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October 29, 2006
Jesus, the Light of the World
Isaiah 60: 1-10/John 8: 12-20
October 29th, 2006
Two weeks ago we thought about what Jesus said in Jerusalem one day on the great Jewish Feast of Tabernacles: “If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink.” Before this we remembered that Jesus said, “I am the bread of life . . . I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever.” Today we have heard Jesus say, “I am the light of the world.” Jesus is talking about the life of the spirit, the inner unseen part of us all using terms that refer to physical life.
We are made up two-thirds of water. Food provides the building blocks by which we sustain physical life. Light is needed for this food to grow.
While we take spiritual things in a totally subjective way, indeed in a take-it-or-leave-it kind of way, we all know there is something we can’t put our fingers on that is the difference between discontent and contentment. Why are some people who have everything so discontented? Why are other people who have so very little so content? You and I are much more than physical beings.
A kind friend recently gave me Francis Collins’ book, The Language of God, which I read greedily in a few days. Here the author explained how DNA is the hereditary code of our species. DNA gives the words of God’s vocabulary.
Collins is project director of the Human Genome Project in Washington, DC. Some of us may not be familiar with the term “genome.” A genome includes all the DNA in an organism, including its genes. Genes carry information for making all the proteins that determine, among other things, how an organism looks, how well its body metabolizes food or fights infection, and sometimes even how it behaves. This DNA code operates unseen to the naked eye. But it is evident in its effects. This explains why you resemble your grandma; why I look like my Dad’s Uncle John. Collins expresses his conviction that DNA “speaks” the language of God telling how God unfolds all life.
But is there something beyond DNA? Is there really a Being who speaks the language of DNA? Richard Dawkins, the well-known Oxford biologist, is one of a group of scientists that ridicules the idea of God. But Francis Collins, of like stature as a scientist, sees things differently, that God is not a blind clock-maker, as Dawkins scorns, but a personal Being who desires to be known, to have a relationship with you and me. The longing for meaning we all have is ultimately a longing for God—a response to the light that gives this spark to everyone.
In my many years living in the Purdue community I have come to know well many wonderful scientists, some who believe in God and others who don’t. It has seemed to me that a factor in my friendship with them all has been that I am a pastor. You’d be amused if you knew some of the remarks unbelieving friends have made to me knowing I am a pastor. Whether or not there is a God, somehow a pastor represents the issue of meaning in life.
Why do we physical beings wonder about the meaning of life? Isn’t this desire for meaning evidence that there is more to life than our physical existence?
In the days I was reading Collins’ book I was also thinking about the texts we have read this morning. Isaiah promised that after darkness would cover the earth, the Lord will arise upon you, and the glory of the Lord will be seen.”
Jesus said, “I am the light of the world.” And we make a connection with what Isaiah said. Jesus went on to say, “He who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” We wonder if Jesus was talking about something parallel on the plain of “meaning” to DNA on the physical plain. Jesus said, “The one who follows me will not walk in darkness.” What is this darkness of which the Bible speaks so often?
We began our service this morning remembering the first words of the Bible. The Hebrew Bible described the prevailing condition as tohuvevohu. “Without form and void,” our Bibles translate this. “Darkness was on the surface of the abyss.” The Hebrew term tohuvevohu sounds like gobbledygook, but I really like it. It suggests chaos. It’s like a Marathi word I learned growing up in India and sometimes say, “wakerdeetickadee.” It means, total confusion. Tohuvevohu indeed. Chaos: utter darkness, shapelessness, bloblness. Then God the Son heard the Father speak. “Light, be there on that wakerdeetikadee tohuvevohu.”
What was this light? This was a different light than the light that came from the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day. The ancient writer was pointing to that something greater than the physical that hovers over, indeed precedes and makes possible all of physical life.
It was the touch of this light that made possible the separation of dry from water. In John’s Gospel we read, “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” The light of the sun can be blocked so there is shade or darkness. The light that came before the light of the sun cannot be extinguished. This light reflects the will of God. Though we were created by the will of God. God has given us the privilege of accepting or rejecting it. It is natural to us to insist on our own way. This reflects God—whose will acted in creation. Sometimes this turns out pretty badly. Then we are in the dark.
When the Bible mentions darkness it uses a term that means chaos, ignorance, and evil and not just the absence of light. Indeed, when we are asleep we’re happy to have light hide for a while.
The sun’s light shines on Iraq, but Iraq today is a land in the darkness of chaos. I learned when I was in Zambia of customs that subjected women to horrendous ordeals after the death of their husbands; this was the darkness of ignorance. In Darfur we see the grim darkness of evil. But we don’t have to look far away to Iraq, Zambia, or Darfur to find darkness.
You and I know that there are many homes, the basic social unit in our prosperous land, that are in terrible darkness. We were reminded of this darkness recently when we read in the newspapers of a mother who beat her little girl to death and a dad who let it happen. What long months and years of frustration and misery led to this young mother’s violence to her child? Why was she so deeply unhappy? This is opposite to instinct of motherhood.
Come to the local jail that warehouses people whose lives are in disarray. They are only the tip of the iceberg. Why road-rage, that fury that erupts in decent people when someone invades our space on the street? Why the fascination with courts and cops and prisons as entertainment? Why are we so preoccupied with terrorism when we have the most powerful defense force in the world? We’ve never had a roadside bomb go off in West Lafayette. Why all the darkness? Why are churches in turmoil even though their message is about the Light of the world? How are things in your family?
It is because the message of the Gospel is not just that the light has shined on our darkness but that “the one who follows Jesus will not walk in darkness but have the light of life.” It takes more than piously saying, Jesus is the Light. Old Screwtape loves to hear us talk of Jesus this way—as it may keep us from trying to follow Him. I sometimes think of the Gospel-light the way we speak of those who will not take opportunity when it comes knocking: “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”
George MacDonald remarked in one of his sermons, “Foolish is the one . . . who would rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting the world right, by waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects that integral part of the world where lies his business, his first business—namely, his own character and conduct.”
We may be acutely aware of the darkness out there while not noticing the darkness in here. We are aware in principle of this problem because we talk about it—all that’s wrong out there. But we hold at arm’s length the cure. If you and I will follow Jesus we will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life. We must draw a circle, step inside, and say, “Let it happen here.” Take a vacation from your concern about the darkness in others, and let there be light in your circle.
In Proverbs 20: 27 we read, “the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.” What a suggestive term. It points to what Paul wrote in describing the momentum of the Gospel “through faith for faith.” When I who have no faith see it in you, it plants a seed in my heart.
We speak of faith as a gift of God, and so it is. But like any gift offered to us we have to reach out and take it. If it is indeed this gift of faith that we have taken it will trigger a battle of wills inside. Jesus said, “My will is to do the will of Him who sent me.” There was potentially a collision of wills there this suggests. It is obvious in us.
Is there a battle of wills going on in you when you feel disgusted with someone? Do you feel tension arise in you at that moment that says, “Maybe I’m harder on her than on myself?” Does a voice inside say, “Am I judging myself by the same standard?” Does something tug at your conscience saying, “I don’t see the whole picture.” Is there any momentum inside that asks, “Can this be the will of God for me now?”
When you are tempted in the various ways we all are tempted, is there any responding voice to the allure of that temptation that asks you forcefully, “If this were the last thing I did would I be glad to stand in the presence of God?” Is there any higher voice that asks, “Would Jesus be welcome to join me in this?” When you speak to others is there a filter on your words that asks, “Will I destroy or build up with what I say?”
What good effect there is from one whose will is coming under submission to the will of God. “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord,” Proverbs tells us. From your will God can and will light the candle of someone else and dispel her darkness.
On Christmas Eve we end the service with the lights turned off. I light a candle and then I go to each section and light a candle someone is holding. And from that light all the candles in the sanctuary are lit until a beautiful light radiates the room. Our young people like to sing, “It only takes a spark to get a candle glowing.” So it is.
A momentum can begin in one person who determines to do as much of the will of God as she understands. Your spirit is the candle of the Lord from which He will light another candle. Every admirable trait you have seen in anyone that you recognize is special in an uncanny way as living the Jesus-life is just as available to you. But this comes to us only if it is our purpose to follow the Light who is Jesus. He is the candle who give meaning to us who live in the oft darkness of this troubled day.
One further thing. Jesus specifically asked us to join Him in dispelling the darkness now as He dispelled the darkness before Creation. Not by preaching at it, but in this way, “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” It’s pretty hard to argue that light is not there if it shines brightly. You and I are the best argument in a dark world that there is a God who has given meaning to life if we shine where we are. Think on this and do as you see is right.
Let us pray: Thank you, heavenly Father, for sending us the Light, your Son, Jesus. Help us to follow Him. Help us to shine with His light. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
October 22, 2006
Jesus and the Adulteress
Leviticus 20: 1-10
John 8: 1-11
October 22nd, 2006
Probably this story of Jesus ranks up there with His feeding the five thousand as best known. Jesus and the adulteress! It has all the elements of great drama. The righteous Son of God on one side of the triangle. The woman, caught in the very act of adultery on another. Her accusers on the third side with stones in hand. They wait to accuse Jesus who has already shown Himself apparently soft on Sabbath keeping in the company of a woman caught red-handed in violation of an offense that merits the death penalty.
They remind Jesus what He already knows. “The law of Moses commanded us to stone such.” But they only said half what the law of Moses says. We just read the law in Leviticus; both of those involved in the adultery were condemned. Where is the man now?
We read this story from afar, two thousand years later. We look on uneasily. Adultery is not uncommon today even among Christians. It is one of a number of loose attitudes we have about sex. Among those who read this story are those who know where they fit into the picture. Sex has come to be treated as a strictly biological and social function for many today. It is not a moral matter; it is more like eating and drinking, just a natural appetite to be enjoyed.
But we’re uneasy with this because we know how infidelity shatters homes still, despite how loose thinking about sex has become. And we have guilty consciences as we realize that pornography has stolen the purity of many a Christian heart. Many Christian homes have become dens of iniquity as we participate vicariously in private in the vilest of acts. MSNBC has caught on film and shown to the world respectable members of society in the act of preying on children sexually. How surprised we are at some of the offenders. Him?
We realize that adultery is now viewed “seriously” from two sides. On the one hand when it is others who are involved in it we recognize how wrong it is. How can she just dump her husband with her kids looking on? What is she saying to them about the importance of faithfulness in marriage?
On the other hand if it is we who are involved in an adulterous affair it does not seem like a wrong. “How could something that feels so right be wrong?” a man thinks who feels those soaring passions of longing and desire for someone else’s wife. It feels just like the days before marriage when he was dating. Only now there is the complication that there was a day he stood in the front of a church with this now no-longer beloved woman and promised to be faithful to her until death.
I can’t forget being told many years ago by a friend that sleeping with her husband now felt like adultery because she loved another man. We go with our feelings an awful lot these days. But we reveal our sense of what is really right and wrong as we feel feelings of condemnation when we see others offending.
We look hard at this story hoping to find some justification for our looser attitude toward adultery. Jesus didn’t stand with her accusers, agreeing that she deserved death. When Jesus heard the accusation of this woman He bent down and started doodling in the dust. Or was He doodling? What was He writing? The woman’s accusers looked at what He wrote and something caught their attention.
It has been suggested that he wrote in the dust the words of the seventh commandment, “You shall not commit adultery.” It is just two words in Hebrew. In Hebrew the verb is masculine. Lo tinaf. The you is masculine as it always was when making a general rule. But we wonder if one after another of her accusers read that “you” and saw a finger pointed at him. They knew what that law meant.
Rabbinic law was already being developed according to the principle we read in the Mishna. It was a pious Jew’s duty to guard the Torah against violation by building a fence around each command. Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount was in keeping with this principle. The command that says “Don’t murder” means not only “don’t take the physical life of someone but also don’t destroy him emotionally.” “Don’t say, ‘You fool,’ or be angry at him so that you crush his spirit.”
The law that says, “Don’t commit adultery” means “Don’t look lustfully on a woman too.” The Pharisees who saw Jesus doodling in the dust may well have understood how they all offended against the law in spirit. Standing in the presence of a Man whom they knew to be pure however offensive he was to them, their consciences rose up against them. So that when Jesus stood to answer their question, “Let him who is without [this] sin among you cast the first stone,” they melted away, one after the other. Only Jesus and the woman remained.
Jesus asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” The last time in John’s Gospel that He addressed a woman with the word “Woman,” it was His mother. Do you remember at the wedding in Cana Jesus’ mother had mentioned to Him, “They have no wine.” Jesus seems rude in saying to her, “Woman, what have you to do with me?” I proposed when I spoke of this moment in Jesus’ life that when He called His mother, “woman,” He used the word the first man, Adam, said when he saw the glorious creature God created from his rib. He called her ishah, woman. She was first ishah the mother of the human race before she was called Eve (havah), a name that is very like the word for life in Hebrew. Mary, Jesus’ mother, has played a mother role to many in the Church. Now this woman joins the list of “mothers,” the first in the Gospels to receive the good news of the mercy of God.
Did she deserve mercy? When we read the law in Leviticus that those caught in adultery should be killed it does not say that the ones who would execute the guilty had to be without sin. It seems that the issue was only if you were caught in the act. Yet even back then there must have been a feeling that something wasn’t quite right that the guilty ones who have not been caught should condemn and execute those who have been caught. Unfairness hovered over the whole judicial system then as it does now.
F.W. Robertson said in a sermon he preached before judges in Brighton, England many years ago that justice without mercy is not justice. Because every judge knows in her own heart that she offends. Every judge knows that he does not stand as a righteous person sincerely defending the majesty of the law. Because if he was so concerned about the majesty of the law he would step forward and admit publicly, mea culpa. I am guilty. Power prevents perspective.
But now back to the story. The woman replied to Jesus’ questions, “Where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go and do not sin again.” Why did Jesus not condemn the woman? Was it because He didn’t think adultery was wrong or that the woman was guilty? No on both accounts. Jesus said not a jot or a tittle of the law would pass away till all were fulfilled. And the law did say that adultery should receive the death penalty. But the death penalty did not have the last word.
We began this morning’s worship service remembering the psalmist’s words, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases.” “The Lord who forgives all your iniquities.” Paul wrote, “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
The death that comes as the reward of sin comes naturally despite what comes to a person legally. All who are not caught in their offense legally will still suffer the consequence. Perhaps the consequence will be a ruined conscience, a lost sensitivity to sin so that gradually a person is dragged down into worse and worse behavior until he is a moral wreck. For some sins there comes physical death as the body is eaten away by the effects of the sin. For every sin there comes some consequence in this life.
But the God who created us, who knows that we are made of dust is greater than our sin. And here we see Jesus as the God who forgives all our iniquities. But it does not stop there.
Jesus said to the woman, “Go and do not sin again.” We need to hear this merciful guidance that we can follow after we have been forgiven. So long as we are condemned and feel it, what incentive do we have to mend our ways? What does it matter to a condemned person if he adds to the offenses? How can he be condemned over and over again? The silly justice that sentences a murderer to multiple life sentences for multiple offenses knows full well that a person only has one life to live, one death to die.
Behind human condemnation stands the justice of God who will render to us all according to what we have done. But the justice of God in rendering to us what we deserve reserves the right of showing mercy. “He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust.” The reason why Jesus died for our sins was so that we would not need to suffer the penalty that we deserved for our sin. He died our death that we could live His life. It is a great mystery how this is so, but that the Bible teaches this is beyond doubt. God, the only righteous judge, is full of mercy to those who fear Him.
I wish we knew something of the trajectory of this woman’s life after Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” Maybe she was the woman Luke describes who anointed Jesus’ feet with a mix of her tears and precious ointment. As this was happening Simon who had invited Jesus to dinner said under his breath, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him.”
In response Jesus told a parable about a creditor who had two debtors. One owed a little bit, the other owed a lot. The creditor forgave them both. Jesus asked his host, “Now which will love him more?” Simon rightly answered, “The one, I suppose, whom he forgave more.”
We say, “I suppose” when we are reluctant to state the obvious. We rightly live as Christians only if we give up the tendency to say, “I suppose,” when we forthrightly apply the grace of God to our sin. “I suppose I need God’s grace,” is a sad way to be a Christian. I think we are so harsh with one another sometimes because we think, “I suppose” when we sing “Amazing Grace” with everyone else.
I hope that as we put ourselves into the picture of this story we may, like the men who accused the woman, quietly slink away when we hear Jesus say, “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” But then let us somehow also remain as the woman and hear Jesus say to us, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.” And perhaps if we have understood how unworthy we are to cast that first stone, and how we have heard Jesus’ mercy extended to us, we can take His mercy seriously so as to act on Jesus’ guidance, no His command, that we would love to obey out of gratitude, “Go and do not sin again.”
How do these things apply to you and me today? Whom are you condemning with stone in hand? Can you feel the pleasure of the woman who has enjoyed the mercy of God? Let us hear God speak to us and respond as we ought.
O Lord God, for your mercy that endures to every generation we give you thanks. Grant to us to live beneath your mercy with such gratitude that we sin less and less until the day when we see Jesus and sin no more. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
October 15, 2006
Jesus, The Fount of Living Waters
Psalm 24 / Zechariah 14: 6-9, 16-21/John 7: 14, 37-39
October 15th, 2006
Richard Dawkins, renowned professor of zoology at Oxford has just published a book that will hit our bookstores on Wednesday. Its title: The God Delusion. The review of this book I read in The Economist states that Dawkins wrote it partly as a result of 9/11. The day that will live in infamy witnessed essentially a religious act. The hatred of some radical people, whose religion boiled down to a core of hatred for the West erupted in violence so awful that I suspect even the most devout believer was shocked into the possible effects of religion—even ours, even Christianity. Dawkins uses this fact as the launching pad for a ferocious attack on religion, all religion, and on its basic premise that there is a God.
Often the thought comes to me that Jesus had in mind to eliminate what we usually think of as “religion.” I see the images the New Testament gives of Jesus in encounters with people of other religions—with the Samaritan woman, with the Syro-Phoenecian woman, with Roman army officers who probably participated in some of the popular mystery cults. How un-argumentative He was. There was no animosity, no proving I’m right and you’re wrong. To the Samaritan woman He said, “God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.” Just that.
The fundamental need in the human breast easily gets confused. It is easily distracted in religious controversy, where we defend our little points of view on ultimate things with a tenacity that considers immodesty a virtue and humility a vice. Jesus set out to get humanity back on track. This is what I believe was going on in the passage from the Gospel of John that we just read together.
Jesus stood near or in the Temple in Jerusalem, maybe near the Kidron Valley through which runs a brook during the rainy season, and said, “If any one thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”
Jesus would sometimes use the place where he was standing or sitting as an illustration of a great truth. When He told His disciples, “On this rock I will build my church,” He was in a cave overlooking the source of the Jordan River. In this cave there is a massive rock comprising much of the floor. I can see Jesus touching this rock as He spoke of building the Church on a rock.
Now He stood near the Brook Kidron as the winter rains began and the stream was flowing. He said with the sound of running water in the background, “If any one thirsts let him come to me and drink.” Thirst is the most basic human instinct—water our basic need. We are made up two-thirds of water; everyone is. Our physical thirst is an analogy of an even deeper thirst.
Once before we read that Jesus stood with a Samaritan woman at a famous well. She drew some water for Him to drink and He offered her a drink of water that would leave her never thirsty again. “Give me a drink of that water,” she asked. This was Jesus’ way, to teach great truths from the ordinary circumstances of life. How close the sacred depths of life are to ordinary aspects of life.
But more was going on than the present flow of water in the Kidron Valley as Jesus spoke there. Five hundred years before the prophet Zechariah had spoken of a momentous day to come: “On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem, half to the eastern sea and half to the western sea, all year long.”
When did Zechariah have in mind that this would happen? He didn’t know. The Prophets never knew when fulfillment would come. Perhaps he stood by this same seasonal stream in Jerusalem that produced periodically water that was needed all the time. The living water he foretold would not be seasonal; it would flow all the time, in summer as in winter. Perhaps he thought of King David’s words in the 46th Psalm: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.” The prophet Isaiah too wrote two hundred years after David: “Look upon Zion, the city of our appointed feasts . . . there the Lord in majesty will be for us a place of broad rivers and streams . . . the people who dwell there will be forgiven their iniquity.”
Forgiveness would come out of Jerusalem, the city of our appointed feasts—the last of which was this Feast of Booths, the Feast of Ingathering, as the waters flowed in the Kidron Valley. How the Old Testament scriptures pointed to this moment when Jesus spoke in Jerusalem at this great Feast of Ingathering of peoples as well as of the harvest bounty.
The prophet Zechariah said that the nations would come to Jerusalem as though they were all Jews, to keep the Feast of Booths. Indeed, they had to. If they would not come God would punish them. Our Constitution’s first amendment states that Congress cannot make any laws having to do with the establishment of religion. But when the living waters flow from Jerusalem it will be obvious what is the real source of satisfaction of this inner thirst we all have. I wonder if this will be seen as “religion.”
It would not be a voluntary ingathering. It will be an odd requirement—to come where life’s deepest needs are not. It would be compulsory. But every thoughtful parent compels her children to do what is really important (vegetables, bath – time for bed, for school, for church and Sunday School), so the God who created heaven and earth would compel all nations to focus on those spiritual Facts that eclipse every religious opinion—the Fact of our thirst and the fact of where this thirst is satisfied. In God. In the living God—whom we know in Jesus Christ.
No longer will there be thousands of different humanly contrived ways of thinking of God shredding the human race, with violence erupting in this and that sector as a means of forcing this or that religion’s point of view on others.
The prophet Isaiah wrote of a day when “Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, who the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage.”
I read these various scriptures from the Old Testament and I remember the promise God made to Abraham, “In your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” How and when? John’s Gospel tells us, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
I read the Apostle Paul’s summary exclamation in Romans 11, after demonstrating the culpability of the world before God, Jew and Gentile, “God has consigned all men to disobedience that he may have mercy on all. O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”
How does this message get out to the world? Is it not through the Word of God? Isaiah the prophet wrote, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the one who brings good tidings, who publishes peace, who brings good tidings of good, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.”
Can it be that the reason why our Jewish friends dance and sing and clap their hands as they carry around the Torah scroll in their sanctuaries because this is the Word of God that brings good tidings, that publishes peace, that publishes salvation—not just to Israel but to Egypt and Assyria and to America and Iraq and China and the uttermost parts of the earth where Jesus told His disciples to spread the Gospel? How beautiful are the feet of those who spread the good tidings, and how beautiful is the Word they proclaim—a word celebrated with rejoicing today—Sinchat Torah!
Jesus told His disciples to go into all the world with this Good News. But if we go into the world with this Gospel without letting its effect on us take place we merely further the problem of religion. Ideas about God are of no use unapplied, without life being transformed by this Gospel.
George MacDonald reminds us in one of his sermons that the first business of the one who proclaims the Gospel is with his own character and conduct. “A cure in one person who repents and turns is a beginning of the cure of the whole human race.” This is the hope of the Gospel—the word of God.
And so we come full circle this morning. We all noticed with the children this morning that today is the Jewish festival that remembers God’s gift of His Word, the Torah. Though this is a Jewish festival it points to the source from which we know of God’s love for the whole world. Indeed, the great Jewish festivals all point to God’s satisfaction of our greatest needs: the Feast of Booths, of Ingathering, pointed to the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, that in His seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed.
Blessed how? By the elimination of the curse of mutual hostility that comes with our national and religious boundaries. Blessed by the forgiveness of our sin that alienates us from ourselves, from one another and from God. The breaking down of the walls of separation between Jew and Gentile, slave and master, male and female. Blessed by the satisfaction of that profound thirst we all have by the gift of living water.
The water that satisfies all of our bodies is made up of H2O. We little understand what Jesus meant when He said, “No one comes to the Father but by me.” He was not endorsing a religion when He said that. He spoke of the living water that satisfies inner thirst. He was stating a fact as true as that water is the greatest need of the human body.
I hope you have come to Jesus in your thirst. Drink of Him. How? You ask. Just do it. Let your mind and heart guide you through the labyrinth of unsatisfying solutions to your heart’s need until you come and drink of Jesus. If you really seek this water you will find it.
We bless you Lord God for giving to us water to drink, and for Jesus, who is the living water. Grant to us to drink of Him. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
October 08, 2006
The Great Feast of Tabernacles
Leviticus 23: 33-43
John 7: 1-9
October 8th, 2006
(Baptism of Erin Menser)
The section from John’s Gospel that we have just read is timely for us to read today. First, the Feast of Tabernacles or Succoth stands behind the message of this section of John’s Gospel. Second, yesterday and today are the very days in the Jewish calendar to celebrate this Feast. Third, this is the weekend of the Feast of the Hunter’s Moon when a lot of people come to Ft. Ouiatenon, and many folk sleep outside in makeshift shelters. Now if this is not a current use of Scripture, what is?
Before plowing into the significance of this great harvest festival, the third great Jewish Feast, I want to ask a question. Why have the great Jewish feasts not been kept in Christianity? It is true that Jesus chided the Pharisees for putting too much emphasis on the tradition of the elders. But the great Feasts were not just human traditions; they were commanded by God.
Paul wrote harshly about those who thought religion was a matter of keeping Sabbaths and feast days, if the reason for this was to impress God with the goal of being saved. But did Paul then denounce the third commandment, to keep the Sabbath Day—that he kept faithfully? When God commanded Israel to keep the feasts, it was for a good reason.
What if we joyously kept the Feasts out of gratitude? What if our children came to look forward to these Feasts because they were fun, a time when church was fun as well as “significant spiritually?” What if in family life children and parents and grandparents thought of life together in the community so that this community event, this time of joyous togetherness was a dominant joy in the life of the family? What if? Why not?
There were three reasons God commanded Israel to keep the great feasts: first, to remember His care for them in the past, second, to keep them together as a people; third, because of a longer range significance they did not yet know. All three of these purposes are pertinent to us too.
We take the Lord’s Supper to remember Jesus’ death for our sins. We gather together around a table here to do this. And I always try to remind you that this is a harbinger of the Marriage Feast of the Lamb when “all will be well and all manner of things will be well.”
Water baptism itself reminds us of how God saved His ancient people using water—bringing Israel through the Red Sea on dry land before enveloping their pursuing enemies with the same water that had parted. It is a Sacrament that we always do together publicly, unless the person receiving it is very ill. And as a sign of washing it points to the time when we “shall be as we should be,” “when we see Him as He is.”
The thought has occurred to me often over the past years of being a pastor that we have lost something precious in our land in not stressing the fundamental significance to Christianity of being together. “Freedom in Christ” has dove-tailed a bit conveniently with the freedom of democracy. Having stressed freedom, individual choice, the priority of individual over family, family over community, community over nation, our nation over other nations, the weekend by contrast with the Lord’s Day, we have forfeited something very precious. In the grave we discover we’re all together—finally.
When people leave us we gather and sing, “Bless be the tie that binds.” Something contradictory there. What tie? They’re leaving us! What Christian love that binds? Binds us—how? Sometimes when people leave it would be very ironic to sing this song.
When God gave Israel the command to come together to Jerusalem three times a year, in days before airplanes facilitated long-distance travel, He gave them the means of maintaining their identity as God’s people. It took considerable effort to stay together, particularly after many Jews were taken into exile. At Pentecost we remember that there were Jews in Jerusalem from all over the ancient world. It took some effort for them to be there to celebrate Pentecost together.
The Gospel lesson this morning tells of an unusual, I’m tempted to say strange moment in Jesus’ life. His brothers tell Him to go to Judea so that all may see His works. Immediately after this we read that his brothers didn’t believe in Him. I wonder, were they taunting Him? Here was this kid brother who often seemed preoccupied, doing remarkable deeds that made people flock to Him—feeding a huge crowd with a shepherd lad’s lunch, passing strangely at night from one side of the Galilee to the other without getting into a boat. But what would be His reception in the more sophisticated precincts of Jerusalem. Besides, it was the Feast of Booths (or Tabernacles) when Jews were supposed to go to Jerusalem.
Jesus told them to go to the Feast. He also said something so strange: “My time has not yet fully come.” When they heard this they must have thought, “Your time is no different than ours. Is it or is it not the Feast of Tabernacles when we’re all supposed to go to Jerusalem?” We should not imagine that anyone then saw things as we see them when we read the Gospels.
Then Jesus must have seemed an overly reflective, puzzling young man. No wife, though past the age when young men married. He’d abandoned the livelihood of their father in the carpenter shop to go traipsing off around the countryside doing strange things. What did Jesus mean when He said, “My time has not yet come?”
He had more in mind than that His time to be crucified for the sins of the world had not yet come. His time is fulfilled when all people come to Him. We will read next Lord’s Day that Jesus did, in fact, go to Jerusalem. But His hesitation now to do what every devout Jew was obliged to do, to go to Jerusalem to celebrate all three great feasts of the Jews—Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles—was because of the immense significance of this Feast to God’s purposes for this world—a purpose that centered in Him. As God made flesh, sent to trigger the fulfillment of these purposes, Jesus had to go to Jerusalem, not with the family, but alone to do the will of His heavenly Father for the sake of the world.
Jesus fulfilled the purpose of the Feast of Tabernacles. We might note that John’s Gospel tells us that “the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.” Actually the word is “tented,” but the tent in mind was not like the tents we use in camping. No easily assembled shelter made of nylon and aluminum poles. It was a tent like the one the children built with me this morning. Leafy branches, willows, myrtles, palm branches on a wooden frame.
If we had looked around Jerusalem on the day when Jesus went to celebrate this Feast we would have seen little leafy huts like this all over the place. People would share materials. This family is short of palm branches, while another family has more than it needs. This family is made up only of aged grandparents because the younger generation died of sickness or at the hands of the Romans. This family is poor and hasn’t enough good food to make merry, so another family shares of its bounty. And everyone is equal as they stay in a little booth made of freshly cut branches. The rich family sleeps in as humble a home as the poor. The poor family sleeps as magnificently as the rich.
Not only that but strangers are welcomed into the humble little huts. In Deuteronomy 16 we read: “you and your son and your daughter, your manservant and your maidservant, the Levite who is within your towns, the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow who are among you, at the place which the Lord your God will choose, to make his name dwell there.”
This was very likely the Feast mentioned in the book of Judges, a harvest feast, when young men of the Tribe of Benjamin watched young women dancing and chose from them wives. The Tribe of Benjamin had been nearly wiped out by the other eleven tribes because of a disgraceful deed of one of its men, that they refused to punish, but defended the man. But the sadness of the civil war was ended with merriment as they gathered for the Feast of the harvest and young people danced—and young men were drawn to their future wives.
The closest we come to this is at our pot-luck dinners. Then you bring your best cookin’ and share it. And I see you going back again and again by the long tables to enjoy the bounty of shared food.
We often think of truly sacred times as times when we are reading the Bible, praying, or engaged in some other explicitly devotional exercise. But the purpose of the gatherings God commanded Israel to keep included specifically being happy together. Our talent shows are sacred events. Our pot-luck dinners are sacred events. Our softball games and our picnics together are sacred. At everyone of them we are together, bound by our common attachment by faith to Jesus. Strangers join us, sojourners, to use the Old Testament term. You invite guests. And not infrequently it is at times like this that young men and young women are drawn together in a way that sometimes results in weddings at the front of this sanctuary!
When God commanded Israel to keep these feasts together it was to provide a balance to the sacrificial system, the “serious” side of being His people.
There is a place for sermons and prayer meetings and hymn-singing; indeed, a great and necessary place I might say in defense of my position with you. But life together in Christ needs the happy moments, the dinners and picnics and talent shows. We are no less gathered in Jesus’ name when we are laughing and enjoying one another. When our children see this how fond is their impression of the Christian community. They are never bored of them as they might be when sitting in church trying to listen to that old fellow there in a black robe who is talking far too long. I was told by one of our little fellows yesterday he thought I was about ninety seven years old!
Well, what about it? Ought we to be celebrating the great Feasts God commanded Israel? We have no command to do so as a means of being approved by God—as was the case for Israel. But maybe there is wisdom in seeing that the directions God gave Israel were for our instruction too. Did not Paul write, “The former things were written for our instruction.” Let us be instructed by the good heritage bequeathed to us in the faith explained in the Hebrew Bible. Let us keep what is good. Let us recognize the fulfillment that was intended in each of the Feasts—the Lord’s Supper from Passover, the gift of the Hoy Spirit at Pentecost, and the ingathering of all people at the Feast of Tabernacles.
There is a three-fold, we might say “Trinitarian” lesson given us in the Jewish feasts. Remembering God’s works in the past. Togetherness. Seeing what God intends as the fulfillment of the Feast’s meaning. Let us claim and celebrate too this heritage. What might develop in this place in days to come, under the instruction of this goodly heritage?
Let us pray: Thank you Lord God for all that you teach us in your word. Grant to us the wisdom to be instructed by it. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
October 01, 2006
Dining on Jesus
Exodus 16: 4-8/John 6: 51-60, 66
October 1st, 2006
Today all over the world Christians are taking the Lord’s Supper. It’s as though we’re all gathered around one great table as one loaf and a single cup are passed around to us all. At first there were twelve men, one of whom would go out and betray Jesus. Now there are many of us who have come to Jesus’ table, at His invitation.
When the first disciples took the Last Supper with Jesus they thought it was just another Passover. It seems it was the third Passover they’d had with Jesus. Always be-fore Jesus would say the words from Exodus that reminded the Jewish people of the way God delivered their ancestors from Egypt. But now He said something very different. He said, “This is my body broken for you. This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” How totally unprecedented!
I wonder if any of them made any connection between Jesus’ words at this last Passover: “This is my body which is given for you,” and “this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood,” and what He said as He spoke in the syna-gogue at Capernaum some time before. This morning we read the shocking words Jesus said standing on the bema, the raised platform in that synagogue, ”Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood you have no life in you.” He didn’t say this in the privacy of a conversation with the twelve, but publicly, in the synagogue on the Sabbath apparently after reading from Deuteronomy or Exodus about the manna God supplied in the wilderness. I wonder if any of them made a connection between Jesus’ words at this last Passover and His earlier words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood.
John tells us, “the Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’” It must be an understatement to say they “disputed” among themselves. Did anyone suggest, “Does this sound like cannibalism to you?” A few verses later we read that after this many of his disciples drew back no longer went about with Him.” No wonder.
The Apostle Paul tells us of the ways of idol-worshippers whose temples were their meat-markets. People ate meat that came from animals that were offered as sacri-fices and in doing so they had intimate participation with their gods as they ate their food. There was something about what Jesus said that smacked of this pagan practice, only worse. Because what Jesus said sounded oddly like cannibalism as well. No wonder many disciples left Him after He taught this. I would guess a lot of Christians are not aware this is in their Bibles.
I wonder if all of us here knew that Jesus said those stunning words. Are you tempted to think these words are a bit extreme, certainly more than you believe. This is part of the Bible we politely choose to ignore.
But there is something very basic to Christianity going on here about which the pagan world had some idea. Somehow the way true religion is to work is from deep in-side of us. We must eat for ourselves.
Over the past few weeks we’ve been gradually building to this point. As we’ve read from the Book of Deuteronomy and the Gospel of John it’s as though God gradually put together the means of restoring fallen humanity. Restoring the human heart would take extreme measures. All this in John’s Gospel began with Jesus feeding the 5000 by the Sea of Galilee. He went on to speak of the manna God supplied to ancient Israel in the wilderness. He drew a parallel between that manna and Himself, that both came from heaven. But He was the true bread. The manna was not the true bread. Eat it and you get hungry a few hours later. Indeed, it didn’t last over night; it would get wormy and spoiled before morning. Jesus, by contrast, lasted forever and would satisfy forever. We read last week that Jesus said, “Come to me and you’ll not hunger; believe in me and you’ll not thirst.” He gradually came to the great truth announced in our reading this morning.
From the Old Testament we see how God began with one people, the ancient Is-raelites who were the means of teaching the whole human race. He urged them to re-member how He cared for them. There’s a lot of repetition of Israel’s history in the Old Testament. Why? Because repetition is the mother of memory. Remember! Remember!
Then God urged Israel to thank Him. Why? Because there is nothing like saying “thank you” to teach a person’s heart to be thankful. Take notice of all His all His bene-fits and you’ll be a thankful people. He urged them to keep the commandments. Why? Because they guided the people into the good way of life, pleasing to them and pleasing to their Creator. In all of this we see that God was trying to fill their thoughts with a new outlook on life. He was getting into their heads.
For the rest of the world life was a continuous competition for survival and su-premacy. All most people think about is getting ahead, or maybe just surviving. But Is-rael could let God be their warrior. He was the Lord of Hosts for them. He provided for them in the wilderness and He would provide for them in the Promised Land. All that was needed from them was to remember, to be grateful, to live by the good rules, so much better than selfish natural reflexes. Thus God tried to enter the thoughts of Israel.
But now we see Jesus taking this one step farther as He speaks of these things. Not only would God enter their minds and hearts, He must enter their bodies. Jesus said, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” “Son of man” was a very particular way of pointing to Himself. He could have said sim-ply “my flesh,” but “Son of man” pointed emphatically at Himself. Why? Because this particular son of man was God incarnate. Great doctrine is hidden in these words. God must enter into their very bodies. You must eat the flesh of the Son of God and drink His blood.
I remind us of this knowing how shocking it is, how indiscreet even in our day. Few people nowadays have in mind a kind of Christianity that talks much of the blood of Christ, much less drinking it. We scarcely sing any more the hymns having to do with Jesus’ blood. Jesus intended this indiscretion because the thing He had in mind for us is indiscreet. Discretion, we say, is the better part of valor. Discretion knows when to say when. It looks out for what is best for a person. Discretion gets tossed to the winds if we’re really into the Jesus way.
Part of the difficulty we have in really doing up Christianity fully is that we are far too discrete. We want a reasonable approach to Christianity, convenient, one that fits in with normal life. We want a polite Christianity. We want nothing like the extremism that sometimes comes out of religions that have gone bananas.
Christian extremism in the past produced anchorites in the fourth century that thought that being a real Christian meant they should climb up on platforms high above the ground and spend their lives up there to separate themselves for God. These “pil-larites” certainly were indiscreet in their religion, but what a pointless indiscretion! Be-fore Martin Luther got sensible and got married, snuggling up to his beloved Katherine von Bora he spent nights lying alone on a cold floor in his monastic cell in Erfurt. His back some times bled from his self-whipping as he tried to crush his body so that his spirit could soar. Christianity like other religions has produced many kinds of silly or destructive fanaticism.
We witness how the world is in turmoil today from the minority of extremists who are eager to blow their own bodies up if they can kill other people too that they think their God hates. And so young men and young women, even pregnant mothers strap explosives to their bodies and detonate them for the sake of God. No wonder we fear extremism. Let our Christianity be sensible!
And then we read these words of Jesus that surely should be left out of the Bible. “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in me.”
We have cleaned this up a bit as we remember the Last Supper without those pre-vious words ringing in our ears. We Protestants focus on the symbolic nature of the bread and wine, not trying to define too closely what is actually going on. Protestants take issue with the Catholics for seeing too much connection between what Jesus taught in John 6 and what is happening at Communion. They teach “transubstantiation,” which means that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus when the priest says, “This is my body” at the Mass.
Though I don’t think Jesus intended us to try to quantify what’s going on at this sacred meal, clearly in teaching us to remember that “This is His body” and “This is His blood” He intended that this should shock us repeatedly as to the nature of the relation-ship we are called to have with Him. Jesus wants to get into us.
The only way He can get into us is if we eat Him and drink Him. It’s just a figure of speech you say. It’s just poetic license. That bread does not become His body and the wine does not become His blood before we eat and drink. Thus we parry what Jesus is trying to do in us.
I sometimes actually think when I sit down to one of Bonnie’s exquisite meals what becomes of those fresh beans and home made bread. Somehow the food turns into fingernails and hair and muscle and bone. It even turns into intestinal tissue. It becomes a part of me automatically without my even thinking about it.
Thus we think it good to be careful what we eat. I noticed at Trader Joe’s recently that one can buy organic stuff I never thought about organically before. Why? To keep out of our bodies the various chemicals that have been introduced to our food to make it grow better, but do damage to our bodies. So we try to eat healthy foods, for our bodies’ sakes. You are what you eat, it has been said.
And so it is, in far more than a physical sense. We sometimes speak of “con-suming interests” that grab people. They have virtually “eaten” these interests. “Con-sume” is such an interesting word. Eating is the most intimate way to consume, but we use the word to refer to other ways of being taken over inside.
People may be consumed with boredom or drugs, or alcohol, or with anger and hatred. These things may actually change the bodies of those who are consumed with them. These are bad things.
But there are good consuming interests too. When summer passes to autumn, and when the winter’s cold passes to the warmth of spring young men and women are con-sumed with thoughts of each other. You can see it in their eyes. I watch young people walking hand in hand on campus at Purdue in the fall, their faces flushed with new love. All their thoughts are of the other. This is a lovely thing.
I see how young mothers in particular are consumed with caring for their little ones. We may be consumed with our careers, with our homes, investments, sports, the art—music, physical fitness, indeed, to excel in any endeavor we must give ourselves diligently to it. Sometimes being consumed with a good thing like this can lead to a more wholesome life. There is something fulfilling in being consumed in a good way.
And somehow in this world of consuming interests Jesus says to us, “unless you consume my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you.” We understand this partly when we realize that all the various things that may consume us at the moment will pass.
I saw during the half time of the Purdue/Notre Dame game an interview with Terry Hanratty, once a great Notre Dame quarterback. But now he has gray hair and his body doesn’t look heroic. Stardom in sports is a temporary stage of life.
I hear tragic stories of once great scholars at University Place whose minds are gone. Their bodies are hulls once inhabited by brilliant minds. A couple years ago I visited a dear physician friend at St. Mary’s Health Care center over in Lafayette. He cared so tenderly for friends of mine long gone now. I would speak to this beloved doctor now reduced by Alzheimer’s and felt so bad. How compassionate he was as a doctor. I at-tended his funeral, thinking the place would be packed with grateful former patients. But the place was not packed.
Seeing how passing are all these things that may consume us it should make us sit up and listen to Jesus’ indiscreet words about eating and drinking Him—of consuming Him. Not in some fanatic way that makes us become exhibitionists, but in a way that controls us from deep within. Somehow consuming Jesus has effects lingering even be-yond the life of the body.
The ancient Jews were instructed to begin and end the day by saying, “Hear O Is-rael, the Lord our God, one Lord.” Day after day they reminded themselves to whom they belonged. In instructing Israel in this habit, Moses was a schoolmaster leading us to eat and drink of the Jesus Christ.
When we take the Sacrament of the Lord’s Table, holding bread that we see bro-ken before us at this central table, and drinking wine that I will always pour out very de-liberately while speaking the words Jesus said about the pouring out of His blood, we en-gage in a literal act of eating and drinking that focuses the whole bearing of our lives, if we have come to Jesus.
The Apostle Paul taught us, “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.”
Ponder doing what you do in the course of the day done consciously as unto the Lord Jesus. You have fed on Him in the morning. Digest Him during the days of your life.
We don’t understand these things. I don’t understand what part is God’s to do and what part is ours to do in working out a life consuming Jesus and then being con-sumed with following Jesus. But this I have seen that nobody gets into the Jesus way who does not intend to.
We can think of many reasons why we should take Jesus lightly rather than as a consuming focus for our lives. We are put off by people who have been offensive to us in their ways—who consider themselves strong Christians. We find it hard to maintain the intensity we once felt. We began with a flourish. But the interest has waned. We’re back where we started. I know how this is. I fight the same battle.
Jesus taught us many things about this pilgrimage of faith. He let His disciples know that the pilgrimage meant literally following Him—because they would be object lessons for Christians ever after. And then He taught them and us that we must eat His flesh and drink His blood. And this lets us know there is something “extreme” about His being in us.
Jesus gave us other pictures of His intentions for and with us. He also told us we are friends who share with Him a common interest—to do the will of the Father. He told us we are like servants who are given tasks to be done. He told us we are like builders planning a house who must count the cost before we start to build, lest we run out before the house is done. And He told us that life is an on-going thing, a matter of following after Him. We are pilgrims on a journey. In all of this there is a purpose larger than the purposes of life that must be all consuming—but that this all-consuming faith makes life better rather than worse.
I mentioned to the children that we come every Sunday to church to be reminded often about what is really important. We have Christmas and Good Friday/Easter as fes-tal moments in the year that remind us of the two poles of Jesus’ birth and death—that find their parallel in our birth and death—and the promise of the resurrection. As we eat every day so every day we must consume Jesus if He is to be in us all the time. The Lord’s Supper helps us to understand this as we take into our mouths the elements of bread and wine. Jesus must get into us as intimately as food does, and work on our lives as thoroughly as food nourishes and renews us. Do you get the idea? We must do the eating, but Jesus will do the work in us, in our hearts, that food we eat does on our physi-cal bodies.
Once again as we come to this Table of the Lord, to eat the bread together and drink the wine poured out for us, remember who it is by whom you identify yourself as a Christian—that you belong to Him, that He is in your heart, and that His presence there affects your life. Then let life take its course, knowing that you belong to Him. And He is giving to us life.
One final word. Jesus not only feeds us Himself. He also says to us, “Open your heart so I can eat with you.” Jesus wants to come in to eat with us, a symbol of fellow-ship, if we will open the door and invite Him. In a way it’s an odd mix of word pictures: eat His flesh and invite Him in to eat with you. And so it is. Ponder these things and let your heart move in this direction.
O Lord, how poorly we understand the simple matters you have taught us. But grant that we may not so much understand as we may experience your intentions for us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM