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July 30, 2006
What about the Sabbath?
Isaiah 56: 1-8 / John 5: 10-18
July 30th, 2006
It’s good to be back after two weeks away. I think nearly every pastor would agree with me that spending some extended time away is an important ingredient in keeping on in the work of the ministry. We need to get a bird’s eye view of life. Day after day, week after week, month after month in the cycle of the years, we see with an ant’s eye view of things, with nose to the ground and antennae a mere fraction of an inch higher. A bird’s eye view offers much needed perspective.
These days we need not just any ol’ bird’s eye view; we need an eagle eye’s view. Let’s keep going higher; we need God’s eye view of things. I often think, looking at the pickle the church is in, looking at the confusion haunting the nations, looking at the dilemma of the lives of so many people, I wish I could see from very high up what is the path all of life is taking. It is my duty to give some clues to how to walk this lonesome valley.
When our son was on the ice breaker “Polar Sea” with the Coast Guard he and another fellow operated a computer gizmo that saw with a satellite’s eye view of things to help navigate the ship. Thus the ship was able to nose its way through thick ice by knowing where the ice was thinnest as it went from pole to pole on our planet. Oh to be able to see this clearly.
Each time we welcome a child into our midst in baptism I ponder the way ahead of her, the pathway of her life. Today we welcome little Katrina Dubikovsky into the family of Faith. When she was born, two years ago yesterday in Russia, nobody would have guessed that the way ahead included becoming Ivan and Sasha’s sister and Sergei and Nadya’s daughter—in Indiana. God saw that she would become part of this loving family and that she would become one of us. What is the “us” to which we welcome her? Where are we headed in a path that she will join us?
I pray that in days to come she will have reason to thank God over and over again that she came not only to Nadya, Sergei, and Sasha, but also to this place where she was not only baptized into but also literally loved into the Kingdom of God.
Now I did not know when I plotted this morning’s sermon that I would be baptizing Katrina today. But God knew. And there is, I discover, a connection between baptizing Katrina and the issue that the prophet Isaiah and the Lord Jesus addressed: the Sabbath Day. How different it would seem their views were on Sabbath keeping, at least from an ant’s eye view. Isaiah was concerned that Israel keep the Sabbath. Jesus seemed to debunk Sabbath observance.
Isaiah, writing hundreds of years before the time of Christ urged God’s captive people, “Blessed is the one who . . . keeps the Sabbath, not profaning it . . . to everyone who keeps the Sabbath, and does not profane it . . . these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer . . . for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” Keeping the Sabbath day holy was not only for Jews, but also for foreigners, for deformed people who were not welcome in the Temple because of their deformity.
This was a blessing rather than a restriction. What a blessing it is to rest, to be totally free from duty. Not only not to have to remember to do this or that, but you are forbidden to do this or that so stop even worrying about it. The prophet emphasized the Sabbath Day because his fellow Jews had not been keeping it holy. They became like everyone else, without the discipline God so graciously gave them: six days of work then you must rest. It was a sacred duty to rest one day in seven. In fact, the fourth commandment spelled out this Divine command.
Devout Jews knew the Ten Commandments by heart. Somehow, when the Book of Deuteronomy was written the scribe who remembered and wrote it gave a different reason for keeping the Sabbath day than the one who transmitted the earlier Book of Exodus. In Exodus the reason for keeping the Sabbath day holy was because God rested from His work of creation on the seventh day. In the Book of Genesis we read that God blessed and hallowed the seventh day in resting from His work of creation. But when the Book of Deuteronomy was written and the Ten Commandments were re-issued, the reason for keeping the Sabbath day holy came out a bit differently. Do no work on the Sabbath because God brought you out of the land of Egypt, giving you rest from your bondage, your forced labor for the Egyptians.
Perhaps it was because Deuteronomy was written when memory of bondage in Egypt was keen that a more immediate reason was provided for Sabbath rest. But it was a struggle to keep to the discipline of the Sabbath Day. It was hard for Israel to keep the Sabbath day. Somehow over the years of decline the Sabbath Day disappeared along with keeping the rest of the Ten Commandments.
Thus, after returning to the Promised Land after years of exile, pious Jews remembered God’s command. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day descended from pious Jews from the days of Ezra when the Second Temple was built. These devout Jews asked specifically, “What does it mean to keep the Sabbath day holy?” They thought about this and thought some more. When we look at the Mishna that records all the hard thinking these devout Jews did, we find a whole section devoted to the Sabbath Day. The Mishna was not written down till the end of the second century AD, but its contents came together gradually much earlier, beginning in the days of Ezra.
I found such careful thinking about Sabbath keeping in the Mishna. How do I keep from working on the Sabbath? What is work? The section of the Mishna called “Shabbath” brings together some of the answers to these questions. For example, “He is culpable of breaking the Sabbath that takes out wine enough to mix the cup, or milk enough for a gulp, or honey enough to put on a sore, or oil enough to anoint the smallest member, or water enough to rub off eye-plaster.”
I don’t mean to ridicule these seemingly picayune details. Jesus chided the Pharisees for straining at a gnat; for taking an ant’s eye view while missing God’s eagle eye view of the purpose of the law of the Sabbath. Jesus kept the Sabbath according to the intentions God had in giving this command to Moses. We err on the opposite side. We do not honor the Sabbath Day.
In John’s Gospel this morning we read how some pious Jews took issue with Jesus for healing a man on the Sabbath and then drawing this fellow into sin by having him pick up his bed on the Sabbath. They were so angry at Jesus that they wanted to kill Him. Why such vehement anger? John tells us that it was because Jesus not only broke the Sabbath but called God His Father, making Himself equal with God (5: 18).
Now we should be careful not to throw stones at the Pharisees because we live in a glass house. How have you strained at a gnat to make the Bible say what you want it to say? What kinds of things make you come to a boil? What desecration of something you hold sacred so enrages you that you could see yourself supporting the death penalty for it? In a way we know what is really important to us when we take inventory of what really makes us get upset. What can get you so upset that you could chew nails?
How many of these things are really sacred, that is, having to do with honoring God? In our pluralistic day I am suspicious that there are not very many issues having to do with God that are really sacred. For sure not many Christians would get angry enough to kill for desecrating Sunday, which is the Christian Sabbath. For that matter, think of the Ten Commandments; how many of these are commonly violated—having been explained away by this or that consideration. And no outrage follows. We accommodate the violations of God’s laws that develop.
Well, Jesus did not violate the fourth commandment when He healed the man and told him to take up his bed and walk. He violated the unfolding tradition that defined work to include acts of healing and a simple effort like picking up a straw mat. But He didn’t violate the Sabbath. These interpretations, though made out of the desire to honor God became oppressive, violating the intention of the command to rest on the Sabbath day. Jesus’ eagle eye view of the purpose of the Sabbath Day collided with the ant’s eye view of the rabbis.
It is a constant danger for those who once ignored God completely, that when they start to become serious in their religion they go overboard. But this is not a problem many Christians face today. I believe if Jesus were to come to us American Christians He would ask us, “Why have you completely ignored the fourth commandment, to keep one day in seven holy? I think we do wrong to cite the Apostle Paul who wrote to the Christians at Colossae, “Let no one pass judgment on you . . . with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are only a shadow of what is to come.”
The Apostle Paul kept the Sabbath Day. Whenever he was in a city on the Sabbath he would seek out a synagogue. And we can be sure he set aside his labors as a tent maker on the Sabbath. He rested on that day. When he wrote to the Colossians he warned them against a super-legalism that had crept into the Church, mixing this and that of Jewish law with this and that of the popular Gnosticism infiltrating the Church. Let us not throw out the baby with the bath water. The freedom we have in Christ does not take from us the benefit of God’s kindly discipline that we so desperately need to live out our lives in peace and joy.
If we take an eagle’s eye view of life do we not see that we talk about “obeying Christ” with no sense of what that means. We talk about ”the Christian life,” with little sense of how this might be unique, different from an ordinary life with no consideration of what Christ commands His followers.
In one of his sermons, George MacDonald, the great Scottish story-teller and pastor said, “Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because [Jesus] said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe or even want to believe in him, if you do not anything he tells you.”
We need to put into balance Jesus’ challenge to the Pharisees who had gone overboard in spelling out what Sabbath keeping meant and how Jesus kept to God’s intentions for the Sabbath day. Jesus did not lead us to think the fourth commandment is obsolete. Neither did the Apostle Paul teach Christians to scrap the fourth commandment. “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy,” echoes down through the centuries as a gracious discipline God gives to us, to provide structure and meaning and rest in the oft chaos of life.
Once the Jews were ridiculed by the Romans as lazy for not working one day in seven. In fact, there was a time when they wouldn’t even defend themselves when they were attacked on the Sabbath day. They soon thought better of this realizing that God did not command them to keep the Sabbath in order to be sitting ducks for their enemies on the Sabbath.
I wish I might persuade you all that from an eagle’s eye perspective, from God’s perspective, you and I need to keep one day in seven as a day holy to God. We need the discipline of this day to remember we belong to God; we need the discipline of the Sabbath day to help us remember that belonging to God means living a special kind of life; we need the discipline of the Sabbath day to help us remember that worshipping God together is essential to being a Christian. If one day in seven you specifically do this because God commanded it, it will help to instruct your heart to obey other commands Jesus gave.
In the past two weeks I have thought of what is distracting us as Presbyterians these days, and what distracts some of us at Faith Church. There are some things that bother some of us that we should simply let go; they’re not worth it. They produce needless discord. They have nothing to do with anything that is important. Let them go because Jesus tells you, “Forgive those who bother you so that I forgive you when you bother Me.”
But there are not only these tiny, unimportant matters that are hurting us. There are the positive things we should be doing out of obedience to Jesus that we do not do. Having begun to accept the principle that being a Christian means obeying Jesus, and obeying Jesus means something specific let’s go on to see what Jesus would tell us to do if He were visibly here with us. Let us go on for example from the discipline of keeping Sunday holy to doing for the people who live in the trailer court on Klondike Road what we can. How can we help them? How can we help those children we see there, and the many families there that are struggling to keep afloat? How can we show them that Jesus loves them by loving them?
As Katya Dubikovsky grows up in this congregation what will she learn that following Jesus means? Will she notice that people here come to church each Sunday because they think this is an important part of following Jesus? Will she see that we obviously love each other because little things don’t get under our skin, causing strife within the church? Will she notice that we see beyond ourselves because we have embraced the needy people who live near the church? Will she observe that we give generously because we have been given much, and that these resources go to care for people far and near whom we care for because Jesus loves them?
If Katya sees all of this we will be glad. And it is in your hands and mine whether she will see this. It is in your hands and mine whether Katya will think “believing in Jesus” is just a head thing or a whole life thing. I think I know what we would like Katya to see, and our little ones too, and not only our little ones. We help each other to see from a higher perspective when we choose to live according to this higher perspective.
In many ways this begins with accepting the Sabbath Day, Sunday for us. Keeping it holy. Always be here to worship unless ill or away and not because you had other things more pressing. Be here not for “a satisfying worship experience,” an outlook that asks, “Do I like the way they do things?” but be here to worship God. Be a part of those who worship here, demonstrating that being a member is more than a word. Love one another; serve one another; forgive one another as God has for Christ’s sake forgiven you.
Let Katya see this, and others will see it too. And perhaps God will find at Faith Church an outpost of the Kingdom of God that has ripple effects of great blessing. I pray it may be so.
Let us pray: O God, we bless you for the gift of the Sabbath day, for rest, for refreshment of heart and mind found in worshipping you. Give us grace to trust your word, that it is good to do. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47905
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
July 09, 2006
The Cost of Good Health
II Kings 5: 1-14
John 5: 1-9
July 9th, 2006
Many of Jesus’ great acts of kindness were to heal sick people. In those days there was no health insurance. It cost a lot then too for health care. The gospels tell us of a woman Jesus healed who’d spent all she had in hopes of getting well, to no avail. Being well has to do with a lot more than our bodies, but we all admit these silly bodies of ours are pretty important to us.
We moderns look back at ancient times—that we know only a little about—and sometimes think people back then were ignorant by comparison with what we know today.
But then we get on a plane and travel to some of the ancient sites and we start to get a different impression. What we see often amazes us. Some of you recently came back from Greece and were amazed when you saw the size and grandeur of the Parthenon in Athens. Those of us who went to Jerusalem and saw the huge granite blocks left from the western wall marveled at how ancient peoples moved those huge rocks into place with exact precision. As there were great architects then, there were brilliant doctors too. We know the names of a few of them.
Hippocrates practiced medicine on the little Greek island of Cos in the 5th century before Christ. Doctors today promise to follow the ethics of this great physician even though health-science has progressed, using Hippocrates’ method of exact observation of how the body works. Galen in the second century AD is still talked about for his hospital in Pergamum in Turkey.
But the finest of doctors cannot heal anyone. All they can do is help to orchestrate the conditions under which God’s ways at work in our body can bring healing.
Elisha was a special man of God to whom God lent some of His own power to actually overwhelm Naaman’s leprosy with Divine power. But Elisha’s purpose and God’s purpose in healing Naaman was much more than to cure him of leprosy. Why? Because eventually old age or another disease, or perhaps a wound in battle would end Naaman’s life. Naaman came away from his bath in the Jordan River aware not only that his leprosy was gone but also why it was gone. He realized that the God of Israel healed him. The God of Israel, the Creator of heaven and earth, far greater than the local deity he worshipped in Damascus.
If we read on a bit in II Kings 5 we read that Naaman said, “I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel.” So he took away as much earth from Israel as he could pack on two mules. He put this earth in the temple of the Syrian God Rimmon. When he went into the temple of his people in Damascus, instead of worshiping Rimmon he would worship toward the God of Israel represented in that earth he brought back home.
Naaman caught on to what Jesus intended when He did His miraculous deeds. See beyond the deed to the God who makes it possible.
This morning we read briefly in John’s Gospel of Jesus’ third “sign,” healing a man who had been sick thirty-eight years. He had been lying in a place in Jerusalem where the hope of healing drew a lot of other sick people. It was at a special pool at Bethesda—a name well known to Navy people today because a great Naval hospital in Maryland has adopted this name.
Bethesda is a Hebrew name that means “House of Mercy,” from bet, meaning house, and hesed meaning mercy. If we look for this pool today in Jerusalem we won’t find it. But it once was near the St. Stephen’s Gate. Pilgrims have obliterated the pool by building a succession of churches on this spot.
Why did John select this story to tell among the many events in Jesus’ life that would have interested us? Though it is not immediately obvious to us, there was important symbolism in this place that the Jews of Jesus’ day recognized. At the pool of Bethesda, this House of Mercy, there was a colonnade with five pillars. Why five colonnades? It had to do with the five books of Moses, the Torah, in which the Jewish people read of the ways of God.
Jesus said a few verses later in John 5, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.” Those five columns stood massively for the gift of life found in the Five Books of Moses, the Torah, the most important first section of the Hebrew Bible. But this poor fellow lay for thirty-eight years under the shadow of these five pillars and remained ill.
Then we see it was a pool of water by which he lay. Water too was important to the story of Jesus’ fellow Jews. Water destroyed sin, thus bringing wholeness. God delivered Noah and his family from the waters in which God destroyed the otherwise sinful world. God delivered Israel from the Egyptian bondage by bringing them through the Red Sea safely, after which the waters came rushing in to destroy the Egyptian army that pursued them.
And now this water at the House of Mercy, Bethesda, had special healing properties. Get into it at the right time and your illness is destroyed. How so?
Maybe you notice that in our reading there is a verse three and a verse five, but no verse four. Why? Some of you who grew up on the King James Version of the Bible remember the story included this verse: “An angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” This verse was found only in some questionable manuscripts so all more recent translations of this Gospel don’t include it.
But from what this man said to Jesus explaining why in thirty-eight years he’d not been able to take advantage of the healing properties of this pool it makes better sense when we read this verse left out of our version of the Gospel. If the pool always was able to heal anyone who got into it, surely at some moment in the long wait of thirty-eight years someone would have kindly helped him to the healing waters. But apparently only at special times, unannounced, was it able to heal. It had very limited usefulness. It helped a tiny percentage of those who needed healing. Only the first one who got into it after the angel touched it. It was a bit of a cruel joke for many to be so near and yet so far from the healing they needed.
But then Jesus came. Jesus asked a simple question, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man didn’t exactly say, “Yes.” Maybe he had given up on ever being healed so he forgot why he was there. He was there because that’s where sick people came. It became a place where the barest hope of healing lingered—unfulfilled for most. So instead of replying to Jesus, “Yes, I want to be healed,” the man told the sad reason why he had never been healed. “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up. While I’m trying to get into the water someone always beats me to it.” So its power was spent on some other desperate soul.
Jesus spoke a simple sentence in reply. “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And the man was healed instantly. But his healing was evident only when he took up his bed and walked away—and on into the Temple where some people recognized him. It was the Sabbath Day. “How did he get here, walking on his own two feet?” they wondered.
The story has more details than we can explore. But one significant detail we must notice this morning. Jesus replied to those who faulted Him for healing on the Sabbath, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” By this Jesus meant that God continued working seven days a week after the first Sabbath Day of creation-week.
If you look at our baptismal font you see it has eight sides. There were seven days of creation, on the seventh of which God rested. But then came the eighth day and God got back to work. We are living in that eighth day of God’s on-going work.
And Jesus too lived in that eighth day when God continued to work. It was part of God’s on-going work that happened to take place on this Sabbath Day as Jesus healed a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years of Sabbaths. Never in the vicinity of those five columns of Moses’ Law had he found healing. Never when he lay right beside the waters of the pool at Bethesda for all those years had it ever done him any good.
But when Jesus spoke one sentence, extending God’s on-going work still on the Sabbath Day, the poor fellow’s miserable body was healed. Jesus’ enemies saw things so wrong when all they could think of was that He’d violated their Sabbath rule and their definition of work. The tradition of the elders defined work on the Sabbath with good intentions, but their good intentions missed the boat. Whereas God only intended that people get rest at regular intervals, they forgot that the Sabbath was made for the benefit of people.
Rest heals us. How often have doctors said to us who think the world won’t make it unless we work 24/7, “You must rest.” Why rest? Because rest brings restoration to body and soul. Had Jesus’ adversaries thought a bit beyond their rules they would have seen that Jesus fulfilled the purpose of the Sabbath rest with one three-word sentence—in Aramaic. “Take up your bed and walk.”
For many years, ever since that March day in 1961 when I gave my life to Jesus Christ and claimed Him as my Lord, I cannot remember ever working on Sunday. As a student I didn’t study on Sunday. I never do yard work. For me anyway, it has been an important principle to keep the Christian Sabbath as a day of rest from work.
For many of you in the helping professions it is not possible to keep from working. Hospitals stay open on Sunday because people don’t take a Sabbath from their illness every seven days. Police and firefighters are needed every day. But I believe it is a principle still of the Christian life that God ordained that we should rest.
So it would seem that I’m siding with the Pharisees that Jesus found fault with in doing a work of healing on the Sabbath—that He might have waited till the next day to do. I don’t think so.
Part of what’s going on in the story is not only what Jesus did, but what the man did in response to Jesus. He obeyed Jesus. He took up his bed and walked. Later in the story we read that Jesus said to him, “Sin no more so that nothing worse happens to you.” In other words, more than physical healing came to this man when Jesus spoke the healing command, which the man obeyed.
You and I place great stock in what helps the body get well. Look at your medicine cabinet and count the cost of what you find there! But by far the greater need in all of us has to do with the inner person. We may have the best of physical health while clinging to our sins. And it is these sins to which we cling that far worse than poor physical health happens to us. Indeed, our physical condition is affected by our spiritual condition.
For me the discipline of keeping Sunday as a day of worship and rest has been an important discipline of the heart to remember that my life belongs to God. Remembering my life belongs to God has other implications that have to do with my relationship to people. When we talk about obedience to Jesus but do not obey at the very points that matter most to us, what’s the point of it all?
In a few moments we will gather around this Communion Table. Here, Jesus rests at the center and we who belong to Him gather around. We say we are one in Christ. Folks, let us be at one with one another if we are one in Christ. Let us pray: O Lord God, grant us to find the healing of Your Son, Jesus. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
July 02, 2006
The Burden of Freedom
John 8: 31-36
July 2nd, 2006
Worship on the Patio
The gift of the Jews to the world, it has been said, was monotheism, belief in one God. The gift of Christianity to the world was freedom. Jesus said in that memorable passage we heard this morning, “If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”
Jesus’ other teaching on freedom has been claimed as a motto by a number of universities. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” This is the motto of the University of Freiberg in Germany. I discovered in checking the web that this remark of our Savior has been claimed over and over again as the inspiration for higher learning.
But what is the truth that sets us free? Jesus was not telling us that truth is attained by an unfettered pursuit of learning. Jesus said, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.”
The truth that makes us free comes from continuing in Jesus’ word, which makes us truly His disciples. What is it to continue in His word? It is to continue learning of Him. This sets us free.
Paul echoed His Lord, “For freedom Christ has set us free.” “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods; but now . . . you have come to know God.” In Christ we are introduced to God as children so that we can call Him, “Abba, Father.” In Christ we come to “know God,” and this sets us free. This is an article of our Faith.
Since we have come to that time of the year sacred to all Americans let me remind you how our claim to freedom unfolded. In the late 18th century as part of the Enlightenment the winds of freedom were blowing in Europe. John Locke d. 1704 claimed this freedom much earlier in his “Second Treatise on Government.” There he wrote of all peoples’ “unalienable rights of life, liberty, health, and property.” Where did he get that idea of an unalienable right to freedom that contradicts the state of nature?
It traces back to what Jesus said, echoed by Paul: In Christ, God has set us free. Free from what? Freedom from the bondage of a law we cannot keep. Freedom eventually from death itself.
Christianity played such a part in the development of the Western World that gradually people claimed this freedom. But it was a freedom in a very limited sense, as release from all restraint. It was an idea of freedom that forgot that true freedom is inward and comes in being Jesus’ disciples. It is good for us to remember this even though Thomas Jefferson may have forgotten it.
Our American forbears claimed the rights of life, liberty, and property at the First Continental Congress, October 14, 1774. Then in June, two years later, Thomas Jefferson, realizing not all on our shores owned property, changed the last word in writing our Declaration of Independence. “All people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
It may be that with some lack of diffidence that people of my ancestry point back to the inspiration for this in the northern part of Great Britain in the early 14th century. Patrick Dunbar delivered the Scots Declaration of Arbroath on April 6th, 1320 to Pope John XXII. In this document the Scots told the pope, “It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.” This was a call for national freedom from tyranny, copied by those who framed our own Declaration of Independence.
All of this history interests us as Americans. We happily point to origins earlier than 1776. If we can point back to ancestors who had some part in the story of freedom, we are proud to claim it. Freedom is both a sacred and a political ideal.
But this morning I want to remind us all first that the freedom Jesus proclaimed is ours if we are truly His disciples—it is then that we will know the truth that sets us free. Second, I remind us all that freedom brings with it a burden to carry.
Freedom is far more than the political climate in which we can do whatever we desire. This so-called freedom, if under the bondage of miserable desires leads to terrible bondage. We see the sad spectacle of some young people who come to university as freshman, newly out from their parents immediate control, sometimes choosing to use their new freedom badly. They are lured into a culture of alcohol and sometimes drugs, and it goes downhill from there. Freedom, ill-used, is the source of such misery. In our free land there have been many entrepreneurs of evil, using their freedom from restraint to disgrace our humanity, drawing people into the lowest degradation.
But well used, freedom leads to the highest development of character. And with this high development of character our land has seen remarkable stories of human achievement.
We point with pride to all the first generation immigrants who came to our shores longing for freedom and opportunity. With honest effort and discipline they used well their freedom to create wealth, providing goods and services that served others well, enjoying the just revenue their labor earned.
It all goes back to Jesus’ words, “If the Son shall make you free you shall be free indeed.” The context in which Jesus said this begins back in the previous chapter. In John 7: 16, where Jesus said to His fellow Jews, “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me.” Who could possibly be more free than
Jesus, the Son of God? Who could possibly set any boundaries to freedom on the One “in whom all things hold together,” “by whom all things were created?” But Jesus freely chose to submit to the will of the Father. We find this hard to understand since our idea of submission includes the idea of dominance and subservience.
Jesus made it clear that not only did His teaching come from His heavenly Father, but His will was the will of His heavenly Father. It would seem that a person whose teaching and will are completely governed by the will of another is not free. He is a captive at the deepest level. But it isn’t so. Quite the opposite.
The secular anthem of America is “I did it my way.” Jesus could not have sung that song. His song was “I did it His way,” pointing to His heavenly Father. It was in this way that Jesus brought to us this freedom we claim.
As Jesus neared the end of His work He used His freedom in some strange ways. In John 13 we see the Master washing the feet of His disciples. Picture this. How would you feel if Jesus were at your feet with a basin, pitcher, and towel, washing your feet? He did this for three reasons: first, their feet were dirty. Second, Jesus loved them. Third, they needed to see how to use the freedom He gave them.
Two chapters later, in John 15, Jesus taught them how closely they must remain attached to Him if they would use their freedom well. “I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus taught. If they remained connected to Him, they would bear fruit. Apart from Him they could do nothing.
If you and I are in Christ, we read the same thing. You and I, if we are in Christ, are connected to Him. You and I are not solitary, unattached people with religious opinions, we are connected in Christ.
We easily forget this. We think of freedom as the privilege of doing as we want. Freedom is the right to come and go when and where I please. Freedom is being able to make my own choices, to do or not to do. Yet even if you think this way, when you read what Jesus said about freedom you realize it’s quite a bit different from merely being able to do and think what you please.
Our present dilemma as Presbyterians is that that the Peace, Unity, and Purity report adopted by our latest General Assembly takes away our connectedness to Jesus as branches attached to a vine.
It may seem to some a stretch to connect the teaching of Jesus to all that is taught to us in the Bible, but Jesus specifically connected His teaching to the teaching of His Bible, the Old Testament. And the whole of the New Testament is anchored in Jesus’ person and teaching. So that our freedom to interpret the meaning of the Bible has boundaries—if we are in Christ. We did not make up these boundaries. They are boundaries that are as necessary as railroad tracks are to an Amtrak train. We cannot be “in Christ” and disregard the Bible. Without the Bible we jump the tracks and our heavy wheels get bogged down in soft ground so that we cannot move.
George Matheson, a blind Scottish pastor, wrote these memorable words back in 1890 that capture the conditions of our freedom in Christ.
Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free.
Force me to render up my sword, and I shall conqueror be.
My heart is weak and poor until it master find;
_It has no spring of action sure, it varies with the wind._
It cannot freely move till Thou has wrought its chain;_
Enslave it with Thy matchless love, and deathless it shall reign.
One last truth regarding our freedom I must emphasize for us all. The Christian faith is a togetherness thing. This is a burden hard for many to bear. Christianity is not a loose and voluntary federation of independent individuals. It is many branches connected to the same vine.
These days we are being pulled apart because the idea of freedom has been detached from the Bible which Jesus said would have every jot and title fulfilled. “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Indeed, Jesus led us to think of the spirit of the law behind the letter of the law. You and I are not disconnected by private interpretations of the Bible; we are connected by our common submission to it, if we are in Christ.
It is my heavy duty to speak of this common submission we have to Scripture if we are in Christ in a day when the momentum of freedom tries to shake loose from every restraint. The Bible is famously poorly known and seldom read—though often cited in fragments. The News informs us more than the Bible—including as it quotes the Bible in bits and pieces.
If we here at Faith Church will freely choose to come together in submission to Jesus Christ, in submission to each other, in submission to the clear teaching of the Bible—on much more than matters pertaining to sexuality—we will discover a freedom that will make this congregation flourish as never before.
Now we are facing a severe test as a congregation. Will we be of one mind, heart, and will, deliberately and consciously asking, “What does the Bible teach us?” How do we freely submit to the will of Jesus Christ? And how do we do this together?
The burden that rests on you and me if we are in Christ, is to “truly be His disciples.” The burden is to “continue to be in His word.” It is a burden that falls on our shoulders as individuals. But it will bind us together. Jesus never taught us that individualism is the way to go. All His disciples sat at His feet, knowing that what he taught to one he taught to all together.
Paul explained this same truth in referring to us as a body. Let us be a body with parts that work together, contributing to the whole. This will come if we are in conscious submission to each other as well as consciously submitted to Jesus Christ, whom we call “our Lord.”
In the mid-nineteenth century President Lincoln faced a great test of keeping together our United States of America. He was able to achieve this by force of arms in a terrible Civil War. But at that time the southern Presbyterians broke away from the northern Presbyterians over the sorry issue of slavery.
Now we face a sterner test: will the basis of our togetherness be obedience to the word of God, the word that sets us free, because it binds us to the will of God? “My will is to do the will of Him who sent me,” Jesus said. What is our will? What is yours? Mine? Jesus says to us: “If you continue in my word you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” Some Presbyterians believe we should have a UNITY based only on respect for each other’s opinions. We indeed should be respectful to each other. But the only basis on which we can have unity is submission together to the will of God revealed in Holy Scripture—fairly and rightly accepted in what it means. We are now being reminded RIGHTLY that our unity and our freedom comes only if we are truly Jesus’ disciples—if we continue in His Word.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we bless you for our freedom in Christ Jesus. Help us to continue in His word and to truly be His disciples. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM