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April 25, 2004
Stay Where You Are
Stay Where You Are
Psalm 27 / Luke 24: 44-53
April 25th, 2004
This morning I invite you to think some more about what took place on Easter afternoon.
After Jesus had demonstrated to the eleven disciples that He was alive by eating some broiled fish and honey, He said to them, “You are witnesses of these things . . . but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” In other words, “Wait, you’re not ready to say anything about this yet. Stay until you have been clothed with power from on high.”
One of the greatest differences between us and God is that God sees time as a friend, while we see time as an enemy. We don’t like to wait, while God can wait for ever. The principle thing God tells us to do fast is to listen. "Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger."
We Presbyterians are sometimes accused of taking forever to get something done because of our demand for “decency and order,” but we’re lightning fast by comparison with God.
I will often begin our worship quoting the words of Isaiah, “They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They will walk and not faint.” And you take comfort in those words.
You hear me quote the psalmist immediately after this, “Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and he will strengthen your heart.” We all find these words reassuring. I feel the reassurance when I say this. Why?
I think it is because these promises calm our fears that having to wait does not mean that God has forgotten us. We who were born yesterday and will die tomorrow, want things to happen quickly for fear they won’t happen at all. We imagine we know what should happen, or at least what we’d like to happen, and there’s no time like the present. How many buzzwords we have that project our impatience.
Meanwhile God is watching and unfolding His plan. It seems slow, but the Providence of God does not rush to its end. A thousand years, after all, are like a day to God. God is working out His purposes. “All things work together for good to those that love God, to those that are called according to His purpose.” You reply, “It may be so, but, for goodness sake, God, why are you taking so long?” And God replies, “You’re right. It’s for goodness sake that I take so long.”
We know from 20/20 hindsight that the disciples had to stay in Jerusalem fifty days, until the Feast of Pentecost, before the promise of the Father would come. But they had no idea that Pentecost would be the big day.
I put myself in their place and imagine that those fifty days must have felt like an eternity. Each morning they would get up with no agenda except to wait. Luke tells thus they were often in the Temple about their prayers, blessing God. But who cared for the daily needs? Who provided food for them all? What did they talk about? What plans could they make when they didn’t know what they were supposed to do?
There were several reasons why the disciples would have preferred not to stay where they were.
It was dangerous in Jerusalem.
They were far from home since they all lived up north around the Sea of Galilee. Most of them were married, I expect, and would have wanted to get back to their wives and children—and to their livelihoods.
They had lost the physical presence of Jesus, who held them together. The longer they waited the more their intensity diminished. It was only natural. We forget so soon the most remarkable things. It almost seems imprudent that Jesus told them, “Just wait. Stay where you are.”
I wonder if the first lesson Jesus wanted His disciples and us to learn in this walk of faith is that very little worthwhile can be accomplished quickly. Jesus told Judas, "What you are going to do, do quickly." But His brother James probably gave His more routine advice: Let everyone be swift to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger." What an odd idea: "swift to hear!" It is impossible to hear thoroughly, quickly. Listening makes you wait and be attentive. Jesus wanted His disciples to wait and listen to what the Spirit of God would say to them—in due time—after they had waited on the Lord, finding renewal of their strength.
The disciples would have wanted to strike while the iron was hot, to get on with the task of spreading the Gospel while the memory was fresh in their minds that Jesus was alive. A fresh witness is the best witness because memory fades. But Jesus said, “Wait.” They needed a power greater than their immediate excitement that Jesus was alive.
We say the term, “easy come, easy go.” What comes easily goes easily. Jesus knew the wisdom of that term. They needed the power from on high, the powerful inner presence of the Holy Spirit in order to launch their work that would spread the Gospel of Jesus to the whole world. That’s why Jesus said to them, “Stay where you are. Wait until you are empowered from on high.”
But time has moved on. Now, we think differently. Our strategies try to get as much accomplished as quickly as possible. The Holy Spirit seems like an agent we try to control, rather than the power of God that will control us. How much of our Christian experience requires haste. Efficiency requires it. We value speed, size, numbers, power, and influence. All these were strangely absent from Jesus’ agenda.
Here we find staring us in the face Jesus’ apparent waste of time. “Wait in Jerusalem until you receive the promise of the Father, until you are empowered from on high.”
Jesus challenges you and me in our haste. Are we too quick in the way we try to lead people to trust in Jesus? A few moment’s conversation ends with the question, “Would you like to pray to receive Christ as your Savior?” Jesus said, “Count the cost before you build. Don’t discover after you’ve begun to follow me that you don’t have the resources to continue.” Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.” Where are these questions that must surely make a person think twice before signing on the dotted line?
We think of the Roman Governor Felix’s hesitant response to the Apostle Paul who had explained to Him the Gospel. “Go away for the present; when I have an opportunity I will summon you.” What a bad choice, we say.
I remember the song built on that story in the Book of Acts. It was sung plaintively before the invitation at the end of our evening services, “Almost persuaded now to believe. Almost persuaded, Christ to receive. Seems now some soul to say, go Spirit go away. Some more convenient day. Almost, but lost.”
We cite Paul’s words to the Church at Corinth as many in it procrastinated in their response to the Gospel, “Behold now is the day of salvation.” And so it is. But the salvation which Jesus offers us is not a momentary act that rescues our souls from hell. It is a pilgrimage of a lifetime. It is a daily walk with many “dangers, toils, and snares.” “Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home,” we rightly sing. We’ve got to walk that walk once we’ve begun, and that walk doesn’t happen quickly. Wait. Stay the course.
Many of us are restless. We are achievement oriented people. Even the Church is now measured in terms of achievement. But I remember that Jesus began to guide the Church by telling His disciples to wait until they were empowered from on high, until the Holy Spirit came over them. If they had charged on, what a fiasco it would have caused!
It so happens that today I have been invited to preach at the Korean Presbyterian Church after our Sunday School is over. As I pondered what God might have me say to them, I had St. Paul’s words in II Corinthians 3 come forcefully to mind. There Paul referred to the Christians at Corinth as “our letter of recommendation, written on your hearts.” This was a very gracious response to a graceless congregation that treated him unkindly.
They gave him the impression that they wanted him to provide letters of recommendation to demonstrate he was an acceptable candidate to serve them as apostle. “Do you want a letter from the pillars of the Church in Jerusalem? From Peter, James, and John?”
Kindly he said, “No. You are my letter of recommendation.” That is, you are the proof of my ministry’s good effect. What a kind thing to write to a church that gave him so much pain!
But then he went on to say more, “You are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts.”
I thought of these words of the Apostle Paul when I prepared to preach at Dr. Eleanor Filmer’s funeral service. Over the course of her life she showed such a patient spirit. And God wrote on the tablet of her heart a message that many of us could read. It was a message of patience, kindness, fervent love of God and people, and great demands on herself for faithfulness.
It takes a while to write a good letter. I wonder if Jesus told the disciples to wait fifty days in Jerusalem because God was writing letters on their hearts the message that He would dispatch on Pentecost.
It was a letter to the world, “You can be reconciled to God!” It was a letter filled with hope and reassurance, and needed seasoned hearts on which to be inscribed. Matthew needed time to remember Jesus said, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” He needed time to remember this, because it is much more natural to become weary and impatient with the weary and heavy laden.
If the disciples had rushed off to spreading the word of Jesus’ resurrection immediately, in the first flush of their enthusiasm, and then encountered the bitter rejection followers of Jesus met with in those difficult early days, they would have quit. But with fifty days of waiting, it was long enough that their hearts started to become plastic in God’s hands. They became pliable as they felt the wave-like feelings of exuberance and weariness, impatience and resolve begin to mold their usefulness.
This is why they had to wait. Saints are not made in a moment. Even fifty days wasn’t long, but it was long enough to plant the idea that following Jesus is not a momentary event. It was long enough for Jesus to inscribe a letter on their hearts.
This letter would first be opened in Jerusalem on Pentecost, fifty days later. Then the disciples fanned out and took it to Judea, the region around Jerusalem, and then to Samaria, where the nearly-Jews who were despised by the Jews lived, and then to places very far away, as far away as India, and eventually even America. But they had to wait to let that letter of Jesus get written on their hearts.
Seven years ago when Bonnie and I were in Scotland for that wonderful Sabbatical you gave us, toward the end of our time there we drove down into England to visit some special places. We drove to Brighton to see where Frederick William Robertson served his remarkable but brief ministry at Trinity Chapel. Then we went north to Oxford because I wanted to see Oriel College, where John Henry Newman and John Keble led a segment of their remarkable, Godly careers. Both these men lent strong influence to my life of faith. But maybe most of all I wanted to see Magdalene College, where C.S. Lewis taught and wrote many of his remarkable books.
It was there that he wrote to me a letter with a pen he dipped into ink as he wrote. You can imagine that this letter was and is very precious to me. I wonder how long it took him to write that letter. He wrote corrections in pencil over his ink letters, written with a dip pen! It was so precious I didn’t keep it, but sent it to the C.S. Lewis collection at Wheaton College as a permanent loan, not a gift.
I bought a quill pen in a stationery shop across from the Magdalene tower, and I have used that quill to write a few letters that were very important. It takes time to write a letter like this, and great care so as not to make blotches with the ink, or to put your fingers on the ink before it is dry.
How different it is to write a letter with a dip pen than it is to jot off an email message. You and I may put together an email message very quickly. When I send you all a reminder of our Thursday evening dinner, I write those few casual words of invitation, and then push a button and it goes to all of your email receptors. It’s not a personal message to each one of you. It’s a quick way to stay in touch.
I thought of these things in terms of how God speaks to us. God took the time and the trouble to write us a personal letter. We call this letter, “Jesus,” and His life was written slowly.
So it is no wonder that Jesus made His followers wait at least fifty days before they could start to share this letter with the world. In those fifty days God was writing on the tablets of their heart the message they would tell. It was a message not only that Jesus saves, but that it takes a lifetime to work out that salvation, with fear and trembling.
Most of us need to be reminded to wait, to slow down, indeed, to stop placing demands on God.
I am sometimes tempted to think of our usefulness here in terms of efficiency, equating size with importance, and speed with effectiveness. But God is working out His purposes here in His time, for purposes that are good.
I hope this morning you may hear God saying to you not only “Wait on the Lord,” to find strength, but perhaps, get started for real presenting your life to God, as a life-long venture of trust and faithfulness. Don’t rush, but don’t procrastinate either. There were those who fell away in the early going because God wasn’t being forceful enough in imposing the Kingdom of God as they understood it. Will you be among the few who today will serve God well and patiently in our time?
O Lord, help us to wait on you with trusting and believing hearts. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2004
Have You Seen Jesus Yet?
Have You Seen Jesus Yet?
Psalm 16 / Job 19: 1-4, 14-18, 23-26
Luke 24: 20-43
April 18th, 2004
At this time of year I go out into our back yard each morning with my coffee cup to watch the progress of the trees Bonnie and I planted. I go to our young peach tree and am so glad to see it loaded with pink blossoms. The golden delicious apple tree had no blossoms last year, but is covered with them now. The grape arbor has little explosions of new life along the branches. I marvel at this. I never get used to it.
But as marvelous as this is, it happens every year. I'm accustomed to it. Can God do anything new out there? As wonderful as the cycle of the years is, can God innovate? Has He ever innovated? Is there, can there be anything new under the sun.
The Book of Revelation quotes the glorified Jesus, "I make all things new." Twice the New Testament says related things about Jesus. First, Paul writes, “By Him all things hold together.” And then, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, “He upholds the universe by his word of power.” He makes all things new, and upholds everything that exists, but does He ever do something new?
We seldom think of Jesus specifically behind the cohesion of nature. I believe we think like Deists, with a clock-maker Deity who has made the world, wound it up, and let it run on its own. But the Bible tells us, “He upholds the universe by His word of power.” We may sing in church, “Jesus shall reign where e’er the sun does his successive journeys run,” but we don’t think of Jesus’ reign like the presiding of the Prime Minister in London. It's all so behind the scenes that it very nearly seems like a figure of speech to speak of Jesus this way.
We expect the process to continue unchanged, perhaps with Jesus watching, but His hands are off the controls.
But there was a day a little over two thousand years ago when God did something new. He interrupted the cycle of birth, death, and decay. Last Sunday this place was full of people, and I learned from other people who attend church elsewhere that it was this way there too. People wanted to celebrate Easter. “He is risen! He is risen, indeed!” This was something totally new! Christians around the world greeted each other exuberantly with these words. Why? Because as we sang, “I serve a risen Savior, he’s in the world today.” Had this Savior not first been dead, as dead as Marley's ghost, before He came to life, this would all be rhetoric, nothing more.
Indeed, this is sort of how it was the first Easter. We have read together this morning that all of Jesus’ closest women friends came to the tomb where He had been laid to pay their respects to a dead Jesus. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James and other women came with spices to anoint His dead body. They wanted to alleviate the stench of decomposition out of love for Him.
When they learned that Jesus was alive, they ran to tell the men who had been with Jesus for three years. “These words seemed to them an idle tale,” Luke tells us. The women said, “He is risen!” But the men did not answer, “He is risen indeed.” They said, “No He isn’t. That’s woman-talk.” They still loved Jesus, but it was form of love people feel for the beloved departed.
I wonder what they would have done if they had not been convinced before too long that the women told it like it is. It took some convincing. Luke tells us of interesting encounters Jesus initiated with the Disciples.
First, He appeared to two of them walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, a town about seven miles away. As they spoke gloomily about Jesus’ death, He asked them, “What are you talking about?” One of them scolded Him, “Have you had your head in the sand?”
Jesus began to talk, explaining how their Bible pointed toward all of this. We wonder what passages in the Old Testament He mentioned. Did He cite Job’s words that we read this morning, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth . . . then from my flesh I shall see God.” To us, Job’s confession of faith seems to point right at Jesus. Did Jesus cite the psalm we read, saying it spoke of Him: “Thou dost not give me up to Sheol, or let thy godly one see the pit.” Sheol was the place of the dead. The angels asked the women, “Why do you seek the living in Sheol?”
These two men at least found this strange person who joined them on the road interesting. They invited him to spend the night with them. Then, at supper, everything changed. When He took the bread in His hands and blessed it, and then broke it, acting like the host, they suddenly realized who this Man was. They had seen Jesus break bread just this way before. Luke says, “Their eyes were opened.” And then Jesus disappeared. You can imagine how excited they were, and perplexed. Who has ever had someone simply disappear like a picture off the TV screen when you switch channels?
Even though it was almost dark, they ran all the way back to Jerusalem. They were so thrilled they couldn’t stand going to bed. I wonder if they set a world record for the seven-mile run, but nobody was there with a stopwatch.
They burst in on the eleven disciples, out of breath. “The Lord has risen indeed,” and then, seeing the doubting looks on everyone’s face, they added, “and has appeared to Simon.” What does that mean, we wonder? Maybe Peter wasn’t there at the moment. Or maybe they looked over at Peter to get a nod of agreement. Peter had kept quiet, for a change, aware how often he’d opened his mouth too soon.
At that very moment Jesus appeared to them. But instead of taking this as evidence that the two men who burst into the room excitedly two minutes before were telling the truth, Jesus faithful disciples were startled. They were afraid. They thought it was a ghost. Luke says, oddly, “They disbelieved for joy.” I don’t know what that means. But I know people sometimes respond to unexpected good news oddly.
It wasn’t until Jesus ate some broiled fish and honey right there before them that they were convinced that He had really risen from the dead.
But many folk today, even Christian folk, find it hard to take this all in as actual fact. They are in good company, of course. Even the immediate disciples of Jesus didn't believe He was alive.
I heard a curious sermon on the radio Easter Sunday afternoon from one of the prominent churches in Indianapolis. The kindly preacher spoke about “resurrection moments” happening to us all. The disciples were gloomy because Jesus died, but then they felt better. “Easter faith” encouraged them. Of course, Jesus was dead, but they weren’t depressed any more. They got over it and life moved on for them. Somehow, I don’t think this is what happened.
We have this odd way of thinking that things that happened a long time ago are less real than things that happen now. People who lived a long time ago reported that they saw something, but we assume because it’s out of the ordinary, that they were gullible. The game of phone-tag played out over the centuries, and so we celebrate Easter Sunday as though something happened to Jesus’ dead body, when it was all in the disciples’ minds.
Why do we have this skepticism? Isn’t it because we find it hard to believe that anything really new can happen? God could make this remarkable universe thirteen billion or so years ago, but God couldn’t do anything new on the first Easter morning.
But if Jesus didn’t come alive on Easter morning, it is pointless that we should be here today. If Jesus didn’t escape the tomb alive that day, I’ve wasted my career. Thirty-two years so far of climbing up into the pulpit, often with anxiety, and all for nothing? Christianity is a house of cards if Jesus did not come alive again on Easter morning.
Of course, that we are here this morning, and that I’ve spent thirty-two years preaching the Gospel doesn’t prove that Jesus came alive on Easter morning. But we’ve got some explaining to do about the staying power of this faith if it was all make-believe.
Jesus has strangely changed the hearts of people as though He is alive and well. I mentioned to you the remarkable effect of this Good News in the Bellavista Prison in Medellin when I came back from there in February. The on-going intensity I saw in Julian’s face—a hit man for Pablo Escobar--was this all due to a fairy tale?
What could Jesus’ command mean to His disciples, “Follow me!” have meant if He died, and that was it? What would this new thing that developed from Judaism be if Jesus had stayed dead? I don’t know. The effects suggest that something new and strange happened on Easter morning.
Without the resurrection, the Christian faith falls flat on its face. Without the resurrection, our faith is just a memorial, an allegiance to a dead hero of faith.
But our faith is far more than a memorial to Jesus. In fact, looking down the corridors of time, the Apostle Paul tells us that what happened to Jesus will happen to those who trust in Him. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." We understand the dying part, because we’ve seen this happen. We struggle with the being made alive part because we’ve not seen it happen. We’ve got that idea lodged in our minds, “God can’t really do anything new.” Birth, life, and death—that’s it, because that’s all we’ve seen happen.
Two questions I put before us: First, why do we find it so hard to think that the One who created the heavens and the earth cannot do something new? Second, what can we do to combat our own inability to believe what is basic to the life of faith?
The answer to the first question I think is this: we have to willingly suspend our disbelief when we come to the end of what is easy to understand. We study hard to learn to understand fields of inquiry beyond our ken that have to do with literature or the natural world. Why are we limited to so narrow a sphere?
Each Friday at noon a number of us men meet together to read interesting books that help us understand our faith better. Around that circle are fellows with different areas of expertise. I often feel like a dwarf among giants, intellectually. But I treasure those days when one or other of these friends explains to me what they understand, that is beyond my understanding, beyond my experience.
When we come to the resurrection of Jesus, we have all come to something beyond our understanding, beyond our experience. We understand the grammar of the sentence: "Jesus came alive again." But the meaning is hard because the mechanics of resurrection are unknown.
Here we park our pride at the door and admit, “God, you’ve got me on this one. But I’ll trust you.” We do not crucify our intellects when we admit that here we must walk by faith and not by sight. As I must trust that what a physicist explains to me is accurate, though I barely understand the grammar of what he says, so maybe there’s something beyond the brightest of us to be understood. It is the height of wisdom to trust that God can do something beyond us. God did something beyond us, something new on Easter morning.
Second, what can we do to combat our own inability to believe what is basic to the life of faith?
To the extent that our faith remains something that goes on in our heads and hearts and does not translate into action, we will never come to grips with the Resurrection of Jesus. You and I persuade ourselves that what we believe is true when we act on what we believe. The connection between act of faith and faith itself is uncanny.
Jesus first disciples acted on the information their eyes saw and their ears heard. They acted on what their hands felt, having touched Jesus’ hands that had been nailed to a cross three days before. As they acted on this awareness, they developed a way of life that was convincing, that coordinated with the Gospel they spoke.
Why should you forgive others as Jesus forgave? Why should you care for others with your energy, your time, and your money? Why should you love each other here? Why should you be trustworthy and true? It would seem that it’s easier to get ahead if you look out for yourself and not for others.
You should follow in Jesus’ way, learning of Him who was meek and gentle of heart, in order to fortify your trust that you serve a Risen Savior. You train your own heart as you train your habits. If your habits and heart in alignment, you will be asked why. It's bound to happen. At this far remove from the first Easter morning, Jesus intends that you and I raise this question in peoples' minds.
If you and I have trusted in Jesus, we’ve come as close to seeing Him as it is possible to get. And the more we study Him and follow Him, the more we will resemble Him. And the more we resemble Him the more convincingly we can present Him. And that’s our biggest call in life—to represent Jesus to others. How are we doing?
I pray that God will refresh us to represent Jesus well, so that others may find the joy of trusting Him, and following Him too.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we trust Him whom we have not seen, our hearts having been stirred that You did something new on Easter morning. Help us to live in newness of life, a credit to Jesus and the Gospel, that others may see Jesus too. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2004
Do You See the Place Where They Laid Him?
Do You See the Place Where They Laid Him?
Psalm 13 / Mark 16: 1-8
April 11th, 2004 (Easter)
Places where events special to us took place are precious. You live in a city far from where you were born, then come back and drive by that hospital and feel it is unique to you among all hospitals. You return to the restaurant on your anniversary where you gave your wife her engagement ring. You can think of many places that are dear to you, but something more attaches to this place. I like the line in the love song, “Black is the color of my true love’s hair,” where the fellow sings, “I love the grass on where she stands.”
The place where Jesus’ friends laid Him after He was crucified is more than special to Christians. Some of us here this morning were in the garden within sight of Golgotha, where holy tradition tells us Jesus’ friends buried his body in a cave-tomb. The hill beyond looks like a skull. It looks down over the garden tomb, a sepulcher carved out of a rock. It looks like what we imagine the place was like where Jesus’ broken body was laid to rest after the agony of the cross. A hush came over us all in that place.
When each of us stooped to move inside that doorway, we saw the place where tradition tells us Jesus was laid. The guide didn’t need to point it out to us. It was unlike the first Easter morning when a young man sitting on the right side of the place said to three panic-stricken women, “See the place where they laid Him." It would have had to be on the right side because on the left side was rock wall.
But there is something different about our fascination with this place and other tombs in Jerusalem. It’s not just the difference in the One who was buried there.
We went to another location in Jerusalem where we were shown the tomb of King David. We looked at this monument at it felt like touching history personally. In still another graveyard I saw the tomb of one of the great Spanish rabbis, I think it was Rabbi Moses Maimonides, whose opinions shaped much of medieval Jewish tradition. Both these places left me feeling hushed. I felt personally connected to significant men in history.
But what we felt inside the tomb where they laid Jesus was different because this was a grave where something very strange happened. Before dawn on the third day after Jesus' battered and torn body was laid to rest, an earthquake shook the hillside, and an angel pushed the stone rolled away from the door. Mark doesn’t tell us this, but Matthew’s Gospel does. And Jesus walked out that door, and as John’s Gospel tells us, remained near by.
Because Jesus was there when Mary Magdalene stood outside weeping. He asked her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?” I remember Jesus had called His mother, “Woman” when He was on the cross. It seems to us a harsh, impersonal term, but it must have been a term of endearment.
Dan Brown has told a lot of people who read his novel, The Da Vinci Code, that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife, but that is a fiction. He admits it. But the Gospels are not entertaining us when they tell us that Mary Magdalene, and two other women came and found the tomb empty.
What makes the Garden tomb particularly eerie to any of us who have stepped inside it, is that it is not a grave vacated by grave robbers, or by the practice in those days of gathering up the bones of the deceased when the flesh dropped away, to put them in an ossuary—the kind of box that was recently found holding the bones of Jesus’ brother, James. This tomb was vacated when the body that lay there came to life again and walked out of it.
In the days that followed Jesus showed Himself strangely unattached to any one place. He would appear now here, and now there. Just when two of His disciples realized that Jesus was walking and talking with them as they walked on the Emmaus Road, He was gone. He appeared in a room with His disciples, ate fish and honey to prove He was a physical being, and then disappeared. Jesus showed that He was not attached to any one spot at a time, as He had been limited as any other person is, when He walked the Palestine roads with the twelve disciples.
I wonder, in fact, if in those days after Jesus resurrection He may have appeared to people personally at different places at the same time. Paul tells us Jesus appeared to Peter, then to the twelve, and then to more than five hundred at one time. We assume that he means that Jesus appeared to each of these five hundred at the same time in the same place. But I have wondered if during these forty days Jesus began to demonstrate what he said to His disciples in His last moments with them.
Jesus said to them, “I am with you always.” Around that circle of eleven men, each one heard Him say, “I am with you always.” Each heard Jesus say to him, “I am with you.” And they did not all stay in the same place afterwards.
They would go their separate ways. Tradition tells us Andrew went to Russia. Thomas went to Parthia, and then to India. Each of them went away, and each one trusted the promise, “I am with you always.” So Andrew went to Russia trusting that Jesus was with him there. And Thomas went to India to found the Mar Thoma Church, and Jesus was with Him there.
For forty days I wonder if Jesus primed the pump of trust in His presence everywhere by actually appearing to many different people in many different places wherever they were. People who loved Jesus told each other, “Jesus appeared to me yesterday.” And each one who heard this said, “How can that be? He was with me then?” And slowly the truth crystallized in peoples’ minds, Jesus meant precisely that when He said, “I am with you always,” and that’s why each one saw Jesus with her at the same time, in many different places.
Space could no longer limit Jesus as it does you and me. I cannot be in two places at one time. Neither can you. Neither can David Copperfield. But Jesus was not limited to being in only one place at a time. This seems a strange and fantastic idea, and to be sure neither the Gospels nor the Apostle Paul says this explicitly. I intend no irreverence in proposing this.
But the disciples were so convinced in Jesus’ presence with them after this that they went to the farthest places to bring the presence of Jesus to the world He died to save. And we need not think as some incredulous folk think, that all of these were filled with “Easter faith,” a strong, spiritual delusion that energized them.
And the message that each of the disciples told multiplied this very promise to as many people as heard them tell it. Generation followed generation. One generation told the next, “Jesus promised, ‘I am with you always’.” And it was always as new and true in each generation, no matter where, no matter in what language the promise was repeated, “I am with you always.”
How can this be? We adapt our inability to understand by changing the sense of what Jesus said. We say, “Jesus’ ideas are with us.” Or we say, “The faith of Jesus passes on from one to another.” Or, "we remember Jesus always." But Jesus said, “I am with you always.”
How can it be that Jesus is here in this place today, and Jesus is down the road in Weaver Chapel too? Not only that, but Jesus is in the living rooms where shut-ins cannot get out on Easter morning. He is with them. Jesus is in the prisons, and in hospital rooms, and I could go on and on the rest of the day to mention places far and near. And in each place, what Jesus said to His disciples holds true. “I am with you always.”
I can’t explain how this is true. It’s not His memory that is with me. It is not the ideas He spoke that are with us. Somehow, perhaps as the air we breathe is the same here as it is in Medellin, Colombia, Jesus pervades places.
Paul tells us, “In Him all things hold together.” But I don’t want to try to dabble in the physics of Jesus’ presence. That’s way beyond me.
Instead I think of something else. First, negatively, I think of how inappropriate it was for the Crusaders in the 11th century to fight violently to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslims because this was where Jesus was crucified, buried, and rose again. That was not an appropriate way to honor Jesus' for His Passion.
I think of how inappropriate it is for Christians to so cherish the memory of any place connected with His life that it goads them to hostile acts toward others. It is wrong to fight and kill because Christians cherish a place.
How bizarre it felt to descend into the basement like place in Bethlehem where there was a cold, marble slab with a Bethlehem star fixed in silver on the place where Jesus’ lay as a newborn baby. The manger in which He lay, wrapped in swaddling bands was soft and warm, however humble. That expensive marble slab offered no warmth or welcome.
How unnecessary, though understandable, it was to see the Serbian Orthodox monk passionately kissing the spot where tradition says Jesus’ body was lowered from the cross. This place in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is surrounded by controversy as five Christian denominations divide the place among them, and each guards his fraction of space fervently.
Let’s return to what Paul tells us of Jesus appearing to five hundred people at one time after He rose again. What each of these said to someone else was an eyewitness report. Those who heard these five hundred tell them that Jesus was alive and present with them, told others. And thus the word got out and multiplied.
After Jesus appeared to each of these first five hundred, He did not do so again to them. They had to trust that the One who was dead, and lived again, and who appeared to them, remained with them even when they could not see Him.
And so the word got out, not just that Jesus escaped the tomb alive again, but that Jesus was from now on present with us.
This is the genius of this faith we celebrate this morning. We have sung the most exuberant hymns. We have heard our wonderful choir sing. We have felt that special mood of Easter morning when we know that around the world Christians everywhere are doing the same thing.
But it’s not just Jesus’ memory that we celebrate, but also His presence, His very presence. Jesus is in this room this morning, and I hope that you have opened your heart to Him so that He is in your heart. Because strangely, though Jesus is present, not limited by time and distance, or by the inability to be in only one place at one time as we are, Jesus is limited by the welcome we give Him.
I remember years ago when I was in graduate school the Christmas Eves when I would walk the streets of the city where I studied and look at all the beautifully decorated homes. I saw Christmas tree lights sparkling from living room windows. People put up their decorations to create a festive atmosphere in the neighborhoods. They were festive, but not welcoming. I was not welcome in those homes. Nobody knew me. It pleased folk to have their pretty homes noticed, but they didn’t proceed to say, “Come in and share our Christmas turkey.”
In the Book of Revelation we read this strange verse. Jesus says to people in a church, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice, and will open the door, I will come into him and eat with him and he with me.” What does this strange verse mean? I thought that Jesus is and was present wherever two or three were gathered in His name. How could Jesus, who said, “I am with you always” be shut out of any place.
Christianity is a “by invitation only party.” The invitation is two-way. On the one side, Jesus says, and I repeat after Him each time we take the Lord’s Supper, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” His welcome is continuous and personal. But on the other side there must be the invitation you and I give to Him, “Come, the door of my heart is open. Come in and eat with me.”
It is strange to say, but this morning when we take Communion, even though I pass on to you Jesus’ invitation, “Come, eat with me,” you and I may either welcome Jesus into us or keep Him outside,” as much outside as I was outside in the cold on Christmas Eve looking in at the merriment taking place in those homes many years ago when I was a graduate student.
How do you open your heart’s door to welcome Jesus?
We have all seen that a very small key can open a large door. You put that little carved piece of metal into the opening near the handle, and if it fits perfectly, you turn it and you can open the door.
Strange to say, when you and I say to Jesus, “Jesus, come into my heart and eat with me this morning,” He honors the invitation. It feels strange to say this to someone we cannot see. You’ll feel gullible, perhaps. But the strangeness is all in you.
A small word from your mouth can open your heart. Very often people who take sorry turns of life began their tragic move by saying, "I will take those drugs," or, "I will break into that home." Having said it, a resolve begins in their minds. They do what they determined to do by deliberately saying something.
Something similar happens when we say to Jesus whom we cannot see, “Come, Jesus, be my guest. Come into my heart.” At Communion we can say, "Come into my heart and eat with me," because we are eating with Him. When you put that small piece of bread into your mouth, and when you drink from that small glass, say, “You are as welcome in my heart as this bread and wine are in my mouth.”
What happens from there is up to how you maintain your welcome to Jesus. For me it was a life-changing event when I deliberately opened my heart to Jesus forty-three years ago. Others here would say so too. Some would say their hearts have never been shut to Him, always open, because your parents taught you well to open your heart to Jesus, and you did so as a child.
But it doesn’t matter when, it only matters that you welcome Jesus. Because the only limit Jesus has, in His presence everywhere, is the welcome each of us offers Him. He can be in both Ethiopia and America at the same time. He can be in our sanctuary and in St. Andrews United Methodist Church at the same time.
But until you and I welcome Him into our hearts, He will not come in. He cannot come there without your welcome.
I hope you will make Jesus welcome inside your heart, at the center of your life. And if you are doing this for the first time this morning, and are confused where to go from there, will you please speak with me. I will gladly share with you how it has been for me, and this may help you
Let us pray: O Lord God, we thank You that Jesus was not left in that cold, stone tomb, but that He became alive, and that He burst the boundaries of all that limits us, so that He is always and everywhere with those whose hearts have welcomed Him. Help us now to welcome Him. Lord, We believe. Help our unbelief. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2004
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
Psalm 24 / Zechariah 8: 1-8
Mark 11: 1-11
April 4th, 2004 (Palm Sunday)
Today is Palm Sunday. All around the world Christians celebrate this day, some with parades in which the people process out of the church and around the block carrying palms branches, saying or singing loudly, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Their neighbors watch with curiosity, wondering what it’s all about.
If you ask someone in the parade why she is doing this, she will tell you, “We’re remembering Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.”
What triumphal entry? We know what follows. It was the calm before the storm. And what a storm it was! Mel Gibson has reminded us how horrible a death Jesus died.
Still, Jesus’ Palm Sunday ride into Jerusalem was a triumphal entry. Why? For three reasons, I believe.
First, the crowds that surrounded Jesus thought it was. They called out, “Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming.” I believe they actually thought Jesus would topple the Romans and resurrect King David’s royal line, making a throne needful in Jerusalem again.
Second, we call this a triumphal entry because two of the Gospels tell us that here Jesus fulfilled the prophecy of the prophet Zechariah. “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! . . . Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass.” Though the Gospel of Mark that we just read doesn’t mention this prophecy of Zechariah, Matthew and John both do.
Third, even though Jesus does not seem to us to triumph over the Romans in the week that followed, Jesus’ idea of conquest was opposite to ours.
Jesus taught his disciples, “The one who wants to find his life must lose it, and the one who loses his life will find it.” This isn’t how we usually think, is it? “Seize the day,” we say, not “Lose the day.” In losing His life that Passover weekend, Jesus was finding it. Indeed, it fulfilled His destiny. This was in keeping with deep truths He taught us.
Jesus said, “The one who serves is the greatest.” “Yeah,” we say piously. Jesus may have said it, but even though we will not say so explicitly, beyond question, serving is servile. And if we serve in an exhibit of Christian idealism, we keep track of our service. Do we not notice if others are doing their fair share?
Why? Is it not because we are governed by a more assertive kind of wisdom? Jesus, in His heavenly wisdom, didn’t see serving as a duty, something to do that you don’t like to do for religious reasons. It was a way of finding life, even for the Son of God. How much life would you like? Here is the measure of how much service to offer.
In the battle of life we fight our pitched battles to preserve our dignity and thereby lose the war of life. But it is a hard lesson to learn that the way to victory in the end is to lose battles now. It’s a lesson hard to learn, on the same order as discovering the blessedness of unlimited service to others.
Even though Jesus suffered and died at the end of this week, we believe a remarkable victory happened on Palm Sunday. In fact, it is a victory we cling to by faith even as we live with a more assertive practical philosophy of life. The great struggle for the Church and for us as Christians is to know how to follow Jesus, while still coming out on top.
I believe God uses the dark tunnels we find ourselves in, in order to see the hope-giving hint of light we can only see if we are in a dark tunnel. If we feel ourselves fighting hopeless battles in which our finest efforts at winning never succeed, so that we sink deeper and deeper into a hopeless gloom, we are in a position to look for light at the end of the tunnel. If we can only learn to follow that light, what brightness will come.
Palm Sunday was a tiny pinpoint of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel for God’s people, the Jews. The Jews had lived in a long, dark tunnel of oppression for most of the previous five hundred years. At times it was unbearable. The Romans under whom they now lived could be cruel. They imposed crucifixion on people as commonly as we throw people in jail. Pontius Pilate was about the worst of a long line of oppressive Roman governors.
Then here comes this very symbolic event. A sign of conquest! Even though Jesus was only accompanied by twelve ragamuffin disciples, no soldiers, no shock troops, Jews who knew their history realized that this was how God did things. They remembered that David defeated Goliath. David’s slingshot was a more lethal weapon than Goliath’s massive sword and spear. They remembered their ancestors destroyed Jericho, a city with tall, strong walls, not with battering rams, but with trumpet blasts. This was how God did things. A humble man with twelve ragamuffin followers was the formula for getting the Roman Tenth Legion out of Israel.
Then there may have been those in the crowd who remembered Jesus fed them using a little boy’s lunch of five small loaves and two small fish. He fed five thousand men plus many more women and children so that they were all full—and there were twelve baskets full left over! They remembered watching the disciples in a boat when a terrific storm blew up on the Sea of Galilee. Then it stopped suddenly. They heard from the disciples that Jesus had said to the storm, “Peace, be still!” And it obeyed his command.
So twelve disciples with Jesus was quite enough to banish Rome from Israel. “Hosannah! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming!” Jesus would do what David did to Goliath. He would lead them in victory over the Romans as Joshua, his namesake, led Israel to defeat Jericho, and then all of the land of Canaan!
But their hopes were dashed. This time the Roman Goliath killed their helpless David. And in the process the people that on Palm Sunday were calling out “Hosannah to the Son of David,” changed their tune. By Good Friday some of them may have been in the mob that cried out, “Crucify Him!”
But we hold no grudge against those people who lined the road Jesus took into Jerusalem. We still look back at Palm Sunday and call it Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. We stand with them and look down the dark tunnel of human sadness and recognize that on Palm Sunday a pinpoint of light was shining at the end. He was not intended to provide the full brightness of the Kingdom of God yet. How was this so?
Something very different than anyone expected. There were other Messianic hopefuls before, during, and after Jesus was here. They all ended their attempts at recovering David’s kingdom tragically. They died unwillingly, no doubt sreaming defiance at the Romans who crucified them.
But hope was written all over Jesus’ suggestive ride into Jerusalem. He went to the cross willingly, knowing it was a pyrrhic victory about which His enemies gloated. We recognize this, looking back over the centuries and looking forward beyond Easter to the Second Coming. But there were those in Jerusalem then who sensed that something big was being hinted at too.
The pinpoint of light didn’t turn into a roaring flame that conquered Rome then and there. Instead God was doing something even bigger. The Bible only hints at what this bigger thing was and is. It had to do with the end of death and sorrow, of wars and disease, and ultimately of sin, the great nemesis of the world.
It is the Kingdom of God, a kingdom that is imposed over all the bleak story of human history, over the Holocaust, over Rwanda, over the dreadful massacre now going on in the Sudan. It drapes over the difficulties of your life and mine, over every hospital where people lie dying of AIDS or cancer, over every prison where men and women are locked in barred cages.
Jesus knew the Kingdom of God waited to burst out over this world, so He taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come.” He taught us to pray this because we grow weary of waiting. As we wait God allows tragic things to happen in this troubled world. Meanwhile He plants seeds of hope in our hearts. He provides pinpoints of light, faint glimmers like a suspicion deep in our hearts, that God will prove our hope was not in vain. His love will win in the long run.
How many times in your life have you found one small moment awakening hope in you in a time you were really down? It has been this way for me. Living with chronic illness can seem like being in a long dark tunnel.
Student life too can seem like being in a long, dark tunnel. The weariness of preparing for endless tests and writing papers for professors who are sometimes not the epitome of grace. You catch the flu just when your demands are at a peak. Then your girlfriend breaks up with you. How dark the tunnel can seem. At the moment this seems like all the life there is. Graduation is a word too far off to seem real. But then, a kind word does more for you than you imagined a word could do. It seemed like a light at the end of your tunnel. It lifted your spirits enough to keep on, and you came out of the tunnel alive!
I know a thoughtful and devout older lady who has spent her life in wonderful Christian service. But when she was in her early eighties, a debilitating weakness hit her. She now lives in a nursing home. With all her heart she longs for the work she did and the surrounding presence of the people who shared her vision. But now she’s stuck in a nursing home. It’s a dark tunnel, long, apparently without end. She dreads the thought but suspects it is true, that she won’t leave this place until she dies. But someone from this congregation goes to that nursing home and holds her hand and listens to her and speaks with her, and it is to her like a small hint of light shining at the end of the tunnel.
How various are the tunnels in which we find ourselves. A troubled marriage can be like crawling along a long dark tunnel. Having children with serious handicaps seems like a walk through a long dark tunnel.
John Henry Newman wrote one of my favorite hymns at the darkest period of his life. It is a bit hard to sing musically to modern folk, so we don’t sing it very often. It is a prayer, “Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom. Lead thou me on. The night is dark and I am far from home. Lead thou me on.” It is a hymn I never sing without emotion rising in my thorax. But this sense of living in a dark tunnel, at the end of which we sometimes see a flicker of light, prods us along in the adventure of hope and faith.
I sense that on Palm Sunday God lit a small candle at the end of a dark tunnel for his people. He gave a hint of a triumph that would come.
From the one hundred twenty people who waited in Jerusalem on Pentecost morning, God ignited a flame from that pinpoint of light. It burst into the remarkable movement we now refer to as Christianity.
Christianity spread like a flame across the landscape of the Western world. We look at hospitals and universities and architecture and agriculture as they developed in the West as the fruits of Christian endeavor. And some of the great missionary movements of history sent young men and women from the West to the darkest corners of the world with the Gospel light. And it all began with a small, flickering light in a very dark time.
But nevertheless many people find themselves living in gloom. I wonder what is the nature of your dark tunnel.
While some people in our land are making very good money these days, a lot of people are living on the edge of financial collapse. Beyond our borders, armed conflicts and horrible acts of violence have made Iraq, Israel, the Sudan, Haiti, and so many other places dangerous places to live. The global AIDS crisis is numbing.
The world needs a ray of light now as much as it ever did.
On the first Palm Sunday Jesus provided a spark of hope giving a pinpoint of light at the end of a dark tunnel. Palm Sunday keeps rolling around again each spring. On this day Jesus shines our way again a reminder that we have good reason to trust, to hope, to carry on.
I hope you catch the idea I’m trying to make clear. You who now look out and see darkness, as though you’re in a tunnel, look for the light at the end. How can I say it better than to say as the old Gospel song has it,, “Come to this light, He’s shining for you.” The light at the end of your tunnel is Jesus. Come to Him who is the light. And walk on through your tunnel until you find He has led you out of it.
In a way it sounds so simple, and it is. But looking at the light of Jesus is not a moment’s act. If you have looked at Jesus in a time of darkness, don’t look away when your sense of need subsides. Carry on. Keep looking at Jesus. More than your own need is at issue. If you have seen Jesus, and He is drawing you out of your gloom, you have become a means to help someone else.
Once you have come to the light, in fact, the world is watching to see if what took place was real or a momentary enthusiasm. How disappointed we are when a person who claims to have seen the light of the Gospel lives as though they’d not seen the light, once their dark time has passed. Jesus tells us, “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and glorify your father who is in heaven.” Or in other words, God intends that you may be the light at the end of someone else’s tunnel too.
Let us pray: O Lord, give us wisdom to look at Jesus so as to see Him clearly, and to follow Him out of our darkness into His light. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)