeed, our experience points us otherwise. It matters how and when we choose to respond in life to God.
We read this morning of a moment in time that John freezes for us to see in his Gospel. It is a moment when a Roman official from Capernaum realized that his nearly dead son was suddenly healthy. He asked his servants when his son became well. They told him at 1 PM yesterday, precisely.
They remembered the time because that very sick little boy suddenly sat up on his bed, swung his legs over the side, and ran into the kitchen hungry. After all he hadn’t eaten for days. His little body gradually grew emaciated. They had all been hovering around him, bathing his forehead, holding his listless hands. And suddenly it was a different little fellow in the room, no longer on death’s door, but completely well. So they answered the father, “It was at the seventh hour,” or as we would say, 1:00 o’clock PM. The father remembered that was when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.”
Why did he ask his servants when his son became well? Maybe he was trying to decide if it was just coincidence that his son took a turn for the better. If his son started gradually to become well before 1 PM, then it was coincidental.
But it was AT 1 PM, exactly when he said to Jesus, “Sir, come to my house because my son is dying.” At that moment Jesus replied “Your son will live.” That was exactly when his servants saw him get up from his bed and act like a normal, hungry little boy. This timing was not coincidental.
Furthermore, the timing mattered when this desperate father left home to travel throughout the night and morning to find Jesus when he heard Jesus was nearby. He did not procrastinate, saying to his wife, “Honey, let’s wait to see if Jesus might come this way.” He said, “Now I must go ask this Jesus to come heal our son.”
He acted on his trust in Jesus at that moment. And his trust in Jesus meant that instead of a funeral for his son, he could have a party for him.
Often in matters of health or physical well-being we have a sense of urgency, but in matters of the heart it’s different. I wonder as I drive by the full soccer fields on Sunday after church if there are any parents there who hope their children will have focus in life beyond the moment of thrill at winning a soccer game. I wonder how many of those parents would say, “We are Christians.” And yet they could not spare one morning in the week to have them specifically “remember now their Creator in the days of their youth.” And if one morning cannot be spared, what is the gist of the rest of the week?
I reminded the children this morning of the wise remark of Solomon at the end of the Book of Ecclesiastes. “Remember your creator when you are young, before your body falls apart.”
How many have a very different view of being young. Youth is the time to sow wild oats, to party, have a good time. When college days are past and we get married, and we’re still young, it’s other things. I’ve got important things to do—family stuff, work stuff, leisure stuff. Getting ahead requires all my attention. God can wait. And God does wait.
The moments pass and we discover in retirement, particularly if we are prosperous, that we can still spend our lives in self-indulgence. So even these later years of wisdom are spent on ourselves. At the time we have the time to give to spend and be spent for the cause of Christ, we say, “I’ll wait till this time passes.” And these moments do pass. And very old age sets in. And then we realize the tide was not taken at the flood, leading on to a fortune that mattered.
What an interesting term “getting ahead” is. It pertains to everything we will leave behind one day.
What is it about eternal things that makes it so reasonable to procrastinate in taking them seriously?
I’m reminded of a series of stories of missed opportunities in the Book of Acts. It begins with the Apostle Paul standing before Felix, the Roman procurator. The High Priest, Ananias accused Paul of stirring up sedition, and sent him on to Felix. Paul stood there and Felix told him to tell his side of things.
So Paul spoke. And Felix listened intently. He heard nothing seditious in what Paul said. Indeed, he was intrigued. He wanted to hear more. So after a few days he and his wife Drusilla called Paul back and heard him speak about faith in Jesus Christ. Felix became alarmed and sent him away.
What was it that Paul said that stirred him? Paul undoubtedly told him about Jesus’ crucifixion and rising again. And they heard Paul stick it to them. They realized Jesus was not just a rabble rouser who had been given a slave’s execution. “To follow Jesus you’ve got to deny yourself and take up the cross that is the result of starting to follow Jesus”—if you are a Roman official.
Felix called Paul back several times to hear him, but he never decided, never made a choice. Two years passed and Felix was replaced by Porcius Festus. His opportunity passed.
Then we read of a like encounter between Paul and King Herod Agrippa, who was half-Jewish. He listened intently. But when the moment came to decide he put it off. He said, “In a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian?”
And thus in the Book of Acts we read not only of people like the three thousand at Pentecost, and a Philippian jailor, and like the Apostle Paul who learned of Jesus Christ and found new life in Him, but also of people who learned of Jesus, were intrigued, and remained as they were. And their moments passed.
When I was six years old we were living in Winona Lake in days when Billy Graham was beginning his ministry. I was sitting in the Billy Sunday Tabernacle with its sawdust floor one evening as Billy Graham spoke to the crowd in that amphitheater which was then plenty big. We were home on furlough from India and my dad was studying at a seminary in Winona Lake. I had the sense that somehow it was important to go forward that night. And so I did, though I soon forgot everything except the strong sense of urgency at that moment. Because I remember actually giving my heart and life to God thirteen years later towards the end of my first year of college.
The thought has never left me that there are seasons of life when God may move on us, and those season come and go. And if we do not respond to God when we sense His pull on us, we are not wise. In fact, a culture of Christian indifference may take us over—as is so easy in a time of prosperity.
My father told of a railroad crossing guard in India whose one duty was to respond to the signal of an approaching train and go out and lower the gates. One night he heard the signal and told himself it was a dream. Being tired, he ignored the signal. The train came through and a family in a bullock cart was in its path. And you know what happened. In the years that followed he was often heard to say, “If only I had.”
Time matters.
The future of our children depends on how we have responded to Jesus as parents. The future of the Church depends on whether this generation will take serious regard to Jesus’ summons, or whether we will continue a drift of passive disregard of Jesus’ summons, while saying we believe.
One of you sent me an article this week about the enormous changes overtaking the Western world as a result of the migration of Muslims into the formerly Christian West. I intend no denigration of Muslims in what I say.
Muslims are mostly much more serious about the practice of their religion than Christians. Some are serious to the radical point that is causing such calamity in Iraq and Palestine, in East Timor, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in many other places. Meanwhile we Christians maintain our placid, comfortable indifference to the way of life we say we believe is right. Indeed, we have watched our denomination bless and adopt the ideas and behavior of our culture, forsaking the ways well taught in days past.
The time has come for you and me to follow Jesus if we believe Him. And following means doing something and not merely saying, “I believe,” now leave me alone. It is time. It is time to awake all who sleep.
Let us pray: O Lord God, thank you for the new life promised us in Jesus Christ. Grant that we may accept this life and live it. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
June 18, 2006
Putting Up with Nuisance Prophets
Amos 7: 10-17 / John 4: 43-45
Heidelberg Catechism, Q & A 21
June 18th, 2006
This morning I want to think with you about the wry statement Jesus made, that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown. We may think Jesus is making a comment about “them,” people not like us. But I wonder if John reminds the Christians to whom he wrote that Jesus said this because if anyone is a hometown boy to Christians it is Jesus.
Jesus said some things that I’m tempted to say receive from Christians the ultimate indignity—they are simply ignored. Jesus said to His followers at the close of the Sermon on the Mount, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock . . . And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand.” We have our children sing a cute song with motions about this.
We reply, “We accept the Bible as the authoritative word of God. It is an article of our faith: “The Bible says it; that does it.” Jesus did not talk about articles of faith; He spoke of doing something, a way of life built on Him.
Is Jesus a popular prophet now? “Well,” we reply correctly, “He was not a prophet, but the Son of God.” And we say well.
The other three Gospels report this saying a bit more fully. In Mark Jesus says it most emphatically, “A prophet is not without honor except in his home-town (patridi), and with his next of kin, and in his own house.”
What was wrong with the prophets that those who knew them best didn’t like them at all?
Why? Well, for one thing, prophets sure could be grumpy. We prefer people who smile to people who frown. We picture Jesus as kindly and serious, the kind of man to whom children are attracted. The prophets frowned a lot. “Go to Toastmaster’s Amos,” I wonder if someone told him. Learn to smile more.
It is no wonder that the high priest of the royal shrine of the northern kingdom of Israel at Bethel told Amos, “Go back south to Judah and prophesy there.” Amos frowned far too much.
He frowned partly because he didn’t want to be a prophet to begin with. He preferred his peaceful job as a shepherd. Sheep don’t talk back. Sheep graze, willingly following the shepherd as “he leads them beside still waters,” anointing their heads with oil when they are hurt.
As a prophet Amos said some things nobody wanted to hear. He knew they wouldn’t like to hear it, and maybe that’s why he frowned too. Though when we read the beautiful poetry of the little Book of the prophet Amos, it lets us know that he had an eye and ear for beauty. Beauty would have made him very happy, as happy as evil made him sad.
He prophecied during one of the most prosperous times in the history of Israel. King Jeroboam II reigned forty years. During this long reign Israel stretched its boundaries and grew prosperous. People were optimistic and proud of their country. They saw their prosperity and military power as signs of God’s blessing—even if they didn’t worship strictly as Moses had commanded. They did what we might call “blended worship,” which I don’t intend as a cheap shot at what today is called blended worship. For them it was a blend of their own required standards and the most appealing of the neighboring countries’ religion.
They worshipped at shrines older than Jerusalem, where the Temple stood that Solomon built. Their shrines were more historic than Jerusalem, at Bethel and Gilgal. Bethel was where Jacob saw the ladder reaching from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. He called it Beth–el, “house of God,” and said, “Surely God is in this place and I didn’t know it.”
Gilgal, just east of Bethel near Jericho, was the place where Joshua met the Commander of the Lord of hosts. There he “fell on his face to the earth, and worshiped.” Israel had launched the conquest of Canaan there. There Joshua set up the first sanctuary and altar as Israel claimed God’s promise of a Land. Bethel and Gilgal had history in their favor more than the Jebusite capital of Jerusalem.
But Amos saw what was going on behind all the religious pomp and circumstance at these two centers with such a rich heritage.
“Come to Bethel and transgress; to Gilgal, and multiply transgression; bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days . . . for so you love to do, O people of Israel.” “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . . Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
It was after stirring words like this that the high priest at Bethel told Amos, “Get lost!” But Amos kept right on going. “Hear this you who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end, saying ‘When will the new moon be over that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale, . . . that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the refuse of the wheat?”
I sometimes wonder why Christians have used the prophets as though all they had to say was to predict the coming of the Messiah. Amos spoke from God. He was the voice of God; as we speak of being God’s hands and feet, so he was God’s voice. And this voice spoke timeless guidance. How we treat the poor is very important. How we show justice to people who are poor and in their very poverty are often trapped in ways of life that we then pounce on because of points of law. It is so much easier to administer harsh justice to the poor than to the rich. They can’t defend themselves and must have pro bono lawyers. We’re intrigued when Kenneth Lay and company get the book thrown at them because this has been so rare. We’re fascinated; and many CEOs are hoping we don’t get too intrigued with justice coming to the doors of the rich.
We sometimes hear Amos prediction quoted as pertaining to our day: “The days are coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.”
We quote this in defense of biblical preaching even when it is not popular. Biblical preaching I take to mean preaching that is prophetic, that lays it all out there for you to hear—as Amos did. I do not forget that he spoke God’s words of warning--but also words of blessing.
His prophecy ends, “In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen.” How ironic to refer not to the “house” of David, or the “kingdom” of David, but just the booth of David. It’s the Hebrew word succah that refers to the huts made from leafy branches. How welcome even a booth would be after having had the palace and the Temple itself in Jerusalem destroyed and Israel scattered to the ends of the earth. Oh, to have a booth, just a hut to call by the name of Israel’s great king. Oh to have a moment of genuine nostalgia for the golden days.
Amos’ promise was really generous. “The days are coming when the plowman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed.” It would be a day of such plenty that the harvest couldn’t be gathered in time to plow the ground for the next planting. If he said only this the high priest would have welcomed him.
Jesus’ situation was somewhat like Amos’. He was born in Bethlehem in Judea to the south, but spent his childhood up north in Galilee. The last public event where Jesus was present was at the Feast of Passover, at a moment when the Temple grounds looked like a market for sacrificial animals. He drove out the sheep and oxen with a whip of cords, and routed the moneychangers. No wonder He makes this wry remark: “A prophet has no honor in his own country.” There were those in the Temple that day who said, “Go back to Nazareth to do your prophecying.”
It was in Samaria, midway between Jerusalem and Nazareth, strange to say, that He found public honor. There not only did an outcast woman receive Him gladly, but she brought her entire town to receive Him gladly. He was on His way to His adopted town of Nazareth from His birth-village of Bethlehem. Cana was nearby, where He changed water into wine. Capernaum was there, a village on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, where He healed the son of a Roman policeman. In time, He would rouse skepticism in the region of His adoptive home too. But not yet.
Let us focus just a bit more on why a prophet is so unpopular. If nobody took a prophet seriously then it wouldn’t matter what they say. Treat them just as crazy blokes, malcontents who can be written off as frowning misanthropes. “Get a life,” we might say to them.
But we can’t do that because everyone knows that a real prophet is a public voice that resonates in that private place in us all called conscience. Conscience is where God speaks—if we will listen. I am troubled at how the great conscience clause in the Westminster Confession has been reduced and quoted in such a way that it seems to mean what it does not mean at all. How often have you heard someone say, “God alone is Lord of the conscience.” And who, we ask, is to determine what God has said that pertains to conscience? The term “spirit” is widely used today as though the ways of life that have become popular are the voice of the Spirit of God. Thus we listen to the “spirit” of things and say, “This is the voice of God to which my conscience listens.”
But the Westminster Confession is clear: “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in anything contrary to his Word, or beside it in matters of faith or worship.”
It is this voice of conscience that is the immediate, personal prophetic voice in us all if we will listen.
It is the voice to which David refers in Psalm 139, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me . . . You understand my thought afar off.”
Whereas we may so easily think that this or that place where we find ourselves we are away from the presence of God. So we act in a way we think nobody can see, or speak in a way that we feel safe from the ears of those we would want to impress better with our words. David admits to us: “Where shall I go from your spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend up into heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall your hand lead me . . . If I say surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light about me . . . the night shines as the day.”
The prophets called peoples’ attention to the real God, the One who is everywhere, not the God-substitute of their creation, the kind that liked their kind of people and took seriously their religious posturing. Someone wrote, “There is no reason to flee from a god who is nothing more than a benevolent father, a father who guarantees our immortality and final happiness.”
I proposed to our children this morning that we may think we’re healthy because we can do our pushups and crunches and we checked out OK with the dentist. But a doctor checks our blood and takes an X-ray and may find a lethal tumor inside us where the eye can’t see. The prophet was worse than a doctor, but better than one too. Because he could see with the eyes of God deeper than an X-ray or a blood test, into the heart, into the conscience.
We are fond of the prayer that comes at the end of the 139th Psalm: “Search me, O God, and know my heart, try me and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.” The God to whom David offers this prayer is the God for whom Amos spoke to Israel and to Judah, and to other nations too. Why? Because “God so loved THE WORLD that He gave His only-begotten Son, that who-so-ever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” The God to whom David spoke this prayer is a God we cannot escape, whose image we cannot shape, whose idea of faith demands belief, that is obedience from the heart.
This is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in whose presence we live every moment of every day and night, who sees into our depths, not looking to discover where He might find us thinking badly, but who looks at us with enormous love—a love so great that He cannot let us be content with a shabby faith.
The prophets were unpopular because they held people to account when their consciences went to sleep. They had no honor of the kind that people give to public figures who make them feel good. But in the end, look, we’re still reading Amos. And we’re still reading Isaiah, even though he was put to death cruelly in his own day by those who wanted their consciences left alone. And we’re still claiming Jesus as our Lord as well as our Savior.
And if Jesus is indeed our Lord, He is Lord of our consciences. Conscience is the deep place where we know God knows all about us. Many of us often drown the voice of conscience. We have shaped our prophets according to our idea of what we’d like God to say that we would like to hear. And we suffer the consequences. It is good that we become weary and heavy-laden, having come to the end of ourselves, thoroughly miserable and distressed. Because then we can come to Jesus and find rest. What kind of rest does Jesus give?
He gives His gentle yoke of actual meekness—to those who are finally aware how wearying a thing it is to pretend they are what they know they are not. He gives to them His burden of lowliness of heart—to those who have grown tired of posturing they are better than they know they are. Indeed, Jesus gives joy unspeakable and full of glory; a kind of happiness that martyrs had in their hearts facing execution; a kind of peace that the world cannot give.
I imagine sitting down at the table with Amos and Jesus. I wonder would Amos say to me, “What I really want to say is the last thing I said in my prophecy. The last word—‘I will plant them on their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land which I have given them says the Lord your God.” And I would think, “What an optimist! What a gracious man!”
And Jesus would say, “I did not come to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through me.” And I would wonder why Jesus and Amos were not popular in their hometowns, among their own kinfolk, in their own houses? Doesn’t it have to do with how we want to hear them? If I defend my sins, calling them by other names, and try to make my conscience agree with me, then how irksome is the voice of Jesus, or of the prophets who came before Him.
Let me close with Jesus’ words at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: “Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise person who built a house on a rock; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it was built on the rock. And every one who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish person who built a house upon sand; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against the house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.”
Let us pray: Thank you, Lord God, for your prophets, for Amos, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah and all these who spoke your word, and for Jesus who is your final word to us. Grant that we may love your prophets, and love more than them, your Son Jesus. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
June 11, 2006
An Unexpected Refreshment
Psalm 19; Genesis 29: 1-12
John 4: 5-15
June 11th, 2006
We have come this morning to one of the most beloved stories in the Gospels. A favorite song of some of you no doubt was stimulated by the story of the Samaritan woman at the well.
Like the woman at the well I was seeking
For things that could not satisfy:
And then I heard my Savior speaking:
Draw from my well that never shall run dry.
Fill my cup Lord,
I lift it up, Lord!
Come and quench this thirsting of my soul;
Bread of heaven, Feed me till I want no more
Fill my cup, fill it up and make me whole!
Oddly the song seems to express prejudice against the woman. Who says she sought things that could not satisfy? Who says she was responsible for having five husbands in a row? When one divorced her, perhaps for a trivial reason, she was chosen for her good looks by another man, and rejected for some reason by him. And the same by another, and another, and another, until she was no longer so beautiful, and gave up on marriage and lived with someone who would provide her a roof and a meal. She’ll do the hard work and endure the advances of a far lesser man than she started with in exchange for security. So it seems to me.
From her story we get the picture of a thirst that Jesus seems to say should no longer be there if we have drunk of Him. The water He promised the woman was a kind that would quench thirst forever. But our spiritual thirst keeps on and on, does it not?
I have often thought of this paradox. Jesus offered water that would continually satisfy, yet what one of us does not have a persistent spiritual thirst. I read the 42nd Psalm as my own testimony, “As the hart pants after water brooks, so pants my soul after Thee, O God. . . I thirst for God, for the living God.” I like these lines best in the old KJV where I first read them. Or the 63rd Psalm, “O God, Thou art my God, early will I seek Thee. My soul thirsts for Thee; my flesh longs for Thee as in a dry and thirsty land where no water is.”
In this troubled life, when the church as well as the world is often a source of distress, how can we keep from feeling such a thirst for God even though we believe every word Jesus said—that the water He gives takes away thirst completely?
So let’s look again at the wonderful story from which we read a snippet this morning. Jesus arrived at noon at Jacob’s well near the little village of Sychar located in the region once belonging to the tribe of Ephraim. Ephraim was Joseph’s younger son. Manasseh, the tribe descending from his older son, got land on the other side of the Jordan. Jacob’s well, beloved for its connection to the place where the great patriarch met his beloved wife, Rachel, was in the region given to the younger son.
This in itself is noteworthy and bears on this story. In ancient times it was the eldest son that expected the special blessing. Younger siblings got the scraps left after custom made sure that the first and strongest seed of the father got preference in a sort of Darwinian rule of primogeniture.
But time and time again in the Old Testament the younger son gets chosen—Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph, the youngest for a while, over Reuben in Jacob’s family. A modern Jewish writer notes that this pattern may be reflected in Christianity seeming to be favored instead of Judaism, its ancient source. We are Gentiles, the non-chosen people, now seemingly favored over the Jews by history if not by God.
And thus God continues to show His care for the one that would be neglected naturally. This you and I need to remember who may often feel of little importance in our day that favors the strong, the wealthy, the brilliant, the privileged, and the well-known.
Now Jesus arrives at Jacob’s well where He meets this very neglected woman, so insignificant that we don’t even learn her name. Here we begin to see the boundaries of God’s love expand for the world. God’s love embraces the known and the unknown.
In John 3 we saw Jesus focus His attention on a man whose name we know, Nicodemas. He was one of the favored among the favored people of God, the Jews. Now we meet an unnamed woman among the dis-favored few, the small sect of Samaritans—from whom Jesus drew an example of what it is to obey the law of God, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The Good Samaritan was a Samaritan too.
God embraces those whom people no longer love—even a Samaritan woman, loved and married five-times, divorced five times and living with someone she’s not married to. I have noticed how society naturally thinks little of people who have had troubled lives.
This woman was in this class. She is so despised by her own people for her troubled life that she is reduced to coming to draw water from the deep, old well in the heat of the day. I picture her letting down that long rope with the bucket at the end until it arrives at the water, way below. She pulls up that long rope under the beating sun. Perhaps she hauls up two buckets to save the walking, carrying them home while the sun beats down on her. And she sweats profusely and her back is bowed with weariness.
How opposite was the picture we saw last Sunday. The contrast is significant in the message of God’s love for the WORLD found in this Gospel.
Last Sunday we saw Jesus deep in conversation late at night with Nicodemas. The Pharisees would study late into the night when it was cool. Nicodemas came to Jesus in the cool of the night. He was a member of the most highly esteemed of the Jewish sects, the one Josephus chose to belong to after sampling the rest of them. He was a Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin, the Israeli supreme court. Nicodemas was the crème de la crème among the Pharisees. He knew the law well—and kept it. But Nicodemas thirsted after God still. And his thirst for God brought him to Jesus. Jesus said to this good man, “You must be born again.”
Today we see Jesus in a very opposite conversation. It is high noon, the hottest time of the day. He is with an unnamed woman of low esteem, part of a religious group despised by the Jews. She said to Jesus, “The Jews don’t have anything to do with Samaritans.” She knew this from sad experience as she was doubly treated with the disdain—by Jews and by other Samaritan women who rejected her company when they drew water in the cool of the morning.
I find it interesting that Jesus did not repeat to this woman the words he said to Nicodemas, “You must be born again.” She needed this too, and knew it. He phrased His offer to her more gently. He offered her a drink from which she’d not thirst again.
But we wonder what did He offer her? What is this “living water?” It is a phrase found in Genesis 26: 19 and Leviticus 14: 5, at least in Hebrew. But there it only means “running water.”
The Samaritans didn’t accept the prophets of the Old Testament. If they had they would know that the prophet Jeremiah sadly wrote for God that “my people . . . have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” The later prophet Zechariah promised more cheerfully that at the fulfillment of the promise of the Feast of Booths, “living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem . . . in summer and in winter.”
Some have proposed that this living water is knowledge that grows. But the more knowledge we have, the more we want. The more we know the more we realize we don’t know. And we come to the limits of what we can understand.
Others think Jesus offered a new kind of religion, a kind that doesn’t need the old fashioned traditions of worship, but only to worship God in spirit and in truth. But do we not see how much variety people have in their views of what it is to worship right—so that worship itself becomes a means by which we push one another away? Away from God, it seems, when away from self-approved Christians. Tradition may be a wonderful avenue of worship, a humble acceptance of what we have received from beloved forebears. But in all of this something is lacking. It is not the source of living water.
Jesus Himself is the living water. Isn’t this what John is telling us when he described the wedding at Cana of Galilee? There Jesus turned lots of water into lots of the best wine. And wine, we learn in the Gospels is the sign of the blood of Christ.
In John 6 Jesus said something that was so scandalous that He lost some followers as a result. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” At Cana he changed water into wine and wedding guests drank it and were surprised how good it tasted.
Do you see what Jesus was doing? In this encounter with the Samaritan woman he does not change the water into wine, but gets right to the point. He offers her living water that will once and for all quench her thirst. He is this water—something Jesus says far more graphically and shockingly to great interpreters of the law in John 6. She asked Jesus, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst,” thinking about all she knew to think, that then she wouldn’t need to come draw water in the middle of the day. But Jesus meant much more—as He always does in His promises to us.
From Jesus' conversation with Nicodemas we learn about being born again. From Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman we learn about drinking of the water of life, a drink that provides endless satisfaction for a thirst that goes beyond our need for H2O—of which our bodies are principally composed.
Each time we take the Lord’s Supper we take just a little bit of wine. It is never enough to satisfy someone who is thirsty. Our Catholic brothers and sisters believe that when believers drink that wine it is a renewed taste of the blood of Christ, the living water that satisfies. We think along the same lines, but defined differently, that in the Lord’s Supper we are reminded that Jesus has satisfied the deepest thirst of all.
What is this deepest thirst? Thirst drives human society. Why do we think so much and work so hard for money? What’s the appeal of numbers on a bank ledger or green backs in the wallet or now plastic cards that say—“I’ll pay later.” We can’t eat money. We can’t drink it, or build houses with it, or cars, or speed boats. In itself money is totally useless except to start fires. Money is a sign of our endless sense of need. And it fails us when we come to the end of the road and realize we are going to die. There are no luggage racks on funeral cars, and no trailers.
What we need is far, far deeper than anything money can buy. The woman at the well needed more than to be freed from having to come draw water in the heat of the day.
It is not beside the point that the One from whom she received this wonderful gift looked like a human being and was a human being. Sure, Jesus was God made flesh—but she didn’t know this. She thought He was a prophet, that’s all, a great man, because He told her all about her sorry story. It mattered that she was offered this living water by a Person. She could not understand the theology of the Incarnation or of living water, but she sure could understand Jesus’ look, the tone of His voice, the body language of His gestures, his posture as He spoke with her. Look at how much space in this chapter is devoted to Jesus' encounter with her. He gave her time. He gave her every gesture she needed to trust that there was something more He had to offer, something she knew she needed.
The prophet Isaiah wrote: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings.” The physical apparatus God has given to us to communicate His love for the world is a conduit we often short-change. God has given you and me the apparatus to communicate the Gospel—our bodies, our hands, our feet, our faces, our eyes, our speech, our attitudes—all of which are agents with which we embrace the unloved, the hungry, the thirsty, the wounded souls that God so loves that He gave His beloved Son—that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.
Paul asked, “How shall they hear without a preacher?” What is a preacher? A preacher is a reproduction of the Incarnation. A preacher is a human being, any bodily representative of Jesus,--who spent time with a rejected woman as well as with an exemplary religious man, offering Himself as the vehicle of the Gospel to each. You may be the only preacher someone will ever hear. The only Gospel they see. Each of these people, Nicodemas and the unnamed Samaritan woman, went from their encounters with Jesus changed. Each saw into the face of God and noticed in His eyes that He loved them.
People need to see into your eyes, into your face, and to notice the love of God staring out of your eyes and mine. It is this love of God that Jesus not only poured out from His eyes, but from His veins, that is the source of everlasting satisfaction of our deep thirst. We bring this thirst to the community of faith on the Lord’s Day and if it is working right, we are reminded how Jesus satisfies us here, in this place. That is the welcome of this place. I pray this happens here.
Then let us go from here devoted to that One who loves us, from whose face and veins we have drawn this profound acceptance, this life-giving approval and forgiveness and a invitation to remain in His company—that is, to “follow me.” If we are with Him we have the living water. Let us live as though we believe this pertains to my life, and to yours.
The story ends with many Samaritans believing in Jesus because of the witness of this woman they all thought so ill of. They asked Jesus to stay with them. He stayed two more days. I wonder how those two days must have been. I wonder if from that day on the Samaritan woman was welcomed into the company of other women who drew water in the cool of the morning or evening. I wonder if the man with whom she lived married her, and from that day on cared for her and loved her so that she was never divorced again. I wonder if in one city of the Samaritans anyway no one thought of worshiping on Mt. Gerazim as the big issue of life.
Both those days Jesus no doubt got up early to pray. And perhaps they watched Him pray, and indeed, perhaps they were welcomed to pray with Him, and heard Him address God, “Abba, Father,” and knew that they too, though rejected by the Jews as Samaritans, were accepted in the beloved by their heavenly Father.” And so are you and so am I in Christ. And so let us live out our gratitude to Jesus who made this known to us.
Let us pray: O Lord God, creator of all things, father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our heavenly Father too, we thank You for the drink after which we never thirst again, that flows from Jesus Christ Your Son. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
June 04, 2006
Status in the Kingdom of God
Ruth 1: 15-18
John 3: 22-36
June 4th, 2006
The Feast of Pentecost
Today is Pentecost, as we have been reminded at the start of today’s service. We are accustomed to remembering Christmas and Easter. Few Protestants remember Pentecost. Today we’ve tried to do a bit better. Why, when there is nothing in the New Testament about celebrating special days? In fact, to the contrary, the Apostle Paul wrote to Christians in Colossae about special days: “Let no one pass judgment on you . . . with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.”
One way the religion of the Old Testament is very different from that of the New Testament is that the ancient Israelites were required to celebrate three great pilgrimage feasts to Jerusalem: Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. “Three times in the year you shall keep a feast to me,” Moses told the Israelites. These feasts at first were family celebrations. But then they expanded and became all-Israel events.
Why? Well, for more than one reason. They brought the people together so they remembered they were part of a great family with a common heritage that identified them. It was a way of keeping connected as God’s people.
But there was more than this. In Deuteronomy we read: “You shall rejoice in your feast, you, and your son and your daughter, and your man-servant and thy maid-servant, and the Levite, and the sojourner, and the fatherless and the widow, who are among you . . . You shall surely rejoice.”
We read in the 100th Psalm, “Let all the earth make a joyful noise to the Lord. Serve the Lord with rejoicing.” This may well have been an antiphonal song the Israelites sang when they gathered for these feasts. Whereas the daily routine of sacrifices was probably tiresome, even gruesome, the great feasts were happy events. At the last of these feasts young women would dance before young men hoping to attract their future husbands.
God gave three great feast days to ancient Israel to remind them of the on-going life with God that was their call—and that it was a happy thing to be God’s people. Little did they know that in each of these three feasts God was pointing to the length and breadth of His love for the whole world.
They had no idea, for example, that at Passover, many years after the Exodus from Egypt, that a first-born Son born in the family line of Judah would die for the sins of the world. All they knew then was that a first-born son died in a lot of Egyptian homes long ago as part of their deliverance from bondage in Egypt.
They had no idea that at Pentecost when they read the Book of Ruth together, that this story of a Moabite woman’s merger into the family line of the greatest king of Israel anticipated God’s reaching out to the whole world through the seed of Ruth, David’s great-grandmother. We listened this morning to those beautiful words of Ruth to Naomi, that remind us of what Jesus said to us, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” At Pentecost we remember not only the coming of the Holy Spirit one day long ago; we remember He has not forsaken us.
And it was beyond their dreams that at the third great feast, Succoth, a feast of in-gathering the harvest, they were remembering year after year that all nations would be gathered to Jerusalem. From Jerusalem springs of living water would flow to refresh every thirsty person.
Nobody at the time realized this was what Jesus was talking about in what we read in John 7: 37, “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, ‘If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, “ Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water”.”
And then John lets us know what this meant: “Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive.” Jesus used this last Jewish Feast of Tabernacles to proclaim the refreshment He would offer to all who come to Him to drink. It was the feast when we non-Jews were welcomed into the fold of God along with the physical descendants of Jacob.
If these feasts were so important to the Jews why were no counterparts established in the New Testament for Christians? Why are we not commanded to be happy together three times in the year? What a great antidote times of happiness together are to the woes of life that hound us! Laughter is great medicine, and all the more when it is prompted by the joy of the Lord.
I don’t know the answer to this question. Maybe the reason why we were not given Christian feasts is that the Jewish feasts come too infrequently. In Acts 2 we read of the early Christians that they broke bread together often, from house to house. We are to entertain each other often, being together over good food, sharing our homes week in and week out. We’re to have LOTS of church dinners. In these regular moments we suture our bond in Christ. These are our feasts that bring happiness.
Or maybe we were not commanded to celebrate formal three-times-a year feasts because the more organization there is the more incidental structure develops. And where there is structure there is administrative authority to make sure things get done. And where there is administrative authority people with strong temperaments rise to the top of the structure. And thus within the Church there develops the very thing Jesus said was not the case in the Kingdom of God. In the Kingdom of God the one who is master and Lord serves those over whom He has authority. But in the kingdoms people develop, those on top boss those below them on the totem pole. Jesus taught us: Do as I say; Do as I do!
We read this morning John the Baptist’s words that should echo loudly through every congregation: “He must increase but I must decrease.” Josephus tells us that Herod put John the Baptist to death because he feared this humble man was gaining too much political muscle. Little did he know how little interest John the Baptist had in political power. The last of John’s desires was that he could rule over people. His whole way of life rejected the things ordinary people consider important: comfort, security, status, or power. “Jesus, the Master who served, must increase; I must decrease.”
John the Baptist said this in the course of a conversation he had with some of his followers who had been talking with a Jew—which probably means a Pharisee, one concerned with interpretation of the Bible. John’s followers asked him about Jesus—to whom he had pointed one day as he baptized people in the Jordan River. John said then, “See, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” But this One of whom John spoke stood in line with sinners to be baptized. And now he was baptizing, or his followers were doing this as Jesus looked on.
John the Baptist’s disciples thought that only their leader did this kind of thing. Why was Jesus baptizing?
John was not in the least threatened by the people coming to Jesus for baptism. He called himself a “friend of the bridegroom,” with Jesus the bridegroom. In other words John said, “Everything is about Him; I’m just His friend. I am thrilled at the sound of His voice. I’m completely happy because I see people coming to Him.” Remember that in the other Gospels we read that John said, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’.”
Here we read John the Baptist’s words that point toward Pentecost, “He whom God has sent utters the words of God, for it is not by measure that He gives the Spirit.” And John’s Gospel here concludes with those stunning words I remember so often: “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.”
Last week I closed reminding you of Bonhoeffer’s words that echo this truth of Holy Scripture: To believe is to obey; to obey is to believe. We cannot get away from this. Belief is not a matter of the head alone, of the heart where great mysterious thoughts are treasured. Belief demands our whole bodies by which we become the friends of Jesus. We are Jesus’ friends if we do what He commands us. Let us NOT let our good Reformed theology of grace push to the side this clear message of obedience that is life to receive and death to reject.
What does all of this have to do with Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was poured out? That is, beyond the fact that all things are connected in one way or another? Pentecost, I reminded you, was a great feast of the Jews. It was a time of rejoicing that took place at the barley harvest, and perhaps also celebrated God’s giving the Law through Moses on Mt. Sinai.
The connection with Pentecost is clear as John the Baptist pointed toward God’s giving the Spirit fully (not by measure). The connection with rejoicing is evident in referring to Jesus as the Bridegroom. At wedding receptions there is a lot of rejoicing.
And it is in this on-going, all enveloping rejoicing that we see an important aspect of God’s gift to us of the Holy Spirit. Being together as those who trust in Jesus is rightfully a happy thing—day after day, week after week, year after year. But this rejoicing comes with a price tag—deliberate submissiveness to God. Sometimes there is tension and little rejoicing. This says to us: What do I need to do to restore the rejoicing?
Put yourself among those who were waiting in Jerusalem when the day of Pentecost finally arrived. For nearly fifty days they had been together, patiently waiting for the promise of the Father of which Jesus spoke to them. What did they feel when they heard this sound as of a mighty rushing wind, a controlled hurricane, loud as thunder yet it did not blow out those flames of fire they saw on one another’s heads? Were they conscious of what was going on? Or were they filled with ecstasy of the kind that they weren’t conscious of what was going on?
Were their desires and personalities completely overwhelmed so that they could not do anything else but go into the streets of Jerusalem with the message of the Gospel? We think it must have been this way, that the disciples who flooded the streets of Jerusalem must have been “beside themselves.”
But I wonder if it wasn’t quite this way. I wonder if as they waited patiently those fifty days against all the tendencies that work against patience in you and me, that they learned to be completely submissive to God. Patience is a good teacher. What can keep 120 people together for fifty days when all sorts of “reasonable” considerations say, “Time’s up. It ain’t going to happen. Jesus meant well but He was wrong. He’s gone and we’re left with what you see—just us.”
There have been long years in which faithful Christians have asked, “What has become of the Holy Spirit?” not realizing He was still at work. I think, in fact, of our present distress over developments in our denomination that sometimes make me feel like a feather before the wind, blown this way and then that by forces beyond me—whether within this congregation where some of you are angry at the denomination, or outside our congregation where I am a part of a larger framework.
Where is the Holy Spirit when we need Him? Perhaps we look back with romantic visions of what happened at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit just took control and made people do what they would not ordinarily do. It may have been this way, but it would not keep on being this way after this.
Indeed, even then, it was only because people were submitted together to the will of Jesus who said, “Stay in Jerusalem until you receive the promise of the Father.” Even then, had there not been a spirit of submissiveness to God, I wonder could the Holy Spirit have done that strange and wonderful work described in the Book of Acts. Submission to God is very hard to achieve. It happens from person to person. Submission means waiting beyond the bounds of patience. It means putting up with conditions that are annoying. It means seeing beyond the present moment a higher purpose at work.
And for us who cannot expect the Holy Spirit to descend again as He did on the first Christian Pentecost, it means waiting until God causes to arise within us a consensus that we will recognize as the will of God—and act on it together.
I have been reminded by quite a few people since I mailed my letter to the congregation that it is crucial what we believe. Indeed it is important what we believe. Believing right includes correct doctrine. But part of believing right is maintaining a spirit of submissiveness to the will of God—indeed to the will of God that we do not always know for sure what it is. Waiting on the Lord is never comfortable. We want to be on with things, to fix what is broken.
As Americans we’re proud of “no taxation without representation,” and of that assertive outlook that made our forebears scratch and claw a great country out of the wilderness to which the Pilgrims came.
I would urge us now to learn to wait on the Lord, to wait patiently for Him. And in due time He will make clear what is right for us to do. How long this “due time” is from us now I don’t know. But I know that being submissive to God often will require us to quietly wait. And while we wait let us be busy with believing, that is obeying our Lord Jesus in the wide range of tasks He has asked of us.
Let us look at these tasks in faith, believing that they are the agenda over which we have some control. The agenda Jesus gave us is to believe and to obey, and to do the works of belief and obedience. Among these are to walk faithfully, as individuals, the walk of faith to cherish our spouses, children, friends and to do our duty as unto God. Among these are to speak winsomely of Jesus to others. Among these are to build up one another within this congregation. Among these are to serve one another in a spirit of gentleness, undemanding, sincerely, tirelessly. Among these is to remember as our dander rises, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”
Today we come to the Table of the Lord. Look beneath that white cloth and you see the emblems of the body and blood of Jesus that He lay down freely out of submission to the will of the Father. Let us eat of Him. Let us drink of Him. Let us learn of Him meekness and gentleness of heart, and we will find rest for our souls.
O Lord, grant us to be instruments of your Holy Spirit. In our day. In this time. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM