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March 25, 2007
How Can You and I Love Jesus?
Exodus 19: 1-9/John 14: 12-24
March 25, 2007
Next Sunday is Palm Sunday, which means that the cycle of the year has come full circle. The cycle began only four months ago, with Advent. We go from Jesus’ birth to His death in just four months. After Easter comes what’s called Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time starts with Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost (May 27th) and goes until the first Sunday of Advent, November 25th. How interesting but irrelevant you say.
Jesus never proposed that we celebrate either Easter or Christmas—two very important days to us. What He did propose was that we love each other day in and day out, throughout the year and throughout the years. And towards the end of His ministry Jesus even talked a little about our loving Him. Only in John’s Gospel, towards the end does he introduce the idea that we might love Jesus.
I wonder why, when the Great Commandment says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength,” Jesus did not start early to tell His disciples, “Love me with all you’ve got!” because I’m the One with the Father. Instead of this, Jesus taught more on the second commandment that was like the first, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Look in a concordance under the word “love” in the Gospels. You’ll find that nearly every time Jesus talked about love it had to do with loving God or loving other people. More specifically Jesus said to His disciples that the clue that they were His disciples would be their love for one another. Crazy idealism!
Why did Jesus not emphasize the importance of loving Him? What kind of modesty was this in the Son of God? I remember Paul tells us, “He emptied Himself.” This one who died out of love for the world emptied Himself. Maybe this is why so little is written about loving Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus wasn’t out there looking to see if anyone loved Him. He wanted them to love God and to love one another. He transparently showed them God but they couldn’t see through Him. We’re not talking about the theology of the Trinity here, that Jesus was the Second Person of the Trinity. We’re talking about what the Man Jesus showed as He mingled with people.
I scrolled back through the hymns I remember to see which ones had to do with loving Jesus. I didn’t come up with too many. Indeed, there are not very many. I thought I remembered one line. In the hymn, “O Love that Will Not Let me Go,” written by George Matheson, the blind pastor of the 19th century Scottish Free Church ” there is the line, “I give thee back the life I owe that from its ocean depths may flow life that will endless be.” I thought I remembered that Matheson wrote of love he owed, but I was wrong. It was life, not love he dashed off in that quickly written masterpiece of hymnody. It took him five minutes he said to write this hymn—on June 6, 1882. But it was LIFE not LOVE he felt we owe back to the Love that will not let us go.
We sing here sometimes a round of love to the Holy Trinity:
”Father . . . Jesus . . . Spirit I adore, you lay my life before you, how I love you.”
Then there is the Gospel song we sang this morning, “O how I love Jesus.” Why? Because He first loved me.” Maybe it’s usually that way. We love those who love us, and then when we think to when we first began to love someone, maybe it was a reaction to their first loving us.
I remember a romantic sounding ditty from my high school youth group years, “More time alone with Thee, Lord Jesus.” I don’t know that any of us had developed a devotional life, but it was something we talked about. I thought sometimes that it was a trifle hypocritical to sing, “More time alone with Thee, Lord Jesus,” as though we were love-struck teenagers, when we really spent very little time alone with Him.
Various of the saints of the Church were known for their love for Jesus. To mind comes St. Catherine of Sienna, the 14th century Dominican nun who had visions of being engaged to Jesus. She said Jesus called her, “my wife,” and would show the engagement ring the Lord gave to her—a ring only she could see.
But we don’t get much benefit from knowing the ecstatic visions of unusual Christians. What is appropriate in our feelings toward Jesus—because feelings plays a part in love. Why is love for Jesus, the Man of Galilee who lived His short life on Planet Earth so small a part of our thinking? Maybe because the historical figure, Jesus, lived so long ago that we actually know of Him distantly. But we speak of a “personal relationship with Christ.” What part does or ought love for Him play in this personal relationship?
What did Jesus say about loving Him? Listen to what Jesus said as recorded in John 14. Six times John mentions something Jesus said about loving Him: “If you love me you will keep my commandments (15),” and then, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who love me (21),” followed by, “The one who loves me will be loved by my father, and I will love Him and manifest myself to him (21b) “ and “If someone loves me he will keep my word (23) “ and “He who does not love me does not keep my words (24)”. Finally, Jesus said what must have sounded contradictory to His disciples, “If you loved me you would have rejoiced because I go to the Father (28).” That’s it. That’s the extent of His teaching about loving Him. Six brief remarks in one teaching in one of the Gospels—with no elaboration about what love means.
Luke tells us that the woman who anointed Jesus feet loved Him much because she recognized how much she had been forgiven. But this is a report of someone who loved Him, not a teaching that she ought to love Him. Perhaps if we realized the extent of our forgiveness we would love Him—Luke is instructing us when he reports this story.
We don’t hear Jesus say anything more about loving Him until after the resurrection, again from the Gospel of John. Jesus asked Peter three times, “Peter, do you love me more than these?—referring to the rest of the disciples. And then, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” And finally, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
The Greek word for love in the first two of these questions is the agape-word—that we think of as the self-giving love, God’s kind of love--without condition. Peter answered, “Yes.” To both questions. Clearly he was becoming nervous at this line of questioning because his self-giving love ran short a few days before. People who read this think that Jesus asked Peter this three times because Peter had denied Him three times on the night of Jesus’ trial. Perhaps.
The third time Jesus asked Peter if he loved Him He used another word for love, the verb form of the word meaning friend--phileo. “Peter, are you my friend?” Why this different word for love the third time? Maybe it’s because Jesus had spoken to them about being His friends—if you do what I command you. Maybe when Peter heard Jesus use the “friend” word for love the third time he understood that what the Lord looked for was true friendship, the kind that prompts consistent obedience. Loving Jesus with the self-giving kind of love can show itself in a flurry of martyrdom, or in passionate defense when needed. But being Jesus’ friend requires continuity. It’s easier to die for someone than to live in true friendship. How many friendships weather the tests of time? Jesus wanted from Peter a love that would stand the test of time—friendship.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and most of John tell us repeatedly to love God and our neighbor. John emphasizes that we should love each other as Jesus loved us, a new kind of love that makes us willing to lay down our lives for each other. But Jesus spoke sparingly about loving Him.
Isn’t it odd that Jesus did not say, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples because you love me.” They’ll we know we are His disciples if we love one another. Jesus wasn’t teaching theology here; He was teaching something personal and experiential. Friendship with Jesus demands continuity with each other and not spasms of display during the rush of a challenge.
John, the disciple closest to Jesus personally remembered how the Lord stressed loving one another most. John reminded his fellow Christians, “The one who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in the darkness still.” Being “in the light” meant being a follower of Jesus, the Light of the world. And then more forcefully John wrote, “If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar. For the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.”
It is really sad to see Christians who care an awful lot about God and the Truth, but they don’t seem to love other Christians very much.
In this last part of John’s first letter he writes of loving God rather than loving Jesus. But the two loves are alike if not the same for those of us who have not seen either Jesus or the One to whom Jesus prayed.
I need to become very personal with you in conclusion. Something I hope may linger in all our thoughts as participants in this community of people drawn to Faith Church for various reasons, but principally because we have trusted in Jesus: You and I show our friendship with Jesus by our friendship with one another. I urge you not only to be often in this place, and that you be here at that first moment on the Lord’s Day when I invite you to greet one another—, which theologically speaking is like saying hello to Jesus, but that you find a place in this fellowship where it is evident you are a friend.
Jesus taught us that if we walk in the light we have fellowship with one another. There are so many things that inhibit this fellowship. We lead busy lives so that there is not the time it seems, to give to friendship here. I’m reminded of what I heard on WBAA recently of someone who said to a great violinist after a concert, “I wanted to be a good violinist but I didn’t have the time.” Maybe we say, “I’d like to be a friend to others here, but I haven’t the time.”
How often have friendships here been broken by disappointment or resentment or other feelings that could not be healed by self-scrutiny and forgiveness. It’s easier to pull away than to restore a friendship by forgiveness. There are, after all, many other churches available where one can begin afresh with no one I know well enough to be irritated with him--yet.
I hear the echo of Jesus’ words down through the corridors of time, ““If you love me you will keep my commandments (15),” and then, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who love me (21),” “He who does not love me does not keep my words (24)”. And finally, “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another—and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.”
Let us love God with heart, soul, strength, and mind. Let us love our neighbor as ourselves. Let us love Jesus, that is, let us keep His words—being doers of the word and not hearers only—like people who build their houses on a rock and when the rain comes tumbling down the house does not go flat.
Let us pray: O Lord, we are not in doubt what You have taught us. Grant to us the courage to keep your words. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 11:00 AM
March 18, 2007
How Necessary is Jesus?
Isaiah 55: 1-11/John 14: 1-11
March 18th, 2007
How Necessary is Jesus?
Isaiah 55: 1-11/John 14: 1-11
March 18th, 2007
The words of Isaiah that we listened to a few moments ago come to mind nearly every time I listen to the Bible being read. “My word that goes forth from my mouth shall not return to me empty.” How unlike our words that often we hope will get lost in the mist because we cannot take them back. How often in our controversies we claim God’s Word as the foundation for our ideas but the ideas are often painfully just our own. Thankfully only God’s word will not return to Him empty.
I love those gracious words of God at the start of Isaiah 55: “Everyone who thirst, come to the waters?” Then in the next chapter, “Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord, say, ‘The Lord will separate me from his people . . . for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” All people? Do I understand this Divine message of universal welcome right?
Jesus quoted those words of the prophet Isaiah as He cleansed the Temple of the moneychangers who carved an unfair monopoly in the market place of sacrificial animals. The Lord’s House is not a place for commercial profit but a place of prayer for all people.
But the universal welcome suggested in Isaiah 55 and 56 seems jeopardized in the Gospel lesson we just read. One sentence in John 14 seems to stand out nowadays. “I am The Way, The Truth, and The Life; no one comes to the Father except by me.”
We read this today in a competitive religious climate as a gauntlet thrown down in the face of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and all others who claim a different way to God. That one sentence sounds like a challenge. When it is announced as a competitive challenge it is anything but appealing. It sounds like an affront. It says to non-Christians, you’re all wrong; only our Jesus is the way to God.
It matters not only what we say but also how we say it. In a few moments I want to think of what Jesus said in the context in which he spoke it. But here I want to recognize that some understandable reason stands behind tossing down these words of Jesus as a gauntlet, a glove of challenge to a religious duel for supremacy in a pluralistic age.
First, in our global village those who believe in Jesus don’t have to cross the ocean to mix everyday with people who believe in Mohammed or Vishnu or Buddha, or only in the Law of Moses. We never expected freedom of religion to come to this in America. Those who hammered out the “establishment clause” of our Bill of Rights had in mind keeping away from our shores anything like the authority of the Church of England in their former motherland. Now as the American Episcopal Church languishes there is little risk of that. Instead, just across the street some Christians in our country can see a mosque or a Hindu temple. Even the presence of Synagogues gets under the skin of some “good Christian Americans.”
Christians have responded to this plurality of religions in various ways, but the two extremes are pluralism and defensive exclusivism. Any word that ends with the three letters ISM labels an ideology.
Lesslie Newbigen, who was a missionary in India for forty years before returning to England, defined pluralism as an ideology where there is “no officially approved pattern of belief or conduct.” He wrote this description of pluralism in dismay in 1989.
The Gospel that sounded so clearly in India in distinction from Hinduism and Islam he found swallowed up in Great Britain. He found that England, indeed the Western world had the vocabulary of Christianity because of long exposure to the Gospel, but the specifics of the Gospel of Jesus Christ had been squashed into a religious mush. The ideology of this religious mush was Pluralism. Pluralism says you’ve got your truth and I’ve got mine, and we’re both right because truth is only what a person thinks is true.
On the other side from pluralism is exclusivism that says “I’m all right and you’re all wrong.” At its worst this exclusivism has led to suicide bombings in the Muslim world. It has led to the demonstrations by some Christians that we used to see on the Purdue campus. They held up these placards that pronounced God’s damnation of all and sundry that did not agree with them in matters of faith—even other Christians.
When Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father but by me,” did He intend that this should be the mantra of belligerent Christians in a pluralistic society? I don’t think so. But neither do I think we do well to water down what our Lord teaches here. Let’s look more closely at what Jesus said and the context in which He said it. What did Jesus mean when He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life?”
First, we can’t help but notice that in this section of the Gospel of John Jesus speaks often of the Father. Our Lord referred to God as the Father repeatedly. Remember Jesus was a Jew, a descendant of the ancient Israelites. It was a bold thing back when Moses was preparing Israel for the exodus from bondage in Egypt to say to the King of Egypt that God called Israel “my son,” actually, “my first-born son.” To call Israel first, my son (bni), and then my first born (bkori) offered not only to Israel a privileged relationship to God, but it also opened to others the privilege of a “second-born” or “third-born” relationship with God. In Isaiah 19 we see this welcome extended even to Egypt and Assyria.
It was this broader compass of God’s love that Isaiah and others of Israel’s prophets took up and emphasized. Indeed, the Feast of Tabernacles that all Israelites were to celebrate each year was a feast of ingathering of all peoples into God’s great harvest.
But the point I want to make here is that when Jesus referred to God as “the Father” repeatedly in John’s Gospel our Lord made personal what Moses had made a national relationship with God. Moses taught that Israel was God’s first-born Son. Jesus, the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth,”taught that individually we may call God, “Father.” He taught us to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” It is no whimsical thing to call God, “Father.” So first, remember how wonderful to call God Father in the first place.
Second, when Jesus told His disciples, “I am the way to the Father and no one comes but by me,” He did not say this in a competitive, pluralistic religious environment but as comfort that as He had been the way to the Father while He was with His disciples He would continue to be the way to the Father when He was no longer with them. He went so far as to say, “The one who has seen me HAS SEEN the Father.” Jesus said this to His disciples not to those who had conflicting beliefs about ultimate things.
One of the unique things about Judaism in the ancient world was that though the Jews were an ethnic unit, a religion of people with family ties to their origins, they actively invited non-Jews to come to worship the God of Israel. They learned this from their prophets. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples,” we read in the prophet Isaiah.
The Book of Acts refers to “God-fearers.” God-fearers were non-Jews who learned of the God the Jews worshipped and were drawn to worship Him while not actually becoming Jews. In the Mishna, the heart of the Jewish oral law, we read that one duty of a devout Jew is to “raise up many disciples,” among three duties. To extend the welcome of God to those who were not born into the family of Israel was a gracious word.
Now as Jesus drew near to the end of His time with His disciples they were deeply worried. They saw how close He was to the Father in heaven. They trusted that He was going to introduce the reign of the heavenly Father on earth—the Kingdom of God. He had taught them to address God, “Our Father.” But then He told them He was going away. Furthermore, alarmingly He told them, “Where I am going you cannot follow me now.” They knew this meant His enemies were going to do to Him as He predicted, kill him. Thus they feared their access to God as Father would be gone.
Peter impulsively responded with his infamous broken promise, “I will lay down my life for you.” And Jesus laid bare the extent of his weakness: “You will have denied me three times before the roosters announce the coming of morning.”
Jesus’ disciples badly needed His comfort. So in the verses that surround our passage this morning the Lord emphasized the Father, and then tells them in no uncertain words, “I am [still] the way, [still] the truth, and [still] the life. No one [will] come to the Father except by me.”
It is because Jesus said this that we do well to tell other people about Jesus. But so much more than words is involved in coming through Jesus to the Father. Coming to the Father by Jesus is not a matter of saying certain words. We must remember that Jesus warned, “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven but the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. This remark comes with others that give us pause. “The gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” I look at the masses that stream to churches in our land and wonder which gate they go through. Jesus seems to tell us that calling God “Father” requires living a family relationship to this Father. Earnestly doing the will of God is part of believing in Him. Obedience to the Lord Jesus is part and parcel of trusting Him as Savior.
Remove intending to try doing the will of God from saying “I believe” and I wonder if we see what makes up streaming through the broad gate that does not lead to life. This is not a popular word of caution today. But it is a caution I often personally feel in my heart.
Perhaps I want to say that if we truly believe that Jesus is the necessary way to the Father, the only way to heaven, it is much more than a matter of saying a password. A password may get you into your email account, but it won’t get you into heaven. If you and I have come to the Father through Jesus Christ it will be evident that we are trying to follow Jesus.
And if we are trying to follow Jesus two things will result: First, we’ll recognize that following Jesus is no automatic reflex for any of us. It is as hard as John Bunyan described in his Pilgrim’s Progress to follow the Jesus way. It is humbling to try to live like a Christian.
Second, if we are trying hard to follow the Jesus way it will strip us of our belligerence. We never see Jesus toe-to-toe with a Samaritan or a pagan Roman saying, “I’m better than you are.” What Jesus was spoke so eloquently what He was. All kinds of people were drawn to Him. If you believe in Jesus; if you and I believe He is the way, the truth and the life to the point that following Him is the great passion of our lives, people will be drawn to us as they were to Him. We will not need to claim that word of Jesus as a battle cry in a warring market-place of religions. I have been reminded that I often use the word “winsome.” I learned this from my late beloved teacher, Bruce Metzger in his prayers before class. He reminded us that the only reason for faithful scholarship as pastors was to help make the Gospel winsome—so people would be drawn to Jesus.
There was a song I remember hearing many years ago. It put into Jesus’ mouth thought provoking remarks: “You call me the way, but walk me not. You call me the life but live me not. You call me the truth but believe me not. If I condemn you, blame me not.” We believe we are saved by grace that is greater than our sin, but should we for that reason take lightly Jesus’ words when we say we believe in Him?
With all my heart I believe that Jesus is the way to the Father. Else I would not be a Christian. I’d be a Unitarian if I did not think Jesus was the only way to the Father. With all my heart I also believe that if I say I believe in Him, it is my task in life to try with all I’ve got to follow Him. And if it is this way for us all, what will be our tone of voice when we quote Jesus’ words, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me?” Will it seem like a challenge to us to walk His way to the Father so that the way of Jesus has great appeal? Or will it seem like an affront to all who have not yet trusted in Jesus?
Remember the promise of Scripture, “Every knee will bow, in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Let’s let God work out how this will happen.
Remember this comes after Paul urges us, “Have this mind in you that was in Christ Jesus: He emptied Himself. He took the form of a servant.” You who believe in Jesus, think this way of yourself. How different does it seem to come to the Father through this Jesus than through a Jesus you defend with your fists clenched as the only way to the Father.
Let us pray: Grant to us, O Lord, to so trust in Your Son, Jesus that we follow Him in a way that makes appealing His access to You. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 01:08 PM
March 11, 2007
Who Looks Like a Christian?
Numbers 12: 1-10/John 13: 31-35
March 11th, 2007
When you walk on campus at Purdue it’s easy to tell which women are practicing Muslims. They wear a head-covering, some a long dress. You can tell an observant Jewish man by the kippah he wears, a Sikh by his tightly wound turban and beard. You can tell who comes from India or China or Japan by certain characteristic physical features. I remember when we were enjoying our Sabbatical in Scotland that it was remarkable how these perfectly American looking girls could speak in such a delightfully un-American way.
Thus we think of people as being Muslim, Jewish, or Polish, or Scottish, or whatever by certain characteristics of dress, physical feature, or way of speaking.
But how can you tell if a person is a follower of Jesus? Back in the second century there was an anonymous letter sent to the teacher of the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius son of Antoninus Pius. The emperor, though a Stoic philosopher, and reckoned a good emperor, compared with Nero or Calligula was very harsh on Christians. This letter to Diognetus, his teacher, called attention to the distinguishing features of Christians that should make him delight in them. He said they are the very soul of the empire.
I’ve often thought that if Christians down through history had been the soul, a driving force of love surging within the boundaries of the church and spilling over into neighborhoods, market places in towns and cities and across national boundaries and continents, how different would have been the world’s story.
We read this morning Jesus’ type-casting His disciples. “By this all people will know you are my disciples that you love one another.”
I am self-conscious these days every time I emphasize love—which I’ve been told is a good bit. I’m self-conscious in harping on this theme because when I get to the bottom line in my thinking I always come up with this. This is what the Man said. Jesus stressed it. I didn’t make it up.
There is the risk of speaking too much of love these days because it seems to imply sweeping under the rug all the needful particulars of morality and belief, opting for a mush-like pluralism. This is not what Jesus meant. And it is not what I mean.
There are so many competing ideas about how to be a proper Christian. We divide as orthodox or progressive, liberal or conservative. We divide over our specific point of view on the Bible (regardless of whether we read it). And even if we’re all conservative some have a “higher” view of the Bible than others—defining its origins acutely—whether or not we read it. And if we share the highest view of the Bible’s inspiration and authority we will differ on its application. We differ on contemporary or traditional worship styles. Christians divide over their views on the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world.
Meanwhile, quietly there throbs in the background Jesus’ unmistakable word, “By this will all people know that you are my disciples that you love one another.” Jesus amplified what He meant. “Love one another as I have loved you.” This was a new commandment. The earlier command said, “Love your neighbor as yourself. The new command, “Love as I have loved you.” But this an odd kind of commandment.
Because if I cannot do what love commands from the heart it will seem an onerous commandment. When I start to compute how far to go in loving, love evaporates. I become a casuist.
Casuists are knit-pickers. They see fine points and make them big points. They compute how much and how often. It was one of these that asked Jesus, ”How often must I forgive, seven times?” And Jesus replied, “no. Seventy times seven.” And so the casuist gets out his abacus or calculator and starts to keep track—“488, 489, 490, WHAM, that’s all the forgiveness you get.” Maybe Jesus knew that after 490 times forgiveness would become a habit, just as the Bible tells us of God, “His mercy endures forever.”
For us to love from the heart, our hearts need changing. I’m tempted to say that what Darwin called “the survival of the fittest” is the natural selection of the heart. The outward flow of love runs up against the inward flow of the self and all that pertains to me and to my kind. Until the outward-flow of love replaces the inward-flow of self, it’s hard to be desire to be recognized as a Christian in Jesus’ terms. Then we substitute other identification marks of our own making of what it is to be a Christian. We put on our bracelets and bumper stickers and flash our slogans and grocery lists of belief.
How different it is when this love flows from the heart. In Thomas a Kempis’ little book The Imitation of Christ that our Wednesday evening study group has been reading we read “Of the Wondrous Effect of Divine Love.” This Dutch Christian who lived during one of the most scandal-ridden eras of Church history, focused on what is basic to being a Christian. The Imitation of Christ. What he said served then as a reminder to all who were upset with the church, “here is what is basic.” Let me read a fragment of what he wrote about the one who imitates Jesus in his soul:
The one that loves flies, runs, and rejoices. This one is free and cannot be held in. He gives all for all, and has all in all because he rests in One Highest above all things, from who all that is good flows and proceeds. This one respects not the gifts but turns himself above all good unto the Giver. Love oftentimes knows no measure, but is fervent beyond all measure. Love feels no burden, thinks nothing a trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself and all things possible. It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and warrants them to take effect, where he who does not love, would faint and lie down.
How different this outlook is from the outlook that computes what I must do. Here is what Jesus’ brother James called “the perfect law of liberty.”
Of course, there are other teachings in the Bible too that I embrace with all my heart, about faith and obedience and details describing Jesus’ virgin birth and sinless life and bodily resurrection and coming again all which many of us believe, and justification by faith. But if we may trust the emphasis that Jesus made on the centrality of love, and what the Apostle Paul describes in I Corinthians 13 of the greater importance of love to knowledge or understanding mysteries or powerful deeds of faith, then there is no escaping that loving one another is the key to recognizing a Christian.
I chose the story from Numbers 12 about Miriam and Aaron’s beef with Moses because this kind of problem typifies what happens when love leaves the church. Presumably Miriam and Aaron had heard God’s commands by now to love Him with everything you’ve got and your neighbor as yourself. But they’d gotten used to the idea. Part of the furniture of ideas that they were so accustomed to seeing that they forgot it was there.
Miriam and Aaron were Moses’ older siblings. Little brother had surpassed them in stature even though he didn’t have aggressive behavior. So they started the ball rolling of opposition to Moses—among people who knew what God said about loving Him and one another. They began by challenging the appropriateness of his wife. They called her a Cushite—i.e., from Ethiopia. Josephus tells of his marriage to an Ethiopian princess. Then they went on to their real quarrel with him and asked, “Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses?” A technical question!! Having raised the question it was like opening Pandora’s Box. The view got to festering that little Moses had gotten too big for his boots. Sure, he was the one who went up to Mt. Sinai and got the Ten Commandments and the design of the Tabernacle with its Ark of the Covenant. But did that mean he was the only one who could speak about religious themes?
How forcefully the Lord intervened in this potential rift among His people. He came down in a pillar of cloud before the front door of the Tabernacle. He summoned Miriam and Aaron. They came, I suspect with far less bravado than when they had belittled Moses. And the Lord made clear how unique was Moses’ role in His plan for Israel. “Whereas prophets spoke on the basis of dreams and visions I give them, I speak with Moses mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in dark speech; and he sees the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?”
The Lord struck Miriam with leprosy so that she was put outside the camp as though she was a living corpse. But Moses pleaded for his rebellious sister. The Lord told him if she had sassed her dad she would have been shamed for seven days, so let her be embarrassed as a leper for seven days outside the camp, and then I’ll let her back in.” Moses was not vindictive.
Miriam and Aaron had their reasons for standing against Moses. And no doubt their reasons included some religious rationale by which they dignified their jealousy of their little brother. How often it’s the case that people use sanctimonious language to describe jealousy or resentment. I wonder how often in the history of the Church Christians have said, “I prayed about it. . .” and then they go on to describe what boils down to, “I was jealous and resented someone disagreeing with me or offending my sense of personal importance.”
One last thought that struck me reveals the tie in between loving as Jesus commanded and believing in one God only. If we do not love God supremely and love one another as Jesus loved us it’s because we love something else more. We worship another god or gods. A 20th century theologian I didn’t agree with on too many things I saw his point on one thing. He spoke of God as our ultimate concern. What is my ultimate concern? That is what I worship—my God in effect.
It’s the kind of question only I can ask myself and you can ask yourself, “What is your ultimate concern?” That is, what do I think is MOST important? Then take inventory of how I make my decisions, how I come to like this person and not that one, etc. What is the unifying principle in my choices? That is my ultimate concern.
Jesus taught us, “If you are my disciple your ultimate concern WILL be this, love God supremely and love one another as I love you.” He did not say it OUGHT to be this way. Jesus said, “It will be this way.” John wrote in I John 1: 7, “If we walk in the light as Jesus is in the light we have fellowship one with another.”
We like to quote the title of a book J.B. Phillips wrote some years ago, “Your God is too small.” I’ve heard Christians with one set of beliefs accuse others with these words. Your God is too small. But if I see that my ultimate concern is centered in me, like it or not, my God is too small. If my God is as big as Jesus, my bigness will be like Jesus’ bigness of heart.
I pray that the Holy Spirit will shape our hearts so that we first want to obey Jesus and then that we may obey Jesus, loving one another as He loves us and thus proving to be His disciples. What evidence is there that I am a Christian? And you?
Let us pray: Grant, O Lord that we may desire to be identified as Jesus’ disciples. And grant that desiring this, we may love one another as He loved us, from a pure heart, fervently. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 12:40 PM
March 04, 2007
Who Should Take Holy Communion?
I Samuel 18: 5-11/John 13: 21-30
March 4th, 2007
When we take the Lord’s Supper we are celebrating an evening meal together even though we usually do this in the morning. It would seem odd to call it “The Lord’s Breakfast,” so an alternative term is usually used, “Communion,” or “The Eucharist,” which means, “The Giving Thanks.”
The layout of this sanctuary is for a purpose; we gather around a table. It is a drop-leaf dinner table.
It doesn’t look like an altar for a reason. We are not offering a sacrifice. We are offering a meal.
The Lord’s Supper is the central event around which a Christian community gathers—much as the evening meal is the central event in a family’s life. If the parents both work and have day-jobs—which I know not all parents do—and the children are still at home, at supper-time they come together around the table. In all your homes someone gives thanks to God for the gift of food, and then you dig in.
The most definitive scene of all that is best about the Scottish heritage is found in Robert Burns’ poem, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” In the lilting Highland dialect Burns describes the humble wee cottage at the end of the work-day. The father sits with “the lisping infant prattling on his knee” as “his thriftie wifie’s smile” radiates over the tiny room. In come “the elder bairns” from their plowing and herding. The jewel of the room is “their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman grown, in youthfu’ bloom, love sparkling in her e’e.” The father asks around how the day has been. And then there’s a knock on the door. “Jenny, wha kens the meaning o’ the same, tells how a neebor lad cam o’er the moor, to do some errands, and convoy her hame.” “The wily mother sees the conscious flame sparkle in Jenny’s e’e, and flush her cheek.”
“He’s a strappan youth; he taks the mother’s eye.” She sees the mix of his shyness and seriousness and is “weel pleased” with Jenny’s choice of men. The supper is modest—soup and porridge, all they can afford-- but the evening is grand because it is a cheerful supper. All are welcome around this table. It is Scotland’s tribute to Communion as it ought to be, as it might have been at Jesus’ final meal with His disciples, except for one thing.
How different was the evening of Jesus’ final supper with His disciples. Jesus took a piece of bread dipped it into the garnish and gave it to one who was about to betray Him. Judas had already planned to betray Jesus, but here he acts as though he’s more than one of the gang. Jesus specifically serves him.
Should he have been there at all? If you and I were writing the script for the Gospel, would we have eliminated the traitor-disciple and brushed up the image of Peter a bit? This is our tendency isn’t it? Would you and I have eliminated Judas from the guest list of the last supper? Jesus knew all along what Judas was up to, yet He served this traitor as though he were a special guest.
Not all human meals enjoy perfect harmony around the table, but this is our ideal for the Lord’s Table. Even if we know it is not true for all who gather around the Lord’s Table in a congregation, that all love one another and Jesus supremely, this is the fond ideal we hold. We try to ignore exceptions to this ideal; treat them as though they’re not there. Just before we actually take the bread and cup you and I pray together the prayer in which Jesus taught us to say, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” so that we could in fact as well as in ideal love each other and Jesus’ supremely when we gather at this table. How good it would be if before we ate this meal together, month by month, you and I thought of this or that person that we now forgive—and will live out that forgiveness in the days ahead.
Maybe you wonder why I chose to read the passage from I Samuel for our Old Testament lesson. Ever since David clobbered Goliath, rescuing Israel from an engagement with the Philistines destined for disaster, King Saul knew David was a special fellow. David was taken from tending sheep and welcomed into the royal household as though he was family. King Saul’s son, Prince Jonathan, became a close friend of the shepherd boy, David.
David could not only toss a stone with a sling, he also could strum a pretty mean harp. Gradually King Saul found two competing instincts growing in his heart: a love for David’s music, but hatred for David. This is the scene before us. While Saul listens to David’s music, perhaps singing psalms he has composed, Saul remembers hearing the popular songs about David, women singing in the streets as he rode by, “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” So while David is playing music Saul picks up a javelin hidden beside his couch and hurls it at David. Saul is usually accurate with his spear-throws, but this time he misses. Twice he misses. David gets the idea he’s not all that welcome at King Saul’s table. Later on Saul has the gall to ask why David doesn’t show up for dinner any more?
Do you see any similarity between the Old Testament scene and the setting of Jesus’ final meal with His disciples? Jesus, born of the seed of David, faced a dangerous meal and walked right into the trap. But in both settings the meal was by definition a sacred moment of family and friendship. It was like mealtime at your home or mine when we have invited friends to share the table with family. All are welcome and safe except Jesus wasn’t safe.
When you come to this table I hope you realize you are both welcome and safe. Here you and I together are beneath the cross of Jesus, “a shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land.” Here Jesus presides. Everything I say in inviting you and in the words of Institution I quote or paraphrase from Holy Scripture. I invite you in behalf of Jesus who offered the bread and cup not only to eleven disciples who loved Him, but to one disciple who plotted His death.
But there is another aspect to this meal. These elements do not just show up here on a Sunday morning. There are folk in the congregation who carefully prepare this sacred meal. Sometimes the bread is specially baked by someone in the congregation. One family with a Jewish heritage used to prepare the beautiful braided loaf, the chala, eaten at the Passover Seder. Wine and grape juice are poured into tiny cups. The very care with which this table is prepared reflects the care of the Lord Jesus who offered Himself so fully to us. He was born specially of a virgin. He led a faultless life. His good deeds rearranged nature in the doing—healing lepers, feeding multitudes with little—expecting nothing in return.
When we have folks to dinner at our home I have in mind the movie “Babbett’s Feast.” Bonnie and I work together to make the dinner as good as we can. In the movie that I customarily have in mind when we do this, Babbett, a French gourmet cook, now a servant, an alien in a foreign land, comes on to some money and spends it ALL on the most sumptuous meal her talent could contrive with no expectations of the RECIPIENTS returning the favor.
Why? Apparently simply to bring some happiness to this highly religious but dreary little community. It was stymied with weary tradition with no lubricating sense of joy. Babbett won their hearts by her lavish meal, freely offered to people who were neither her family nor her chosen friends. She worked for them as a servant. Slowly as the meal progresses they notice something beautiful has happened. They start to notice how delicious is the food and wine, how beautiful the linen cloth and serviettes or napkins, the china and crystal. The elegance gratuitously offered to them dawns on them and reaches into them. One after another they make small comments about the remarkable meal.
I wish we could see if there were any long-range effects of this meal, any healing of their souls, any planting of the seed of gratitude and generosity and joy, any future re-celebrations of this event.
We do know of the long-range effects of Jesus’ final meal. It has become rightfully the focal point of Christian worship. Even on Sundays when we don’t take the Lord’s Supper, the plate and the cup and the pitcher are on the table as a reminder. But it is possible to celebrate the event and still to forget its intent.
The passage from I Corinthians that I will always quote as “The words of institution” are part of a reordering of this sacred meal in the days of earliest Church. In Corinth “Communion” had become anything but a time of communing. The rich brought their gourmet meals and the poor brought their porridge and each watched the other. They didn’t share as we will this morning after worship at our MAOPI dinner . You have prepared, pulling out the stops and brought your portable “Babbett’s Feast” to share with each other. What is the best food I can make, the most delicious, to share with everyone here as well as with people you may invite to come with you. It’s like the Great Banquet to which all are invited.
This week I saw some of our “church ladies” spending hours preparing Fellowship Hall so that it was beautiful for this lunch. Look around Fellowship Hall as people come in. There is a look of expectancy. People think as they come in, “This is my best; I hope they love it.” And you’ll sneak peaks as people go by the long table with their empty plates. Will my dish get all consumed? Do folk like it as much as I do? This is an agape, a love feast. It is both like and unlike Communion. It is communion for sure, because we are together sharing our best with each other. But it’s not Communion, capital C, with the token amounts of bread and wine. Both these meals are very important to us as Christians. And I hope you will stay because you are welcome.
The Apostle Paul cautioned those who come to the Lord’s Table to come worthily. They should come discerning that it is no ordinary meal, but partaking of the body of the Lord. When he said this I don’t think he meant that only the “deserving” are welcome. That is, you don’t have to be perfect, sinless. But remember when you come to this meal you are coming to eat with the Lord Jesus. You and I may be reaching our hand into the dish with Jesus. Peter reached his hand with Jesus, as did John and Andrew and Thaddeus and the others. As for the betrayer Judas, Jesus specially fed him.
Viewed from Judas’ perspective how foul he must have felt at that moment. But viewed from Jesus’ side, Judas was as welcome as Peter and John. Because Jesus would soon die on the cross for those who would betray Him as well as for those who loved Him.
A great difference between Jesus and most of us is that whereas we love those who love us, who please us, who share our views, who may return our favors, Jesus loved those who hated Him, who did not please Him, who did not share His views, and who would never return His favors to them.
Who is welcome at the Lord’s Table? I would be as welcoming as Jesus. But I ask us all to consider how we will come to His welcome. “How can it be that I should gain an interest in my Savior’s blood?” Charles Wesley asked in the hymn we will soon sing. In Jesus’ name I will welcome you all here. But how good it is to remember what we are doing—coming to eat with the Holy Child of God who for our sakes gave us a Babbett’s Feast in a setting more tender than the scene in Burns’ “Cotter’s Saturday Night.” Take your place at this table. Enjoy your welcome. Share in its sacred mystery and love, not just for Jesus, but for all who reach into the plate with you for a piece of bread.
Thus we will fulfill Jesus’ intent when He said, “As often as eat this bread and drink this cup you show forth my death until I come.” Jesus’ death gave promise of our life. The finest way you and I can say thank you to Jesus is to deliberately, even against our inclinations, love one another as He loved even Judas Iscariot.
Let us pray. O Lord God, for the gift of your Son Jesus, for the gift of His life and death we thank you. And for the gift of this table in which we are welcome with Him. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 479064
Posted by faithpres at 10:21 AM