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December 17, 2006
The Privilege of the Lowly
Ezekiel 34: 11-16/Luke 2: 8-20
December 17th, 2006
I am nearing the stage of my days as a pastor when I wonder if I have stressed what is most important in my preaching. I sometimes feel the most important part of my work is spent with those who most know how needy they are. I have little to offer someone who feels he needs nothing.
In the sector of Christendom that has been my home I have often listened to preachers and Bible teachers stressing the importance of taking the Bible literally. I was taught not to like to hear people say before reading the Bible in church, "Listen FOR the Word of God." No. Listen TO the Word of God! The Bible does not contain the Word of God. It IS the Word of God. And so I still believe. For this reason I have preached from Old and New Testament, from popular and unknown parts of the Bible.
But my impression is that though the words themselves are of primary importance--which is why I have devoted so much energy throughout my years as a pastor to sharpening my skills in Hebrew and Greek, the words are somewhat like the trees in a forest.
You've heard the little adage, "He can't see the forest for the trees." Well, I sometimes get the feeling that we have short-changed ourselves by so focusing on the trees that we do not see the wonder of the forest.
The forest, of course, is the grand picture that God has painted for us of His will for us in the Bible as a whole. Sometimes we need to listen FOR the Word of God as well as TO the Word of God. That is, we need to look at the forest and not just at the trees.
Or, to think of it in another way, we need to see the panorama of God's Word to us and not just the individual brush strokes in the picture. Some of the brush strokes aren't all that glamorous, but O, the grandeur of the whole picture.
When we focus on the words without regard for the picture God is painting, we single out this or that brush stroke for emphasis. Thus, in our day of proof-text-ing, of snatching this or that verse as proof for a point of view, we have latched on to this or that tree in the forest as though it gives us the essence of the forest itself.
When I look at the panorama of the Bible a few truths stand out from the rest. I see that when Jesus summarized God's expectations of us, he honed in on two points: 1. Love God with everything and 2. Love your neighbor as yourself. Here Jesus spoke timeless truth as it relates to our response to God. He did not summarize here what God has done for us.
We have, in our doctrines, spent much time on examining what God has done for us, while Jesus summarized God's teaching by explaining our rightful response to God. So that if I do not love God with everything I am and do not love my neighbor as myself, I have missed the forest, not seen the picture –of God's purpose in giving us the Bible.
Another truth that leaps out of the panorama God paints in His Word is that loving my neighbor is essential to loving God with everything I have and am. I do not love God well if I study the details about Him in Scripture but do not love my neighbor.
Two questions come to mind. 1. Who is my neighbor? 2. Why do I need to love my neighbor as myself?
Jesus answered the question, "Who is my neighbor?" with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan cared for an enemy after he'd been robbed, beaten, and left for dead. This is a pretty broad hint at the Forest God wants us to see in His Word. Love the one you think of as an enemy. Love the one that you're tempted to pass by, looking the other way because it's too costly of time or resources to reach out to him. Jesus said this is how to love my neighbor, as he pointed out who is my neighbor.
Second, we ask, "Why do I need to love my neighbor as myself?" Because God created my neighbor. Because part of why God created me was to love my neighbor. Not only that, but because I am somebody else's neighbor.
When I'm down and in need, and look to see who will be a Good Samaritan to me, I am grateful when someone reaches out to me. I join ranks with others in this troubled world that have been robbed, beaten, and left for dead.
The way God intends to care for me is through the one who sees me as her neighbor—that is, someone who loves me as she loves herself. When someone cares for us out of the blue, invariably we think, "There is someone who really loves God."
You were stranded on the highway. It was cold; night was drawing near. Your cell phone went dead. Cars whizzed by. You prayed, "O Lord, help!" Someone stopped. He wondered if it might be a trap. Maybe he would get held up when he stopped to help. But he stopped anyway. You at first were afraid. Is it someone who will do as we sometimes see in crime stories on TV? It wasn't this kind of person. You said, "You were an answer to my prayer!"
On Friday morning Mike and I were in the Tippecanoe County Courthouse where we saw quite a few people waiting to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds before a black-robed judge. We saw defense lawyers and the prosecuting attorney clumped up near the bench, talking, as people waited to know their fate. We saw four people sitting in front of us, humbled, in handcuffs, chained about the waste, shackles on their feet, dressed in jail-clothes, dark blue. Public humiliation was the first stage in their punishment.
I found myself thinking, "Give me the justice of God any day." "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me." Not so for the wretched ones who stand before us needing grace! The law loses its majesty if not tempered with mercy—as judge and defendant both see their need for the grace of God.
I didn't know the offenses that brought these folk to their humiliation, but I know the offenses that land a lot of people in our jails. I learn of this each Tuesday evening. Often their offenses are the offenses of the poor. It is a vicious cycle. They try to drown out the sorrow of life in hurtful ways—alcohol, drugs, promiscuous sex that leads to children being born who need support that the unwed mother or divorced parents cannot afford. The poor sink in a miry pit with quicksand at the bottom. Deeper and deeper they sink into misery. Our system nearly guarantees many will not get out. Something inside me shouts, "They are my neighbor too. Jesus said, 'Love your neighbor as yourself, Stuart'."
I have a hunch that sexual promiscuity is not always a product of raw lust. Sometimes people hope for a sexual encounter that will provide a moments’ happiness. Instead they often reap an unwanted child or AIDS.
I read Psalm 40 and wonder if it applies to them too or only to me when I'm in need? "I waited patiently for the Lord; He inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure."
I look at people in the deep trenches of need and I see before me in the flesh the Bible's description of the lost sheep without a shepherd.
In the prophet Ezekiel we read this morning of God's fond promise, "I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out . . . I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness." It is one of the gentlest, kindest pictures of God and people. God is like the best, the most tender of shepherds, while we are like the most lost of sheep.
In the preceding verses Ezekiel writes, "My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill . . . with none to search or seek for them." These words Ezekiel wrote in the sixth century before Jesus was born, when God's chosen people were all in exile. They were scattered over the ancient world, from Egypt to Babylon. Indeed, so surely was their scattering now a part of their identity that the two strongest centers of Judaism were in Alexandria, Egypt, and Nehardea, Babylon. It was in Egypt, far away from Jerusalem, that the great Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible was made. It was in Babylon that the greatest body of Jewish oral tradition was written and edited that we find in the Babylonian Talmud.
But God's care for His people was not symbolized in Egypt or Babylon, but in Jerusalem. The prophet, Jeremiah wrote in the century before Ezekiel, "As a shepherd seeks out his flock . . . I will rescue them from all places where they have been scattered."
He went on to promise, "I will feed them with good pasture, and upon the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture . . . I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them; he shall feed them and be their shepherd."
When Jeremiah wrote this, he remembered the promise we find in the prophet Isaiah, that we hear in Handle's "Messiah" each year at Advent and Easter, "He will feed his flock like a shepherd, he will gather the lambs in his arms, he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young."
When we read this of God, we see God pointing His finger of destiny at Jerusalem, and Judea, and Jesus, born in the region in which little Bethlehem nestled into the countryside, the least of the clans of Judah—as Micah wrote. And when God stirred the prophets to remember God as a shepherd who cares tenderly for His sheep, gathering them to their familiar grazing land, to Jerusalem and Judea, the focus of God's finger singled out humble shepherds to first know of His grace.
Every Christmas we look at one batch of trees in the forest of God's great panorama of salvation. Luke 2 charms us in its description of shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appearing to them, scaring them, then saying, 'Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which shall come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord."
Thus we faithfully put shepherds in our manger scenes—one of the most beautiful trees in the forest. And we think, how wonderful it must have been to be one of those shepherds. What a privilege, at least that one night, to be a lowly shepherd outside Bethlehem, in the field, keeping watch over my sheep.
I must close, but when I see this tree in the great forest of God's Word, I see a primary truth of the Gospel illustrated. Shepherds were humble folk. Sometimes proud, swaggering, redneck types. But in terms of how society saw them, they were humble folk. And if you'd got into a conversation with the toughest of them, with that leathery hide that comes from self-defense, and penetrated beneath the leather exterior, you'd see that his expectations of life were very tender. Their needs were as basic as the need of their sheep.
The shepherd psalm says, "The Lord is my shepherd, I have everything I need." And your need and mine is very basic too. At the beginning and end of our lives we're back to basics. What do you need, I mean really need, even more deeply than you need food, clothes, and shelter? As a baby needs most the tender warmth of its parents, and as a dying person needs most to know she is not alone as she approaches the valley of the shadow of death, so you and I need to know of the love of God, mediated through the love of people.
And if you and I love God, and love our neighbor as ourselves, people at their moments of greatest vulnerability, of greatest need are equipped to receive God's love mediated through us.
A number of times of late I've seen fellows hardened by life's circumstances at the jail speak about God when they feel we care about them. And they will even say they're glad things have gone ill for them because it brought them to realize the most basic element of their need for God. It is a gift, then, to be brought low.
I pray that as we strive for comfort and security and plenty and happiness we may also realize how very basic is our own need. And I pray that we will respond to the needs that we see in others in such a quantity and with such affection that they may see how the Lord is their shepherd, and find themselves gathered into the fold of His care. Is this not part of the grand picture? Is this not a view of the forest that summaries the words of the Holy Bible?
O Lord, may it be with us and through us according to your Word. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at December 17, 2006 09:30 AM