Faith Presbyterian Church

April 22, 2007

The Hope of the Gospel

Jeremiah 31: 31-36/John 20: 16-31
April 22, 2007

This past week we were again appalled at how humanity can erupt in violence. This time it was a young man on a university campus. In 1999 we learned to think of a beautiful flower called Columbine as a word suggesting violence. Six years ago we learned: 911. 911 used to mean instant rescue. We have added another term: Virginia Tech, a great university now a name that will be associated with violence.

I listened to a TV interview with an elegant and thoughtful Iraqi diplomat shortly after this happened. He was so gracious. He commiserated with the sudden grief America feels as it shares the loss of thirty-three families—including the innocent family whose son and brother was the murderer. Then he quietly reminded the one who interviewed him that every day in Iraq families have to contend with this kind of thing. Every day is interrupted by a suicide bomber somewhere suddenly imposing violently a warped idealism on others, plunging more families into grief, destroying market places and restaurants and play grounds at the same time.

We tend to typecast Iraq as a place where suicide bombers are as Iraqi as apple pie. Not so. No more than we are a country where 911, Columbine, and last week’s Virginia Tech are typical of America.

It was for the immediate benefit of a world such as this that the two passages of Scripture we read this morning were written. Jeremiah wrote for the benefit of a nation just taken into exile. John wrote for a new community of people, without an identity yet who lived in material insecurity and often persecution. What word for our day can we find here?

The people who first heard Jeremiah’s words had heard the sound of chariot wheels and the footsteps of soldiers on their streets in Jerusalem and all the surrounding towns. Picture columns of tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbling down Rt. 26, fanning out into our neighborhoods. Those who heard Jeremiah knew what it was like to have their front doors suddenly broken down, wives and daughters ravished, fathers and dads taken prisoner or killed, their property stolen or destroyed. The cream of the crop of the land was marched off in chains to a far away place where they spoke a different language. Their sacred Place, the Temple, a symbol of all they stood for, was destroyed.

Everything precious to them was gone.

It was for their benefit that the prophet wrote words I’ve often quoted here at the start of a worship service: “I know the plans that I have for you, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the Lord.”

It was to comfort such as these that another prophet wrote, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, says your God. Speak comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low . . . and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.”

At first these words must have sounded like hollow promises. But those words came to mind again and again as the years rolled on, and forged hope in the hearts of God’s chosen people. They were the means to the blessing of the world, a promise that must have sounded hollow to them at the moment. Little did they know that just seventy years later a Persian king who had recently conquered the empire that sacked Jerusalem, would send many Jews packing for Jerusalem with the means to rebuild their Temple and the city.

In later times people would see how on target Jeremiah was in tying in their spiritual situation with their need for a material security. Just after the words I quoted above we read of God’s promise to restore their land. He will bring them back home. Indeed, God would bring them back in more than one way: back to their homeland but also back to Him. Because face it, what good is it to be in the right place if it is with a bad frame of heart and mind?

It was a gracious promise that when God’s people—then as now—seek Him with all their hearts they will find Him. We read these words as though they were meant for us. Because the heart of everyone needs most of all to be at peace with its Creator. We can be in the most painful situation outwardly speaking, and yet have perfect peace of mind, if we are squared away inwardly with our Creator. We can enjoy every material blessing and live in distress if our hearts are askew with one another and with God. If our hearts are square with God and with one another, virtually any situation can be more than endured. We can be happy.

That great old hymn that we love to sing in hard times, “It is well with my soul” many of you know was written by a husband and father after learning of the death at sea of his wife and daughters. “When peace like a river attendeth my ways and sorrow like sea-billows roll, whatever my lot Thou hast taught me to say, ‘It is well, it is well with my soul’.”

Elaine read for us what Jeremiah told his people as they struggled to make a go of it in Babylon. They probably didn’t know how to take his promise of returning to Jerusalem in seventy years. They knew even less how to take this second promise: “The days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah . . . I will write my law on their hearts; and I will be their God and they will be my people.”

Up until now the covenant as far as the people were concerned was a symbol of their failure. The covenant with its laws was a check list of how they had failed to live with integrity before God and one another. What could Jeremiah mean that God would write this law on their hearts?

They didn’t know about computers then, but had they known of computers it would nearly seem God was promising to put a computer chip into them that would re-program their hearts to live well. But this was not how it would be. God does not compel anyone to trust in Him or to obey Him. We who believe that Jeremiah’s echo of God’s promise has been fulfilled in the coming of the Lord Jesus and in the gift of the Holy Spirit do not always act as though God has written on our hearts His laws. It is not always obvious that we enjoy an inward principle that overcomes the natural defects of our humanity.

John hints to us at least how this writing of God’s law on the heart would come about. We read this morning why he wrote this Gospel. He did not write it in order to tell everything Jesus did. He couldn’t fit into one document a record of everything Jesus said and did. But he wrote what we find here “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.” Belief is God’s stylus to mark grooves into the clay tablets of our hearts. Or so it seems. But believing is not a fool-proof means to a Christian’s re-creation as a reflection of Jesus’ character. This is no doubt why the same author stresses that belief and behavior must be in tandem.

As Bonhoeffer put it, to believe is to obey.

You do not actually believe the Gospel if you live in disobedience to it. The groove of God’s stylus of belief has not been scratched onto the tablet of the heart if there is not the evidence of changed behavior.

We have a caused a lot of harm in all our theological quizzes, suggesting that God is pleased when we hold all the right ideas--as we have constructed them from our assessment of the pertinence of the Bible’s words. It is true Jesus said, “You will know the truth and the truth will make you free,” but to quote this out of context is a crime. Here is what Jesus said, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Continuing in His word refers to a way of life rather than to a way of thought. If you are living as Jesus taught then you’ll know the truth that will make you free. It begins with a way of life and not with ideas held in the mind.

What is this way of life? John’s entire Gospel is written to explain this way of life--in order that you and I may know the truth that will make us free.

While I believe we ought to honestly assess what the Bible teaches, and stick up for this when the Bible is rejected by fellow Christians, we do ill if we defend a way of life lived in violation of Jesus’ teaching and example. We do well to defend the Bible graciously before its cultured despisers when it is confused or attacked. We do well to respond firmly to men like Richard Dawkins who is trying to get all religion outlawed in Great Britain. His diabolical and quixotic campaign will surely fail, but he is doing considerable harm. But the principal business of being a Christian is living out a way of life. It is hard to refute a good life.

When Jeremiah wrote people still thought in terms of sacrifices to offer as the means of taking care of problems of behavior. Sin is bad behavior that often leads to bad thoughts. We think the direction is from bad thoughts to bad behavior, and I suppose it sometimes works this way. But it works the other way too: bad behavior fixes in our minds the welcome of bad thoughts.

Maybe John knew about the grace of God in a way Jeremiah did not yet understand. John understood that even though Jesus said “you are my friends if you do what I command you,” his Lord would do something very different from what God demanded in the Old Testament times when these commands were disobeyed.

Instead of an animal dying because of my sin, Jesus died because of my sin. When Jesus died it was as though you and I who are parents should punish ourselves when our children do badly. It was as though if my son wastes his life in self-destructive behavior, I bear the consequences in my body while my son enjoys good health and happiness.

As Paul put it, “He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.”

John wrote this Gospel for us who have the best of both worlds. We can read it and know what is the true way to live, and thus come to know the truth that frees us. And if we don’t, instead of being punished, Jesus takes the rap. And somehow, in a way I don’t understand, if we will take the helpless first step of trusting that this is true, a first step that we call “believing in Him,” then God forgives us and treats us as though we’ve never sinned at all. But surely we were not given this promise so as to presume on God’s mercy. What a waste of life to continue as though God had never offered to us a way of life that is good, that brings God joy, and offers an antidote to the miseries of this world. I often pray, “Lord, help me to make some difference for good.” It is a reminder that should surge in our hearts that God has given us all this for a purpose far richer than our own eternal security.

The hope of the Gospel is this that we can continue in God’s word if we wish. And if we do, we’ll know the truth. And if we do not continue in God’s word, then “where sin abounds grace does much more abound.” Somehow God will get to you and me even if we continue to resist Him. Even if we cling to our little self-justifications, our self-approval with unexamined lives, He loves us still. God will win in the end over the most stubborn of us. This is the hope of the Gospel.

But how much better it is if we choose to follow Jesus. How much better if we read the Scriptures with humility and hunger, and then, asking God to give us His Holy Spirit in as much quantity as we need, strive to do as Jesus taught us. Trying goes a long way. It’s when we substitute ideas about God for trying to obey Jesus that we cause heartache to ourselves, to others, and to God.

Once again, and for the final time in my life with you as pastor, we baptize a little one into the family of God. Let us teach him by precept and example what it is to be a Christian.

Let us pray: O Lord, grant that we may live as you have taught us to believe, rather than believe as we live. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:00 AM

April 15, 2007

Thomas’ Quite Reasonable Doubt

Daniel 12: 1-3/John 20: 19-25
April 15th, 2005

Last Sunday was Easter, as I’m sure you remember. This morning I invite you to think with me about the evening of that first Easter as it was in the life of Thomas, one of Jesus’ disciples. We think of him as Doubting Thomas.

The rest of the disciples were excited as can be. They’d seen Jesus alive. They blurted out to Thomas, “We’ve seen Jesus.” They expected he would be thrilled. Not so. He tells them not just “I won’t believe until I see for myself, but “Unless I see the nail-prints and put my fingers in them and put my hand in His side I will not believe.” Thomas had to see and touch!

So we call this fellow Doubting Thomas. But do you think you or I would have responded differently? Our first encounter with Thomas comes midway through John’s Gospel. Jesus had just told His disciples He was going to prepare a place for them and they knew the way. Thomas replied, “We don’t know where you are going: how can we know the way?” Thomas was an honest and faithful man.

Thomas knew that less than three days before his world had been shattered for reasons that had the rest of the disciples weeping with him. Perhaps he watched Jesus’ body being carried from Golgotha to the cave-tomb of Joseph of Aramathea.

Thomas is intriguing to a lot of us because we too doubt. How can anyone help some uncertainties? In matters of faith we’re talking about not only unseen things but also about matters of which self-confident authorities make conflicting pronouncements. How do we know which self-confident authority to believe?

Many modern folk think they have found a friend in Thomas as a skeptic about the bodily resurrection of Jesus—that is the very hinge of the Christian faith. After all, as St. Paul said, “If Christ has not been raised all this preaching is foolishness. We are of all people the most pitiful, because Jesus’ resurrection is the heart of our confidence in God’s intentions toward us.

In The Gospel of Thomas, supposedly written by this same disciple of Jesus, we read that Jesus said, “I am amazed at how the great wealth [the spirit] has made its home in this poverty [the body].” If Jesus believed that the body was worthless this adds fuel to the idea that the bodily resurrection of Jesus was an idea made up by Jesus’ disciples—that placed far too much stock in the body.

The low esteem of the body suggested here was not shared by many Jews in Jesus’ day. In fact the Old Testament, the Bible of the Jews is packed with references to the resurrection of the body. The testimony from the Book of Daniel that Pat read for us this morning is a summary statement of a confidence in God’s promise of the resurrection of the body that existed since the days of Abraham.
As I reminded you last Sunday, there was a prayer composed five hundred years before the time of Jesus that devout Jews would say three times a day. Jesus would have said this along with Thomas and the other disciples. Observant Jews still pray to God: “You are mighty, You humble the proud . . . You sustain life giving life to the dead; in the blink of an eye you bring salvation. Blessed are You, Adonai, who gives life to the dead.”

Thomas would have prayed this prayer. He would have known what the Bible taught about Abraham being able to see in the blessing that would proceed from his family—because he would rise from the grave. Ezekiel foretold that “them bones, them bones gonna walk around” so that devout Jews who could afford to, stored the bones of deceased loved ones in ossuaries to help God at the resurrection. The Gospel lesson this morning simply informs us that Thomas’ doubt was like the uncertainty of the rest of the disciples’ until they saw Jesus and then understood He was the first to experience this resurrection.

Was Thomas a habitual doubter? I don’t think so. He’d left all to follow Jesus for three years. Until they’d seen Him the other disciples were: doubting John, doubting Andrew, doubting Peter, doubting Thaddeus, etc. The New Testament gives us no clues that Thomas was uniquely defective in faith.
Thomas has become something of a hero in our day when doubt and skepticism are treated as virtues, signs of intellectual honesty. It’s not hard to see why this might be. The word “doubt” as we use it is very broad and suggestive. In fact it suggests far more than Thomas’ reasonable uncertainty.

Doubt today includes reasonable confusion when looking at the mass of religious options claiming our allegiance. There are so many Christian groups claiming to have it right. Do I believe the one with the most glamour, or that speaks the loudest and most often? That has the most people? Do I choose the group with the most striking personality at the helm? Do I stay with the one I’m used to or do I try something new? Should I give them all a look-see? But how do I choose between them once I’ve looked them all over?

Then, there are so many non-Christian religions that have found a home in our land. They have become almost as American as apple pie. Our Constitution welcomes them as much as it does Christianity. Maybe I should choose one of them. Others have. Why not become a Muslim—they’re not all like Al Qaida or the Teliban. Or maybe I’ll become a disciple of Hare Krishna? Why not Scientology or Jehovah’s Witnesses?

With all the scandals that have shaken the Church, both in the Protestant and Catholic versions of Western Christendom it’s easy to wonder if any of them stands for what is good, true, and beautiful.

Add to this the individualism bred in our free society that suggests to people they should forever hedge their bets in matters religious. In fact there are institutional forms of this hedging of bets.

John Updike described an institutionalized form of this outlook that is attractive to some folk today. “It seemed so milky, so smugly vague and evasive; an unimpeachably featureless dilution of the Christian religion as I had met it in its Lutheran form.” I won’t tell you which religious organization he is describing. But the same outlook has infected our denomination.

Brad Longfield, son-in-law of the late Sue Whitford, one of the former General Presbyters in our presbytery, wrote a very good book, The Presbyterian Controversy, that I used in the Church history segment of the Commissioned Lay Pastor course I taught two years ago. He concludes the book by asserting that we’ve got to offer a clearer message as Presbyterians.

I was surprised at the response to this book within our congenial class. Before discussing this book we enjoyed such harmony in the class. But at our last session there were those who were troubled that had chosen Longfield’s book as a way of proposing that the message we proclaim should be clearer. The Gospel of inclusiveness seems to demand something less than a clear message that might be offensive to some who are searching to find their way.

Within our denomination there is such celebration of diversity that many people hungry for the Gospel are confused at the message they’ve hearing from some of our pulpits. When the outward forms of hymn-singing, creed-saying, and ceremonial Bible reading celebrate make-believe, what’s the point? If we replace a faith rooted deeply in the Bible as the source--in the virgin-born, sinless-living, death-defeating Jesus as its cornerstone, what is there beside cultural interest in Christianity? I know I’m mostly preaching to the choir in saying this here. I pray this pulpit will never sound with a smugly vague and evasive; an unimpeachably featureless dilution of the Christian religion.

Well, all of this finds no friend in Thomas, Jesus’ disciple who had to see and touch Jesus before he would believe Jesus was alive and well. As things turned out, seeing was enough for him. When he saw Jesus he said, “My Lord and my God!”

Early Church tradition tells us that Thomas became a missionary to far away places. In the land where my brothers and I spent much of our early life the Mar Thoma Church, the St. Thomas Church in south India claims to be founded by this famed doubter, Doubting Thomas—who obeyed the Great Commission—go and tell. There were many who heard Thomas preach that earned Jesus’ commendation: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

Let me conclude by coming back to this matter of doubt that may be an issue for you. Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, observed a few years ago that belief “looks like a demand to bind oneself to yesterday . . . Who wants to do that in an age when the idea of ‘tradition’ has been replaced by the idea of ‘progress’?”

He seems on target in proposing that the way Christianity looks to a lot of modern people is a “convulsive effort to proclaim as contemporary something that is, after all, really a relic of days gone by.”

How is a person to think, living in an environment that surrounds us not so much with honest uncertainty, but skepticism and cynicism and hedging bets in matters of faith? Doubt is a modest kind of not-knowing. But skepticism and cynicism may be relentless tendencies of thought supported with pride. I sense that some skepticism is defensive, maybe a bit lazy, and perhaps even dishonest. It’s not hard to stand back and ask questions hard to answer. Some doubt derives from painful memories or from disappointment with oneself.

Belief draws us out of ourselves. Jesus did not invite us to engage in whimsically fond thoughts about Him, but to trust in Him. Trust is demanding. We are not trusting Jesus if we simply hold some ideas about Him that we may have been taught by our parents, or that serve as passwords securing the friendship of people we like. Trusting Jesus is a robust, demanding way of life.

Those who give themselves to a life where Jesus is at the center, His commands governing their responses to life’s situations, His teachings informing their consciences, His name held with reverence in their thoughts, find a way of life that satisfies the deepest needs of the heart. Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us in his Introduction to Christianity that following Jesus may not banish every doubt and fear all the time because at times our inner weakness may trigger fearful self-doubt—doubting God. Some of the greatest saints have feared at times that they didn’t believe at all.

But what kept them on track was sheer, dogged obedience in life. If in moments or seasons of doubt we start to do things we ought not, or if we quit habits of private devotion and public worship, we will drift away from the faith itself. When we realize this and pray with that fearful father in the Gospel story, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief,” and then begin again to pray, to choose good habits, to read the Bible—with the intention of doing what it teaches, and to resume the discipline of public worship, perhaps we’ll discover that we’re not so overwhelmed with the rootlessness we had before.

This morning we will baptize a little boy and a grown lady. In claiming the sign and promise of baptism they accept God’s claim on them that they can remember when they are troubled by doubts and fears. “Remember your baptism,” Luther told the fearful Christian. Whatever you think about Jesus from time to time in moments of weakness, there is no doubt what God thinks of you all the time—that He loves you and in Jesus Christ He claims you as His child.

O Lord, grant us to trust this is so. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 10:00 AM

April 08, 2007

Whose Bones are in that Bone Box?

Job 19: 20-27/John 20: 1-18
April 8th, 2007 (Easter)

Let me get right to an answer to the question you read in the bulletin: “Whose bones are in that bone box?” I take it you know what I’m talking about—the announcement much in the news recently that the remains of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were found in an ossuary near Jerusalem.

I’m never sure how seriously it is my duty to treat this kind of news. The wheel that squeaks loudest gets the grease. When the news is of this kind pastors are supposed to say something. The information I have is the same as you have. We’re told that Professor Amos Kloner, the archaeologist who supervised the discovery twenty-seven years ago denied the idea that is now catching everyone’s notice. “It is impossible. It’s nonsense.”

On a somewhat less serious level, I’m reminded of two fellows who grabbed public notice in Scotland in 1842 claiming they were the long-lost grandsons of a Polish princess and Bonnie Prince Charlie, Charles Edward Stuart, the pretender to the throne of England who escaped to Rome after the crushing defeat of his pathetic forces at Culloden Moor in 1745. Kilt-wearing and other tokens of Scots identity were forbidden for thirty-seven years.

That unhappy time passed. The 19th century was dominated by Queen Victoria (1819-1901,) who had a beloved personal servant, Mr. Brown, who was a Highlander. He usually wore a kilt. The queen loved to see men dressed in kilts. So she promoted kilt-wearing and bagpipe playing.

So these two self-proclaimed grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie, noticing how popular kilt-wearing had become, published a book with a Latin title: Vestiarium Scoticum, based on documents they “discovered” dating back to the 16th century. This book grabbed a lot of public interest. It granted the panache of antiquity to Scots pride in wearing kilts. Well, the documents were proved forgeries. The upshot of all this is that I must inform you the red tartan you see on the Advent wreathe here may not be all that old. But no harm is done since it is charming to see.

Of more consequence is this business of playing with peoples’ faith with bogus information. Perhaps this is a good place to say I am convinced that as Christians we have no duty to try to debunk other peoples’ deeply felt beliefs. This is not the Jesus-way. Be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you—but take no delight in wounding the religious sensitivities of other. We do not add to the appeal of the Gospel by trying to prove other peoples’ religions defective. This is as offensive to them as the bone-box idea is to you. In matters of belief it is not like a court of law where brute facts alone matter. Deep feelings as well as truth are the terrain of belief. Harm the feelings and the truth is not attractive. Live out the Gospel and the truth is attractive. Live by the Gospel and the Truth is attractive.

But back to the bone-box which is apparently evidence that Jesus died like every other person. There were no bones in that ossuary. Nobody knows to whom the residue belongs that was found. The names attached to the residue of dust were announced on the basis of the names scratched on the exterior of the box. Though the names are not altogether clear, publicists have inferred that there is a one in ten million chance that they do not belong to the holy family.

That the bones of three members of a poor family from Galilee, who died years apart, were found in an ossuary in Jerusalem, in a part of the city that probably held the ossuaries of aristocrats, is unlikely. Matthew’s Gospel tells us the first attempt to persuade people that Jesus did not rise from death. The guards posted at Jesus’ tomb were bribed to say His body was stolen by His disciples as the guards were sleeping.

Other ideas have been advanced explaining away Jesus’ resurrection. Some have proposed Jesus was drugged on the cross and did not die. He was resuscitated from his drug-induced stupor.

Perhaps most troubling is the view one commonly hears that “the Easter Faith” was only a conviction that took over His disciples that Jesus was spiritually alive. It was this Easter Faith that took over the disciples that made them willing to face death (and extinction) as they proclaimed the Gospel that has so affected the world.

We are here this morning because we believe that on the first day of the week after Passover in about the year AD 30, Jesus of Nazareth, who had been crucified the Friday before, came out of the tomb alive.

There are two truths I hope you may remember after this morning. First, the account we just read from John’s Gospel, that has parallels in the other three Gospels, makes clear the earliest followers of Jesus not only saw an empty tomb, but they saw Jesus alive whom they knew had been in that tomb. Second, the resurrection of Jesus, that the Apostle Paul calls “the first fruits of them that sleep,” is in keeping with the clear teaching of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible of the ancient Jews.

First, the resurrection of Jesus’ body was an event as sure as His birth. If you allow your mind to travel back to the scene John describes you can envision Mary Magdalene’s frame of mind. Jesus had given her life after she was tormented by demonic possession. Racked with the horrors of this condition she felt such gratitude to Jesus that she was the first to come care for Jesus’ body early the morning of the first day after the Sabbath. The Sabbath was reckoned from evening to morning so to come when she did was no violation of the Sabbath. Even good deeds like anointing the bodies of deceased loved ones were forbidden on the Sabbath.

When she arrived at the tomb, in the darkness of the early morning she saw the stone that covered the mouth of the tomb was not in place. In a panic she ran to find the disciples to announce the only inference she could draw: His body had been stolen. Peter and John raced to the tomb, John arriving first. Inside the tomb they saw the linen wrap that had been around Jesus’ body lying in place. Near by was the head-wrap. They saw nothing else. They went back home in a dither. Mary stayed on, weeping.

She had not yet gone into the tomb as Peter and John did. But now she stooped to look inside. Then she saw two angels dressed in white, one at the head and one at the foot of the slab. Maybe she didn’t recognize them as angels because when they asked her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” she answered very reasonably. The sight of something so spooky as this at a tomb usually doesn’t promote rational discourse. Without waiting for further reply Mary stood up and turning around saw someone indistinctly. He too asks, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She didn’t answer His question. Instead she seems to have turned away and said, “Sir, if you have taken Him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take Him away.”

I find chills running up and down my spine as I visualize what came next. This unknown man, this stranger she thought was a gardener, said one word. “Mary.” And that voice she heard behind her triggered an immediate response. She turned toward that voice and uttered a word of affection that still rings down through time, “Rabboni,” My teacher. My rescuer. My most beloved friend. This Friend of sinners who had befriended her. She wanted to embrace Him as we all do those we love, particularly after times like this.

Jesus gave Mary Magdalene the first missionary command: “Go to my brethren and say to them I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Perhaps she could no longer see Him. Mary went to the disciples and told them, “I have seen the Lord.” It seems they both believed her and did not trust what they had heard. From then on the Easter story is about the slow realization that the disciples had that Jesus had really come to life again. Thus the Christian Faith began with trust that Jesus really became alive again after He was crucified.

But let me get to my second point that Jesus’ resurrection was in keeping with the teaching of the Hebrew Bible and the classic beliefs of the Jewish people.

Mike read from the Book of Job Job’s confession of faith that has been made popular in Handel’s oratorio, “Messiah.” The contralto aria, “I know that my redeemer liveth,” has cemented in our minds this Old Testament verse. In context it seems that Job did not intend to make a Messianic prophecy. Instead He was affirming his trust that there was someone who would prove he was not guilty of deeds that warranted his suffering. “Redeemer” here may simply mean “vindicator,” the one who would defend his cause when family and friends failed him.

But we do not have to rely only on this beloved witness that Christians have seen among many broad hints in the Old Testament that Jesus was God’s promised Messiah. A Jewish professor at Harvard, Jon Levinson, published a book last year in which he argues that the belief of God’s people, the ancient Israelites, and then their successors, the Jews, has always been that God would grant to them the resurrection of the body. The “Amidah,” the eighteen-fold prayer devout Jews offer three times a day, has as its second blessing,

“You, O Lord, are mighty forever, You are the Reviver of the dead, You are greatly able to save. You sustain the living in loving kindness, You revive the dead with great compassion, You support the falling, heal the sick, set free the bound and keep faith with those who sleep in the dust. Who is like You, O Master of mighty deeds? Who compares to You, a king who puts to death and restores to life, and brings forth salvation? And You are faithful to revive the dead. Blessed are You, O Lord, who revives the dead.”

Levenson confronts the view that has taken over Jewish thinking as well as much Christian thinking that the idea of the resurrection was a late import into Jewish thinking, drawn from Zoroastrianism. When I was in seminary we were shown how apocalyptic literature, the successor to the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible, introduced the idea of the resurrection of the body. The prophets, it was maintained, taught the resurrection of Israel as a nation, but not of individual Israelites who had died.
Not so, Levenson shows persuasively. There isn’t time to unfold his honest argument, but let me propose one clue. God promised to Abraham that in him and in his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed. The promise was not only to Abraham’s descendants, but also to him. God said, “My covenant is with you” before saying it was with his descendants. This is the first of numerous broad hints that have been overlooked, interpreted away, because of the assumption that dead bodies just don’t rise again. Abraham will be able to see the fulfillment of this promise. He will come to life again. God is the God of the living and not the dead.

The Apostle Paul, heir to this heritage realized that Jesus was the first evidence of God’s promise to Abraham not only of blessing, but also of personal resurrection from death. Jesus was the “first fruits” of them that sleep. A great harvest will follow.

A popular Gospel song we sang some years ago had these words, “Because He lives, I can face tomorrow. Because He lives, all fear is gone. Because I know He holds the future life is worth the living because He lives.” Why? Because we can face the future with trust that we too will live. Don’t erase this promise from the Gospel.

Think of what this means. It is a promise that if we are in Christ, we will come to life after we die, changed for the better in a way we cannot imagine. Your best self will look at you in the mirror in the morning. All you wish you were and more will come to pass but recognizable as you.

This also means that our bodies are of enormous significance now, not just as the repositories of our souls, but as an indelible part of what we are. Therefore, we should live in these bodies now with great respect and great joy, knowing they are all the evidence we can see of what God will cause to be for us when His work of grace is completed.

Whose bones were once in that bone box? Not Jesus’ bones. We’ll never know. But the reason why bones were preserved was that the Jews in those days wanted to help God out in the resurrection by keeping the basic framework of bodies together. It would be helpful to God to have at least the bones in one place. It was more than a sign of respect. It was a sign that they believed God’s promises in the Hebrew Bible that our bodies count. He will bring His people back to life again.
Let this promise fortify us to live with purpose, glorifying God in our bodies. Let us live out our lives in joy and gratitude, enjoying God’s good gifts, and giving of ourselves to fulfill His loving purposes to others through His grace channeled through us.

Let us pray: O Lord, for such a great and grand promise as the resurrection of our bodies, we give you thanks. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 02:23 PM

April 01, 2007

Jesus’ Big Moment in Jerusalem

Zechariah 14: 1-8/John 12: 12-19
April 1st, 2007

Everybody, everywhere loves a parade. A parade celebrates something or other, sometimes something important. Sometimes a parade seems just to celebrate celebrating. I remember with strange fondness when I played the bugle in our Boy Scout troop drum and bugle corps in India.

I have a picture of us marching along some dusty road in Ooty, blasting our bugles and pounding our drums. I don’t remember what we celebrated. I can visualize people standing along the roadside grinning and plugging their ears as they watched us khaki clad white boys march by making an awful din. It’s the parade that counts. It doesn’t have to sound good.

We have the idea of a parade when we think of Palm Sunday and Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. It was a parade with excited people lining the roadsides, waving palm branches and shouting “Hosannah!” a word that sounds a bit to us like “Hooray.” We wave our American flags. They waved palm branches. John’s Gospel doesn’t tell about the people throwing down their sweaters and jackets before Jesus as He rode along—quietly.

Usually we read from Zechariah 9 on Palm Sunday. This prophet who prophesied as the Second Temple was being built five-hundred years earlier, wrote one line that captured the attention of early Christians: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! 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.”

The early Christians were Jews. In those difficult days when the Jews looked for deliverance from the Romans they searched the Scriptures for hints of how God would deliver them.

Just as you and I read the prophets of the Old Testament and find comfort from some verses, no matter what their context, so did the early Jews. You and I read Isaiah 43: 1-2 and quote it to one another in times of stress or sadness: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you . . .” And we rightly find comfort in those words written long ago in another context.

In a similar way Jews in Jesus’ day read the Scriptures written long before and recognized that the prophets of old were talking specifically about much later times—about now, specifically.

You remember when Jesus understood the prophet Isaiah in this way. One Sabbath He was invited to read in the synagogue in His hometown. After he read from Isaiah 61 Jesus gave the scroll back to the attendant and said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Isaiah was talking about NOW.
It was just this idea that came to Jesus’ disciples as they thought back on that charged moment when Jesus rode into Jerusalem from Bethany five days before the Passover that ended with Jesus’ crucifixion. The old prophet was looking down the corridors of time when he wrote, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! 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.”

John could have read more than this from the prophet Zechariah. The passage we read this morning included, “On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem . . . and the Lord will become king over all the earth.”

Back in John 7 we read that Jesus had this prophecy in mind when he was in Jerusalem at the Feast of Tabernacles. Then Jesus said, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me . . . out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.”

You and I read this that Jesus said long ago and couple it with the story of the Samaritan woman at the well and sing a beloved song, “Fill my cup Lord, I lift it up Lord, come and quench this thirsting in my soul.” Jesus is the living water who quenches our deepest thirst. Thus we see Zechariah 14 and John 4 and 7 speaking to us now.

We look back at the first Palm Sunday and because of what Jesus’ disciples saw, we see broad hints of things to come. This was Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. But what was the triumph? When did it happen?

Churches around the world commemorate that first Palm Sunday parade with parades of their own. Little children and grown-ups will walk around the block waving palm branches before entering their churches for their Palm Sunday service. Why?

Because five days before the Passover, John’s Gospel tells us, “a great crowd who had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!’ And Jesus found a young ass and sat upon it.”

We imagine that “Hosannah” must have meant something like “Hooray!” But it was a shout with more urgency than celebration to it. It derives from the same Hebrew word as the name Jesus Yeshuah is the name in Hebrew, and means “the Lord delivers.” Hosannah (Hosh’iah na) was a cry that meant, “Deliver us NOW!” What was the tone of voice in that crowd? It was a cry that if it had echoed through the streets of Jerusalem would surely have brought the Roman soldiers running. It would have had the effect of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, summoning the nation to arms. The great leader is passing by. Let’s join Him and put off the dreadful yoke of Rome. Pontius Pilate was the worst of the Roman governors assigned to the Province of Judea.

Something like this, in fact, happened thirty-six years later after a Roman army mysteriously gave up putting down Jewish rebels near Jerusalem. When the Roman consul, Cestius Gallus quit Jewish rebels in Jerusalem took heart and began to mobilize for major war. This started the War with Rome that ended with the destruction of the Temple that Jesus came to after His “triumphal entry.”

Nothing like a revolt was conceivable when Jesus came quietly and humbly into Jerusalem. We don’t know what fraction of the great crowd (oxlos polus) in Jerusalem that day watched Jesus ride by. Some think it could not have been huge or Roman soldiers would have come running to smother the potential insurrection. But clearly it was a large enough number that it caught the attention of Jesus’ disciples. What are we to think of this?

I think of how we reckon importance by largeness. John underscored the importance of this moment by saying a large number of people saw Jesus ride into Jerusalem. Similarly he and the other Gospel writers emphasized the grandeur of Jesus’ care for people by telling us He fed 5,000 men plus women and children on one occasion, and 4,000 people on another—with a small shepherd boy’s lunch. We look at the great numbers, but we also look at the small lunch with which Jesus began.

I wonder when I read the story of Jesus’ triumphal entry. It had no marks of triumph to it except the suggestive imagery of Jesus riding on a donkey-colt, reminiscent of the understatement by which conquering generals sometimes proclaimed their great conquests. Thus they rub it in. “It was a piece of cake, conquering you.” Perhaps this suggested false humility.

I think back to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Mark’s Gospel puts it most simply. “Now after John the Baptist was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God and saying, “The Kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.” Who heard Jesus say this? How many? Did He say this loudly or softly?

We see on the television pictures of evangelists preaching to vast throngs of people. I think of the televised crusades in Africa of that fellow from Akron, Ohio. As far as the eye can see there are people—who cannot see what’s going on up there where the evangelist makes people fall backward under the Spirit’s impulse--and tells them they are healed. Nowadays it is important to show that a lot of people are present to suggest the importance of the religious event. But the great moments in Jesus’ life that we celebrate grandly happened in out of the way places—like Bethlehem in a stable, and in tiny Jericho, on a hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee, in a modest upper room in Jerusalem, on a bleak hill where three crosses stood on Good Friday, and very early when all were asleep in a tomb near Jerusalem and now, five days before Passover.

I wonder if when Jesus came into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday it was a similar understatement. The importance of the event was not measured by how many people watched, but by the consequences that awaited, the way a mighty oak tree is foretold in a little acorn. If we cut open the acorn we’ll see no hint of the immense tree that would grow from it if we hadn’t cut it open. The secret of that oak tree to come lies hidden in the DNA tucked into the acorn. It takes a long time for an oak tree to grow quietly through the winters and summers of many years. Even so the DNA of Palm Sunday waited a long time to produce something that looked like a conquest.

What happened after the first Palm Sunday hardly looked like a victory. The victory Jesus achieved on the cross looked like utter defeat. But everyone ever after who has found her life changed by the Gospel recognizes the power of the cross. This victory in the human heart doesn’t come in mass production like Henry Ford’s model-Ts. This victory comes quietly, from person to person as solitary people look at that gentle Man who, five days after riding humbly on a colt into Jerusalem hung on a cross.

When people watch a parade they feed off the excitement generated by so many people. But when we come to Jesus, there is not much gained by feeding off the excitement of the crowd. We come to Jesus in our personal and private need and that’s where He meets us.

I believe a problem many people have in finding satisfaction for their inner needs is that they think of themselves as others seem to be, in the crowd watching the parade. So if I can reproduce what you said, or what was your apparent “experience” of Jesus, I will find God’s satisfaction of my need. It doesn’t work that way very often.

One of the most interesting aspects of my years as a pastor is recognizing the difference between what I don’t know when I look out over a crowd assembled for worship and what I discover when individuals sit with me to talk alone. How often I’ve totally misread people. The look on the face belied the need in the heart.

The other Gospels that tell of Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem remark, as in Matthew, quoting Zechariah, how humble Jesus was. He did not wave to the crowd, enjoying His celebrity. Luke tells us that when Jesus drew near to Jerusalem he wept over it. “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace!”

Even so there are those of you who come to this festive day with your hearts heavy. You hear the grand hymns and feel the excitement but what you want is a drink from that flowing stream that Jesus said is available if we come to Him. Does it help you to see the look on Jesus’ face? It has been the experience of many people that they had to reach their bottom-out experience of feeling need before they could see the look on Jesus’ face, and then take the drink that would satisfy them.

“Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden,” Jesus said. Indeed, unless we are weary and heavy laden we’ll probably just join in the noise of the crowd at the parade. Unless we know we’re thirsty we’ll look at the water but not DRINK.

When you come to Jesus, weary and heavy laden, don’t cling to your burden. Don’t hold onto it “out of principle,” sure that you have to cherish what is crushing your spirit. Jesus said, “My yoke is heavy, my burden is light.” You and I, one by one, have to exchange our heavy burden for Jesus’ light burden. I wonder if today might be such a day for you. Come to Jesus. Don’t just stand in the Palm Sunday parade and try to get caught up in the excitement. See into that quiet and humble face of Jesus as He rides by on that little donkey colt and know that He has you in mind. May I pray that you will see Jesus in your need today, and that you will come to Him and drink of the living water He has ready to pour to overflowing into your cup.

Let us pray: O Lord God, grant to us to see into the face of Jesus riding by, and to listen to Him speak to us, and to respond to His invitation, “Come to me, and I will give you rest.” Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:00 AM

March 25, 2007

How Can You and I Love Jesus?

Exodus 19: 1-9/John 14: 12-24
March 25, 2007

Next Sunday is Palm Sunday, which means that the cycle of the year has come full circle. The cycle began only four months ago, with Advent. We go from Jesus’ birth to His death in just four months. After Easter comes what’s called Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time starts with Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost (May 27th) and goes until the first Sunday of Advent, November 25th. How interesting but irrelevant you say.

Jesus never proposed that we celebrate either Easter or Christmas—two very important days to us. What He did propose was that we love each other day in and day out, throughout the year and throughout the years. And towards the end of His ministry Jesus even talked a little about our loving Him. Only in John’s Gospel, towards the end does he introduce the idea that we might love Jesus.

I wonder why, when the Great Commandment says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength,” Jesus did not start early to tell His disciples, “Love me with all you’ve got!” because I’m the One with the Father. Instead of this, Jesus taught more on the second commandment that was like the first, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Look in a concordance under the word “love” in the Gospels. You’ll find that nearly every time Jesus talked about love it had to do with loving God or loving other people. More specifically Jesus said to His disciples that the clue that they were His disciples would be their love for one another. Crazy idealism!

Why did Jesus not emphasize the importance of loving Him? What kind of modesty was this in the Son of God? I remember Paul tells us, “He emptied Himself.” This one who died out of love for the world emptied Himself. Maybe this is why so little is written about loving Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus wasn’t out there looking to see if anyone loved Him. He wanted them to love God and to love one another. He transparently showed them God but they couldn’t see through Him. We’re not talking about the theology of the Trinity here, that Jesus was the Second Person of the Trinity. We’re talking about what the Man Jesus showed as He mingled with people.

I scrolled back through the hymns I remember to see which ones had to do with loving Jesus. I didn’t come up with too many. Indeed, there are not very many. I thought I remembered one line. In the hymn, “O Love that Will Not Let me Go,” written by George Matheson, the blind pastor of the 19th century Scottish Free Church ” there is the line, “I give thee back the life I owe that from its ocean depths may flow life that will endless be.” I thought I remembered that Matheson wrote of love he owed, but I was wrong. It was life, not love he dashed off in that quickly written masterpiece of hymnody. It took him five minutes he said to write this hymn—on June 6, 1882. But it was LIFE not LOVE he felt we owe back to the Love that will not let us go.

We sing here sometimes a round of love to the Holy Trinity:

”Father . . . Jesus . . . Spirit I adore, you lay my life before you, how I love you.”
Then there is the Gospel song we sang this morning, “O how I love Jesus.” Why? Because He first loved me.” Maybe it’s usually that way. We love those who love us, and then when we think to when we first began to love someone, maybe it was a reaction to their first loving us.

I remember a romantic sounding ditty from my high school youth group years, “More time alone with Thee, Lord Jesus.” I don’t know that any of us had developed a devotional life, but it was something we talked about. I thought sometimes that it was a trifle hypocritical to sing, “More time alone with Thee, Lord Jesus,” as though we were love-struck teenagers, when we really spent very little time alone with Him.

Various of the saints of the Church were known for their love for Jesus. To mind comes St. Catherine of Sienna, the 14th century Dominican nun who had visions of being engaged to Jesus. She said Jesus called her, “my wife,” and would show the engagement ring the Lord gave to her—a ring only she could see.

But we don’t get much benefit from knowing the ecstatic visions of unusual Christians. What is appropriate in our feelings toward Jesus—because feelings plays a part in love. Why is love for Jesus, the Man of Galilee who lived His short life on Planet Earth so small a part of our thinking? Maybe because the historical figure, Jesus, lived so long ago that we actually know of Him distantly. But we speak of a “personal relationship with Christ.” What part does or ought love for Him play in this personal relationship?

What did Jesus say about loving Him? Listen to what Jesus said as recorded in John 14. Six times John mentions something Jesus said about loving Him: “If you love me you will keep my commandments (15),” and then, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who love me (21),” followed by, “The one who loves me will be loved by my father, and I will love Him and manifest myself to him (21b) “ and “If someone loves me he will keep my word (23) “ and “He who does not love me does not keep my words (24)”. Finally, Jesus said what must have sounded contradictory to His disciples, “If you loved me you would have rejoiced because I go to the Father (28).” That’s it. That’s the extent of His teaching about loving Him. Six brief remarks in one teaching in one of the Gospels—with no elaboration about what love means.

Luke tells us that the woman who anointed Jesus feet loved Him much because she recognized how much she had been forgiven. But this is a report of someone who loved Him, not a teaching that she ought to love Him. Perhaps if we realized the extent of our forgiveness we would love Him—Luke is instructing us when he reports this story.

We don’t hear Jesus say anything more about loving Him until after the resurrection, again from the Gospel of John. Jesus asked Peter three times, “Peter, do you love me more than these?—referring to the rest of the disciples. And then, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” And finally, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”

The Greek word for love in the first two of these questions is the agape-word—that we think of as the self-giving love, God’s kind of love--without condition. Peter answered, “Yes.” To both questions. Clearly he was becoming nervous at this line of questioning because his self-giving love ran short a few days before. People who read this think that Jesus asked Peter this three times because Peter had denied Him three times on the night of Jesus’ trial. Perhaps.

The third time Jesus asked Peter if he loved Him He used another word for love, the verb form of the word meaning friend--phileo. “Peter, are you my friend?” Why this different word for love the third time? Maybe it’s because Jesus had spoken to them about being His friends—if you do what I command you. Maybe when Peter heard Jesus use the “friend” word for love the third time he understood that what the Lord looked for was true friendship, the kind that prompts consistent obedience. Loving Jesus with the self-giving kind of love can show itself in a flurry of martyrdom, or in passionate defense when needed. But being Jesus’ friend requires continuity. It’s easier to die for someone than to live in true friendship. How many friendships weather the tests of time? Jesus wanted from Peter a love that would stand the test of time—friendship.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and most of John tell us repeatedly to love God and our neighbor. John emphasizes that we should love each other as Jesus loved us, a new kind of love that makes us willing to lay down our lives for each other. But Jesus spoke sparingly about loving Him.

Isn’t it odd that Jesus did not say, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples because you love me.” They’ll we know we are His disciples if we love one another. Jesus wasn’t teaching theology here; He was teaching something personal and experiential. Friendship with Jesus demands continuity with each other and not spasms of display during the rush of a challenge.

John, the disciple closest to Jesus personally remembered how the Lord stressed loving one another most. John reminded his fellow Christians, “The one who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in the darkness still.” Being “in the light” meant being a follower of Jesus, the Light of the world. And then more forcefully John wrote, “If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar. For the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.”

It is really sad to see Christians who care an awful lot about God and the Truth, but they don’t seem to love other Christians very much.

In this last part of John’s first letter he writes of loving God rather than loving Jesus. But the two loves are alike if not the same for those of us who have not seen either Jesus or the One to whom Jesus prayed.

I need to become very personal with you in conclusion. Something I hope may linger in all our thoughts as participants in this community of people drawn to Faith Church for various reasons, but principally because we have trusted in Jesus: You and I show our friendship with Jesus by our friendship with one another. I urge you not only to be often in this place, and that you be here at that first moment on the Lord’s Day when I invite you to greet one another—, which theologically speaking is like saying hello to Jesus, but that you find a place in this fellowship where it is evident you are a friend.

Jesus taught us that if we walk in the light we have fellowship with one another. There are so many things that inhibit this fellowship. We lead busy lives so that there is not the time it seems, to give to friendship here. I’m reminded of what I heard on WBAA recently of someone who said to a great violinist after a concert, “I wanted to be a good violinist but I didn’t have the time.” Maybe we say, “I’d like to be a friend to others here, but I haven’t the time.”

How often have friendships here been broken by disappointment or resentment or other feelings that could not be healed by self-scrutiny and forgiveness. It’s easier to pull away than to restore a friendship by forgiveness. There are, after all, many other churches available where one can begin afresh with no one I know well enough to be irritated with him--yet.

I hear the echo of Jesus’ words down through the corridors of time, ““If you love me you will keep my commandments (15),” and then, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who love me (21),” “He who does not love me does not keep my words (24)”. And finally, “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another—and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.”

Let us love God with heart, soul, strength, and mind. Let us love our neighbor as ourselves. Let us love Jesus, that is, let us keep His words—being doers of the word and not hearers only—like people who build their houses on a rock and when the rain comes tumbling down the house does not go flat.

Let us pray: O Lord, we are not in doubt what You have taught us. Grant to us the courage to keep your words. Amen.

Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 11:00 AM

March 18, 2007

How Necessary is Jesus?

Isaiah 55: 1-11/John 14: 1-11
March 18th, 2007

How Necessary is Jesus?
Isaiah 55: 1-11/John 14: 1-11
March 18th, 2007

The words of Isaiah that we listened to a few moments ago come to mind nearly every time I listen to the Bible being read. “My word that goes forth from my mouth shall not return to me empty.” How unlike our words that often we hope will get lost in the mist because we cannot take them back. How often in our controversies we claim God’s Word as the foundation for our ideas but the ideas are often painfully just our own. Thankfully only God’s word will not return to Him empty.

I love those gracious words of God at the start of Isaiah 55: “Everyone who thirst, come to the waters?” Then in the next chapter, “Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord, say, ‘The Lord will separate me from his people . . . for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” All people? Do I understand this Divine message of universal welcome right?

Jesus quoted those words of the prophet Isaiah as He cleansed the Temple of the moneychangers who carved an unfair monopoly in the market place of sacrificial animals. The Lord’s House is not a place for commercial profit but a place of prayer for all people.

But the universal welcome suggested in Isaiah 55 and 56 seems jeopardized in the Gospel lesson we just read. One sentence in John 14 seems to stand out nowadays. “I am The Way, The Truth, and The Life; no one comes to the Father except by me.”

We read this today in a competitive religious climate as a gauntlet thrown down in the face of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and all others who claim a different way to God. That one sentence sounds like a challenge. When it is announced as a competitive challenge it is anything but appealing. It sounds like an affront. It says to non-Christians, you’re all wrong; only our Jesus is the way to God.

It matters not only what we say but also how we say it. In a few moments I want to think of what Jesus said in the context in which he spoke it. But here I want to recognize that some understandable reason stands behind tossing down these words of Jesus as a gauntlet, a glove of challenge to a religious duel for supremacy in a pluralistic age.

First, in our global village those who believe in Jesus don’t have to cross the ocean to mix everyday with people who believe in Mohammed or Vishnu or Buddha, or only in the Law of Moses. We never expected freedom of religion to come to this in America. Those who hammered out the “establishment clause” of our Bill of Rights had in mind keeping away from our shores anything like the authority of the Church of England in their former motherland. Now as the American Episcopal Church languishes there is little risk of that. Instead, just across the street some Christians in our country can see a mosque or a Hindu temple. Even the presence of Synagogues gets under the skin of some “good Christian Americans.”

Christians have responded to this plurality of religions in various ways, but the two extremes are pluralism and defensive exclusivism. Any word that ends with the three letters ISM labels an ideology.
Lesslie Newbigen, who was a missionary in India for forty years before returning to England, defined pluralism as an ideology where there is “no officially approved pattern of belief or conduct.” He wrote this description of pluralism in dismay in 1989.

The Gospel that sounded so clearly in India in distinction from Hinduism and Islam he found swallowed up in Great Britain. He found that England, indeed the Western world had the vocabulary of Christianity because of long exposure to the Gospel, but the specifics of the Gospel of Jesus Christ had been squashed into a religious mush. The ideology of this religious mush was Pluralism. Pluralism says you’ve got your truth and I’ve got mine, and we’re both right because truth is only what a person thinks is true.

On the other side from pluralism is exclusivism that says “I’m all right and you’re all wrong.” At its worst this exclusivism has led to suicide bombings in the Muslim world. It has led to the demonstrations by some Christians that we used to see on the Purdue campus. They held up these placards that pronounced God’s damnation of all and sundry that did not agree with them in matters of faith—even other Christians.

When Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father but by me,” did He intend that this should be the mantra of belligerent Christians in a pluralistic society? I don’t think so. But neither do I think we do well to water down what our Lord teaches here. Let’s look more closely at what Jesus said and the context in which He said it. What did Jesus mean when He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life?”

First, we can’t help but notice that in this section of the Gospel of John Jesus speaks often of the Father. Our Lord referred to God as the Father repeatedly. Remember Jesus was a Jew, a descendant of the ancient Israelites. It was a bold thing back when Moses was preparing Israel for the exodus from bondage in Egypt to say to the King of Egypt that God called Israel “my son,” actually, “my first-born son.” To call Israel first, my son (bni), and then my first born (bkori) offered not only to Israel a privileged relationship to God, but it also opened to others the privilege of a “second-born” or “third-born” relationship with God. In Isaiah 19 we see this welcome extended even to Egypt and Assyria.
It was this broader compass of God’s love that Isaiah and others of Israel’s prophets took up and emphasized. Indeed, the Feast of Tabernacles that all Israelites were to celebrate each year was a feast of ingathering of all peoples into God’s great harvest.

But the point I want to make here is that when Jesus referred to God as “the Father” repeatedly in John’s Gospel our Lord made personal what Moses had made a national relationship with God. Moses taught that Israel was God’s first-born Son. Jesus, the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth,”taught that individually we may call God, “Father.” He taught us to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” It is no whimsical thing to call God, “Father.” So first, remember how wonderful to call God Father in the first place.

Second, when Jesus told His disciples, “I am the way to the Father and no one comes but by me,” He did not say this in a competitive, pluralistic religious environment but as comfort that as He had been the way to the Father while He was with His disciples He would continue to be the way to the Father when He was no longer with them. He went so far as to say, “The one who has seen me HAS SEEN the Father.” Jesus said this to His disciples not to those who had conflicting beliefs about ultimate things.
One of the unique things about Judaism in the ancient world was that though the Jews were an ethnic unit, a religion of people with family ties to their origins, they actively invited non-Jews to come to worship the God of Israel. They learned this from their prophets. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples,” we read in the prophet Isaiah.

The Book of Acts refers to “God-fearers.” God-fearers were non-Jews who learned of the God the Jews worshipped and were drawn to worship Him while not actually becoming Jews. In the Mishna, the heart of the Jewish oral law, we read that one duty of a devout Jew is to “raise up many disciples,” among three duties. To extend the welcome of God to those who were not born into the family of Israel was a gracious word.

Now as Jesus drew near to the end of His time with His disciples they were deeply worried. They saw how close He was to the Father in heaven. They trusted that He was going to introduce the reign of the heavenly Father on earth—the Kingdom of God. He had taught them to address God, “Our Father.” But then He told them He was going away. Furthermore, alarmingly He told them, “Where I am going you cannot follow me now.” They knew this meant His enemies were going to do to Him as He predicted, kill him. Thus they feared their access to God as Father would be gone.

Peter impulsively responded with his infamous broken promise, “I will lay down my life for you.” And Jesus laid bare the extent of his weakness: “You will have denied me three times before the roosters announce the coming of morning.”

Jesus’ disciples badly needed His comfort. So in the verses that surround our passage this morning the Lord emphasized the Father, and then tells them in no uncertain words, “I am [still] the way, [still] the truth, and [still] the life. No one [will] come to the Father except by me.”

It is because Jesus said this that we do well to tell other people about Jesus. But so much more than words is involved in coming through Jesus to the Father. Coming to the Father by Jesus is not a matter of saying certain words. We must remember that Jesus warned, “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven but the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. This remark comes with others that give us pause. “The gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” I look at the masses that stream to churches in our land and wonder which gate they go through. Jesus seems to tell us that calling God “Father” requires living a family relationship to this Father. Earnestly doing the will of God is part of believing in Him. Obedience to the Lord Jesus is part and parcel of trusting Him as Savior.

Remove intending to try doing the will of God from saying “I believe” and I wonder if we see what makes up streaming through the broad gate that does not lead to life. This is not a popular word of caution today. But it is a caution I often personally feel in my heart.

Perhaps I want to say that if we truly believe that Jesus is the necessary way to the Father, the only way to heaven, it is much more than a matter of saying a password. A password may get you into your email account, but it won’t get you into heaven. If you and I have come to the Father through Jesus Christ it will be evident that we are trying to follow Jesus.

And if we are trying to follow Jesus two things will result: First, we’ll recognize that following Jesus is no automatic reflex for any of us. It is as hard as John Bunyan described in his Pilgrim’s Progress to follow the Jesus way. It is humbling to try to live like a Christian.

Second, if we are trying hard to follow the Jesus way it will strip us of our belligerence. We never see Jesus toe-to-toe with a Samaritan or a pagan Roman saying, “I’m better than you are.” What Jesus was spoke so eloquently what He was. All kinds of people were drawn to Him. If you believe in Jesus; if you and I believe He is the way, the truth and the life to the point that following Him is the great passion of our lives, people will be drawn to us as they were to Him. We will not need to claim that word of Jesus as a battle cry in a warring market-place of religions. I have been reminded that I often use the word “winsome.” I learned this from my late beloved teacher, Bruce Metzger in his prayers before class. He reminded us that the only reason for faithful scholarship as pastors was to help make the Gospel winsome—so people would be drawn to Jesus.

There was a song I remember hearing many years ago. It put into Jesus’ mouth thought provoking remarks: “You call me the way, but walk me not. You call me the life but live me not. You call me the truth but believe me not. If I condemn you, blame me not.” We believe we are saved by grace that is greater than our sin, but should we for that reason take lightly Jesus’ words when we say we believe in Him?

With all my heart I believe that Jesus is the way to the Father. Else I would not be a Christian. I’d be a Unitarian if I did not think Jesus was the only way to the Father. With all my heart I also believe that if I say I believe in Him, it is my task in life to try with all I’ve got to follow Him. And if it is this way for us all, what will be our tone of voice when we quote Jesus’ words, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me?” Will it seem like a challenge to us to walk His way to the Father so that the way of Jesus has great appeal? Or will it seem like an affront to all who have not yet trusted in Jesus?

Remember the promise of Scripture, “Every knee will bow, in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Let’s let God work out how this will happen.

Remember this comes after Paul urges us, “Have this mind in you that was in Christ Jesus: He emptied Himself. He took the form of a servant.” You who believe in Jesus, think this way of yourself. How different does it seem to come to the Father through this Jesus than through a Jesus you defend with your fists clenched as the only way to the Father.

Let us pray: Grant to us, O Lord, to so trust in Your Son, Jesus that we follow Him in a way that makes appealing His access to You. Amen.

Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 01:08 PM

March 11, 2007

Who Looks Like a Christian?

Numbers 12: 1-10/John 13: 31-35
March 11th, 2007

When you walk on campus at Purdue it’s easy to tell which women are practicing Muslims. They wear a head-covering, some a long dress. You can tell an observant Jewish man by the kippah he wears, a Sikh by his tightly wound turban and beard. You can tell who comes from India or China or Japan by certain characteristic physical features. I remember when we were enjoying our Sabbatical in Scotland that it was remarkable how these perfectly American looking girls could speak in such a delightfully un-American way.

Thus we think of people as being Muslim, Jewish, or Polish, or Scottish, or whatever by certain characteristics of dress, physical feature, or way of speaking.

But how can you tell if a person is a follower of Jesus? Back in the second century there was an anonymous letter sent to the teacher of the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius son of Antoninus Pius. The emperor, though a Stoic philosopher, and reckoned a good emperor, compared with Nero or Calligula was very harsh on Christians. This letter to Diognetus, his teacher, called attention to the distinguishing features of Christians that should make him delight in them. He said they are the very soul of the empire.

I’ve often thought that if Christians down through history had been the soul, a driving force of love surging within the boundaries of the church and spilling over into neighborhoods, market places in towns and cities and across national boundaries and continents, how different would have been the world’s story.

We read this morning Jesus’ type-casting His disciples. “By this all people will know you are my disciples that you love one another.”

I am self-conscious these days every time I emphasize love—which I’ve been told is a good bit. I’m self-conscious in harping on this theme because when I get to the bottom line in my thinking I always come up with this. This is what the Man said. Jesus stressed it. I didn’t make it up.

There is the risk of speaking too much of love these days because it seems to imply sweeping under the rug all the needful particulars of morality and belief, opting for a mush-like pluralism. This is not what Jesus meant. And it is not what I mean.

There are so many competing ideas about how to be a proper Christian. We divide as orthodox or progressive, liberal or conservative. We divide over our specific point of view on the Bible (regardless of whether we read it). And even if we’re all conservative some have a “higher” view of the Bible than others—defining its origins acutely—whether or not we read it. And if we share the highest view of the Bible’s inspiration and authority we will differ on its application. We differ on contemporary or traditional worship styles. Christians divide over their views on the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world.

Meanwhile, quietly there throbs in the background Jesus’ unmistakable word, “By this will all people know that you are my disciples that you love one another.” Jesus amplified what He meant. “Love one another as I have loved you.” This was a new commandment. The earlier command said, “Love your neighbor as yourself. The new command, “Love as I have loved you.” But this an odd kind of commandment.

Because if I cannot do what love commands from the heart it will seem an onerous commandment. When I start to compute how far to go in loving, love evaporates. I become a casuist.

Casuists are knit-pickers. They see fine points and make them big points. They compute how much and how often. It was one of these that asked Jesus, ”How often must I forgive, seven times?” And Jesus replied, “no. Seventy times seven.” And so the casuist gets out his abacus or calculator and starts to keep track—“488, 489, 490, WHAM, that’s all the forgiveness you get.” Maybe Jesus knew that after 490 times forgiveness would become a habit, just as the Bible tells us of God, “His mercy endures forever.”

For us to love from the heart, our hearts need changing. I’m tempted to say that what Darwin called “the survival of the fittest” is the natural selection of the heart. The outward flow of love runs up against the inward flow of the self and all that pertains to me and to my kind. Until the outward-flow of love replaces the inward-flow of self, it’s hard to be desire to be recognized as a Christian in Jesus’ terms. Then we substitute other identification marks of our own making of what it is to be a Christian. We put on our bracelets and bumper stickers and flash our slogans and grocery lists of belief.

How different it is when this love flows from the heart. In Thomas a Kempis’ little book The Imitation of Christ that our Wednesday evening study group has been reading we read “Of the Wondrous Effect of Divine Love.” This Dutch Christian who lived during one of the most scandal-ridden eras of Church history, focused on what is basic to being a Christian. The Imitation of Christ. What he said served then as a reminder to all who were upset with the church, “here is what is basic.” Let me read a fragment of what he wrote about the one who imitates Jesus in his soul:

The one that loves flies, runs, and rejoices. This one is free and cannot be held in. He gives all for all, and has all in all because he rests in One Highest above all things, from who all that is good flows and proceeds. This one respects not the gifts but turns himself above all good unto the Giver. Love oftentimes knows no measure, but is fervent beyond all measure. Love feels no burden, thinks nothing a trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself and all things possible. It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and warrants them to take effect, where he who does not love, would faint and lie down.

How different this outlook is from the outlook that computes what I must do. Here is what Jesus’ brother James called “the perfect law of liberty.”

Of course, there are other teachings in the Bible too that I embrace with all my heart, about faith and obedience and details describing Jesus’ virgin birth and sinless life and bodily resurrection and coming again all which many of us believe, and justification by faith. But if we may trust the emphasis that Jesus made on the centrality of love, and what the Apostle Paul describes in I Corinthians 13 of the greater importance of love to knowledge or understanding mysteries or powerful deeds of faith, then there is no escaping that loving one another is the key to recognizing a Christian.

I chose the story from Numbers 12 about Miriam and Aaron’s beef with Moses because this kind of problem typifies what happens when love leaves the church. Presumably Miriam and Aaron had heard God’s commands by now to love Him with everything you’ve got and your neighbor as yourself. But they’d gotten used to the idea. Part of the furniture of ideas that they were so accustomed to seeing that they forgot it was there.

Miriam and Aaron were Moses’ older siblings. Little brother had surpassed them in stature even though he didn’t have aggressive behavior. So they started the ball rolling of opposition to Moses—among people who knew what God said about loving Him and one another. They began by challenging the appropriateness of his wife. They called her a Cushite—i.e., from Ethiopia. Josephus tells of his marriage to an Ethiopian princess. Then they went on to their real quarrel with him and asked, “Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses?” A technical question!! Having raised the question it was like opening Pandora’s Box. The view got to festering that little Moses had gotten too big for his boots. Sure, he was the one who went up to Mt. Sinai and got the Ten Commandments and the design of the Tabernacle with its Ark of the Covenant. But did that mean he was the only one who could speak about religious themes?

How forcefully the Lord intervened in this potential rift among His people. He came down in a pillar of cloud before the front door of the Tabernacle. He summoned Miriam and Aaron. They came, I suspect with far less bravado than when they had belittled Moses. And the Lord made clear how unique was Moses’ role in His plan for Israel. “Whereas prophets spoke on the basis of dreams and visions I give them, I speak with Moses mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in dark speech; and he sees the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?”

The Lord struck Miriam with leprosy so that she was put outside the camp as though she was a living corpse. But Moses pleaded for his rebellious sister. The Lord told him if she had sassed her dad she would have been shamed for seven days, so let her be embarrassed as a leper for seven days outside the camp, and then I’ll let her back in.” Moses was not vindictive.

Miriam and Aaron had their reasons for standing against Moses. And no doubt their reasons included some religious rationale by which they dignified their jealousy of their little brother. How often it’s the case that people use sanctimonious language to describe jealousy or resentment. I wonder how often in the history of the Church Christians have said, “I prayed about it. . .” and then they go on to describe what boils down to, “I was jealous and resented someone disagreeing with me or offending my sense of personal importance.”

One last thought that struck me reveals the tie in between loving as Jesus commanded and believing in one God only. If we do not love God supremely and love one another as Jesus loved us it’s because we love something else more. We worship another god or gods. A 20th century theologian I didn’t agree with on too many things I saw his point on one thing. He spoke of God as our ultimate concern. What is my ultimate concern? That is what I worship—my God in effect.

It’s the kind of question only I can ask myself and you can ask yourself, “What is your ultimate concern?” That is, what do I think is MOST important? Then take inventory of how I make my decisions, how I come to like this person and not that one, etc. What is the unifying principle in my choices? That is my ultimate concern.

Jesus taught us, “If you are my disciple your ultimate concern WILL be this, love God supremely and love one another as I love you.” He did not say it OUGHT to be this way. Jesus said, “It will be this way.” John wrote in I John 1: 7, “If we walk in the light as Jesus is in the light we have fellowship one with another.”

We like to quote the title of a book J.B. Phillips wrote some years ago, “Your God is too small.” I’ve heard Christians with one set of beliefs accuse others with these words. Your God is too small. But if I see that my ultimate concern is centered in me, like it or not, my God is too small. If my God is as big as Jesus, my bigness will be like Jesus’ bigness of heart.

I pray that the Holy Spirit will shape our hearts so that we first want to obey Jesus and then that we may obey Jesus, loving one another as He loves us and thus proving to be His disciples. What evidence is there that I am a Christian? And you?

Let us pray: Grant, O Lord that we may desire to be identified as Jesus’ disciples. And grant that desiring this, we may love one another as He loved us, from a pure heart, fervently. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 12:40 PM

March 04, 2007

Who Should Take Holy Communion?

I Samuel 18: 5-11/John 13: 21-30
March 4th, 2007

When we take the Lord’s Supper we are celebrating an evening meal together even though we usually do this in the morning. It would seem odd to call it “The Lord’s Breakfast,” so an alternative term is usually used, “Communion,” or “The Eucharist,” which means, “The Giving Thanks.”

The layout of this sanctuary is for a purpose; we gather around a table. It is a drop-leaf dinner table.
It doesn’t look like an altar for a reason. We are not offering a sacrifice. We are offering a meal.

The Lord’s Supper is the central event around which a Christian community gathers—much as the evening meal is the central event in a family’s life. If the parents both work and have day-jobs—which I know not all parents do—and the children are still at home, at supper-time they come together around the table. In all your homes someone gives thanks to God for the gift of food, and then you dig in.

The most definitive scene of all that is best about the Scottish heritage is found in Robert Burns’ poem, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” In the lilting Highland dialect Burns describes the humble wee cottage at the end of the work-day. The father sits with “the lisping infant prattling on his knee” as “his thriftie wifie’s smile” radiates over the tiny room. In come “the elder bairns” from their plowing and herding. The jewel of the room is “their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman grown, in youthfu’ bloom, love sparkling in her e’e.” The father asks around how the day has been. And then there’s a knock on the door. “Jenny, wha kens the meaning o’ the same, tells how a neebor lad cam o’er the moor, to do some errands, and convoy her hame.” “The wily mother sees the conscious flame sparkle in Jenny’s e’e, and flush her cheek.”

“He’s a strappan youth; he taks the mother’s eye.” She sees the mix of his shyness and seriousness and is “weel pleased” with Jenny’s choice of men. The supper is modest—soup and porridge, all they can afford-- but the evening is grand because it is a cheerful supper. All are welcome around this table. It is Scotland’s tribute to Communion as it ought to be, as it might have been at Jesus’ final meal with His disciples, except for one thing.

How different was the evening of Jesus’ final supper with His disciples. Jesus took a piece of bread dipped it into the garnish and gave it to one who was about to betray Him. Judas had already planned to betray Jesus, but here he acts as though he’s more than one of the gang. Jesus specifically serves him.

Should he have been there at all? If you and I were writing the script for the Gospel, would we have eliminated the traitor-disciple and brushed up the image of Peter a bit? This is our tendency isn’t it? Would you and I have eliminated Judas from the guest list of the last supper? Jesus knew all along what Judas was up to, yet He served this traitor as though he were a special guest.

Not all human meals enjoy perfect harmony around the table, but this is our ideal for the Lord’s Table. Even if we know it is not true for all who gather around the Lord’s Table in a congregation, that all love one another and Jesus supremely, this is the fond ideal we hold. We try to ignore exceptions to this ideal; treat them as though they’re not there. Just before we actually take the bread and cup you and I pray together the prayer in which Jesus taught us to say, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” so that we could in fact as well as in ideal love each other and Jesus’ supremely when we gather at this table. How good it would be if before we ate this meal together, month by month, you and I thought of this or that person that we now forgive—and will live out that forgiveness in the days ahead.

Maybe you wonder why I chose to read the passage from I Samuel for our Old Testament lesson. Ever since David clobbered Goliath, rescuing Israel from an engagement with the Philistines destined for disaster, King Saul knew David was a special fellow. David was taken from tending sheep and welcomed into the royal household as though he was family. King Saul’s son, Prince Jonathan, became a close friend of the shepherd boy, David.

David could not only toss a stone with a sling, he also could strum a pretty mean harp. Gradually King Saul found two competing instincts growing in his heart: a love for David’s music, but hatred for David. This is the scene before us. While Saul listens to David’s music, perhaps singing psalms he has composed, Saul remembers hearing the popular songs about David, women singing in the streets as he rode by, “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” So while David is playing music Saul picks up a javelin hidden beside his couch and hurls it at David. Saul is usually accurate with his spear-throws, but this time he misses. Twice he misses. David gets the idea he’s not all that welcome at King Saul’s table. Later on Saul has the gall to ask why David doesn’t show up for dinner any more?

Do you see any similarity between the Old Testament scene and the setting of Jesus’ final meal with His disciples? Jesus, born of the seed of David, faced a dangerous meal and walked right into the trap. But in both settings the meal was by definition a sacred moment of family and friendship. It was like mealtime at your home or mine when we have invited friends to share the table with family. All are welcome and safe except Jesus wasn’t safe.

When you come to this table I hope you realize you are both welcome and safe. Here you and I together are beneath the cross of Jesus, “a shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land.” Here Jesus presides. Everything I say in inviting you and in the words of Institution I quote or paraphrase from Holy Scripture. I invite you in behalf of Jesus who offered the bread and cup not only to eleven disciples who loved Him, but to one disciple who plotted His death.

But there is another aspect to this meal. These elements do not just show up here on a Sunday morning. There are folk in the congregation who carefully prepare this sacred meal. Sometimes the bread is specially baked by someone in the congregation. One family with a Jewish heritage used to prepare the beautiful braided loaf, the chala, eaten at the Passover Seder. Wine and grape juice are poured into tiny cups. The very care with which this table is prepared reflects the care of the Lord Jesus who offered Himself so fully to us. He was born specially of a virgin. He led a faultless life. His good deeds rearranged nature in the doing—healing lepers, feeding multitudes with little—expecting nothing in return.

When we have folks to dinner at our home I have in mind the movie “Babbett’s Feast.” Bonnie and I work together to make the dinner as good as we can. In the movie that I customarily have in mind when we do this, Babbett, a French gourmet cook, now a servant, an alien in a foreign land, comes on to some money and spends it ALL on the most sumptuous meal her talent could contrive with no expectations of the RECIPIENTS returning the favor.

Why? Apparently simply to bring some happiness to this highly religious but dreary little community. It was stymied with weary tradition with no lubricating sense of joy. Babbett won their hearts by her lavish meal, freely offered to people who were neither her family nor her chosen friends. She worked for them as a servant. Slowly as the meal progresses they notice something beautiful has happened. They start to notice how delicious is the food and wine, how beautiful the linen cloth and serviettes or napkins, the china and crystal. The elegance gratuitously offered to them dawns on them and reaches into them. One after another they make small comments about the remarkable meal.

I wish we could see if there were any long-range effects of this meal, any healing of their souls, any planting of the seed of gratitude and generosity and joy, any future re-celebrations of this event.
We do know of the long-range effects of Jesus’ final meal. It has become rightfully the focal point of Christian worship. Even on Sundays when we don’t take the Lord’s Supper, the plate and the cup and the pitcher are on the table as a reminder. But it is possible to celebrate the event and still to forget its intent.

The passage from I Corinthians that I will always quote as “The words of institution” are part of a reordering of this sacred meal in the days of earliest Church. In Corinth “Communion” had become anything but a time of communing. The rich brought their gourmet meals and the poor brought their porridge and each watched the other. They didn’t share as we will this morning after worship at our MAOPI dinner . You have prepared, pulling out the stops and brought your portable “Babbett’s Feast” to share with each other. What is the best food I can make, the most delicious, to share with everyone here as well as with people you may invite to come with you. It’s like the Great Banquet to which all are invited.

This week I saw some of our “church ladies” spending hours preparing Fellowship Hall so that it was beautiful for this lunch. Look around Fellowship Hall as people come in. There is a look of expectancy. People think as they come in, “This is my best; I hope they love it.” And you’ll sneak peaks as people go by the long table with their empty plates. Will my dish get all consumed? Do folk like it as much as I do? This is an agape, a love feast. It is both like and unlike Communion. It is communion for sure, because we are together sharing our best with each other. But it’s not Communion, capital C, with the token amounts of bread and wine. Both these meals are very important to us as Christians. And I hope you will stay because you are welcome.

The Apostle Paul cautioned those who come to the Lord’s Table to come worthily. They should come discerning that it is no ordinary meal, but partaking of the body of the Lord. When he said this I don’t think he meant that only the “deserving” are welcome. That is, you don’t have to be perfect, sinless. But remember when you come to this meal you are coming to eat with the Lord Jesus. You and I may be reaching our hand into the dish with Jesus. Peter reached his hand with Jesus, as did John and Andrew and Thaddeus and the others. As for the betrayer Judas, Jesus specially fed him.
Viewed from Judas’ perspective how foul he must have felt at that moment. But viewed from Jesus’ side, Judas was as welcome as Peter and John. Because Jesus would soon die on the cross for those who would betray Him as well as for those who loved Him.

A great difference between Jesus and most of us is that whereas we love those who love us, who please us, who share our views, who may return our favors, Jesus loved those who hated Him, who did not please Him, who did not share His views, and who would never return His favors to them.

Who is welcome at the Lord’s Table? I would be as welcoming as Jesus. But I ask us all to consider how we will come to His welcome. “How can it be that I should gain an interest in my Savior’s blood?” Charles Wesley asked in the hymn we will soon sing. In Jesus’ name I will welcome you all here. But how good it is to remember what we are doing—coming to eat with the Holy Child of God who for our sakes gave us a Babbett’s Feast in a setting more tender than the scene in Burns’ “Cotter’s Saturday Night.” Take your place at this table. Enjoy your welcome. Share in its sacred mystery and love, not just for Jesus, but for all who reach into the plate with you for a piece of bread.

Thus we will fulfill Jesus’ intent when He said, “As often as eat this bread and drink this cup you show forth my death until I come.” Jesus’ death gave promise of our life. The finest way you and I can say thank you to Jesus is to deliberately, even against our inclinations, love one another as He loved even Judas Iscariot.

Let us pray. O Lord God, for the gift of your Son Jesus, for the gift of His life and death we thank you. And for the gift of this table in which we are welcome with Him. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 479064

Posted by faithpres at 10:21 AM

February 25, 2007

The Rejected Sacrament

Genesis 18: 1-8/John 13: 1-17
February 25th, 2007

Over the years I’ve thought of Jesus’ words in John 13 a lot. After washing His disciples’ feet on Maundy Thursday Jesus said, “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you an example in order that you yourselves do also . . . if you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.”

And then, as if anticipating the reluctance future disciples would have Jesus said, “Truly, truly I say to you all, the servant is not greater than his lord, neither the one who is sent greater than the one who sent him.”

The word for “blessed” here is the same as in the Sermon on the Mount. We don’t know what to do with the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are the poor in spirit—no way; blessed are the meek—yeah really; blessed are the peacemakers—maybe sometimes.” Is it any wonder that a Christian should mull these strange teachings of Jesus? They are so counter to our instincts that they must be guidance to more heavenly living than comes natural. Following Jesus doesn’t come naturally.

We might say that when Jesus said “you ought” to do this it’s just a bit less than “DO IT.” “Ought” seems just a bit less emphatic than “DO IT.” What did Jesus mean when He said, “You ought to wash one another’s feet?” We don’t see a stern look in Jesus’ eyes as a rule.

In the Greek text the word for “ought” is the verb opheilo, which means: “owe, be obligated, or ought.”
I looked in my chubby Moulton and Geden’s Concordance to the Greek New Testament, fifth edition to see what kind of obligation is intended when this word is used elsewhere. I can’t mention them all because it appears thirty-five times in the New Testament. Thirteen of these are in the Gospels; two in John’s Gospel. The other place in John is in 19: 7, where Jesus’ Jewish antagonists say to Pilate, “We have a law, and by that law he ought to die because he has made Himself the Son of God.” In this case Jesus’ enemies wrongly quoted Scripture, but their intention is obvious. They wanted Jesus killed.

“Ought” means far more than a suggestion.

We use the word variously. For example I might say, “I ought to go to the store before a blizzard to make sure we have milk and bread.” In fact we use the word carelessly, reducing its meaning to whimsy, as in—“I ought to get a haircut.” But when I say, “I ought to show up at the court when I get a subpoena,” I mean if I don’t respond to a subpoena I will go to jail for contempt of court. This is a bit worse than running out of milk and bread.

Do you think we should wonder how serious Jesus was when He said we ought to wash one another’s feet? It’s not a heaven or hell kind of issue—since we’re saved by grace alone. But is it a fair question, “What did Jesus intend for us when He said this?” Does this matter?

What’s going on in our intentions when we put Jesus’ commands through a filter to screen out the real commands from the mere “good ideas?” All the segments of Christendom, except the Brethren and a few others in the Anabaptist tradition have filtered this command of Jesus out of consideration. The Roman Catholic Church, with its seven Sacraments does not include foot washing among them, although on Maundy Thursday the pope has a ceremony of washing the feet of twelve people in Rome.
What is a Sacrament? It’s not a term found in the Bible. The Church made up the term as it pondered Jesus’ array of commands.

In the Reformed heritage we say that Jesus’ specific command is the qualification for a Sacrament. So we celebrate the Lord’s Supper because He said, “Do this in remembrance of me.” And we celebrate Baptism because Jesus commanded that when we proclaim the Gospel we are to baptize those who respond in the name of the Holy Trinity—and preach obedience to all that Jesus commanded to do. But how do our two Sacraments differ from other commands Jesus made?

I noticed something in re-reading Donald Baillie’s wonderful little book on the Sacraments that there is one further qualification we Reformed Christians have regarding the Sacraments. They must not only be commanded by Jesus; they must also contain a promise. What is lacking in foot-washing is that there appears to be no promise included with the “ought” Jesus mentioned. For this reason foot-washing is not a Sacrament.

Yet, if we did this most demonstrative act to one another is there not at least an implied promise” “If you do this for one another you will cultivate a servant’s heart.” That’s a promise. If we reminded each other how central mutual service is to being a part of a Christian community is there not the implied promise of a community committed to serving one another?

And so God has given commands to us that, though not strictly speaking required, if we do them the church will be better for it—indeed, it will be what He intended. When we treat as optional “odd” commands Jesus made, well, see the kinds of people-difficulties we wrestle with in the Church.
There are commands Jesus made that we see as hints at the direction our thoughts should go. Are the Beatitudes commands? Well, not exactly. The Beatitudes, all those “Blessed are you ifs” are just hints to guide us against our natural inclinations. It is not my natural way to bless those who curse me. It is not my natural way to pray for those who use me despitefully. It is not my way to feel fortunate if I’m persecuted for a righteous act. So when I read, “Blessed are you if . . .” it wasn’t exactly a command. I don’t have to obey this kind of teaching. I’m just blessed if I do.

Then there is another category of Jesus’ commands that blends with common sense. Because of this we take these commands less like commands than like wise advice. Jesus said, later in this chapter from John’s Gospel, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

We don’t have to look too long or far to realize that we have set up other standards for being identified as Jesus’ disciples. When I was examined for ordination I don’t recall any inventory to see how thorough was my love for others. I was scrutinized by some on matters of doctrine. I was tested by others in terms of my knowledge of church government. I was tested to see if I knew enough about the Bible—in a very superficial way. And even more superficially I was checked out to see if I knew an aleph and an alpha from an eggplant—that is, if I was acquainted with the languages of Scripture. But never was I examined to see if I loved as Jesus said was the standard for recognizing His disciples.

A like omission is evident with regard to Jesus’ command to forgive. Peter asked how often he ought to forgive. As many as seven times? You know Jesus’ answer well. “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.” Regularly in our public praying together we repeat the Lord’s Prayer with its “and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” We know that there is a stern emphasis Jesus gives to the command to forgive. “For if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses.”

You know how we take the commands to love as Jesus loved and to forgive. We take them as suggestions too demanding to be considered at face value. What we believe is more important to us than taking Jesus’ commands of this sort to heart in a way that reshapes character.

But back to foot-washing itself. Perhaps we may see what happened in our reading from Genesis as an anticipation and rationale for Jesus’ teaching concerning foot-washing. There is an understood law of hospitality among desert peoples. When strangers come to you, wandering through the inhospitable desert, treat them with hospitality. It just so happened that when Abraham celebrated the desert sacrament of hospitality he was entertaining God. One of the three men who came to Abraham he calls by the name of God, YHWH, or LORD—capital letters.

And who knows what place Abraham’s celebrating the sacrament of hospitality meant in the plan of God. It was at this time, as the LORD enjoyed Abraham’s hospitality along with the two men who were with him, who were actually angels, that the LORD told Abraham and Sarah that in the spring she would bear a son. I wonder what would have been the case if Abraham had not offered the desert sacrament of hospitality to the LORD. We don’t know.

Before Abraham knew the nature of his three guests, he obeyed this “optional” law, this virtuous custom that God put into the hearts of desert people that made the lot of the traveler more secure and removed the fear of the vulnerability of desert-travel.

My impression is that there may be a parallel between the desert sacrament of hospitality and Jesus’ command, or should we say “strong recommendation” to His disciples: Wash one another’s feet. In days when it was as gracious a thing to do as to offer someone a cool drink on a hot summer day in our time, gracious hosts washed the feet of their guests. What is parallel to this in our day? What would it mean to you if you discovered you’d washed Jesus’ feet unawares—out of sheer obedience?
I have thought of these matters in terms of the questions, “Why the Sacraments at all? Why do we celebrate The Lord’s Supper and Baptism?” There are some Protestant bodies that don’t do either one. The Quakers, for example, and until recently the Salvation Army had no Communion and no Baptism.

Donald Baillie remarks that many “intelligent and educated Christians are content with the more reasonable and rational elements in public worship, preaching and praying and the reading of Scripture and the expression of praise in musical form.” Performing the liturgical acts of breaking bread, pouring out wine, and pouring water of the head seem to be vestiges of earlier days when people believed in magic. Indeed, in some churches I have seen these two Sacraments administered very casually. They are treated not so much as sacred moments when God is uniquely obeyed, but as casual gestures reminiscent of what was once important.

Which of the commands that Jesus gave do you think we ought to obey? And why should we obey them? I shouldn’t leave you with questions, I suppose. But it has been the way of the Church, particularly since the Reformation to so emphasize grace that we don’t know how to handle the idea of commands. The commands that coordinate with our predispositions we take seriously. The commands that put a strain on our natural behavior we put into a different category. We interpret them oddly. I know that Jesus’ command to wash one another’s feet is treated as essentially a reminder on the virtue of serving one another.

But I leave you with the question: “Do you think that Jesus may have more than this in mind? And maybe if we took to heart this command as well as the imperatives to love as He loved, and to forgive multiple times, along with the Beatitudes as more than impossible norms, something more supernatural might seem to be at work in being a Christian, a follower of Jesus? Think on these things.

Let us pray: O Lord, we who are fragile hear you speak and we ask your grace to take you at your word, that we may be faithful followers of Jesus. In whose name we pray. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 10:33 AM

February 18, 2007

Facing the Opportunity that Defines Life

Numbers 21: 4-9/John 12: 31-43
February 18th, 2007

I find myself thinking quite a bit these days about the choices and opportunities long ago that led to the work I have done for all these years. How did I go from that young lad so unsure of what to make of the Bible’s guidance in life to a pastor whose task it is to speak to people from the Bible?

I think Moses must have felt like this too. “How did I go from nearly being fed to the Nile crocodiles as a baby to being the one chosen by Almighty God to communicate His word to this difficult mob of Israelites little knowing all history was included in this audience?”

What we read in the Bible describes events that happened day after day as unanticipated as the events that come to you and me in the course of life. There were consequences that came as a result of choices Moses and the Israelites made. Somehow these choices unfolded against the backdrop of a great plan God was working out for the benefit of the whole human race—including you and me.
There are two places in the Gospel of John where the writer refers back to the story Mike just read for us from the Book of Numbers. This was a pivot moment in the life of our ancient forbears in the faith. But they had no idea it was so.

All they knew at the time was that they were weary and fed up with Moses. He had led them through harsh terrain for as many years as it took for babies to reach their mid-thirties. They were near their destination but, to use a basketball term appropriate to our time and place, a near miss is as painful as an air-ball when the game is at stake.

They had just passed Mt. Hor where they had buried Moses’ brother, Aaron. It’s not exactly clear today where Mt. Hor was because the names of places have changed. Some geographers think Mt Hor was the same as Mt. Hermon, a mountain that the psalmist refers to very cheerfully many years later. Its twin peaks are often covered with snow.

Maybe you remember Psalm 133, a psalm that rejoices at the restoration of fellowship between Moses and Aaron. This unity “is like the dew of Hermon that falls on the mountains of Zion! For there the Lord has commanded the blessing, life for evermore.”

But that happy time of reunion between Moses and Aaron in the past was far different from the present. Now Mt. Hor was the place where Moses’ brother had just been buried. The people liked Aaron because he dared to stand up to his little brother, Moses. He was their ally when the going was hard.

Now he was gone. All they had was their own murmuring as a way to vent their feelings. Food and water were scarce. Squeaking wheels get grease. So SQUEAK—NOT PRAY OR TRY.

The people didn’t have the painful duties of leadership as Moses did. Moses too was tired. He no doubt responded to his weariness by imploring God every morning and evening to show him the way to go. Day after day God said merely, “Keep walking.” Tired and impatient the people grumbled.
It is a common human response to difficulty or disappointment. Do we not do our share of this? They spoke against God and Moses. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water and we loathe this worthless food.” They said it to Moses, but they meant it for God. We may see something positive here. At least they believed that God was leading them, just not in the way they wanted.

God responded to their rebellion. Elsewhere we read that rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. Rebellion works black magic on the human spirit. It ruins families. It undermines communities. It breeds divisiveness. It PREVENTS COOPERATIVE EFFORTS.

So God sent poisonous snakes to fix their problem of grumbling. Nothing quite fixes one’s attention on what is important like a good snake bite. The snakes bit many people. Many people died. So the people got the idea that they had spoken one time too many against the Lord and against Moses. They stopped grumbling and begged Moses to pray the Lord to take away the serpents.
We’re not told that God took away the snakes. Instead God told Moses to set a bronze snake up on a post. Anyone who looked up at that bronze snake was healed of the snake’s venom. There is an old Jewish reflection on this story that I find pertinent today.

“It was not the sight of the serpent of brass that brought with it healing and life; but whenever those who had been bitten by the serpents raised their eyes upward and subordinated their hearts to the will of the heavenly Father, they were healed; if they gave no thought to God, they perished.”

This interpretation adds an insight to what we read in Numbers. The way we read the story it seems that no matter what was in peoples’ minds, if they looked up at that bronze snake they were cured of their snake bite. But it was looking up to God that really mattered.

Jesus too seemed to see in that ancient story that God looked for the state of the peoples’ hearts. When Jesus spoke with Nicodemas as recorded in John 3: 14-15 the Lord compared believing in Him with looking up at the bronze serpent for the ancient Israelites. Indeed, the word “snake” is suggestive in the Bible with the terrible affliction called sin. In Genesis 3 it was the serpent that beguiled Eve so that she ate of the forbidden fruit. This first act of disobedience polluted the human race.

Jesus said that believing in Him was like the ancient Jews looking up at the bronze snake. Though Jesus was not in any way like the snake, he said, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up.”

It is a curious thing that Jesus should compare His benefit to us sinners with the bronze statue of the very serpents that inflicted the lethal bites on the Israelites. But we get the point. And the Jewish midrash seems to catch this point. It was the upward look of need to God that God wanted to see in His people. In trust they looked up to the source of their healing—that God commanded Moses to make.

Well, we must think of what Jesus said in the passage before us this morning. Jesus had just been introduced to two Greek men who wanted to see Him. Instead of speaking with them directly Jesus seemed to be filled with the sense of His destiny.

“The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified.” He then spoke those words that defined life in a way we find so hard to grasp: “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Jesus then turned his thoughts to His Father in prayer. “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour?” It seems Jesus didn’t know what to ask of His heavenly Father now. He dreaded losing His life—that led to finding it, fulfilling His purpose.

After Jesus spoke people heard sounds from the skies that seemed to be like thunder. They looked at Jesus who was evidently enveloped in His profound reveries. They heard His prayer. And then Jesus turned from praying to notice those who were around Him. “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine.” The Hebrew word meaning voice is the same as the word for sound. They heard a sound; Jesus heard a voice. The sound made them look up as the voice made Jesus look up. They thought it was thunder. Only Jesus seemed to know that it was His Father speaking to Him..

It occurs to me that their inability to understand what God spoke to His Son then was like our inability to understand the roar of a lion. Another lion will hear the roar and no doubt hears significances that we can’t pick up. All we hear is the fearsome sound. But another lion hears a voice in an idiom it recognizes.

Then Jesus spoke to those with him referring again to that episode about which we read this morning from the Book of Numbers. “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” John tells us that when Jesus said this He referred to the manner of His death—by crucifixion. Those who gathered around Jesus caught this meaning. They were totally confused.

“We have heard from the law that the Christ remains for ever. How can you say that the Son of man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?”

The Book of Daniel that was so important to the Jewish people in their time of trials, used this term Son of Man in a very suggestive way. We read of Daniel’s vision:

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a Son of Man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him. And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away.

The kingdom of the Son of Man was to have no end. How could Jesus speak of being crucified if He was this Son of Man?

I think that those who gathered around Jesus were not skeptical so much as they were puzzled. This section begins with the Greeks who wanted to see Jesus, so Philip and Andrew brought them just in time to hear Jesus speak these haunting words. The strong words Jesus spoke about those who do not believe were said to people who felt positively toward Jesus, it seems.

There is much here that it would be interesting to discuss with you this morning. But the clock is not my friend. So I must get to the specific word Jesus said that leaps out at me from this intense passage in the Gospel of John.

Jesus said, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, lest the darkness overtake you . . . while you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light.”
This sounds nearly gnostic; it seems so mysterious. But Jesus could scarcely have been more practical. Jesus used the term “walk” as a synonym for “believe” in order to make clear that to believe is not merely to hold ideas about Him. To believe is to live in a certain way. “Walk” is a very Hebrew idea that refers to life as it was lived in a day before there were transportation vehicles. In Jesus’ day too people mostly got from here to there by walking. The Hebrew word for “go” is “walk.”

So believing in Jesus was walking with Jesus. Jesus’ ways were ways of light. No hidden-ness. No deceitfulness. No posturing as religious. No complaining. Just straight-out walking with Him who went from Bethlehem to Calvary out of submission to the will of God.

What is the application of all of this to us? All of us are here this morning because we have ideas about Jesus that we think of as believing in Him. We all find difficulty in walking in Jesus’ way. Our difficulty is that life is filled with events that sometimes make us fearful and sometimes grumpy. We feel the way should be more clear than it is.

We should draw a line in our minds connecting the grumbling of the ancient Israelites with our own grumbling. I doubt that God will send snakes to bite us when we grumble, but for sure when we are rebellious inside our grumbling eats at us. It poisons us. And the only way to be cured of our poisonous grumbling is to look at Jesus. But Jesus says that it’s not just looking at Him, which we do in some sort of religious way, particularly as we near the season of Lent and Easter. Instead, looking at Jesus means deliberately following in His way—in particular when doing what Jesus said to do is the least appealing thing in the world. The Sermon on the Mount is to jar us out of lethargy in following Jesus. “Blessed are you when men revile you…” and “bless those who persecute you.” All of that.
When we choose to live other than Jesus leads us, we walk in darkness. Walk your way and you stumble and fall. We feel out of sorts. But if we look at Jesus and will humble ourselves to follow Him, we walk in the light. Then we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from our sin.

Let us walk with Jesus. We will walk with Him if we try to walk with Him. We won’t be walking with Him if this idea isn’t even in our heads. We little realize how our future is sculpted by what we choose to do in moments like this when God puts before us a clear idea to which we must respond. Let us choose to follow Jesus.

Let us pray: O God, thank you for sending us Jesus, the light of the world. Help us to follow Him. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

February 11, 2007

Jesus and the Good Life

Ruth 1: 1-18/John 12: 20-26
February 11th, 2007

Isaac Watts, the great 18th century hymn-writer, was pastor of a dissenting congregation in London. Dissenting congregations broke away from the Church of England in the trying days when the bishops were authoritarian in ways that stifled the church. Watts is well known for his Communion hymn,
“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”

But Watts wrote another hymn I must have sung often when I was young. It has been running through my mind this week though I have not heard this song in decades. Here are three stanzas of this hymn.

Am I a soldier of the cross,
a follower of the Lamb?_
And shall I fear to own His cause
or blush to speak His name?_

Must I be carried to the skies_
on flowery beds of ease,_
While others fought to win the prize
and sailed through bloody seas?

Sure I must fight, if I would reign; _
increase my courage, Lord;_
I'll bear the toil, endure the pain, _
supported by Thy Word.

I think this old hymn came to mind because I’ve been chewing on a question: “what did Jesus expect of His followers two thousand years later?” It’s a question that arises from my work as a pastor.
Isaac Watts served as pastor for fifty years, many of these years in a London congregation during one of the most decadent centuries of the Church in England. Its problems were both like and unlike the acids now at work in the American Episcopal Church and in our own denomination.

Some earnest Christians like the family of Charles and John Wesley remained within the Church of England, striving for reform. Their kind, dubbed “Methodists”—were eventually forced out of the Church of England. Others like the family into which Isaac Watts was born at great cost to themselves separated from the established Church.

I have thought of these two kinds of response to the troubled 18th century English Church as I have thought of the two responses now evident in a number of denominations in our troubled century: to remain and work for reform or to dissent and leave. How similar were the high and low levels of life in the 18th and 21st centuries. Some great saints, men and women, then and now rise above the ordinary. But violence and decadence then as violence and decadence now have grasped the popular imagination even of Christians. The issues today are not exactly the same as in the 18th century, but in both the same human weaknesses prevail.

Within the vast and vibrant sector of protest today, within the ranks of independent-minded evangelical Protestantism, grave and embarrassing problems persist. There are desperate moral problems in the ranks of pastors and people that ought not to be. The sin of pride raises its dreary head among us. Matters of right thought and behavior are as important as issues of belief.

Part of the cause of this distress is what has been made of the great Bible doctrine of justification by faith alone. The New Testament teaches clearly that we are saved by God’s grace alone, through faith in Jesus alone, and not of our own virtuous deeds.

But the kind of emphasis this doctrine has received has made it seem that it takes very little effort to be a “follower of the Lamb.” We may be lured to Jesus with the question, “Do you want a happy life?” Of course! And then the answer, “Jesus is the answer.” As an old Gospel song put it, “Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain. He washed it white as snow.” Indeed, it seems inappropriate to try very hard. “What do you think you’re doing, earning your salvation?”

I’m so grateful for our heritage as Presbyterians. Our roots reach deep into the Church of the apostles and martyrs who gave their lives to preserve for us the Gospel. With such a wonderful heritage, what has happened? There are several factors in our distress whose effects we lament but whose causes we cherish.

We are victims of our prosperity—of our lack of material need. We are victims of our political clout just now. We are victims of our freedom and of our passion for freedom. Obedience to any authority beyond personal choice is out of fashion.

What is the cure? The cure will come, one by one, as we ask what Isaac Watts asked, “Am I a follower of the Lamb?” And then look for a true answer.

St. Paul reminded us that without grace we’re all lost. But he wrote this while “working out his own salvation with fear and trembling.” He taught about grace while concerned that after having preached to others he might be disqualified, or a castaway, as the KJV puts it so vividly.

I don’t perceive this kind of concern nowadays. Our concern is much much about that disobedient THEM. It is not clear what is the unique goodness of a Christian for having become a follower of the Lamb.

Without intending in any way to introduce a dreary, introspective, and morose kind of religion, I hear Isaac Watts asking himself, “Am I a follower of the Lamb?” And I think it is a pertinent question to revive today.

I say this to you because it is my duty to do so, but it is a question I ask myself. I wonder what might happen if we were all to declare a moratorium on noticing the under-achieving going on beyond us, and one by one took issue with our own achievement as followers of the Lamb.
What ambition is appropriate to a follower of the Lamb? David’s words in the psalm we read this morning haunt me.

“One thing I have asked of the Lord, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to enjoy the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His temple.”
This is a thought-provoking verse, rather mystical. “One thing I have asked of the Lord?” Is it not a bit narrow to have that one thing be “to dwell in the house of the Lord the rest of my life?” Maybe a bit passive?

Would it not be more productive to ask God to use His considerable gifts to me in such a way that He is glorified? Should David not have desired to make Israel glorious beyond compare as a harbinger of the Kingdom of God? No. It was a seemingly passive quest, to “dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.” Sometimes when the deep matters are put into words they don’t sound very “productive.”

David admitted the same kind of thing St. Augustine did when he confessed that his heart was restless unless it found repose in God. As David put it in another psalm, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” And again “my flesh longs for thee as in a dry and thirsty land where no water is.” This does not mean that things were idle at Jerusalem’s worship center. Priests were busy with their sacrifices. David’s issue was what was in Isaac Watts’ mind when he asked, “Am I a soldier of the cross, a follower of the Lamb?”

It was for David a rudder adjustment he needed in the voyage of life. Regardless of what’s going on out there, the major battle is what’s going on in here.

This train of thought was stirred further in me this week as I thought of Jesus’ words in our Gospel
lesson. “The one who loves his life loses it, and the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” This is a very individual matter. My life. Your life. Just two chapters earlier we read Jesus’ words about His sheep, “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.” What then is this abundant life?

Jesus’ words about losing and keeping life come at the close of a section that begins with some Greek fellows approaching His disciple, Philip, saying, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Maybe they’d seen Jesus but knew there was more to Him than met the eye. Greeks were deep thinkers. They wanted to see into Jesus’ depths.

Andrew and Philip told Jesus about these Greek fellows’ interest in Him. Jesus seemed oblivious of them, or maybe he meant, “It’s the best of times to look at me because the time has come for the Son of man to be glorified.” Here is my great moment. But what kind of great moment was this? It was as though Jesus had Isaac Watts’ ideal in mind:

Sure I must fight, if I would reign; _
increase my courage, Lord;_
I'll bear the toil, endure the pain, _
supported by Thy Word.

Jesus went on to explain His moment, “Truly, truly, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Jesus’ goal was to bear a lot of fruit. Indeed, a whole world of fruit. What is this fruit like? I ask, what is that fruit like today? Eventually it will look like, “every knee bowing and every tongue confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord.”

Does this mean a vast throng of groveling humanity? I don’t think so. I think it will be more like what takes place after a great musical performance. In the packed music hall everyone’s heart has been grasped by the beauty of sound, the virtuosity of the performers who are lost in their music. The Bach partita is finished and there is a moment of rapt silence. And then throughout the massive hall people stand, unselfconsciously, tears in their eyes, applauding and calling out “Bravo!” Such scenes are a faint harbinger of what it will be like when every knee spontaneously bends at the sight of Jesus, and no lip can restrain the response that wells up within the heart, “Jesus is Lord,” the fondest words a person can imagine. We live in the time between.

This is a vision that has got lost in the shuffle of Christianity. Jesus showed Himself as a good Shepherd. He wanted abundant life for His sheep. So He tells them: “the one who loves his life loses it, and the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life?”

Life’s bounty comes a bit differently than the ordinary person expects. I’ve read one explanation of Jesus’ meaning in this odd remark that makes very good sense but is probably wrong. The writer proposed that the modern application of this teaching is that anyone who goes after a large ambition must sacrifice to get there. If you want to be great in your field, you can’t get to greatness without self-sacrifice. You must sacrifice sleep and social life. But this is not what Jesus meant.
I have the hunch that the attitude of Ruth that we saw this morning reflected to her mother-in-law Naomi gives us something of the beauty and passion Jesus had in mind.

Ruth said to Naomi, her mother-in-law, “Only one thing I want, to go where you go, to let your God be my God, to let your people be my people.” As it turned out Ruth’s devotion had a remarkable outcome. But that’s beside the point. She had no idea she would be great-grandmother of Israel’s greatest King, and in the family line in which the Messiah was born. She forgot her own well-being. In losing her life she was finding it. She had no idea that she was prefiguring the attitude of her distant descendant, Jesus, who gave His life in order that you and I might have life abundant.

You and I will find life if we are, one by one followers of the Lamb. We will not find this life so long as we try to find it in all the ways that are common in a prosperous, free society. You may get your own way, willy nilly, and lose your life. No matter what Christian gloss we give to our self-seeking, we need to become followers of the Lamb.

I suppose it’s appropriate that we don’t know who the author of the song was, who wrote her or his confession, “I have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back; no turning back. Though none should join me, still I will follow. No turning back; no turning back.”

Let us pray: O Lamb of God, we want to follow You. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:29 AM

February 04, 2007

What About the Poor Always with Us?

Exodus 23: 1-11 / John 12: 1-8
February 4th, 2007

Let me distract your thoughts for a few moments from the Super Bowl.

In fact, let me direct our thoughts to an event much less conspicuous, but far more memorable. We just read together of one of the most remarkable moments in Jesus’ life. It was a moment He enjoyed. All four Gospels describe one such moment. Two of them tell us Jesus said, “wherever this Gospel is preached what she has done will be told in memory of her.” Of HER, not of HIM.

Luke’s Gospel tells us she was a woman of the street. She intruded at a respectable dinner uninvited. Jesus reclined with good people. In she came. She risked censure, perhaps even violent dismissal from the house. Call the cops. But, since Jesus did not pull back from her neither did anyone else. All watched as, apparently oblivious to all others there her tears flowed as they poured out mingling with the precious ointment on His feet. She tenderly massaged His feet.

We know something about Mary of Bethany of whom we read shortly ago. She was seemingly a good person in an upright family. She was a close friend of Jesus, along with her sister and brother. Mary was anointing Jesus for His burial. It was as though she was already sorrowing for Him. We’re also told something about the unnamed woman in Luke’s Gospel. Jesus had forgiven her in some unforgettable way. She was overwhelmed with gratitude to Jesus.

But of the woman mentioned in Matthew and Mark we know little. Jesus said of the woman in Matthew that she had done something beautiful for Him. How did this woman happen to have this ointment? Was she too a woman of the street like the one mentioned in Luke? Maybe she had bought the ointment to make herself smell good for her tragic career serving the lust of men. It was a business investment for her. She used that costly perfume, all of it, on Jesus’ feet instead.

When we tell the Gospel when do we get right to this part of the story? “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” one presentation of the Gospel rightly says. But when do we get to hear about this woman, or maybe these women who so loved Jesus? Do we let it be known that it is appropriate to feel great gratitude so that a lavish act of thanks is OK?

I sense that when we lead people to Jesus we don’t make it clear that lavish gratitude is appropriate—perhaps we are so reserved in our own gratitude that the inference is never made. But look at how we eulogize the magnanimity of Jesus—that He should stoop to our lowly estate and die for us. The rich gift need not only be for Him to give. Indeed—we need to give grandly or we may not give at all—and be left in the shadows of a poorly spent life.

Rather than recognizing the gratitude of the women the disciples responded oddly. Each woman’s deed is paired with a hostile response from Jesus’ disciples. Matthew tells us it was not just Judas but all the disciples that chided the woman. Such injudicious use of all that money. “This ointment might have been sold for a large sum, and given to the poor.” Jesus replied, “You will always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.”

What? Most unlike Jesus as we think of Him—the Man for others. Jesus sounds so callous. Did not Moses tell us in our Old Testament reading today—care for the poor!!

Did Jesus not say in the chapter just before this in Matthew’s gospel “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to the least of these my brethren you did it to me.” Not “as unto me,” but “to me.” This woman’s deed was as good as though she were visiting someone in prison, or feeding the hungry, or clothing the meagerly clad that were out in the cold.

Mother Teresa would say when she picked up the starving skeleton of a person, racked with disease, from the slums of Calcutta, that she was caring for Jesus. This was her way of pouring ointment on Jesus’ feet. And the world so admired her for this that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
We admire, even if from a distance, great acts of mercy to the suffering. But, like the disciples of Jesus, we’re not sure what to do with the uninhibited generosity of these women to Jesus—or, for that matter, too magnanimous care of the poor—since poverty is everywhere and people might be taking advantage of us.

This is an odd section of the Gospels to apply. We are rightfully cautious about great expenditures on beautiful buildings to honor God. Instead of constructing a multi-million dollar cathedral with an expensive pipe organ such as Notre Dame Cathedral, let’s give the money to the poor. Was Jesus telling us that it’s maybe OK to spend a lot on a lavish place of worship even though the poor desperately need our care? When we put this side by side with the Parable of the Sheep and Goats are we to see that it is a both-and proposition and not an either-or proposition. Do both—worship grandly and give generously.

But maybe we are not to think of this dichotomy at all. Perhaps the lesson you and I are to hear very privately in our hearts is there is great value in maverick love for Jesus. Deeds of love for Jesus have two benefits. First, they are good for the soul of the one who pours out a lavish gift for the love of God. Second, deeds like this, because they are rare, are like good seed that may fall on fertile ground. Someone who needs to make a generous offering, a life-outpouring act, may hear and recognize this is what her heart longs to do.

Harry Emerson Fosdick preached a sermon many years ago, “The Hope of the World in its Minorities.” He preached this in the large, affluent Riverside Church in New York City. In his flock were the movers and shakers of society. He said to them, “History has depended, not on the ninety-eight per cent, but on the two per cent [both for good and for ill]. Jesus has use for good seed, “though but a few kernels, which if carefully sown, might multiply itself.” The example of generous hearts, generous out of gratitude catches on with other hearts prepared.

I thought of what a tiny fraction of all the responses to Jesus is represented in these women’s response to Jesus.

Many people came to listen to Jesus. We do that too. He had wise lessons to teach. Many thronged to Him to get their diseases healed, to get their tummies filled with food—to get something from Him. We are not to think ill of these needy folk. After all we come to Jesus for healing and for God’s supply.
Then there were twelve men who left their homes and livelihoods to follow Him. And they did well. They provided the foundation for “The Church of the Apostles and Martyrs.”

But there is only this one woman whose deed Jesus said would be included in the Gospel story. Talk about a minority! One woman, or maybe it was three women who threw caution and modesty to the winds. They lavished on Jesus their affectionate devotion. And Jesus said this would be told wherever the Gospel would be heard.

Why did Jesus say this? Jesus teaches us, “Let your light so shine that others will see it and glorify God” Jesus says to all of us with our tiny candles. Few of us have great gifts. All of us have something. What this woman had was a jar of expensive ointment. But we still smell its fragrance.
Jesus tells us, “Remember this woman who anointed my feet and wiped them with her hair.” Let’s let her deed serve as good seed in us. What if this smaller than two-percent minority-deed were the leaven that leavened the dough of this congregation, and of each gathering of Christians that listens to the Gospel story?

Now it is happily sometimes the case when an idea grabs hold of people that great movements begin. Some of these movements do a lot of good. I think of the great good World Vision is doing in impoverished nations. Thank God for Bob Cook’s vision for digging wells in parched lands, supplying clean water to drink as well as for irrigation—and so much else.

I think of Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship that got going when he was in prison and recognized how badly people in prison are often treated. He has given hope to many people around the world in prison as his vision has spread. Dan Taylor’s wonderful work at Trinity Mission. How many folk in our town have been rescued from lives enslaved to drugs and alcohol through Dan’s disciplined vision. I am grateful for the good done by World Vision, and Trinity Mission, and Joe Micon who so long served LUM, and of Dana Hobson at Life Care Services, and the many other noble ventures that serve humanity in Jesus’ name.

But when you come right down to it these movements gather in few of all the millions of people who claim to be followers of Jesus. You and I may send periodic donations to this or that effort. We may even volunteer some time to serve with LUM or other worthy ventures. But we live our lives as individuals much more than we live them as participants in great movements.

I wonder if Jesus calls our attention to the lavish, solitary act of this woman in order to grasp the imagination and the heart of particular people who will be infected with her kind of devotion in the small place where they live. Thus they will turn small opportunities into major moments of personal love for Jesus.

The things we do already, the Vacation Bible School, the Sunday School, the choir, the work of deacons and elders, the maintenance of our facilities, the outreach to the jail and to the retirement communities and nursing homes come to life when this person or that is aflame with the love of Christ. What a difference there is between going through the motions and doing one’s task filled with the love of Christ.

Ponder this with me. Do you see a place where your own passion for Jesus is needed? What costly ointment do we have to pour on Jesus’ feet?

Today as we take the elements of Jesus’ body, the bread and the wine, we remember how lavish was His gift to you and me. Well might we sing with Isaac Watts, “Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were a present far too small. Love so amazing so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” But we’re not asked to measure our response by some standard of large or small. Let that other song move us: “Take my like and let it be consecrated Lord to Thee.” And then find our way to do it.
I remember that Jesus did not tell His disciples or anyone else that they should do as she did. It has to come from within us. He did tell us to love one another as He loved, but not to love Him in this way. But maybe if we recognize the love of Jesus we will find a way to love Him lavishly.

Lord grant us so to love you that the impulse that moved the women that anointed Jesus feet will find a place in our hearts. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:28 AM

January 28, 2007

Jesus, Stone of Help

I Samuel 7: 3-12/John 11: 32-44
January 28th, 2007

This morning I tried to recover for our children a wonderful Old Testament word that has become lost among Christians: Ebenezer. We know Ebenezer as the first name of the hero in Charles Dickens’ “Christmas Carol”, Ebenezer Scrooge. So we think that Ebenezer must be a by-word for coldness of heart, of stinginess. Christians don’t know this word so it has been removed in most hymnals from one of my favorite hymns, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”.

But the name has quite an opposite sense than coldness of heart. Though there is some oddness to its happy meaning. In our reading from I Samuel 7, Ebenezer is called that because here and then the Lord miraculously delivered Israel from their dreaded enemies, the Philistines. God “thundered with a mighty voice that day against the Philistines and threw them into confusion . . . so Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jesharnah and called its name Ebenezer, for he said, ‘Hitherto the Lord has helped us’.” Ebenezer means “stone of help.” Or as it is in Hebrew more specifically, “stone of the help.” It was one particular time of help Samuel had in mind.

The oddness comes when we look at the two other places in I Samuel where this place is mentioned. Ebenezer is first identified as the place where the Philistines defeated Israel, slaying thousands of Israelite troops. In the second, Ebenezer is where the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant. It seems that at Ebenezer twice the Lord did not help Israel. It is at the third and final mentioning of Ebenezer that it seems the place got its name from God’s help at that place. What’s going on?
On the one hand the place gets its name from God’s special help. On the other hand, the place is named that already before we learn that Samuel set up a stone to celebrate God’s deliverance. And God does not deliver His people there.

We see this kind of thing elsewhere in the Old Testament with regard to another place full of wonder. In the Book of Genesis long before Jacob was born we learn that Abraham pitched his tent near a place called Bethel. Yet in Genesis 28: 16 we read that Jacob re-named a place that used to be called Luz, Bethel, which means House of God, because God appeared to him in a dream. He woke from his dream and said, “God was in this place and I did not know it. This is none other than the house of God, the gate of heaven.” So he sets up a stone and calls the place Bethel, house of God. It was a custom in the time of the Patriarchs to set up standing stones as signs of God’s special presence there.

This is puzzling enough to beg for some explanation. Here is what I think is going on here. Genesis and I Samuel were written well after the events being described. In Genesis 12 Moses tells of Abraham at Bethel using the name by which this place was known in his own time, not in Abraham’s time. And in I Samuel we read of Ebenezer twice before we learn why the place was called Ebenezer because this was how the place was known ever after.

After Samuel set up a stone in the vicinity where God delivered Israel from its enemy, the Philistines, the people remembered God’s help to them there. It was for the people of Israel somewhat like the importance you and I put on special places. I think of what comes to mind when we hear the name Gettysburg. Who thinks of Samuel Gettys, who purchased land from Wm. Penn at this spot and built a tavern there in the mid eighteenth century? We think of the Battle of Gettysburg, and President Lincoln’s famed address there a hundred years later rather than of the man who gave his name to this place.

Ebenezer was the place where the Lord helped Israel in a special time of need! Indeed, you and I have places that we think of in this way. I set up no monument there, in fact the building has been torn down where I remember the night when I determined I wanted to be a Christian for real. I pass that spot near LaSalle St. in Chicago and there zooms to mind that night in March of the year 1961 when in great need for the mists of my life to clear I prayed so deliberately, “Lord, take my life. I want to be yours.” I was not the same person after this.

Any time Christians go to Bethany, a small town near Jerusalem they think, “This is where Jesus went to the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.” Here is where for four days Mary and Martha wondered why Jesus neglected them in their time of need. But then Jesus came and brought Lazarus back to life after lying in the cold stone tomb four days.

We began reading from this remarkable eleventh chapter of John’s Gospel at the place we left off last Lord’s Day. I chose as our Old Testament lesson this morning the passage of I Samuel mentioning the name Ebenezer, Stone of Help, because it connected so suggestively with the word stone in John 11. At first we read of the stone that was rolled in front of Lazarus’ tomb, blocking the entry way just as the stone that would soon thereafter block the mouth of the tomb where Jesus was buried.

Mary and Martha stood before that stone and wept. It seemed to represent Jesus’ failure to respond to their need. No stone of help here. There would have been no stone in front of that tomb if Jesus had only come when He was needed. That tomb would have remained empty. They would not have given that spot a second thought. But Jesus seemed to fail them in their time of need. That stone was a symbol to them of Jesus’ failure to help them, for a while.

My mind travels to the connection the Apostle Paul draws between Jesus and the stone from which God supplied the ancient Israelites with water.` Moses arrived again at Mt Horeb, the other name for Mt. Sinai where God gave the Law to Israel. There was no water. The people feared they would die of thirst. So God told Moses to strike the rock. Water gushed out of the rock. It was a stone of help.

Paul remembers this story and wrote to the Christians at Corinth, “That rock was Christ.” Paul refers to the story that developed among the Jews that this rock followed Israel in the desert. It was a sign of God’s help back then just as Jesus remains a sign for us of God’s help that pursues us wherever we are.

And so we confess and believe. Jesus said, “I will never fail you nor forsake you.” We cling to this promise in time of need.

But as I have heard various ones of you remind me in times of your distress, you wonder why God does not answer your cry for help. Where is Jesus when I need Him? This was the very question Mary and Martha asked. It was the question the Israelites asked when at Ebenezer they were crushed by their enemies and the Ark of the Covenant was stolen by the Philistines. Where is God, my Stone of Help, when I need Him most?

This is a serious matter for us when we have waited a long time, prayed a long time, and our prayers seem to fall on deaf ears in the heavens. I’m tempted to say that though God has put eternity in our hearts he has put the sense of time in our heads. And we try to juggle the two, trust in God ultimately—in God who does all things well, and trust in God now, when we have grown weary in our waiting and praying. Some people give up on God when no help comes. They read the psalmist’s question and answer, “From whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” And it sounds so good when times are good. But when we imitate the psalmist and call out to God in our distress, it’s as though prayer is an empty exercise.

Let me say I’m not immune to this same reflex. I look back over the years I’ve been a pastor and remember some long stretches of time when I felt I was walking in a wasteland. There have been some long years of waiting for God to lead me from the wilderness, difficult times, difficult people, when it was my duty still to get up in the pulpit on the Lord’s Day and speak cheerful, inspiring words that would enable my folk to face life with confidence in God’s presence. Every now and then I remember some of those long stretches of time. The promises of Scripture echoed as words in a canyon. “I am with you,” the words bounced off the canyon walls while no help came.

This kind of experience comes to most of us at one time or another. There are some for whom there seems no escape from it.

I have thought that some are “wired” in such a way that they’re capable of more optimism than others. There are some people who have a natural optimism, able to smile into a hurricane, rejoicing that there is still a half glass of water left. No worries, as the Australians say. And there are others who face immense good fortune and see a half-empty glass. Pessimism. Gloom. It’s a matter of perception.

And there are still others who are worn down by circumstances. It’s not a matter of seeing a glass half full or half empty. They have hurt for so long, faced harshness from a spouse or a boss for so long, faced illness for so long, been on the brink of financial ruin so often for so long. They turn to their faith in God with trust that somehow continues on even though it has grown thin as a thread. I’m speaking of some here this morning.

I marvel at how life seems to go so smoothly for some and so precariously for others. And it is not of their deserving. It just happens that way. And it is the same Jesus, the same Stone of Help, the same rock to which we all turn. Some times it is as it was for Israel that God delivered them from the Philistines, and at other times the Philistines got the best of them. It is as it was for Mary and Martha with Jesus; He didn’t show up until four days after Lazarus was dead.

May I say that I have learned never to give up, never to draw the curtain and say I will not trust in God any more. It is helpful to read of the experience of others who waited every bit as long as I have in situations still more perilous. I have seen that our solutions, the ones we pray for, may not be the best solutions. Our inward needs are far greater than our outward needs. When I read the biography of George MacDonald, for example, and discover that he faced the utter rejection of his congregation at Arundel, and that his family lived in dire want afterward. And he had no idea that he would turn out to be one of England’s greatest Victorian novelists and most beloved preachers. He had no idea that today people would buy his stories and that C.S. Lewis would bring him fame by calling attention to his place in his own legendary career. All he had was the present. All he could see was the moment of his distress. I think of Edith Stein, a Roman Catholic nun born a Jew—killed because of this by the Nazis. Where was her stone of help?

We now think MacDonald and all like him wise for keeping on trusting in God. We now admire him as a very wise and good man. Perhaps God so made him that he could only respond this way to his hard times. But I don’t think God wires us to respond this way. We all have the same wires in our heads and hearts. We forge our own outlooks. It’s just that some dare to trust God, determine to obey God in the small disappointments and are fortified for the large ones. Sometimes the outcome of this trust in God is more favorable circumstances. Sometimes this is not the case.

We don’t trust in God in order for things to get better. It’s not a means to an end, a way to pull the strings on the Divine puppet. “Faith is the evidence of things not seen.” Heidelberg Catechism question 1, “In life and death”, Christians in famine and disease ridden parts of Africa are grateful to remember. Still keep on.

So I urge you not to give up in whatever your trial is. But I also urge us as a congregation to be responsive to one another. In order to be responsive to one another we cannot be cut off from each other. Some of us need to see that God has a place for us not merely to find encouragement, to find peace in a church agreeable to our theology and preferred style of worship. God has put us here to be part of His on-going work of grace in behalf of others.

I urge you to come together here in the various ways we come together. Come pray with us on Wednesday morning. Come to Sunday School and listen not only to the lesson but also to the people who need you to see into their hearts so that you can be part of God’s supply to them.

The on-going lesson of Israel was of a people God did not give up on though they faced centuries of distress. The on-going lesson of Mary and Martha was that Jesus did come and raise Lazarus from the tomb. And you and I have an on-going story too. Don’t abort the story by giving up on God. Don’t neglect to take your place in God’s way of caring for others. The psalmist wrote, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” He did not say how God provides this refuge and strength. Sometimes it is miraculously supplied. At other times God uses the method He intended when He created us not only for Himself, but also for one another.

I pray God may deliver us in our times of trial and wish He would not make us wait. I hope you will and that I will continue to trust long after trusting has seemed futile. And then I pray that when God answers our prayers in our time of need we may be able to hear and recognize how near and gracious God is.

O Lord, our Stone of Help, the Rock of our salvation, grant to us grace to realize how very true are your promises, and how near and present You are. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 10:35 AM

January 21, 2007

Trusting Jesus When the Chips Are Down

Deuteronomy 1: 1, 9-18/John 11: 1-4, 17-27
January 21st, 2007

I have never played Poker, but I remember the term, “when the chips are down.” I know that it is not a good thing when the chips are down. I think it means the pile of chips you’re winning is down, and you’re losing the game. When your stack of chips is up, you’re winning; down, you’re losing.

We read the Bible so many years after any part of it was written to get guidance from God on how to live today. Our Old Testament reading this morning might have been chosen to give us wisdom in how to “run” a church, not only when the chips are down, but all the time. Choose responsible people to help the pastor lead the congregation in following God’s ways.

But I chose this passage for Moses’ remarks about when the chips were down, when he found disappointment in his task. The leadership sometimes stood against him. Even his brother and sister led revolt against him. How many biographies of pastor’s I’ve read that included sad reports of opposition, even revolt in the congregation.

When we run into difficulty with people at church it reflects on God. There were moments in Moses’ life with Israel when he stood between them and God. It was a most difficult position. We’d like to think that fine and happy relationships might be the ordinary state for God’s people walking in God’s ways. But Paradise remains around the next bend in the road.

In the lesson from John’s Gospel we read this morning we see extreme disappointment with the Son of God on the part of two of His best friends. They knew Jesus would rally to their need immediately when He learned their brother Lazarus was very ill. After all, they were close friends with Jesus.

But He could scarcely have let them down more. Jesus arrived at the graveside four days after Lazarus was buried. Talk about disappointment with God! I’m not sure they knew Jesus’ full theological description as the Nicene Creed puts it, completely God and completely man, but they knew His works were the work of God. Who but God can heal all kinds of sick people, feed masses of hungry people using minute amounts of food. He could even raise the dead.

When the chips were down Moses, Mary, and Martha didn’t find God leaping to their rescue. They trusted in God with the chips down, but He didn’t leap to rescue them in a timely way. Let’s look more closely at these Bible accounts that were given to us for our instruction.

First we read from the Book of Deuteronomy Moses’ reminiscence of how things had gone with him and the people of Israel as he neared the end of his life. He looks back and says, “I said to you [way back forty years ago] I am not able alone to bear you . . .How can I bear alone the weight and burden of you and your strife?” It was the strife in particular that got him down.

Moses dictated or wrote this second book, a reminiscence of his forty years with Israel that we call the Book of Deuteronomy [which means Second Law] from the east side of the Jordan River. He looked across the Jordan at the Promised Land we now know as the nation of Israel, knowing he’d never step foot on it. This was a heavy loss for him we can imagine.

When we listen to the haunting Negro Spiritual “Deep River, my home is over Jordan,” it is the view of Moses looking across into a land on which he would never set foot. The American slaves who were brought to this continent from their homes far away in Africa read the story of Moses and recognized that the great Law Giver of the Jewish people suffered a plight like their own. The theme of the Exodus has meant a lot to African Americans. How the forbears of recent generations of African Americans longed for freedom on the other side of their Jordan River. How they longed for something that would come to their children generations later. They could only dream about it. Were it not for great people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., that Jordan would not have been crossed till years later.

Moses, the man of God, who went up to Mt. Sinai and received the Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone, who established the pattern of worship Israel would follow for years to come, was denied the right to enter Canaan. Why? Three times in the early chapters of Deuteronomy Moses tells Israel that God held it against him on their account so that he did not get to set foot in the land God promised to Abraham. He was blamed for what they did even though his personal life was a spectacular exhibit of closeness to God. In His personal disappointment that is echoed in the Book of Deuteronomy was due to the continual difficulty he had with the Israelite people. Many generations later Moses would be venerated nearly to the point of idolatry. But within his own lifetime there was continual antagonism, rejection, and even revolt led by his brother and sister.

Not only that, but also Moses thinks back and remembers He had to contend with God as well as the Israelites. The predicament of God becoming weary of Israel to the point of planning to wipe them out as a people put him in a terrible fix. We read that Moses argued with God and changed God’s mind about this. What kind of Ultimate Being is it that a man can debate with and win? “What kind of God are you? Moses must have wondered. Are You an Ultimate being? Are you like we are, a Man writ large in the heavens?

Well, part of the interest of the strange passages that tell of Moses’ argument with God is that it gives us a clue to what was involved when God created Adam in His image and likeness. Yes, we are like God, and yes God is something like we are.

Though we find it scandalous to imagine that God the Creator of everything, whose mercy is from everlasting on those who fear Him, can change His mind out of disgust when His people show how badly they need His mercy, the Bible does not blush to tell us this. God got tired of remembering that, as the Psalmist put it, “We are dust.” I intend no irreverence in saying this. The Bible teaches it.

Moses was in a terrible predicament. He did not doubt that God existed, but wondered what kind of God could on the one hand have the power to create heaven and earth with all that is in them and beyond them, and on the other hand vacillate in His mind about His plan set forth in the promise to Abraham centuries before?

Sometimes you and I are puzzled by things. The way we expect God to be is defined by how God “lets things happen.” I hear Christian friends ask, “What is God doing in your life?” I know they mean mostly, “What good stuff is happening for you?” Suppose I answer, “God is testing me terribly right now.” Maybe if someone asks you, “What is God doing in your life?” and you answer, God is tormenting me,” they’d reply, “No, it’s not God tormenting you. It’s the devil.” Or maybe they’d think, “You’re reaping what you sowed.”

But Moses was not reaping what he sowed. And it was not the devil after him. It was God testing his mettle when he was given the task of being the mediator between Israel and their God. These were not made-up tests, but real ones. The people did not need to be instructed to give Moses trouble or to disobey God’s commands. Israel’s behavior has its parallels in our own.

In our finest moments we think how lovingly God is in control. But when life becomes hard, we wonder about God. I have heard some of you speak to me your sorrow at how things have gone for you. The trials that have come to you have come unearned, it seems, or you’re getting worse than you deserved.

Indeed, in the Bible itself we read that haunting question, “Why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?” It is a theme echoed in the Psalms. Where is God when it hurts? a popular Christian writer asked in a book not long ago.

Before proposing an answer to this that I hope may be helpful, let’s turn to the other passage of Scripture we read this morning.

We read again part of the familiar story of the death of Lazarus, and Jesus’ interactions with him and his two sisters, Mary and Martha. These two women, very dear to Jesus, thought they were playing with a “stacked deck” as they saw their brother become very ill. Most people gave up on life in those days when terminal illness hit. But they had Jesus on their side. He loved them. They loved Him. He’d take care of Lazarus’ illness. Lazarus would soon be in the pink of health.

In the next chapter of John’s Gospel, which describes something that happened later—is mentioned here as a clue to how close Jesus was to this family. Mary showed her affection to Jesus very tenderly by anointing his feet with expensive ointment and wiping them dry with her hair. Her reasons seems to be different from the gratitude that made the unnamed woman in Luke 7 care for Jesus in much the same way in a far different setting. We don’t know that Mary was a conspicuous sinner, showering on Jesus her gratitude for forgiveness. She was simply a uniquely close friend.

John mentions this later act of affection here to help us recognize the intensity of the affection that passed between Jesus and this family in better times.

But look at how oddly Jesus responded when he heard Lazarus was very ill. In effect Jesus seemed to suggest, “He’s not all that sick.” He kept on doing whatever he was doing two more days. It is so odd to read in verse five: “When he heard that he [Lazarus] was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” If you love someone, don’t you jump at the chance to help them in their time of need? What kind of love was this from Jesus? The disciples must have thought, “Jesus knows Lazarus isn’t as bad off as his family imagines. It’s just a passing flu or a cold. He’ll improve. Mary and Martha are a bit hyper.”

All the while in the next few verses we learn that Jesus knew full well that Lazarus was very ill. Oddly Jesus told His disciples, “Lazarus is dead and for your sake I am glad I was not there [to heal him while he was still alive.]

Well, Jesus and His disciples got to Bethany four days after Lazarus had died. Meanwhile Mary and Martha had watched their brother sink rapidly. They saw him lapse into a coma and die, knowing that if Jesus had come right away their brother would not be edging toward death. What kind of friend was this on whom they had showered such intimate care—opening their home to Him and His disciples, treating them to hospitality as they’d extend to their own family.

Finally, they heard that Jesus was coming. In deep disappointment Mary, who would later anoint Jesus’ feet, sat at home. She didn’t go to meet Jesus. What was she thinking? What kind of friend is Jesus? But Martha, her sister, ran to meet Jesus. She said the obvious, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

What kind of consolation was it to hear Jesus’ reply, “Your brother will rise again.” She found no consolation now in the doctrine of the resurrection at the last day. She ran to get her sister, Mary and told her quietly, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” She didn’t call Jesus, “Lord,” but “teacher.” Mary came quickly, overwhelmed with disappointment in Jesus. But she speaks to Him still as she had before, “Lord if you had been here my brother would have not died.”

It is at this point that we see one of the most moving images of Jesus, the Man as well as of Jesus, God made flesh who could bring to life that which was dead before. In a moving passage John tells us that when Jesus saw Mary crying, and others with her, He was moved in his spirit and troubled. Then the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” Jesus wept. Why? Is it not because even though He knew all the power that resided in His word, in His touch, aspects of His Deity, He also knew the full weight of sorrow—theirs and so His too.

We know what follows. Jesus brings Lazarus to life again. But we also know that Lazarus did not live forever after that. Before Lazarus and his sisters would die, Jesus Himself would suffer abandonment by His heavenly Father, and He would go to His death without God the Father intervening to rescue Him.

In both these scenes of Moses’ life and Mary, Martha, and Lazarus with Jesus it seems to me we get a picture of how near God is to life. But God does not respond to our needs in a timely way we think. Is this perhaps because the present distress is not the whole of life God? We would all love it if God were to swoop down and fix everything at the moment. If God would immediately fix me so I don’t have cancer anymore, or fix the misery of my marriage, or change the hearts of those that are making my life very difficult, how much easier it would be to trust in God.

My personal experience has been that people don’t respond this way when God seems to fix problems. They are apt to think it would have happened even if they had not prayed. God knows this about us. Sometimes God fixes our problems, making things seem to go well for a long span of time. But in the end death comes to us all.

I believe God wanted Moses to learn that God’s idea of the fulfillment of His covenant with His people needs a lot more than one lifetime, or even of many generations to fulfill. There would come a time when Moses would see God was as good as His word. We might see this as pie in the sky thinking. But who can deny that life’s importance reaches far beyond what any of us experience in a moment, or a week, or even a lifetime.

When Jesus let Mary and Martha suffer momentary grief before raising their brother to life—for a while, He wanted them to see a picture bigger than the affection they enjoyed from Him, and He from them. The love of God for His Son, Jesus, in fact, had to still let the great Plan unfold, that sent Jesus to the cross.

But beyond the cross, and beyond your present difficulty, there stretches the loving purpose of God that is only for our good.

The Apostle Paul ends the great Resurrection passage in I Corinthians by writing, “Be steadfast, immoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for you know that in the Lord your work is not in vain.” So we are to keep on keeping on, whatever the moment is bringing to us.

How often I have been fortified by this truth when things were really tough as a pastor, or when sickness overwhelmed our home. And each of you has your own version of distress to work through. But in your distress, keep on keeping on being faithful, steadfast, immoveable in your commitment to doing the business of life God has given you to do. Those who resort to bitterness, who give up, miss the good that God always seems to steal through the gray clouds for us.

Perhaps as you think of the life of Moses and of Mary and Martha’s disappointment with Jesus at the moment, you may see your life flash before you. Then claim for yourself the good that God holds before all who trust Him, whether their names be Moses, Mary, Martha, or any other name by which we are called.

Let us pray: O Lord, to speak of things beyond our knowledge can seem glib in the face of sorrows. Grant to us the patience to run well the course that is set before us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:27 AM

January 14, 2007

Two Foundations of Trusting Jesus

Psalm 4 / Joshua 1: 1-8
John 10: 22-42
January 14th, 2007

This morning we ordain and install some of our folk to the sacred work of being deacons and elders. I could scarcely think of three more fitting passages from the Bible to read and ponder at a time like this.

The fourth Psalm is an evening psalm. Read it before you go to sleep at night. Did I honor God with my behavior and my words today? If I got angry, was it fair and reasonable anger or anger because I didn’t get my way? Spend time communing with your own heart on your bed. Take stock of your day. Then get a good sleep at night. Good advice for us all, and all the more so for us if we are in the work of the ministry.

Then we read God’s counsel to Joshua that he was to pass on to the Israelites. They were about to inherit the Promised Land after forty years in the wilderness. He and his people needed a new frame of heart and mind. So the Lord says to Joshua, “Don’t let God’s word depart from your mouth. Let it fill your mind day and night. Then you will prosper in all ways that matter. God will never fail you or forsake you. Live as God has told you to live.”

What better things could be said to us as we begin a new year and as we are on the threshold of a new stage in the life of this congregation. If it isn’t God’s word that fills our thoughts as a guide for our lives it will be other words and ideas that are swirling in our land and in the church. We want to prosper in all the ways that matter. The personal and private lives of those who lead in the church have a lot to do with the success of the congregation. Being a deacon, elder, or pastor asks a lot more of us than attending committee meetings, or going through the motions of church business.

A congregation’s life cannot rise higher than the personal lives of its people. Psalm 4 and Joshua 1 are excellent guides to the inner life of those who lead.

But this morning I want to focus on what Jesus said in our lesson from the Gospel of John. It has to do with a crisis of belief. The religious leaders you and I might think would be first to rally to Jesus didn’t believe He was who He said He was.

But we can’t correct the problems of people who lived two thousand years ago. The reason why John’s Gospel tells us of the crisis of belief of people long ago is because the problem has never gone away. This Gospel was written about sixty years after Jesus left this earthly scene. John showed us this episode in Jesus’ life to inform Christians of his day why Jesus was believable. He then spends much of his effort in the Gospel and three letters near the end of the New Testament answering the question, “so what?” So I say believe in Jesus. So what? What difference does it make? Well, if it has not made a difference in how we live we may fairly ask, “Do we believe in Jesus?”

Today there is a crisis of faith in the Western world—in Europe, in the British Isles, and in America. The crisis is a bit different in America where fish symbols are pasted on the back of a lot of cars, where radio and TV religious broadcasts are part of the culture. In Europe and Great Britain the problem is nearly total indifference to religion. Our crisis is indifference to what faith in Jesus really means.

Is faith in Jesus faith in the American way? Is faith in Jesus a way to prosperity, success, and our idea of the good life? Does faith in Jesus mean mingling with the approved people? Does it mean getting very excited under the fired-up rhetoric of leaders of mass movements? Our crisis is that faith and belief are oft-used terms but the ways of Jesus may not be our ways. Our standard of behavior is not very high. Our standard is some kind of average of what people like us tolerate and do. Jesus said, “You are my friends if you do as I command you.” The Christian faith is more a matter of what we do than what we say we believe. Because I fear we actually may not believe what we say we do.

Belief takes place deep in the heart. It is from our depths that our behavior arises. We show what we really believe by what we do. John’s Gospel tells us, “The one who believes in the Son has eternal life; the one who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.” Belief, if it is not the same thing as obedience to God, requires it in order to be belief.

The setting for the passage from John’s Gospel we have read is the Feast of Dedication, that is Hannukah. Hannukah today takes place about the same time as our Christmas. Jesus walked in a colonnade in the Temple named after King Solomon. We can picture religious teachers gathered around Him, talking as they walked. The place and time of the conversation was significant to it.
About two hundred years earlier the scene here was very different. The Feast of Hannukah brought this to mind. Then the Temple was desecrated by the Greek king of these parts. He tried to stamp out Judaism. In 170 BC this king attacked Jerusalem, killing about 80,000 Jews, selling many others into slavery. Jewish parents who gave their little boys the sign of the Covenant, circumcision, were crucified with their little boys hanging around their necks. Then he had a pig sacrificed on the large altar in the Temple court.

The reason why John tells us when Jesus walked with the religious leaders of His people was because the Jewish revolutionaries who defeated their Greek overlords 200 years before and rededicated the Temple were models of the kind of Messiah they looked for. They wanted someone to topple the Romans as the Maccabees had toppled the Seleucids.

So we read that the leaders asked Jesus, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

Jesus reply must have puzzled them. “I told you and you don’t believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to who I am. You don’t believe them either.”

How puzzling Jesus must have been when He talked about His sheep knowing and following Him. They didn’t think of the Messiah as a shepherd, unless he was a former shepherd who became a great leader like King David.

People who listened intently to how Jesus taught noticed that He spoke differently from other teachers of His day. When He took the will of God in the laws of Moses to a new level, He did it differently from other religious teachers. Early in the Gospel of Mark we read that some people said of Jesus, “He doesn’t teach like the scribes but as one who has authority.” We wonder how this difference was perceived. Maybe He spoke softly. Maybe He spoke humbly instead of proudly. Maybe His use of folksy illustrations made things more clear than other teachers’ teaching. When He taught they laughed a lot because His illustrations were so funny and profound. He poked fun at self-righeous people who were like someone with a pole sticking out of his eye getting all hot and bothered about someone else with a splinter in his eye. Jesus was not unique in seeing deeper implications to the Ten Commandments’ statements on adultery and murder. Other teachers did too, but they saw implications that put unnecessary burdens on people.

This bothered the religious teachers who seemed to think we can impress God only by living very strict and unnatural lives. For Jesus to disagree with them and then say that He was speaking in behalf of God, whom He called his father, irritated them. They called it blasphemy—cursing God.
Not only that, but He said that the works He did were the works of the Father, of God. They didn’t really quarrel that Jesus healed people and fed great crowds of hungry people. It was that He did it on the Sabbath. That was the problem. Then to say He was doing all this as the works of God, His Father was the final straw. This was an outrage, blasphemy.

Jesus countered their accusation by quoting the 82nd Psalm where the psalmist wrote: “I say you are gods, sons of the most High, all of you.” In our Bibles the word “gods” here is not capitalized because the translators knew that the writer of the psalm referred to judges and not to deities. Judges have the duty to judge according to true justice, the kind that God will give to everyone. In fact, the psalmist calls them “sons of the Most High.”

So when Jesus referred to God as His Father, and said His deeds were the works of the Father, He was in good company. When Jesus referred to God as His father it was in a greater sense than the writer of the 82nd Psalm intended. But at least He could say as the psalmist did of the judges who did the work of God in rendering good justice. Fair justice is God’s justice. As the words of the judges were believable when they were fair, so were Jesus’ words were believable.

Jesus’ words were believable because His works were believable. None of Jesus’ enemies denied that people Jesus healed were really healed. When Jesus fed the multitudes we don’t read that anyone said He was a fake, or that the report was false. The problem Jesus’ enemies had with His deeds, was that He sometimes did them on the Sabbath. This they believed was a violation of the fourth commandment that forbad doing work on the Sabbath. They had not caught on that the Sabbath, the day of rest was made for the benefit of people. God heals and restores the soul of His people as they rest. Jesus did works of restoration more specifically for people He saw in need.

This was all far more than an argument about ideas and rules. Jesus spoke and did all that He did in front of those who followed Him as well as before enemies so they could get the idea that following Him was a matter of doing and saying. At one point Jesus said to His disciples, “If you believe in me you will do greater works than I do because I go to the Father.”

What does that mean? Doesn’t it seem to mean that if we have really believed in Jesus there will be a mysterious grandeur to what we do because we are governed by this One whom we follow? Imagine the effect of great masses of people who believe in Jesus, speaking with His grace, behaving with His gentleness, and finding in themselves a power to do things that defy explanation.

In our day we see those who purport to heal in Jesus name. We see a lot of religious muscle flexed in the cultural wars. There is no doubt of the religious quality of much of this. But instead of persuading people massively to become followers of Jesus, hearts won by the grace and sweetness of the life and Gospel Christians proclaim, there is massive cynicism that Christians have aroused. I had dinner recently with a Purdue professor who was very polite to me and asked good questions about what it was like to be a pastor. But he has been turned away from serious consideration of the Christian message because of the embarrassment of the image of Christianity today. He didn’t say this so as to insult me.

Brothers and sisters, this ought not to be. And I pray that in this place in the coming year, in the coming years, it may not be so. When you come to Jesus listen to all that He says to do in following Him. First of all and completely indispensable let it be indisputably evident that you love one another. Let there be no doubt. Let it be the first piece of evidence when people step foot inside these doors, or when they come to one of our group fellowships, or when they talk with us in private, that we love one another. Without this we have no Gospel worth hearing. This love has characteristics: patient, kind, not jealous, envious, boastful, arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way, not irritable of resentful. It doesn’t rejoice when others do wrong, but in the truth. It hears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things—and does not end.

Then let us speak humbly the great truths that we believe. And let the evidence that we believe the truth not be in the severity and force of our argument, but in the power of our simple obedience to Jesus. Privately live this life. So that when we are together the whole may be greater than the sum of our parts. Then we may see some works proceed from us that have the power of the Holy Spirit behind them.

The horse must come before the cart. First, in the privacy of our homes and in our hearts, love God and love one another. Then do the deeds of love. Then let the mass of those who love God and one another see what will arise as the special works of God that may be credible to those who see them.
I put this challenge before us all this year. But particularly I challenge you who have offered yourselves for service and been chosen by our people, we trust at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, let us live the Gospel we profess. Let our faith, our belief in Jesus, be evident in what we say and in what we do. And God will lead us by His Holy Spirit into the days ahead. They will be good and happy days, full of love and good works and right belief. That awakens faith in Jesus Christ in others.

Let us pray: O Lord God, how grand is your gift to us of being called your children. Help us to follow Your Holy Child Jesus in all that we think, and say, and do. And grant that this congregation may experience your love that passes all understanding, and display it. And that through us others may come to believe Jesus and to follow Him. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 02:01 PM

November 26, 2006

Jesus, the Trustworthy Shepherd

Jeremiah 31: 7-14
John 10: 1-6
November 26th, 2006

Every Sunday morning for many years you have heard me end the service with an ascription of praise to God that includes a blessing, a benediction. With three fingers of my right hand extended, an ancient sign of the Holy Trinity, I will say, “Now the God of peace that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus that great shepherd of the sheep, make you perfect in every good work to do His will.” You leave worship with these last words ringing in your memory. Jesus, the Great Shepherd has a good and perfect will for me to.
The blessing goes on with another word-picture that suggest Jesus is like a lamb—“through the blood of the everlasting covenant make you perfect in every good work to do His will.” Jesus, the Lamb of God, took away the sins of the world. The goal of this Shepherd-Lamb is to make you and me perfect in every good work to do His will, leading us in a life well pleasing in God’s sight.

This was what the Great Shepherd did, after all. He said, “My will is to do the will of Him who sent me.” And He leads us to do the will of the One who sent Him. Through His blood of the everlasting covenant He makes this possible.

Increasingly I savor the words of this benediction. They come to me during the day. I say them slowly every Sunday so they may sink in to us all. We leave worship reminded of our purpose in life, to do what is well-pleasing in the sight of our Great Shepherd. I see some of you moving your lips, repeating with me those familiar words.
Here is the hope of the Gospel—Jesus the Great Shepherd that I can claim as my Shepherd. Here is the goal of the Gospel, to make us “perfect in every good work to do His will.” Perfect means complete, fulfilled, the purpose of your life and mine achieved. Here is the means of the Gospel, the blood of the everlasting Covenant. It applies to us sheep that leave worship to follow the great Shepherd of the sheep.

As I pondered not only the Scriptures before us this morning but also the many other Bible references to God as shepherd I saw so many directions I could lead us in our thinking this morning. How clever it is possible for us sheep to become with this teaching!

Indeed, if I were to open up the tenth chapter of John carefully, many questions come to mind. What did Jesus mean, “Other sheep I have that are not of this fold?” Who are these other sheep? In the sixteenth verse Jesus speaks of one fold (in Greek, aules) and one flock (in Greek, poimen). The fold of the sheep is the enclosure in which they are kept. All sheep in the flock not in the same enclosure. But there is still one flock that belongs to the shepherd. How suggestive are these words of Jesus. We scrutinize and interpret them in our day of great diversity and splintering of Christendom. We set out to prove how we are in the right fold, the one for which Jesus is shepherd, while others may not be in the right fold. Who are these other sheep of His, we wonder? Because we believe strongly we are sure ours is the one fold as well as the one flock.

I see the vast development of ideas since New Testament times and how this doctrinal development has occurred here and there as a means of self-approval as well as an attempt to understand. And I think, “O if we could see ourselves as sheep more than as theologians, how would we see the Shepherd differently.”

When we look at the relationship between shepherds and sheep, do the sheep think of the meaning of that strange creature with two legs that guides them, protects them, provides them enough to eat and drink, pours oil over their wounds, and goes hunting for them when they stray? Sheep probably think nothing at all about their shepherds. But we do. Of course, we are sheep with different brains than the four-legged kind have.

In the metaphor of sheep and shepherd we see that all the sheep do is trust their shepherd. Faith for them is a verb, an action word not a noun. It is not a synonym for “right belief.” Faith is trust in the shepherd. They go where the shepherd leads. They eat what the shepherd feeds them. They drink from the still running water to which the shepherd leads them. They feel safe in the shepherd’s presence. And in that most favorite of all psalms that we want to hear when death is near they trust that “even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

Of course, one reason why we don’t think of ourselves only as sheep is that the Bible gives us more images of God than of a shepherd. God is a righteous Judge too. He is angry with the wicked every day. Our thoughts of God are tinged with fear, reasonably so, in the presence of One who knows all about us. God is the Lord of Hosts, the Commander of invincible heavenly forces. God is the Creator of all things. The Bible does not only tell us of God as our Shepherd, with Jesus as the personification of this gentle image. So we do not think of God only as our Shepherd.

Not only that but we are not of the species called “sheep.” We are human beings. We are at the top of the heap in the animal world, with minds capable of brilliant thoughts. Real sheep are not capable of great art, great virtue, and great sins. We are. We can launch space-craft to the moon and Mars. We discover quantum theory and the vocabulary of DNA. We can produce gifted artists like Michaelangelo who can paint glorious pictures and sculpt marble into detailed likenesses of David and Moses.

We can become suicide-bombers and follow leaders like Adolf Hitler. Sheep have no capacity for this. Their thoughts, such as they are, never stray far from eating and drinking. So it is harder for us to remember that “we are the sheep of God’s hand,” when we are busy with the many things that people think about.

So there are red herrings we go chasing after that deflect from this basic teaching of the Bible that puts us into the humble position of sheep.

The sheep and shepherds that we read about in the Scriptures are different from western images of sheep farming that we see on TV or reading National Geographic. We know of vast sheep farms in New Zealand. There helicopters as well as horseback riders are used to move great populations of sheep from here to there. Since the market for wool has been reduced by cheaper synthetic materials for making clothing, the sheep are headed for market as lamb chops rather than as providers of wool for wool coats and blankets. Those who herd sheep to the butcher shop do not come to know them well over the years.

Agri-business sheep farmers hardly fit the image of the shepherds in the Bible. Sheep-for-meat-farmers don’t know their sheep by name. They don’t worry about the one lost sheep because when there are thousands of sheep to care for it’s far different from leaving ninety and nine. It is economically unfeasible to leave the ninety-nine thousand to look for the one lost sheep.

So we have to let our minds drift to olden times in the Middle East where there was an intimate relationship between a small flock sheep and the shepherd. Then sheep were kept for the wool they could give, year after year. So shepherds knew their sheep by name. “Here brown-leg. Here “Black Ear.” The shepherd calls, and Brown-leg and Black-ear know their names. They know the voice of the shepherd. Some times shepherds talk in sing-song sounds using a strange language developed between him and his flock. Over the years the language grows, unique to this flock known by name to the shepherd, and known uniquely by voice to the sheep. This is the picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd we are to see.

In our Gospel lesson this morning Jesus is a good shepherd, the kind that gives his life for the sheep. William Barclay reminds us that when John refers to Jesus as the “good shepherd” he uses a word for “good” (kalos) that means winsome, loving, and kind. Jesus is not just a skilled (agathos) shepherd, one simply good at caring for sheep. He is kind. Not only that, He puts their wellbeing before His own. He lays his life on the line to protect them.

But I see that I have gone on and done what I proposed we need to do less—talk about the Shepherd. What we need is to recover some sense of being the people of His pasture, the sheep of His hand. How can we do this in a day of so many competing ideas of what it is to follow the Shepherd?

In past weeks we have noticed that faith is an action verb rather than a noun. Obedience has far more to do with being faithful sheep than believing great ideas about Him. When you and I come to the end of the day we may discover that our present orthodoxies more or less hit the mark, but we can tell for sure if we have obeyed the will of the Shepherd.

When I remember that the Lord is my Shepherd and I am His sheep, I will try far more to follow the voice of my Shepherd than to argue about what He means. I know where my Shepherd guides me—in ways of righteousness—that is, deep goodness. I know that my Shepherd wants me to love God with all I am, and that an index of whether I love God is how I’m doing with loving my neighbor. I know that God wants me to feel as He does about people who suffer from want or sickness, or who are in jail. I know that God is compassionate over all, so I should be too. And I know that following in these ways that my Shepherd guides me gives me a lot to do that I can only do if I keep my eyes on Him, and my ears—listening to His voice rather than to my own self-protecting voice.

Above my father’s desk was a plaque given to him by Moravian missionaries in Costa Rica when he taught one summer in their seminary. It is the Moravian “coat of arms.” I showed it to the children this morning. It depicts Jesus as the Lamb of God striding forward, its right leg raised to take the next step. It seems to hold in that hoof the pole on which hangs the banner of the cross. Around its head is a yellow halo with a Latin cross on it. It walks on green grass. Around the border we read: Vicit agnus noster; eum sequamur. Our Lamb conquers. We will follow Him.”

Let us pray: O God our Shepherd, we thank you for Jesus our Good Shepherd, the Good Lamb of God. Grant that we may follow Him. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

November 19, 2006

Jesus, the Sight-Giver

Isaiah 35: 1-10
John 9: 1-17
November 19th, 2006

This morning we have read about one of Jesus’ loving acts of healing that reminded early Christians of the prophecy of Isaiah. “When our God comes then the eyes of the blind will be opened.” Jesus was not equally successful in healing all kinds of blindness.

There is more than one kind of blindness. This story is about our God’s encounter with two kinds of blindness. Jesus did not always heal physical blindness in the same way. Sometimes He spoke a word and a blind person could see. In one instance he spat on a man’s eyes and he gradually began to see. He needed another dose of Jesus’ touch to see clearly. Maybe Jesus healed this man gradually as an illustration of how gradually we are healed of spiritual blindness.
Physical blindness is not as harmful as spiritual blindness. A person whose eyes don’t see is not destructive. A blind person often has other senses that become sharper making up for the loss of eye-sight. Part of the charm of Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and the glorious Italian tenor, Andrea Bocelli, blinded at age twelve, is that they sing from their hearts in a way that reaches deep inside us all.

Not so with a person who will not “see,” whose heart is hard, who is locked in a bias, a prejudice, a habit of mind. This kind of person will not admit to being blind. “I see things right,” such a person insists. Jesus came to heal this kind of blindness too. A physically blind person lives with her uncertainty as a fact of life. A spiritually blind person may not be lacking in certainty. “Maybe wrong, but never in doubt,” we poke fun uneasily at such a person.
Unfortunately with the best intentions things we “see” we may see in error. Honestly we may be dead wrong, imagining that we see. This is our predicament when it comes to things of God. As Paul reminds us in Romans 1, there are those who worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, often unwittingly I think. Blindness, after all, is a problem of not being able to see.

In our story this morning both physical and spiritual blindness are spread before us. The man was blind from birth. The religious leaders whose eyes worked just fine, grew more blind as they refused to accept the obvious, that Jesus healed the man born blind. Their trouble in “seeing” had to do with their confusion as to the purpose of the Sabbath Day. How could Jesus be from God if He healed on the Sabbath? Did God not command Israel to do no work on the Sabbath?
I don’t think the purpose of this story was so that Christians should forever poke fun at Jewish Pharisees for being so blind as not to recognize that Jesus did the work of God. Indeed, the Pharisees had a point. They raised a question interesting in itself.

Behind the question that seems so obviously answered to us they dithered with the question, “If a man’s work is that of a “faith-healer,” shouldn’t He refrain from this work on the Sabbath the way a carpenter should?”

Why did it bother them so much that Jesus healed people on the Sabbath? Was it just a passion for keeping God’s law? Is there not a scale of values, so that routinely keeping the Sabbath Day holy can be interrupted when there is the opportunity to do good? All sorts of exceptions find their way into the Jewish oral law. It’s the intention that matters.

Sure Jesus could have waited till the following day, but He was here now where and as there was a need. Was their concern for the Sabbath a smokescreen “principle” hiding jealousy, or some other human smallness? We wonder, but we should not presume on them ill motives.
Some religious kinds of refusal to see seem obvious to us but not to others. How can the Muslim Al-Qaida terrorists fail to see the evil of their deeds? We call them terrorists; but they call themselves defenders of God’s true way.

Otherwise devout Christians in the Union of South Africa and in our country were blind to their sin of racial prejudice. They claimed they merely accepted the curse God placed on Noah’s son Ham—the father of all the dark-skinned races.

Abusive husbands and fathers are customarily blind to their ill behavior. Christian husbands believe they are merely exercising their headship in the home as they grow impatient when their commands fall on deaf ears. Thus they may become emotionally or even physically abusive to enforce God’s law as they perceive it. The list could go on and on of blindnesses that affect us all.

Thus we knowingly quote Robert Burns’ poem with regard to other people, “Wad some power the gift to give us, to see ourselves as others see us. It would from many a blunder free us.” It’s remarkable how we think others should heed Burns’ poem.

Let us come back to the story again. The man in the Gospel story this morning was born blind. Unlike the other blind folk who may have been blinded by disease or accident, this man’s blindness was perceived as God’s punishment for sin--maybe his own, maybe his parents’.

The religious leaders who challenged Jesus believed that if God was punishing this man for sin it was wrong to interrupt the judgment of God—particularly on the Sabbath. But Jesus said this man was not blind because of anyone’s sin.

A friend of mine of years ago became a Christian after reading this story. Dr. Purushotman Krishna was a professor of Oriental philosophy at Durban University in South Africa. Christian students in house to house visitation left him a copy of the New Testament. Some time afterward he picked it up, opened to John 9, and read this story. The penny dropped; the light went on in his mind. We are not punished in future lives for sins in previous lives. It melted his heart and he trusted in Jesus.

Perhaps this awareness was one purpose of this story. But another purpose is that we should stoop beneath the load of people with handicaps of any sort. Jesus said the divine reason for the man being born blind it was that the works of God might be made manifest in Him. The work of God was to restore his sight.

We draw inferences from this about other hard things in our lives and in the lives of others. Romans 8: 28 tells us “All things work together for good to those who love God, who are the called according to His purpose.” “All things?” Mike Bergmann and I spoke of this truth to young folk in the Work Release Jail this past Tuesday. Even the Holocaust? Even Saddam Hussein’s genocides? Even 9/11? It’s hard to think this. Certainly the immediate good is hard to see in the wake of great evil. But looking for good that God may bring, brings immediate healing effects inside us.

I look for the good that God will bring out of the “evil” He sends my way. Simply thinking this softens me inside. It is an antidote to bitterness. It makes you and me possible sources of blessing we would not be otherwise. God has to use strong medicine to cure the hardness of the human heart. When my hard heart is softened so that I can become of use to God, I may well look back and thank God for the hard things that came my way. I realize this does not satisfy us in trying to imagine the good that can come from immense evils.
What Jesus did in this story targeted in particular the blindness of religious people. We might say that for religious reasons these spiritual leaders took issue with Jesus. I think of this and realize that we who have strong beliefs may not realize how God needs to heal us.

I see how this story asks us religious folk to open the eyes of our hearts to areas of our own blindness. Andrew Sullivan has called attention in a recent book to how the great tension between Muslims in the East and we in West is due to the certainty on both sides that we know the will of God for sure. He writes that the fervor and fanaticism that grips millions across the Muslim world is because they know the will of God regarding us in the West. Thus a suicide bomber may go to her violent death with a smile on her face, in total calm—knowing God willed her to. You and I read this and we are appalled.

The natural response to this is to develop a counter-weight of fervor and fanaticism, or, lacking that, of force. Let’s fight the fanatic enemy with greater force. In the West we have a problem; few of us take matters of faith as seriously as do many Musims. A faith that does not regulate our lives is not a very strong force against an enemy that takes extremes for granted. We see they are blind to reason and decency. They see that we are blind to truth; indeed that we tolerate great evil in our materialistic society. They see how listless is our devotion, while they bow their foreheads to the ground five times a day towards Mecca in prayer, wherever they are.
I see a glimpse of Jesus speaking to us in this story. Jesus did not engage the Pharisees who challenged His healing on the Sabbath by arguing about the Law of Moses as a lawyer might do. He did not stand up to them and say, “I’m right.” He did not exercise the force He might have used. He quietly did what was the right thing to do.
He healed the man.

And we may suspect that if one of the Pharisees had been afflicted with a stroke as He stood pointing a finger at Jesus on that Sabbath Day, Jesus would have healed the man—just as he replaced the ear of the High Priest’s soldier in the Garden of Gethsemane after Peter whacked it off.

How do the eyes of our hearts need changing? Are we open to the question? Isaiah said, “When our God comes, then the eyes of the blind will be opened.” Indeed, we should acknowledge that Jesus was God and worship Him.

But seeing that Jesus indeed healed this man is not enough. Physical blindness was not the only kind of blindness Jesus came to heal. The deeper and more difficult healing is the blindness inside of us. To acknowledge that we may not see is the first step in God giving us the gift of sight.

Maybe if you and I will concede there may be a need for this, the Holy Spirit may open this squinting observation so that our eyes may open still wider, till we take vigorous stock of ourselves. I often remember that Scripture tells us that God looks for humble and contrite hearts for His residence. Humility and reticence hardly seem virtues in a day of religious conflict. But they are still needed for God to be at home in our hearts.

What blindness do I need to see in myself? It is a good question. God can heal us of our blindness—through Jesus Christ our Lord, who still opens the eyes of the blind.

Let us pray: O Lord, thank you that Jesus healed people whose eyes didn’t work. Grant that He may heal us of our blindness too. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

November 12, 2006

Father Abraham

Genesis 15: 1-6/John 8: 39-48
November 12th, 2006

There was a rabbi who lived about the same time as the Apostle Paul who taught that there are three things important to know: “know where you came from, know where you are going, and know before whom you are about to give account and reckoning.”

Our dad used to tell us boys about an early Robertson who came to the aid of King Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. “Stout Duncan,” this early Robertson was called. He arrived on the scene in the nick of time. With his aid the Scots defeated the detested English King Edward I. So our Robertson forbears were awarded the tartan that has appeared on our Christmas wreathe at Faith Church for the past 20 years. Imagine that! These old memories undoubtedly grow with time, but this lore becomes precious. It matters to us where we have come from.

Jews and Christians remember fondly their connection with Abraham, a man who lived nearly 4000 years ago. For Jews it is a hereditary link because Abraham was the grandfather of Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel. For Christians it is a spiritual link. The Apostle Paul taught us that Abraham was the first one about whom it is said, “He believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Christians point back to Abraham as the trail-blazer of the life of faith.

Who was this Abraham? We learn of him in the book of Genesis at the end of a genealogy that begins with Noah. Noah and his family survived the Great Flood. Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Genesis tells us of Shem’s family line into which Abraham was born. At first he was called Abram, but I’ll call him Abraham. We learn that his father, Terah, had planned to go to Canaan—later the Promised Land of Israel. He followed the Euphrates River north to Haran, perhaps because this way he thought he could travel by water all the way to his destination. There were no east-west waterways to follow. He stayed in Haran. We don’t know why. The chemistry of life mixes odd ingredients along the way for us. It did for Terah too.

No doubt Terah told his sons why he wanted to go to Canaan. They knew why he didn’t get there. Then Terah died and his son grabs center stage. The Lord spoke to Abraham, “Go from your country . . . to the land I will show you.” We know that the land God would eventually show him was Canaan, where his father intended to go. But Abram apparently didn’t know this would be his destination or he would have gone straight there.

I think of how the ambition that God may stir in a person’s heart may never be fulfilled in his lifetime. But God uses this unfulfilled ambition to speak to coming generations. God begins to lead in a child’s life as she hears of the unfulfilled longing in the generation before. There are stages we don’t see along the way of God’s leading a family.

In my own life I see how my father’s aspirations to know the Bible in its original languages led him to excel as a seminary student. I’ve seen his grade reports in seminary where he was a top student in Hebrew and Greek—straight As. As the years rolled on he became a missionary in India. He put his linguistic interest to work mastering India’s two main languages to do missionary work. He hadn’t the time to continue his studies in the biblical languages.

One of my cherished books is an edition of the Greek New Testament in which I read inside the cover: “Irvine Robertson, 3.6.90, in hopes of a resurgence of Greek.” Seven months later he died. My father told me of his desire to regain the biblical languages in our last walk together. At the time I was finishing my Ph.D.—with Greek and Hebrew as my principal languages. I see how God worked through my dad to foster in me a longing to know the languages of Scripture. That’s why I pester you with Hebrew.

If the tale were fully told, did God use the father’s longings to move the son?
After first telling Abram to leave home for an unknown destination his life became complex. God promised him a family and a land. But for many years he had neither. He wandered not knowing where he was going; he had no children. How hollow God’s promise must have seemed: “I will make of you a great nation.” Indeed!

Put yourself in his place. How we become discouraged when our dreams aren’t panning out. You maybe intended to go to college, but life’s circumstances interrupted your dreams. Or you began your studies with a vision of becoming a research scientist, or a doctor, or a professor, or a successful entrepreneur. But things didn’t work out. You’re not the lone ranger! The tapestry of life has many loose threads. Abram’s life was pretty low at the point we came to this morning. Then God said to Him words that have made a huge impact on world history. “Go outside on a starry night and look up; that’s how many children you’ll have.”

“Of course I will,” he thought with bitter irony. We read of his doubt. “O Lord God, Sarai and I continue to be childless and the heir of my house is a servant.” In the verses that follow we learn of great dread and darkness that came to Abram. Perhaps for the first time he began to realize how powerless he was to do anything but the next thing God told him to do. He could not affect his destiny.
We read Genesis 15: 6, “He believed the Lord; and [the Lord] reckoned it to him as righteousness.” But did Abram know he was righteous? For that matter did he care? It wasn’t righteousness that Abram wanted; he needed an heir and a place to settle down.

There isn’t time this morning to trace the story of his and Sarai’s life. But it’s interesting to see how Jews and Christians have remembered two different aspects of Abraham’s importance. The Jews remember the physical heredity, and keep on applying the sign of circumcision that God commanded Abraham’s descendents to put on their sons.

Christians remember that “He believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Because we think how often we’ve heard of the importance of belief, belief in God, belief in Jesus.

The background of Abraham’s story rests behind Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees. They tell Jesus, “Abraham is our father.” They meant their biological father. Jesus replied, “If you were Abraham’s children—meaning his spiritual rather than merely biological children—you would do what Abraham did.” What did Abraham do? “He believed God.” Of course, they believed in God but they did not accept that Jesus was sent by His heavenly Father to be the Messiah. This was one thing they did not believe. Indeed, in the blanket belief we bring to our trust in God there are ingredients in what we are asked to believe that we little know are there. The Jews to whom Jesus spoke did not see that their belief in God should include trust in Him, who addled them at every turn.

The Jews could rightfully claim God as their Father. When God told Moses to get the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, he was to tell the king of Egypt, that Israel was God’s first-born son. But Jesus spoke harshly to these fellow Jews who challenged Him: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires.” It was like when Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind me Satan.” Jesus did not tar all His fellow Jews for all time with one brush even as He did not mean Peter was the devil. The word “Satan” means adversary. For a moment Peter was Jesus’ adversary, albeit unintentionally. And in their opposition to Jesus His fellow Jews acted against aspects of the faith in God that they could not comprehend.

It did not seem obvious to the Jews that Jesus was the Son of God—as we understand. It seems obvious to us because we’re used to the idea. But there is an anesthetic effect of knowing something so well without taking to heart its implications. Generation after generation of Christians have spoken of believing in Jesus so that it seems the stress on belief has numbed the will to obey Him. Obedience sounds too much like good works—which Paul said were not able to secure for us salvation.

Even though Jesus’ fellow Jews did not then believe He was the Son of God many of them were obedient to the way of life that had been passed on to them from Moses. Obedience to God’s command was important to Abraham’s belief-system. And obedience was important to the Jews’ way of life. But they missed trusting something essential: Jesus was the promised blessing that God promised would come through the seed of their father, Abraham. But we Christians have minimized obedience as a specific ingredient in the faith by which we are saved.

I remember the parable Jesus told of a man who had two sons—because my father reminded me of this parable a number of times. It haunted him as he watched the trials and tribulations of Christendom. The father said to the first son, “Go work in the vineyard.” The son replied, “No.” But he went and worked in the vineyard. The father said to the second son, “Go, work in the vineyard.” He said, “Yes, dad,” but he did not go. Jesus asked, “Which one did the will of the father?”

Two perceptions capture my interest here. First, Paul tells us that there was considerable benefit in being a physical descendant of Abraham because through his family line came a knowledge of the will of God in the law given through Moses. But second, as Jesus and then Paul made very clear, it is even more important to have Abraham as a spiritual ancestor.

How is Abraham our spiritual ancestor? Because of what went on inside his head? Maybe, just a bit. He believed, but his belief was not just a head-thing. We know Abraham believed because he did something. He left the comfort of home as an old man to obey a command which God gave without even telling him why He gave the command. Abraham believed God; that is, he left home, not even knowing the end point of his destination.

At the time we read of Abraham’s life in Genesis 15 there was very little content to his belief. It was blind trust that God would lead him somehow. We point to our belief in Jesus and all the other things we believe as though this fulfills God’s intentions for all who are heirs of Abraham’s faith.

But we must notice that Abraham worked out his faith day after day for many years. And so must you and I. We get tired, sometimes very tired. I get bone tired, thinking sometimes that Christianity may be an impossibility in the way Jesus taught us. The unfaithfulness of others hurts. Indeed, sometimes it seems Christians use unfaithfulness as a means of hurting others whom they no longer care for. How wearying the chemistry of the Body of Christ can get.

But God never told us we have to feel rested, or that it is bad to feel tired, or that the Body of Christ will always appear ideal. The New Testament picture of the early Church shows a well-flawed Body of Christ. God says to you and me, “Keep on believing and do the deeds that belief causes to happen. Never quit believing; that is, never stop obeying. “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God at work in you to will and to do of His good pleasure.” The same apostle who wrote our salvation is “not of works” said, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

We are so easily distracted. So was Abraham.

When we think of belief we often have a fairly specific idea of what we are to believe. We think we must know of God and Jesus Christ, His Son, correctly. But it is obvious that Abraham knew little of God when he began to obey God. His son knew of God only that this deity was the God of his father, Abraham. And Isaac’s son and his son’s extended family only knew that their God was the God of their fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was not till more than 450 years after Jacob died that God revealed His name to Moses: “I am the Lord.” “Lord” is our English translation of the name of God, too sacred for the Jews to pronounce.

Aspire to be faithful much more than to know the details of God’s identity—details that are simply beyond us to know. Let faithfulness guide you and when your days come to a close, you will see that the God made known to us in Jesus Christ guided you to the extent you were faithful. When our lives are over, God will continue in the next generation what he has begun in ours. I pray God will be known to our children and our children’s children as the One before whom you and I lived in righteousness.

Let us pray: O God, grant that we may so follow you in the life before us, though we cannot see the way ahead. Grant to us to trust you and to obey. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

November 05, 2006

The Truth that Liberates

Leviticus 26: 3-13
John 8: 31-38
November 5th, 2006

A favorite motto at a number of great universities in the western world is drawn from Jesus’ words in our passage today. “You will know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

Why Gothic architecture in so many old university buildings? Well, because of the origins of universities in the monastic and cathedral schools of the Middle Ages. Even great more modern universities like Princeton and Duke reproduce the architecture of the church schools of long ago.

The genius pushing the search for knowledge on a broad front in all these universities traces back to a somewhat shortened form of Jesus’ words which were, “And you will know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Without the word “and,” this is a self-evident principle that is supported by reason. Truth, the product of honest investigation brings freedom to those who live by it. No axe to grind about which we might squabble; just many people honestly going after the evidence. We help each other and rejoice when we come on truth supported by the evidence.

But there is little rejoicing and mutual regard in our troubled world. Is this because we’re not all research scientists? Richard Dawkins argues that it is because religion has thrown the world into a tail-spin. The great battle is between reason and religion, the search for truth against the shackles of religious ideology.

I listened to a video made by Richard Dawkins that illustrates the tragic evidence of ideology as the source of violence and hatred in the world. He interviewed leaders from the primary religions contending for influence in the world and was overwhelmed by the animosity he encountered from them all. I watched the interview with fascination and sympathy. Such ferocious animosity from a Muslim convert from Judaism. Such bland acceptance of tradition by various Jews and Christians in Jerusalem. Then he went to Colorado Springs where he attended worship at Pastor Ted Haggard’s mammoth church. Afterward he interviewed the now scandalized pastor. I thought I would have responded to Dawkins’ challenges very differently. Why the hostility? Why the command to get off church property?

This behavior does not follow from the teaching of the Jesus of whom I read in the New Testament. What is the most basic thing Jesus taught? Many who have come to Jesus say that what drew them was His invitation, “Come, learn of me, because I am meek and gentle of heart and you will find rest.”

Let us get back to the quotation from Jesus with which we began this morning. It actually begins, “And you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” That one word, “and,” that points to what he said before is a very important word.

The word “AND” attaches “you will know the truth and the truth will make you free” to this: “If you continue in my word you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

What did Jesus mean when He said, “If you continue in my word?” What is the word to which Jesus alluded? What does it mean to continue in this word? And what is to be free? At the risk of getting picky I want to pick a bit into what this means as I see it. I am pushed farther and farther back as I follow the trail of the word ‘Word.”

You remember that the Gospel of John starts out describing Jesus Christ this way, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In verse fourteen that we read as the last Scripture each Christmas Eve, John writes with awe and wonder, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

In between we read of this Word, “He was in the world, and the world came to be through Him, and the world did not recognize Him.” I use the word “recognize” instead of “know” that we are used to hearing because the Greek word here is the foundation of our word “recognize.”

I see a thread here. The Word about human behavior—come, learn meekness and gentleness of heart—has something to do with the Word that spoke at creation, causing all things, and the Word that was born at Christmas. How can I possibly prove this remarkable belief? I can’t. But there is something about this that rings true to me.

A thread weaves through the mysterious tapestry of creation, a principle of the connectedness of all life. Biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics to be sure, but also psychology, curiosity about our past--history, languages and the thirst for something that explains the reason for the existence of all the evidence.

John’s Gospel, written long before the explosion of scientific knowledge, tells us that the Son of God played a key role in the physical world and in the unseen spiritual fabric of life—that gives life meaning. “In Him was life and the life was the light of people.” This John writes of this Word that was in the beginning with God.

There is an artificial boundary between spiritual truth and empirical truth. The truth that scientists ferret out in the lab is different from the truth that sets us free in that we can’t discover the truth that sets us free by examining how people think and act. We have to be taught the Truth that sets us free inside. This is part of our dignity and part of our dilemma.

Last year a Korean scientist made up evidence supporting his theory about cloning, a bit of fraud that not only showed reports of his “research” could not be trusted scientifically, but also brought shame to his country? Why shame? Because we must be able to trust the honesty of those who report the evidence uncovered in their research. We tell lies out of the desire for power, or out of fear, or out of embarrassment.

“Continue in my word,” Jesus said to those who wanted to continue learning of Him. Jesus said many things. We point to the sermon on the Mount with all its “blessednesses.” Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are the meek; blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness; blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart.” If we are quietly reflective we see these words are at the foundation of Jesus’ word to us.

I wonder if it were evident that we Christians continued to live, tried hard to live by these words of Jesus if Richard Dawkins would see our way of life needed debunking. Would he see superstition as the foundation of our faith if the most evident part of it were that we were gentle in spirit, un-aggressive in disposition, hungry for goodness, merciful, and pure in heart? If we speak of the Virgin Birth and the Deity of Christ and the bodily resurrection as the heart of our faith, but cannot point to the effect of this on our lives, there is no wonder that honest skeptics say it’s hogwash.

Jesus did not tell us to defend a superstructure of esoteric doctrines as our primary call. He said, “Continue in my word.”

Continuing in Jesus’ word affects your research as much as it affects your attempts to understand theology. Continuing in Jesus’ words affects what we are like as husbands, wives, neighbors, citizens, soldiers, children, athletes, etc., as much as it points us to try to understand what is true about God and the Christian faith.

It is when we continue in Jesus’ word that we will know the truth that sets us free. If we are not continuing in Jesus’ word, we may have a lot of beliefs, but we will not be free in the desirable way Jesus sets us free. We may have political freedom, freedom of action and belief, and all the rest of the external absence of restraint. But within all this external lack of restraint, it is evident we are in bondage to every trait that creates havoc in this world. Fanaticism is no substitute for continuing in Jesus’ word.

Jesus said, “If the Son shall make you free, you will be free indeed.” “Everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.” But if you are continuing in His word, you will not be a slave of sin. If our faith is so consumed with matters of words that we haven’t the energy or motivation to continue in Jesus’ word of life, we have missed the boat.

I envision the church as a community, a sub-set within our culture in which people try very hard to take Jesus at His word. We don’t have everything figured out about the natural world, so we are glad to turn you scientists loose to discover what you can. But meanwhile we will continue to live by Jesus’ word—which is not hard to understand, just hard to do.

How can we continue in Jesus’ word? I am convinced that you and I must first have in mind to do this and want to do it very badly. We must want to continue in Jesus’ way so much that it is a more consuming desire than to be approved by other people—who want us to be like they are.

And in our private determination to stay in the Jesus’ way we must avoid conceit if we see that others don’t share this private discipline. Because when pride comes in we’re out of the Jesus’ mode of life. There is the temptation in everyone who tries hard to look at others and think an unspoken prayer, “I thank you God that I am not like other people, adulterers, unclean, or even like this tax-collector.” The moment any hint of that comes in, we’re off the Jesus’ way.

I pray that Jesus’ word will sink into all of our consciences and infect us: “If you continue in my word, you are indeed my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” We believe this. But we must try to continue in it.

And so we pray to God, “O God, grant to us so to continue in Jesus’ way that we may enjoy the glorious freedom for which you created us. Amen. And then let us not deliberately act contrary to what we pray, and God will grant us what we ask.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 11:35 AM

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

September 24, 2006

Bread, the Staff of Life

Deuteronomy 8: 1-10
John 6: 35-40
September 24th, 2006

This morning I invite you to look carefully with me at a great and mysterious truth that God unfolds for us gradually in the Gospel of John. Jesus said, in the verses we have just read, "I am the bread of life." In the section before this He hinted at this, but did not say this directly. Instead he calls to mind for fellow Jews who knew their Bible well those shaping moments in their history when their forebears were in the wilderness. Forty years they wandered in the desert depending on God for literally everything.

God fed them. God gave them water to drink. God guided them with a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. God protected them.

The bread that God gave them to eat was particularly in Jesus mind as He launched the great teaching about how all of human life is sustained. John does not quote the passage from Deuteronomy that Deb read for us moments ago. But the other Gospel writers tell us that Jesus quoted an important word from that section at the beginning of His ministry. Jesus was weakened by hunger in the desert from a forty-day fast. The devil tempted him to turn some bread-shaped stones into bread. Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy 6 in response: "Do not put the Lord your God to the test," or as we are more used to hearing these words, "Do not tempt the Lord your God."

When the devil persisted, urging Him to try out God's care of Him by jumping from a pinnacle of the Temple Jesus replied, "One does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." It would seem Jesus was still thinking about the bread temptation when He said this. Actually the Hebrew of this verse does not say "every word," but "all" or everything that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord" (kol motsa' pi adonai).

Moses said these things looking back as the end of his life drew near. He reminded his people of the mysterious bread with which God fed them in the wilderness. They called this bread "manna," which sounds like a name of some specialty bread. But when the Israelites first dubbed this bread with this name they were actually asking a question, "What is this?" The name stuck. Ever after this "what is this" was in their minds as a sign of God's provision of the staff of life in a day when there were no fields growing grain in their precincts.

This bread was mysterious in that it didn't really look like bread. The Hebrew word for bread may also be translated "food." This strange food looked flaky like frost, or perhaps like philo-dough; it was white like coriander seed; and it tasted like wafers made with honey. But this was not the whole of its mystery. The Israelites could not plan for tomorrow by gathering up more than enough for day. When Jesus taught us to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," He had in mind the bread that they could only gather enough for one day. Because if left over night the manna was worm infested and spoiled. The psalmist called it "cereal (dagan) from heaven, the bread of powerful ones (lechem abirim)," It came from above as an abundant though mysterious supply from God and gave the strength needed to live.

But Moses also looked forward to the way God would continue to care for them. The way God would care for them didn't have the same kind of mystery to it, but if they stopped to think they would realize how life would simply open up for them.

They would go into a land "flowing with milk and honey." It would be a land with cities ready-made to move into, cities they did not build. They would live in houses they did not construct, filled with things they did not make. They would drink water from wells they did not dig, and eat vegetables from gardens they did not plant. They would drink wine made from grapes that came from vines they did not cultivate. And he had to warn them that as they enjoyed all these benefits that they would not forget the Lord who brought them out of Egypt.

In fact as we look back at God's care of ancient Israel we don't read that He expected them to "believe" in God the way we talk of believing in God. Instead they were not to forget Him. They were to thank Him. They were to fear and obey. And I wonder if these acts of mind and heart that God expected of ancient Israel were the school in which they would learn about belief—which Jesus said was needful to have one's thirst quenched.

I spoke to the children this morning about thanking their parents for the good things they provide—good food, nice looking clothes, toys and so much more. I suggested that in our families when we thank our parents they feel good to be thanked. When this takes place over the years children become the friends of their parents. And so it was for Israel that when they responded to the psalmists' words, "O give thanks to the Lord for He is good; His steadfast love endures for ever," they could remember the story of their past which told of God's care. They would remember and thank Him. They would remember the remarkable manner of God's care and it led them to feel awe before Him. They hopefully remembered to obey Him as they felt awe and gratitude, and thus they were led on to that deeper attitude of heart that the New Testament calls belief.

Belief by nature is exercised toward things unseen. As Hebrews 11: 6 puts it, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." In Old Testament times God's people trusted because they could see God's supply. There were more than visual symbols; there was the actual cloud by day and the actual fire by night to guide them. There was the sudden flow of water when they were thirsty, the morning by morning descent of manna for their food. They got used to things, but there it all was, the daily visual reminder of God's care.

But not so when Jesus came, having emptied Himself of all those visual signs of deity. Now it would take faith that He was who He said He was, who He seemed to be in doing His various signs.

Jesus, on the cusp of revealing the great truths by which all people ever after could find life, looked back to the manna God gave Israel. He taught that that bread, sustaining of life and mysterious in its origin though it was, was not the bread most needed. Israel looked back nostalgically on that bread though at the time it became monotonous so that they complained about it. They complained because it did not fully satisfy. Indeed, it was the most temporary of breads. It was infested with worms and grew stale overnight if they tried to save enough for tomorrow.

There was other bread that really came from above that, if eaten, strengthened the eater with eternal life. "For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world," Jesus said, further tweaking their curiosity. So they asked Him, "Sir, give us this bread all the time." But they little expected the answer that would come.

"I am the bread of life." Yet there was more mystery to come. Jesus did not yet speak of eating this bread, simply of coming to Him as a means of staving off the deep hunger, and believing in Him as a means of quenching the deep thirst.

We often talk of coming to Jesus, and of believing in Him. And we do well because Jesus said to come to Him, particularly if we are weak and heavy laden. He told us that believing in Him was needful to inherit eternal life. But there is something unquantifiable about coming to Him and believing in Him. In a way we don't know when we've really come to Him and not merely to some threshold where Jesus is the subject beyond. We can't see Jesus, after all. Belief is a kind of knowledge, but when it is in someone we cannot see, it is a helpless kind of knowledge. Edith Hamilton referred to this as trust, a word that has less of a knowledge aspect than the word belief.

When Jesus taught of coming to Him and believing in Him it was like two stages along the way to the kind of relationship to Him that He would finally say with all its starkness. Of that I will speak next Lord's Day. Few of us are prepared for this next stage as few were prepared for it in Jesus' day.

How do we come to Jesus and believe in Him so as to receive this life He promised? Why did He call Himself bread?

Because bread is the most basic necessity we have. The word itself in the Old Testament is sometimes used as a synonym for food. Why? Because bread is the most basic of foods. It is made of grain crushed so as to make it digestible and then lumped together and baked. At the Communion service we remember words from a second-century Christian worship order in which we pray, "As the grain was ground . . . let our lives be spent in your service." The bread God gave Israel was not grain-bread but somehow made of coriander seed that was like honey wafers. What a curious description of bread, we think. It was in its curiosity that it suggested the far more marvelous Bread that was born in the House of Bread, which is what Bethlehem means, many years later.

It would have been most appropriate for John to tell us in our passage that Jesus said that as basic as bread is, bread is not the most basic need we have. Indeed, when Jesus wanted to find a suitable metaphor for His life-giving role with us, though He spoke of bread, it was bread unlike any bread anyone has ever eaten.

No wonder there is a reserve in John's Gospel as Jesus taught of the relationship we are to have with Him. Come to Him and have no hunger—but since when does just drawing near to bread satisfy hunger? Believe in Him and you will not thirst, but since when does believing that water is water take away thirst?

And thus we find ourselves in much the same boat as ancient Israel. It struck me how very near Israel's situation we are as it thought of entering the Promised Land. We live in cities we did not personally build, in houses we did not put up. We eat food we did not grow—that is stacked in splendid variety in the grocery stores. We drink wine made from grapes grown in Spain, France, Australia and other far flung places. And all this we are able to buy even with money we do not yet have. How like ancient Israel we are.

And so we must follow the tutorial of faith God gave to Israel. Thank God for everything. Fear Him. Obey His commands. And realizing that this does not draw us as near to Jesus as we need, let us still follow the tutorial of this means of drawing near to God. And in due time Jesus will give us this gift of faith.

Even here there is mystery to God's work with us. Because Jesus said that only those whom the Father draws to the Son will come. Yet, when we think of the story with which all this begins in John 5, where Jesus feeds 5,000 men plus women and children—who came randomly we might say from the surrounding villages and country-side, we realize that Jesus was illustrating how broad is the sweep of God's call. Indeed, how do we know the limits of God's drawing people to His Son? They come hungry and He gives them bread and fish. No, more than that, He gives Himself. Jesus is the Bread of Life. No other bread can be called that because the effects of all other bread are momentary.

I must wait till next Sunday to give the final stage in Jesus' teaching about how we engage Him by faith. But suffice it to say this morning that if we begin with gratitude, awe, and obedience as Israel did, we will surely be led into the stage of belief, by which we apprehend Jesus and find life in Him. These are deeds we must do and not just speak of them.

To speak of gratitude without expressing it is empty. To speak of reverence for God without letting our awe characterize our lives with respect to Him is pointless. To ignore God's command while speaking reverently about them is hypocrisy. The "stuff" that prepares us for faith, a gift of God, is ours to do. It is the means by which we ready ourselves for what God can give. To try to describe this work of God feels strange as I say it. But I perceive this is what happened as God, to use the term of the Apostle Paul, gave the law to be a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. It is for us to accept this tutelage, trusting that it is good, and thus be drawn into that soul-satisfying, life-giving relationship to God that comes only by faith in Jesus.

Let us pray: O Lord, to speak of such hallowed things is beyond us. But grant that so much as we understand of your ways and your expectations of us we may do, so that we may believe in Jesus and thus enter into eternal life. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

September 17, 2006

Perils of the Deep

Jonah 1: 1-6
John 6: 16-21
September 17th, 2006

There is a passage in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” where Brutus offers haunting wisdom to Cassius: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

Does it not sometimes seem to you that your life is lived on the surface of a great deep? We are like little boats headed for some port that we think we know. There are depths to life that every now and then we realize are there; moments we are aware are full of significance.

There come those tides in our lives that carry us along, winds that catch our sails and push us at a pace and in a direction we could not have imagined when we were young. It is important that we set our sails at times when the winds are favorable and set our rudder with the good tide. And sometimes we must fight against the winds and set the tiller at an angle to the tide or life will go ill.

And sometimes there come frightening storms that threaten to drown us. The storms are sometimes due to our mistakes or sins. We made some very bad choices and the consequences blow hard. At other times the storms come completely without our deserving. These storms seem all the more ruthless.

When we face such storms what should we do? The two stories from Jonah and John’s Gospel that we read this morning have to do with these two kinds of storms that come to us. If we will notice there is wisdom for us in both stories.

The two points I would make this morning are these:

First, when our storms are due to our offences or sins in word or deed, we must acknowledge them rather than ignore them, and repent of them before God and before the ones we offended. To repent is to turn away from the wrong that we have done. We must not try to ignore our offenses or blame them on others when they turn out badly. Unrepented of, our sins will certainly become storms or even like hurricanes.

Second, when we have suffered sorrow we are not responsible for, we should take to heart the promise we quote some times on the Lord’s Day from the Heidelberg Catechism. “Whatever evil God sends my way in this troubled life He will turn to my good, for He is able to do it, being Almighty God, and determined to do it, being a faithful Father.” The great promise of this Almighty God-Father is that he will be with us, and that is all we need.

Maybe you wonder why is it that one offense or an accident may cause a tsunami while we have to keep on making good decisions for them to have good effects; and we must have continuous good fortune for good effects to continue? I ponder this too.

Let me begin first with the event described in John’s Gospel. The disciples were crossing the Sea of Galilee at night. Jesus left them alone after the previous day’s feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fish. That gracious deed drained Him. He needed to be refreshed. He withdrew to a mountain by Himself. We can imagine that Jesus needed to be alone to pray, to speak with His heavenly Father, to gather strength for the tests to come.

Perhaps He had told the disciples to meet Him on the other side. So they set the sail of their little craft toward Capernaum. But as often happens when the winds blow across the Sea of Galilee from the surrounding hills, a storm of frightening proportions threatened to capsize them. Then, to make matters scarier still they saw this apparition walking on the water. Was it a ghost? If the water didn’t drown them they’d die of fright. But Jesus spoke, “It is I, don’t be afraid.” And they were glad to take Jesus into the boat with them and thus they reached the shore safely. We’re not told that the storm subsided, but that Jesus got into the boat with them. They were glad to have Jesus with them.

I began this morning’s worship by reminding us all of the promise in the Prophet Isaiah: “Fear not for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine. When you walk through the water I will be with you, and the rivers shall not overwhelm you.” “I will be with you,” the Lord promises us. How often in distress have the word of Psalm 23 surged to mind, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.” That is enough. I am not alone in this. You are not alone. Claim this promise.

The disciples were not responsible for the storm at sea. They did not do wrong to set out when there might be a storm. Presumably Jesus had agreed to meet them on the other side. Yet the storm came and they were at risk.

Perhaps terrible accidents or illnesses have come to you or to loved ones. No one was responsible for the dreadful brain cancer that recently took a young mother in our community of whom I was told this week. The tragic death of three children in the Hockerman family as they returned from holidays last year, hit by a drunk driver comes to mind. They were not responsible for this.

Then I think of the distress that comes with being misunderstood. For example, the speech Pope Benedict gave at the University of Regensburg this past Tuesday, taken so wrong. He spoke to colleagues in a place where he once taught of the importance of the use of reason that we learned from the Greeks. But the illustration he used toward the beginning cited a conversation between a Byzantine emperor and a Muslim academic that focused on the idea of jihad and the will of God. The pope was not impugning Islam. This was not his intent. It is inconceivable that in this highly charged environment he would choose to incite Muslims! He surely had no idea the consequences that would follow his illustration. A frightful flame has been fanned in the Muslim world that results in this peaceful, loving pope being compared to Hitler.

You can think of moments in your life in which you were taken wrong, perhaps falsely accused. A friendship broke over your friend’s taking you entirely differently than you meant. Maybe your reputation took an unearned flogging. It cast a long shadow over your life. Such are the causes of life’s sorrows that make us want to say, “In times like these we need a Savior!”

When events like this happen we look to God. We pray as Jesus prayed, “If it be possible remove this cup from me.” But the answer that comes most often is, “Fear not for I will be with you.” The disciples were glad when Jesus got into the boat with them. Great peace uncannily comes to us when we have cried out to God and recognize that though we’re still in the storm Jesus is there with us in the boat.

But sometimes we earn the storms that come.

Jonah was disobedient to God who told him to go East to Nineveh, but he went west toward Spain. He was told to go tell Nineveh to repent of its sin or suffer dire consequences. He wanted Nineveh to suffer for its cruelty. Assyria was notorious for barbarity towards its enemies. He wanted Nineveh’s doom more than he wanted to obey God, even though his calling was to tell what God told him to say.

We don’t know all that contributed to Jonah’s thinking. Maybe when he mentioned to friends what God told him to do they said, “That’s ridiculous!” Maybe there was a protest from devout Israelites in his village. They thought the way the prophet Habakkuk thought. Why should God favor wicked nations over good nations—that is Assyria over Israel. Only bad should come to Israel’s wicked enemies. It was only reasonable. So Jonah faced peer pressure as well as his own native bias against Nineveh.

But God told Jonah, “Go to Nineveh and tell that wicked city to repent.” But he flat refused. Not only that. He did not stay at home in his refusal; he went the other way. He disobeyed as deliberately as possible. He went down to Joppa and bought a ticket in a boat going the opposite direction, to Tarshish in Spain.

There was an idea the Israelites picked up from peoples who lived around them that the gods were all local deities. Every Baal had its territory. So the Israelites sometimes thought that “the God of Israel” was just the local deity, rather than the Creator of heaven and earth. So Jonah could escape the annoying deity who told him to go to Nineveh by getting out of his territory. It didn’t quite work.

But we know how it came out. The God who spoke to him, the Creator of heaven and earth was every bit as much with him in that boat going to Tarshish as He had been with him in Israel. God goaded him to repent in the most forceful way. A great storm at sea threatened to wreck the ship that took him east. The pagan sailors prayed to their gods as Jonah slept in the hold of the ship. He was momentarily at peace; he had escaped his god’s influence; he was getting away with flaunting God’s will. Just go east, young man, and you can avoid God’s command.

But his peace didn’t last. God taught him a very forceful lesson about repenting of his omnipresence and of his sin of disobedience. The only reasonable thing for the sailors to do with Jonah—he told them—was to toss him overboard because he was the cause of the storm. And so they did.

Jonah found himself in the reeking stomach of a large fish. It stank like crazy. Imagine the company he had in the belly of that leviathan! Everything it had had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner that day was being digested around him! Somehow, like Pinocchio in the whale, he was able to breathe still for three days and three nights before the fish couldn’t stand his company any more. Do you see humor in the story? Not only the sailors but also that great fish could not stand his company! “You make me sick,” it thought. It vomited him up. He found himself on dry land.

Jonah got the point. He reluctantly turned back and went to Nineveh. To his chagrin Nineveh responded to his call for repentance—that came from a prophet who in coming to them was repenting of his own disobedience. The rest of the story you probably know well.

There is a great lesson here. The way back from ours sins against God and against one another is to repent. That is, to admit the wrong we have done and turn from it. We are a proud people, much more apt to stonewall after we know we have offended than to confess our sin and turn from it. We plow on straight ahead. Acknowledging we have done wrong is a sign of weakness—we show that we believe this. Thus we reject the peace of God for ourselves and bring grief to others. Jonah needed to be tossed into the sea and get swallowed by a great fish to get the point. Maybe we need this kind of reminder too.

The truth has surged in my heart in recent years that Christianity seems so much more a matter of believing right than of doing right. It really didn’t matter what Jonah’s theology was if he was disobeying God. It doesn’t matter very much if we have good ideas about the Holy Trinity, about Jesus the Son of God, about the Holy Spirit, about sexual ethics, etc., if we are living in disobedience to God. Bonhoeffer reminded us recently, “To believe is to obey; to obey is to believe.” But we separate obedience from faith because we are getting away with it in our prosperous times.

I think of the line we sing vigorously in Fosdick’s great hymn, “God of grace and God of glory.” “Rich in things and poor in soul.” Thus we may sing cheerfully of ourselves little realizing that the hymn is an appeal to our consciences from God.

When you come down to the bottom line the voyage of life for us all will come to an end. And in the end we look back and see that our storms have a beginning and an ending. It is how we respond to them that matters. Perhaps your storm will end if you confess the wrong, the sin you have done, and turn from it. If you sincerely repent your storm will taper down to a breath of wind. Afterward you will realize that it was a kindness of God that you suffered this consequence of your sin. Your suffering turned you around. Or perhaps you are living in on-going tension inside, in hostility against those who were once your friends because you have not repented of your sin against them. You have not turned around, and you realize you must. Don’t ignore such tuggings of conscience.

Perhaps your storm has come to you unearned. Take comfort in God’s promise that He is with you when you go through the deep water. You are not alone.

God is with us in life’s storms. His kindness is exposed in the storms we have caused, urging us to turn around, to repent and be reconciled. His kindness is exposed in the peace He gives us in the storms that have come “undeserved.” Of course, most of the tragic things that happen cannot be thought of in terms of deserving or not deserving. It is a troubled world we live in. But God presides over this world for good. It belongs to Him.

O Lord God, grant us in the storms of life to see more clearly that You are always near us, and then so to live, responding to your voice, taking comfort in your presence. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

September 10, 2006

Jesus’ Idea of Enough

I Kings 17: 8-16
John 6: 1-15
September 10th, 2006

This account of Jesus’ feeding the five thousand is one of the most thought-provoking stories in the Gospels. All four Gospels tell it. But only John’s Gospel points out the details that make the human element in the story really vivid. And John points us toward the great truth that Jesus is the bread of life who really satisfies our hungry souls if we will feast on Him.

What grabs our attention in the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand with a shepherd boy’s lunch may be the miracle, the outward sign of Jesus power. Or perhaps we notice the shepherd boy himself, offering his little lunch that is more than enough in Jesus’ hands to do all He needs to do. I want to focus on this second obvious lesson of this story.

But first we need to see that this feeding story is just an introduction to a greater truth. The most important point of the story is that Jesus Himself is the bread of life. Jesus fed the five thousand around the time of Passover when bread is an important part of the meal. But now there was no bread in this wilderness place where they all were when they should have been getting ready for Passover. Jesus reminded them afterwards that God provided manna when their ancestors were in the wilderness. This manna had to serve them as the Passover bread because there was no other kind of bread available in the wilderness.

Passover and God’s feeding Israel with manna in the wilderness were only illustrations--just like His feeding the five thousand—of a greater truth—that Jesus is the one who satisfies the hungry heart.
After this Passover there would be other Passovers. After God fed the Israelites manna in the wilderness they were hungry for a greater variety of food, and after they entered Canaan, the manna ceased. After Jesus fed the five thousand with the little boy’s lunch, they were hungry by the end of the day. They needed something more—the Bread of Life Himself—Jesus. This is the great point of this story.

This section of John’s Gospel ends by letting us know we need to feed on Jesus. Then as now there were those who thought it scandalous that all they really needed was to feed on Jesus. Religion demands of us much more than this. How many matters we crowd into our idea of what we need to do to be truly Christian. “Come to me all who are weak and heavy laden,” Jesus says. We need to be weak, tired, hungry, and heavy laden to want to come to Jesus. Perhaps it is hard to eat of Jesus if we are not weak, tired, hungry and heavy laden. Some of His followers left Jesus when they heard they had to eat of Him. We too are easily distracted from feeding on Jesus. Maybe we’re not tired enough, not heavy laden enough to need Him this way.

Let’s get back to the story. It is good to remember to begin again where Jesus began with a little boy and with His disciples and with many others among the five thousand who quietly watched Him that day. Because in this beginning Jesus guides us in how we are to think of ourselves as well as of Him.

This story is dear to me because it reminds me of a poignant moment in my early ministry. Not long after I began my first Presbyterian pastorate in Brookston, the children’s choir director position was open and there was no one to fill it. So I offered to give it a try. Years before I had started a little band when I taught at an orphanage in North Carolina. Now I would try my hand as children’s choir director. I had around fifty kids

I was fortunate to have an excellent accompanist in the mother of one of the little girls in the choir. We decided to do a musical as our big project. We found a musical based on this story called “The Boy Who Had a Fish.” The musical needed a few soloists and a good chorus, so my first task was to pick out the soloists. Since I was new to the church I was given advice by those who knew the kids well. I was told that there would be a very eager little boy who would want to sing, but he shouldn’t bowl me over with his eagerness because he couldn’t carry a tune.

Well, I discovered who this little boy was soon enough. True enough, the little fellow wandered all over Robin Hood’s forest when he sang. What a joyful noise he made unto the Lord! On pursuing this a bit farther I discovered it was because nobody had wanted to squelch his cheerful little personality by making him stick to the notes. But his loud wandering voice was a hazard in the chorus; he distracted others from the tune. So I sat down with the little guy and said he had to stick to the tune. He looked at me with bewilderment. The tune? What’s that? So we helped him know what the tune was. Lo and behold, it soon became evident that this little fellow was the obvious male lead.

So the little boy with apparently small musical gifts but a willing heart became the star of the show in a musical about a boy who brought his small lunch to Jesus to feed five thousand people.
The little that we have if we offer it for Jesus to use is plenty. It is more than enough in God’s hands.

We wish we knew a lot more about this unnamed little boy. How did he happen to have a lunch while nobody else did? Was he inadvertently in that place as he tended his sheep? Or was he in the crowd, the only one who brought a lunch? Did he become a follower of Jesus after this? Was he important in the early days of Christianity?

We can hardy imagine Jesus’ disciples compelling him to give up his lunch. We imagine him giving it willingly. We wish we knew his name.

The only two names we learn are the two disciples who doubt that his little lunch was enough to do any good. He had only five barley pita-type breads and two small fish. Barley was poor people’s grain. Philip told Jesus helpfully, “Two hundred days wages worth of bread would not be enough to give everyone a little bit to eat. So what is this among so many?” It’s good to have practical questions asked when we make our plans, isn’t it? A good dampening bit of common sense wisdom is so valuable is it not when we attempt great things?!

Then Andrew chimes in that he’d found this lad with the little lunch, “But what are these among so many?” And this is the last Andrew and Philip are quoted in the Gospels. I think you and I might like to have remembered that what we said last was a bit more profound than what Philip and Andrew said at this pivot moment in Jesus’ ministry. It wasn’t that they didn’t have faith in Jesus. After all, they left all to follow Him. But in this moment that squeezed their credibility they thought the obvious thoughts.

We must have lots of food to feed lots of people. Didn’t Jesus once teach that we should count the cost before setting out to build a building? Before setting out to feed five thousand people make sure you have enough food!

But in matters of faith what is obvious is not always right. “God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform,” William Cowper taught us to sing. “Deep in unfathomable mines of never ending skill, He treasures up His bright designs and works His sovereign will.” It’s a lesson Jesus wanted His disciples to learn as they watched Him face this impossible situation—thousands to feed and only a little lunch to do it with. And we have something to learn of this too. Expect the unexpected from Jesus.

He looked up as though it were an ordinary table meal with an ordinary family gathered round. He gave thanks, “Blessed are You, O Lord, King of the universe, who brings forth food from the earth.” And then He broke first the bread, and then the fish. And He kept on breaking it and it kept on multiplying. On and on He broke the bread and fish until His disciples fed perhaps as many as twelve thousand hungry people. There were five thousand men plus women and children.

I think it is simply disingenuous to think that Jesus did not actually do as the Gospels tell us. The “miracle” was not that everyone shared what they had, or some such evasion of this Divine deed of multiplication. There was no sign if there was not a “miracle.” But the point of the sign was not that Jesus could miraculously feed great numbers of people with physical bread and fish. Jesus was the point of the sign, for which the miracle was what people could see.

What did the sign point toward? It is possible to see it pointing in various ways. First, it was a sign that Jesus could do an act of God because He was God. Second, the bread was a sign of satisfying life’s most basic need. This need is not the bread itself that sustains physical life. The need is for Him who is the Bread of eternal life, of that life that enshrouds all life, that gives it the meaning which all of us need. Third, here was a sign that Jesus will take the little we have and multiply its usefulness.

What does Jesus expect of us? I wonder if Jesus would point us back to this story at the start of His ministry—about a boy with his noon meal that He gave for Jesus to use.

As He neared the end of His ministry he told a story about three servants to whom the master gave a “little,” though the little seems like an awful lot to us. It was “little” because by comparison with God’s wealth it was as insignificant as the little boy’s lunch in the face of the hunger of a vast throng. But to us the sums Jesus mentioned seem a ot of money. Perhaps a lot of money in human terms is mentioned because it takes a lot of money to catch our attention. Jesus expected these three servants to put to good use the “little” they had when he was away.

To one servant He gave five talents—which is roughly a lifetime’s worth of earned income. To the second he gave two talents—about what he would earn by age forty-five. And to the third he gave one talent---about ten-year’s income. Each of them had a lot more responsibility than the little boy did with his lunch.

The master returned to see how his servants had done. The first servant had doubled the sum equal to a lifetime of his work. “Well done, good and faithful servant,” the master said. “You have been faithful with a little; I will give you much responsibility. Enter into the joy of your master.” How interesting that the master should consider a lifetime of work just a little. A lifetime of faithfulness is still just a little in the big picture.

The second servant he found had taken his income earned till age forty-five and increased the value to ninety year’s worth of income. Again the master said, “You have been faithful with a little. I will give you much responsibility.” And the master welcomed into his inner circle of joy with the other servant.

The third servant who had been given the equivalent of ten year’s worth of income to use perhaps thought that his amount of money wasn’t very much by comparison with the other two servant’s responsibility. Being very conservative, he hid the money so he could give it back and not lose any of it. With confident look he approached the master with the full sum intact, unused. He heard a very different word from his master. “You wicked and slothful servant. You know I reap where I have not sowed and gather where I have not winnowed grain; why didn’t you at least invest it and get a bit of interest?” And the master condemned that fearful, lazy servant. “Cast him out into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Why the weeping and gnashing of teeth? Because in the outer darkness the question will be asked with great sorrow, “Why didn’t I use what I was given? Why did I hoard it, stashing it away so that it was useless? If only I had!!!”

The little boy with his lunch used not for his own benefit ended up with twelve baskets full of bread and fish to take home to mom and dad. Maybe you and I think what God has given us is more like the little boy’s lunch than like even the ten year’s worth of money invested in the faithless servant. I think there are many Christians who feel insignificant with their gifts, and so they think more in terms of survival in life than in terms of usefulness.

Then we hear about some people like the tiny Albanian nun we know as Mother Theresa used her frail body, her poverty, and immense heart to bring hope and healing to thousands of the most wretched people in Calcutta, India. And her gift of herself was multiplied as thousands of young women joined her Sisters of Mercy, bringing hope and the Gospel to thousands of other wretched people in other parts of the world.

Millard Fillmore, now known worldwide as the founder of Habitat for Humanity, came from humble beginnings in Alabama. Full of ambition he became a millionaire by age twenty-nine. But as his business prospered, his health, integrity and marriage failed.

He gave his life to the Lord, reconciling with his wife. He sold all they had and poured the money into caring for the poor. He went to Koinonia Farm a Christian community near Americus, Georgia, where he learned from Clarence Jordan how to apply Jesus’ teaching to life. In 1974 he moved to Zaire to test his idea of building affordable housing for the poor. And thus began what we know as Habitat for Humanity that now provides housing for thousands of people who would not otherwise have a home—in Jesus’ name.

What comparable stories in miniature abound where people come to Jesus, feed on Him, and then use their little lunches or what seem to us their great resources in Jesus’ name. I wonder what awaits the world through the ministry of this congregation when we have felt weary enough, hungry and needy enough to come to feed deeply on Jesus to find rest—to take on us His light yoke—and thus find the peace our hearts long for. Taking on Jesus’ light yoke is something to carry. The “something” is what we have been given for a high purpose.

I began today reminding our children how God used some children in Bible times—Samuel, the only child of a childless old lady, and David, the shepherd boy, and then the unnamed boy who brought his five loaves and two small fish to Jesus. What has God placed in our hands to use that will not only do much good in a hurting world, but also bring Jesus to others who are starving for Him?

Let us pray: O Lord, thank you for what we have to use. Grant us to use what we have to bring people to Jesus and thus to bring healing to our troubled world. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

September 03, 2006

The Evidence for Trust in Jesus

Deuteronomy 18: 15-22/John 5: 30-47
September 3rd, 2006

This morning we have listened to two very striking passages from the Bible, first from Deuteronomy where Moses promises that God will provide another prophet like him. And the question that looms over the years since Moses lived is, “Who was that prophet? Or maybe, “Has that prophet come yet?” We Christians believe Jesus was that one who was actually far more than a prophet. Indeed we take pride in this and ask why everyone doesn’t.

The second passage from the Gospel of John shows us Jesus involved in discussion with fellow Jews about His credibility. What is the evidence that He was legitimate—that is, that in healing on the Sabbath He did the work of God? Was He the one about whom Moses and many other prophets spoke?

Whose testimony should they believe? They looked to current opinion. Jesus pointed out to them that they accept the authority of those who speak on their own authority. Teacher such and such said this so we accept what he says. Nicodemus probed beneath the opinion of the teachers of his day and so he came to Jesus by night to see Jesus for himself. He knew his Bible. He came to see that there was more to Jesus than met the eye of his contemporaries.

John the Baptist believed Jesus was the Lamb of God who came to take away the sins of the world. Should they believe John the Baptist who spoke so glowingly of Him? They didn’t, though all admired John.

Jesus said there were three “evidences” they should believe. First, his works, second, God the Father, and third, the Scriptures. Let us consider these three evidences shortly.

These two passages—from Deuteronomy and the Gospel of John--that point us to Jesus prodded me to ask the question, “What is the evidence for trust in Jesus?”

We can take that question in two ways. First, we might take it as Josh McDowell intended in his well-known book, Evidence that Demands a Verdict. That is, what is the historical and biblical evidence pointing to Him that should compel us to trust in Him?

Second, we might take it from the other angle, “What is the evidence that I trust in Jesus?”

In large measure I think the second question is the most important. Because Jesus is not on trial before us. We have come to treat matters of faith as a great trial with the world as the jury. Christianity is the defendant along with Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and all the other religions that compete for followers. Which one is right? In a way we seem to think that the one that gets the most votes wins. We are big into statistics, you know—democracy however, doesn’t work in matters of faith.

How many members in a religion marks its “success” after all. We’re big into numbers. So we’re worried that Islam is gaining so fast, and Mormonism, and as Presbyterians we worry at the loss of members that many of us think is indicative of something grim. Thus we see external evidence as a clue to what’s going on.

But over and over again the Bible makes plain that it is what’s going on in the human heart that matters. The prophet Isaiah grabs me: “This is the one to whom I will look, the one that is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.” This puts the focus squarely on the individual. God looks through the institutions we establish in our structuring of what is right, often informed by what we are accustomed to. He probes past all of this to the heart of the one who will find Him only if this one seeks Him with all her heart.

Belief, obedience to God’s ways, faithfulness in following Jesus happens one person at a time. And this is the evidence that is either there or not there that we have trusted in Him.

Although I believe it is certainly important that we speak what is true about Jesus so that people may know rightly of him, it is far more needful that we live what is true. And this is what I hope you may consider deeply in your heart. Not just how I or anyone argues persuasively that Jesus fulfills prophecy, or that He was the Son of God—an idea we do not, indeed CANNOT understand. But what you and I can understand if we evidently trust Jesus because we take His word to heart, and try earnestly to live what He teaches us.

We have erred in the terms we use. A teaching we may learn and then recite. So we refer to Jesus’ teachings as lessons learned in school, from a book. But if Jesus’ teachings are not just information but commands that must be obeyed from the heart they take on a different cast. We are compelled to obey commands from our legal system that seem to have immediate consequences if we disobey, but what about commands that don’t have immediate consequences? Jesus’ commands don’t have immediate punishment if we disobey them.

If each time we did not perform according to the golden rule, doing unto others as we would have them do to us, there was an immediate punishment—say a severe headache, or an immense pang of guilt, we might get the idea that this is a command. And we would start to take note of how we are treating others, lest we get a horrid headache or a severe dose of guilt. If each time we did not feed the hungry that we are able to feed, or clothe an insufficiently clothed person in the dead of winter that we could clothe, or deliberately go to the prisons to care for the Jesuses that are incarcerated, or care for the lonely sick in hospital—we received a severe headache or a horrendous pang of guilt, then we might realize that the commands of Jesus were indeed COMMANDS.

But this does not happen. We become accustomed to disobedience in the particulars of Jesus commands. We disobey without remorse because we do not receive immediate punishment. Jesus will not force us to obey Him. The church doesn’t dare. We’ve tried to follow Scripture in this. What happens is that folk simply go elsewhere.

Obedience must come from the heart, out of love for Him. And we know that we love Jesus if His commands are so important to us that we obey them. And if we do obey from the heart there is a luminous quality to our lives that starts to glow.

Indeed, it is more than a clever statement to say that the only book about Jesus that people can understand is the book of your life and mine. How many have been turned off by Jesus Christ by the Bible? A lot of folk talk about the Bible who have never read it. But they have read your life and mine. And their opinions of the Bible are often based on what they have read in your life and mine.

So the great question is, “What is the evidence that you and I trust in Jesus?”

The objective of faith is to bring the human heart into the ways of God. And by heart we mean the whole life. You can tell what a person really believes by what he does, much more than by what he says.

But it is our duty to try to understand what Jesus said about why we should trust in Him—as the beginning point of showing we trust in Him.

In John’s Gospel we read this morning that there were these three evidences: first, His works, second,
God the Father’s witness, and third, the Scriptures.

There were those in Jesus day who were struck by His works.

Thus word of Jesus got to Josephus, the first century Jewish historian who was born shortly after Jesus was crucified said of Jesus something like this:

At that time there arose Jesus, a wise man, if one should call him a man. For he was a performer of marvelous works, a teacher of those who receive the truth with pleasure. And he won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. It was said of him, ‘This was the Christ.’ When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by the foremost men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who first loved him did not cease. For he appeared to them again alive on the third day, the prophets having foretold these things and many other marvels about him. And even now the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has not disappeared.

Wow! Josephus seemed to know all that was most important about Jesus. He even knew that the Hebrew Bible foretold Jesus’ coming.

Indeed many people were amazed at His works, who never got beyond wanting Him to do more and more of them. After all, when He fed them they didn’t have to work hard for their food. And if He healed them, they felt much better. But they never saw past the signs that He did to believe in Him.

Then there was the testimony of God the Father. How were they to pick up on this if they could not hear God the Father’s voice? Jesus noted, “His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen.” But the one witness of the Father they did have they neglected. “You do not have his word abiding in you.” What was this word? I think this word must refer to the witness of history, the witness that came through daily life of the insufficiency of sacrifices they offered to do what they longed to do when they offered them faithfully. Each time a father brought the family to the Temple to sacrifice a lamb there must have been the feeling, “There has to be more to loving God than this.” There must have been the sense that God wanted more than to see a lamb die. They offered sacrifices out of duty, while their hearts longed for God. And their need could only be satisfied if the object of their desire was a person rather than a strange, mysterious, illusive, hidden God. Their very sense of lack testified to the One who would satisfy them when they saw Him.

But when this One came, they didn’t realize He was the One. There is an inertia in the human heart. We are trapped in custom. Even we who claim to have seen Jesus are trapped in our customs so that we know the word, know the story of Him, but He may not have penetrated into our hearts.

The third witness was the Hebrew Bible. How so? Subtly, mysteriously the witness of the Father comes through as we read even the Hebrew Bible. We examine all its parts and can see it points to a final blessing to the world. Not just monotheism, but a person—one like Moses, no—better than Moses. Because their ancestors hardly received Moses with respect. His reputation far exceeded how Moses was received in His own day. He was rejected, often treated with contempt. God had to protect Moses from his own people’s rebellion.

There is not time to suggest how all the Old Testament pointed to Jesus. Nor is this needful because what is important is not encyclopedic knowledge of the fact of Jesus, but submission to the will of Jesus.

As Jesus said that His judgment was just because it was not His will but the will of the One who sent Him, so you and I can expect that we have to get beyond our own will to do His will. We have tried to blend our strong wills with impressions of what it is to be a Christian, and it doesn’t work. Only if in your day to day life, and in my day to day life we deliberately ask, “Lord, what is your will?” will we ever know His will. Asking God’s will is 99% of the battle of life.

How the Church is hurt by our strong wills, what we want very much, not having asked with all our hearts, “Lord, what is your will?” of everything we say and act upon. A proof that the Church is of Divine institution perhaps, is that it has survived despite the chaos of strong wills by which we are torn.

This is why it is evident that the key evidence that will be persuasive to the world that Jesus is worthy of trust is that we have trusted His will for us—that we seek His will as the guiding principle of our lives. This is so uncommon, and its results are so full of grace, that the truth will come through—the great truth by which we show we have been saved. Saved from what? Saved from ourselves. Saved from our fighting conflict of wills by which the harmony in the Church is evident.

As we take the Lord’s Table this morning, as you hold that bread and cup in your hand will you, in your heart say with honesty, “Lord, let your will be my will.” If you and I do this often enough we start to believe and seek what we pray for. The world waits for us who say we trust in Jesus to show evidence that we actually do.

Let this begin this morning. Let this begin again tomorrow morning. Let this begin across the body that gathers here today. And I wonder what will be the effect as others see the evidence that we trust in Jesus.

Let us pray. O Lord, grant to us to trust in Jesus in whom we say we trust. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

August 27, 2006

Our Final Destiny

Isaiah 26: 19-21 / John 5: 25-29
August 27th, 2006

This morning I would like to remind us all what Jesus says about our final destiny. Jesus addresses the subject of our final destiny after making clear His unity with the Father. What He taught was the will of the Father and completely His will too. Though it is said of Jesus in John 3: 17 that He did not come to condemn the world, here we see it is His task to judge people whether they have spent their lives in good or in evil. He did not come to condemn, but He will judge. Though Jesus died for our sins we are accountable for them and there is a reward that comes from doing good—resurrection to life.

Often when we think of the resurrection we wonder about the state of those who have died as babies or as old people. What will be their resurrected form? But this presumes they will be judged good rather than evil so that they rise to life rather than to condemnation.

To us it seems strange to speak in these terms because we Reformed Christians gratefully emphasize that we are justified freely by God’s grace. It is not by works that we are saved. So what do we make of this teaching of Jesus, echoed by the Apostle Paul in Romans 2: 5-6--“. . . when God’s righteousness is revealed He will render to every man according to his works.”

At no point do we reflect the nature of God more than in our claiming His prerogative to judge. It is not our right, but we judge. Why? Because imbedded in us is an awareness of the difference between right and wrong. But it is the blight of our humanity that we persistently act as jury and judge without the benefit of knowing the facts. We assume we know even the motives of one another, and our judgment is sometimes harsh when what we see collides with our standard of what ought to be.

Our “justice” is distributed sometimes ruthlessly. We speak of one another in ways that show little mercy. Thus with a word we may destroy the perception of a person’s character. We break friendships—both our own, and as a consequence of what we said the friendships of others. This despite saying we believe we should follow Jesus who taught us not to judge one another—in the way we do, and that we would be judged by the judgment we extend. This despite how we pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” How we should hope and pray God turns a deaf ear to that prayer!

It was in response to this bizarre moral flaw that Jesus told the little story about the man with a log in his eye hot and bothered by someone with a splinter in his eye? We should laugh nervously at this story, we who are irate at the fragments of wood we see in others’ eyes.

We are a society fixated with judgment. The TV programs having to do with courts and crime and prisons suggest there is a great market for this. Indeed, I am puzzled that in a country that may nearly claim “Amazing Grace” as a second national anthem, we are graceless toward those who offend. Our system is pitiless towards the poor. Once accused the poor are with little hope to escape punishments that crush them. There are several hundred thousand more people in our prisons than in China’s prisons, though their land is much larger than ours and we do not think of China as a model of justice. I grieve when I think of stories I know that are part of this sad part of American life.

The justice of God in the Old Testament was severe, but it was accurate. When we read the sanctions of the covenant God made with Israel in the Book of Deuteronomy there are severe curses for offending God’s law and blessings for keeping it. We hear often the stereotype of a harsh God in the Old Testament who contrasts with a mild Jesus in the New testament. But as severe as the Old Testament could often be, its penalties did not reach beyond death. And the economic factor was intentionally kept out of the justice system. A poor person was not more liable to be punished than a rich person. A rich person could not escape justice by having a clever attorney.

Jesus’ judgment, by contrast with the justice of God displayed in the Old Testament affects the soul. Remember that we just read Jesus’ words about resurrection of life for those who do good, but resurrection of judgment for those who have done evil. This is justice meted out after death for everyone, because everyone will be raised after death. Elsewhere Jesus spoke of the condemned going “into eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

Nor was this only one-time that Jesus spoke of condemnation. Jesus told enough parables of judgment to let us know that judgment was much on His mind. Remember the parable of the farmer (sower) who, on the way to the field had seed drop on various kinds of ground. The various kinds of ground represent the various kinds of people who hear the Gospel. All get the same Gospel seed but only those in whom the Gospel seed finds root is there any benefit. We who have placed such importance on hearing the Gospel and on noticing the immediate response to hearing the Gospel need to remember the warning Jesus gave in this story. Has the Gospel taken root in your life?

How do we know if the Gospel has taken root? Not by all the ideas that we think are important but by the life that proceeds from our belief. As Bonhoeffer told us, echoing the Apostle Paul, “To believe is to obey; to obey is to believe.” But we have commonly separated belief from obedience, so afraid are we of suggesting that we are saved by what we do rather than by grace. We have virtually answered Paul’s question, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” not by saying yes. But we have a meager idea of sin so that we may sin with self-approval.

I hear Jesus’ stunning words so often as I think of these things, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day [the day of the great harvest] many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, I never knew you go away from me, you evildoers.’”

Remember Jesus taught that the world was like a field in which weeds and good grain grew together. At the great harvest Jesus said in a parable, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” In this parable the weeds imagine that because they are in the same field with the wheat that they are wheat, and will be one day nestled with the wheat in barns. Jesus said it is otherwise for them.

This is in the Bible that we profess to believe, that we claim has authority over us. Thus teaches the Jesus in whom we say we trust.

What is it to do the good? Remember that goodness has to do not only with specific deeds that we may call good, but with the intentions of the heart. Jesus said, “Don’t do your good deeds so as to be noticed by others.” Perhaps there are those who would point to “good” that they do that God does not see as good at all, but more like showing off. If you and I are capable of doing great good and we do only a small good, is this goodness?

And what about evil? What you and I may judge as evil may have no regard to the circumstances in which the “evil” was done by someone. In our courts of law there are mitigating factors that are taken into consideration. Years ago I was subpoenaed to come to a trial in St. Petersburg to give testimony of mitigating factors in considering again whether a condemned man, Amos King, should be executed. In fact, he was executed, I regret to say, when he was unfairly tried. Though the courts admitted he didn’t get good representation at the sentencing phase of his trial, they wouldn’t admit that the same lawyer represented him in the trial itself. This lawyer was ill and would shortly die of his illness. Meanwhile he was emotionally involved in another trial so that he had not much interest in representing Mr. King.

We trust that our sense of justice is a fraction of God’s sense of justice. So that God looks for mitigating factors where we do not. “To whom much is given much is required,” the Bible teaches. To whom much less is given less is required.” Jesus said this. Jesus said, “The slave who knew what his master wanted, but . . . did not do what was wanted will receive a severe beating. But the one who did not know and did what deserved a beating will receive a light beating.” How much do we know? How much ought we to know who have these multiple translations of the Bible before us? Jesus prayed on the cross, “God forgive them for they know not what they do.” Here is an exhibit of God’s fairness in Jesus’ prayer.

How unlike our justice this is. How unlike the justice we administer to one another. We get it in our minds to condemn someone without asking questions of mitigating factors, or even if we understand what the person did. Yet we feel ill-used if we are treated in this way.

So what hope have we? I am comforted by the development in Jesus’ teaching that we start to see in John 6, the chapter after this present one. There Jesus gives this remarkable teaching that many of his followers found offensive, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.” Jesus was not teaching cannibalism, as these words suggest. Instead He said this after making clear that He was the bread of life. He became as explicit as human language can allow in teaching that His body, indeed His flesh, was more life-giving than the manna the Israelites ate in the wilderness years. Without it they would have starved. But that manna meant more than they knew.

That manna, a direct gift of God that fell new each morning, was a foretaste of the gift of God in sending His Son, our Lord Jesus. And we must as surely take Him into us as the Israelites had to eat the manna for it to do them any good. How do we do this since we cannot actually eat Jesus and drink His blood? How bizarre the very idea seems!

Jesus pointed toward the cross when He would sacrifice Himself willingly for the sins of the world. By trusting in Jesus, that is not only believing that He died for our sins, but by entering fully into following Him in whom we say we trust, we are eating His flesh and drinking His blood. When we eat something it comes into us and is transformed into healthy bodies. When Jesus enters into us by faith an analogous transformation takes place in us. As Paul put it, “The old passes away; the new has come.” Actually Paul says this of those who are “in Christ,” which is the mirror image of Jesus being in us.

So we who know we do evil and who merit the wrath of God for doing evil, come to Jesus and discover two things:

First, we discover that He makes us want to do good. He makes us want to follow Him, denying ourselves, taking up our crosses and following Him. That’s hard work. That’s a totally demanding way of life. But since Christianity is not a matter of mere words but of a life, if we have trusted in Jesus this becomes our way of life.

Second, we realize that as hard as we try, we cannot be perfect so as to deserve God’s good gift of eternal life. Even if we start being perfect after trusting in Jesus, there is the residue of the past that we must account for, when we did not do the good we knew to do, but chose to do evil instead. So the free gift of God engulfs our sinful selves, giving us what we cannot earn, eternal life. We discover that it is all of grace, all of God’s generous heart, that we are forgiven and accepted in His beloved embrace. It is gratitude for what we have been forgiven that adds fuel to the flame of our desire to live as though we have one agenda in life, to follow Jesus.

Thus we hear Jesus’ summary of God’s intention for us and it becomes our great desire in life. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.”

Is it evident you love God this way? Is it evident that you love your neighbor as yourself? Do you wish you did, if you do not? Do you wish it so much that you are obviously trying—which is an indicator of those who really believe? If not, listen again to what Jesus said about the two-fold resurrection that awaits all people. For some, those who do good, it will be a resurrection to life and for others, those who do evil, it will be a resurrection to condemnation. What resurrection awaits you?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself.

Let us pray: O Heavenly Father, we are grateful that you have created us in your image and likeness, and have equipped us to do your will and to follow Jesus who loved us as you do so that He died for our sins.” Grant to us the desire to trust in Jesus, to follow Him in gratitude, and to come to the end of our days where we may enjoy the resurrection to life that comes to those who do your will as Jesus did. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

August 13, 2006

The Badge of Jesus?

Joshua 5: 10-15
John 5: 19-24
August 13th, 2006

One week ago yesterday Bonnie and I drove to the gate of the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. There an envelope awaited us that had a parking pass for the week. Not cheap! Inside at the “Will Call” booth was another envelope that contained our tickets to many events and a week’s free lodging at Presbyterian House, one of the most hospitable guesthouses I’ve ever encountered. But what awaited me at the desk at Presbyterian House I found down right intriguing as I pondered its effect over the course of the week. I was given a badge to wear on my shirt that said, “Chaplain, Presbyterian House.”

This elegant place is right beside the amphitheater where large musical events and lectures take place. It is also the place where many people come for coffee after the regular morning religious service. It was my duty to stand on the porch wearing my badge and welcoming the folk who streamed onto the porch for cocoa-laced coffee and conversation. People saw my badge and many gravitated over to speak with me. People I met in the morning coffee hours had read about me in the Chautauqua paper, which wrote about me squeezing the last drop of audacious praise that might be found in my resume.

I was, I read in the paper, a distinguished authority on Josephus, the Jewish historian. That accolade, questionable though it might be, drew me into conversations with many folk who’d heard of Josephus and took opportunity to know more of him. I could go on and on giving anecdotes of how that badge that said, “Chaplain, Presbyterian House” paved the way for my exposure to very many people last week.

As the week wore on and this impression sunk in I lay on my bed one night pondering this morning’s Scripture texts. I wondered how things might have been different for Jesus if he’d worn a badge that identified him alluringly as the Presbyterian House Chaplain badge opened doors for me. What could the badge of said? Maybe, “Incarnate Son of God?” Nobody would know what that meant, and many would accuse Jesus of either insanity or blasphemy. What kind of badge could Jesus have worn that would have opened for Him the avenues to peoples’ hearts that my badge afforded me?

Jesus wasn’t into wearing badges. Indeed, it has always been God’s way to go the opposite route with His agents of redeeming the human heart. Moses had a speech impediment that the Hebrew Bible describes grotesquely: “a man with uncircumcised lips.” He was meek in disposition, hardly an asset when trying to claim the interest of people who are more drawn to extroverts.

I think of Abraham who at seventy-five years of age was told to leave everyone he knew and go where nobody knew him and in unknown places be faithful to follow God’s next direction. He had to trust that this God who was newly revealed to him was not a figment of his imagination. And thus Abraham privately obeyed the voice of command that nobody could hear except him.

In the Book of Joshua this morning we read of this unidentified warrior that appeared before Joshua. Joshua, the under-study of Moses in the late wilderness years no doubt had all the self-confidence of most second-string players. He challenges this numinous figure, “Are you friend or foe?” And in a very brief moment he discovers he’s in the presence of a messenger of God. In the Old Testament sometimes the messenger of God turns out to be an appearance of God. But these appearances never came with the One appearing wearing a badge, an identification. It was their inward identity, who they were in their solitary character that was the medium God used.

And so it was when Jesus came. We who now read the New Testament have in mind all the things that have been said about Jesus long after he walked the dusty roads of Palestine. We have in mind the Nicene Creed’s description of Him: “God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made.” It is a badge of honor we assume is attached to His clothing from the moment of His birth. When shepherds and wise men came to Him in His infancy, they saw not a mere human baby, nursing His mother, or a lad helping His father in the carpenter shop of Nazareth later on; we imagine they saw God incarnate and knew it.

But they didn’t. Mary kept things in her heart and pondered them, but very few others had any inkling that they should ponder anything more about Jesus than they pondered about any other young man on the street. Jesus’ “badge” was entirely self-contained. It was hidden in His heart.

I read the words Jesus said of Himself in the section of John’s Gospel this morning and realize nobody then would have read them as we do. All of this about His close relationship to His heavenly Father seems to us very wonderful. Here Jesus lets us into His great secret. Here Jesus finally exposes how His Incarnate Deity works; His will and the will of the Father are in perfect synch, as we would expect the will of Persons of the Holy Trinity to be. But we think this because we’ve seen Jesus’ badge. We believe about Him already such amazing things.

After all, Isaiah foretold He would be “mighty God, the everlasting Father;” we remember this every Christmas when we hear those words of prophecy again. It makes no difference to us that Jesus didn’t look at all mighty as He endured the hate and rejection that led Him to the cross. It doesn’t matter to us that He was Son and not the Father, as we think of the Trinity. We see the badge of Deity fastened on Jesus and it is because we see this badge that we take in stride all the grand things said of Him in the New Testament.

But when we do this, do we not put Jesus up on a pedestal where we venerate Him out of any real usefulness to us as a guide to the kind of life that is God’s intention for us? We have created our elaborate doctrines of Christ that put our stamp of worship on Him, while the Jesus that really walked this earth depended completely on what was within Him, that surging faithfulness to the will of the Father that made Him go from Bethlehem’s manger to Golgotha’s cross.

And since we’re so fascinated with the badge of Deity that Jesus wears we have spent a lot of energy defining what it says and defending its truthfulness. But as we’ve done what God never did in sending His Son to redeem this world, we’ve laid aside what we should really see, what faithfulness looks like, the kind of faithfulness to the will of God that results in a life that brings all of God’s intentions for us to full flower. We’re much bigger into doctrines than we are in to developing character. In fact, we’ve got a doctrine that puts a big question mark over the need to develop Christ-like character. The doctrine of justification by grace through faith has rendered unnecessary the real blooming of sanctification.

Sanctification, the process where the Holy Spirit makes us look like we say we believe is the way to follow Jesus, walks far behind the doctrine of justification. Because it’s so much more comforting to believe that out of sheer grace God looks at us as though we’d never committed a single sin or ever been sinful, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it. Even though I may obviously be a sinner, a gloomy, vengeful, petty, self-centered parody of the Christian life, God sees me as though I were Jesus, “clad in His righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne.” What a comforting doctrine!

It is a badge we urge people to put on once they’ve prayed the prayer that asks Jesus into their hearts—a term we should think about a bit more. From there we’ve gone on to pin other badges on our chests, identifying ourselves as conservatives or whatever are the approved terms in the societies we’ve created in this prosperous land.

But I look at the Bible and at Jesus in particular and see no hint that we’re to wear badges that get us pre-approved. The Bible leads us to seek an inward identity, a heart that wants to beat according to the will of God. All that John’s Gospel told us this morning of Jesus describes inward stuff. His relationship with the Father was not visible on His sleeve. It could only be seen as someone watched the tenor of His life. His disciples watched this unfolding definition of who Jesus was as they saw Him rise from His bed long before they did in order to pray—alone. They watched His responses to people, His total acceptance of people others rejected. They heard Him called “Friend of sinners,” a term that we’ve made to seem good, but was intended as an accusation of low character. After all, are we not known by the company we keep?

But tax collectors, prostitutes, and other unclean folk found in Jesus a friend who drew them up out of their dreary lives. And when Jesus drew them up He gently set their feet on a Rock and established their goings, as the Psalm puts it.

I thought a lot this week as we were at Chautauqua about the confusion that now grips our denomination and that grips all Christendom, for that matter. I thought of what I read recently in a book describing the religious world in the time of Christ, that it was in confusion. Judaism itself emerged from the confusion in the Jewish world after the dismemberment and exile of the Israelite people. Jews identified themselves as Pharisees—careful to keep the finest intentions of the Law of Moses, or as Sadducees—strict constructionists who didn’t go along with the Pharisees’ imaginative expositions of the Law of Moses.

The most pious of all perhaps were the Essenes who separated from the rest of the Jews, interpreting the Hebrew Bible in their special way that saw the fulfillment of prophecy where other Jews did not. And then there were the Zealots who just knew that God’s call to them was to throw off the yolk of Rome by force. Jesus stepped into this chaotic, seething mix of Jewishnesses and refused to be identified with any one of them as a means of getting approval and access to peoples’ hearts.

In ways He was like the Pharisees—as, for example when He interpreted the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” to mean, “Thou shalt not hate or belittle someone;” or in explaining that “Thou shalt not commit adultery” means, “Don’t look lustfully on a woman.” In other ways he was like the Sadducees in His allegiance to the Law that rejected picayune interpretations advanced by the Pharisees. In still other ways He seemed like an Essene, or a Zealot.

But the only badge He wore was on His heart. His will was to do the will of the Father who sent Him. In the confusion of His day does Jesus not offer the guide we need to follow in our confused day?

Just now we’re torn as Presbyterians, with conservatives up in arms over the liberals, the progressives, who seem to us to push at the boundaries set for us by the Bible. Protectively we think of separating from them, pinning our conservative badges on our chests as we know would please God best. Because God wants to know that we identify ourselves as faithful conservatives. Meanwhile, privately, in our homes, in our moments unknown to others, known only to ourselves and, we forget, to God, we are whatever we are. Our badges mean very little. Wearing a badge that wins the approval of other people wearing their badges of self-approval probably means far more to us than it does to God.

I would like to take the cue from Jesus about how to go about the business of life. I mentioned to our children in the children’s sermon that a Christian doesn’t wear a special kind of hat. You may get the idea that a man is a soldier when he wears a soldier’s hat, or a Scot when he wears a tam, or an Arab when he wears that distinctive wrap over his head held down by those circles of black rope. But there is nothing to identify us outwardly as a Christian.

Our identity is inward, where in our hearts we have accepted Jesus’ forgiveness of our sin and determined to make Him Lord of our lives. Our identity is outward in so far as it is evident we love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind—and our neighbor as ourselves. Our identity is evident, Jesus said, if we love one another. If Jesus is not really our Lord, except in a phrase we’ll say; and if our love for God is really only a cultural artifact in an outwardly religious society; and if it is obvious we love ourselves far more than we love any neighbor; and if clearly we don’t love others at church—then, no matter what outward badge we wear, in our hearts we’re hardly Christian at all. And it is what’s going on in the heart that God sees.

And, for that matter, people too pick up on this. Anyone who watches us carefully can tell if our faith is a matter of appearances, of the badge we wear, or whether our identity emerges out of the many facets of our faithfulness to God, to others, to one another.

It is this I long for at Faith Church. Here let your faithfulness be what is obvious about you. Here let your love of God and your neighbor not be suggested as you quote these words of Scripture, but as, from the heart, day after day, you put your heart on autopilot to find and do the will of God. Here let our love for each other be so conspicuous that no one can doubt that we love God—because of how we love each other.

How superfluous a badge becomes once you recognize the character of a person. I pray you and I may wear the identity being forged in our hearts, visible not in external badges that may tell a lie about us, but visible in the texture of our lives—lived as Jesus’ life was lived, in conscious, deliberate submission to the will of God the Father. How beautiful is such a life; how winsome; how satisfying to be lived; how healing in this war-torn, despair-ridden world. Let this be our badge.

Let us pray: O Lord God, we come to you who sees into our depths to know what we are. Grant us so to live that whatever is outward about us will be informed by what you have re-created in us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

July 30, 2006

What about the Sabbath?

Isaiah 56: 1-8 / John 5: 10-18
July 30th, 2006

It’s good to be back after two weeks away. I think nearly every pastor would agree with me that spending some extended time away is an important ingredient in keeping on in the work of the ministry. We need to get a bird’s eye view of life. Day after day, week after week, month after month in the cycle of the years, we see with an ant’s eye view of things, with nose to the ground and antennae a mere fraction of an inch higher. A bird’s eye view offers much needed perspective.

These days we need not just any ol’ bird’s eye view; we need an eagle eye’s view. Let’s keep going higher; we need God’s eye view of things. I often think, looking at the pickle the church is in, looking at the confusion haunting the nations, looking at the dilemma of the lives of so many people, I wish I could see from very high up what is the path all of life is taking. It is my duty to give some clues to how to walk this lonesome valley.

When our son was on the ice breaker “Polar Sea” with the Coast Guard he and another fellow operated a computer gizmo that saw with a satellite’s eye view of things to help navigate the ship. Thus the ship was able to nose its way through thick ice by knowing where the ice was thinnest as it went from pole to pole on our planet. Oh to be able to see this clearly.

Each time we welcome a child into our midst in baptism I ponder the way ahead of her, the pathway of her life. Today we welcome little Katrina Dubikovsky into the family of Faith. When she was born, two years ago yesterday in Russia, nobody would have guessed that the way ahead included becoming Ivan and Sasha’s sister and Sergei and Nadya’s daughter—in Indiana. God saw that she would become part of this loving family and that she would become one of us. What is the “us” to which we welcome her? Where are we headed in a path that she will join us?

I pray that in days to come she will have reason to thank God over and over again that she came not only to Nadya, Sergei, and Sasha, but also to this place where she was not only baptized into but also literally loved into the Kingdom of God.

Now I did not know when I plotted this morning’s sermon that I would be baptizing Katrina today. But God knew. And there is, I discover, a connection between baptizing Katrina and the issue that the prophet Isaiah and the Lord Jesus addressed: the Sabbath Day. How different it would seem their views were on Sabbath keeping, at least from an ant’s eye view. Isaiah was concerned that Israel keep the Sabbath. Jesus seemed to debunk Sabbath observance.

Isaiah, writing hundreds of years before the time of Christ urged God’s captive people, “Blessed is the one who . . . keeps the Sabbath, not profaning it . . . to everyone who keeps the Sabbath, and does not profane it . . . these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer . . . for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” Keeping the Sabbath day holy was not only for Jews, but also for foreigners, for deformed people who were not welcome in the Temple because of their deformity.

This was a blessing rather than a restriction. What a blessing it is to rest, to be totally free from duty. Not only not to have to remember to do this or that, but you are forbidden to do this or that so stop even worrying about it. The prophet emphasized the Sabbath Day because his fellow Jews had not been keeping it holy. They became like everyone else, without the discipline God so graciously gave them: six days of work then you must rest. It was a sacred duty to rest one day in seven. In fact, the fourth commandment spelled out this Divine command.

Devout Jews knew the Ten Commandments by heart. Somehow, when the Book of Deuteronomy was written the scribe who remembered and wrote it gave a different reason for keeping the Sabbath day than the one who transmitted the earlier Book of Exodus. In Exodus the reason for keeping the Sabbath day holy was because God rested from His work of creation on the seventh day. In the Book of Genesis we read that God blessed and hallowed the seventh day in resting from His work of creation. But when the Book of Deuteronomy was written and the Ten Commandments were re-issued, the reason for keeping the Sabbath day holy came out a bit differently. Do no work on the Sabbath because God brought you out of the land of Egypt, giving you rest from your bondage, your forced labor for the Egyptians.

Perhaps it was because Deuteronomy was written when memory of bondage in Egypt was keen that a more immediate reason was provided for Sabbath rest. But it was a struggle to keep to the discipline of the Sabbath Day. It was hard for Israel to keep the Sabbath day. Somehow over the years of decline the Sabbath Day disappeared along with keeping the rest of the Ten Commandments.

Thus, after returning to the Promised Land after years of exile, pious Jews remembered God’s command. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day descended from pious Jews from the days of Ezra when the Second Temple was built. These devout Jews asked specifically, “What does it mean to keep the Sabbath day holy?” They thought about this and thought some more. When we look at the Mishna that records all the hard thinking these devout Jews did, we find a whole section devoted to the Sabbath Day. The Mishna was not written down till the end of the second century AD, but its contents came together gradually much earlier, beginning in the days of Ezra.

I found such careful thinking about Sabbath keeping in the Mishna. How do I keep from working on the Sabbath? What is work? The section of the Mishna called “Shabbath” brings together some of the answers to these questions. For example, “He is culpable of breaking the Sabbath that takes out wine enough to mix the cup, or milk enough for a gulp, or honey enough to put on a sore, or oil enough to anoint the smallest member, or water enough to rub off eye-plaster.”

I don’t mean to ridicule these seemingly picayune details. Jesus chided the Pharisees for straining at a gnat; for taking an ant’s eye view while missing God’s eagle eye view of the purpose of the law of the Sabbath. Jesus kept the Sabbath according to the intentions God had in giving this command to Moses. We err on the opposite side. We do not honor the Sabbath Day.

In John’s Gospel this morning we read how some pious Jews took issue with Jesus for healing a man on the Sabbath and then drawing this fellow into sin by having him pick up his bed on the Sabbath. They were so angry at Jesus that they wanted to kill Him. Why such vehement anger? John tells us that it was because Jesus not only broke the Sabbath but called God His Father, making Himself equal with God (5: 18).

Now we should be careful not to throw stones at the Pharisees because we live in a glass house. How have you strained at a gnat to make the Bible say what you want it to say? What kinds of things make you come to a boil? What desecration of something you hold sacred so enrages you that you could see yourself supporting the death penalty for it? In a way we know what is really important to us when we take inventory of what really makes us get upset. What can get you so upset that you could chew nails?

How many of these things are really sacred, that is, having to do with honoring God? In our pluralistic day I am suspicious that there are not very many issues having to do with God that are really sacred. For sure not many Christians would get angry enough to kill for desecrating Sunday, which is the Christian Sabbath. For that matter, think of the Ten Commandments; how many of these are commonly violated—having been explained away by this or that consideration. And no outrage follows. We accommodate the violations of God’s laws that develop.

Well, Jesus did not violate the fourth commandment when He healed the man and told him to take up his bed and walk. He violated the unfolding tradition that defined work to include acts of healing and a simple effort like picking up a straw mat. But He didn’t violate the Sabbath. These interpretations, though made out of the desire to honor God became oppressive, violating the intention of the command to rest on the Sabbath day. Jesus’ eagle eye view of the purpose of the Sabbath Day collided with the ant’s eye view of the rabbis.

It is a constant danger for those who once ignored God completely, that when they start to become serious in their religion they go overboard. But this is not a problem many Christians face today. I believe if Jesus were to come to us American Christians He would ask us, “Why have you completely ignored the fourth commandment, to keep one day in seven holy? I think we do wrong to cite the Apostle Paul who wrote to the Christians at Colossae, “Let no one pass judgment on you . . . with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are only a shadow of what is to come.”

The Apostle Paul kept the Sabbath Day. Whenever he was in a city on the Sabbath he would seek out a synagogue. And we can be sure he set aside his labors as a tent maker on the Sabbath. He rested on that day. When he wrote to the Colossians he warned them against a super-legalism that had crept into the Church, mixing this and that of Jewish law with this and that of the popular Gnosticism infiltrating the Church. Let us not throw out the baby with the bath water. The freedom we have in Christ does not take from us the benefit of God’s kindly discipline that we so desperately need to live out our lives in peace and joy.

If we take an eagle’s eye view of life do we not see that we talk about “obeying Christ” with no sense of what that means. We talk about ”the Christian life,” with little sense of how this might be unique, different from an ordinary life with no consideration of what Christ commands His followers.

In one of his sermons, George MacDonald, the great Scottish story-teller and pastor said, “Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because [Jesus] said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe or even want to believe in him, if you do not anything he tells you.”

We need to put into balance Jesus’ challenge to the Pharisees who had gone overboard in spelling out what Sabbath keeping meant and how Jesus kept to God’s intentions for the Sabbath day. Jesus did not lead us to think the fourth commandment is obsolete. Neither did the Apostle Paul teach Christians to scrap the fourth commandment. “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy,” echoes down through the centuries as a gracious discipline God gives to us, to provide structure and meaning and rest in the oft chaos of life.

Once the Jews were ridiculed by the Romans as lazy for not working one day in seven. In fact, there was a time when they wouldn’t even defend themselves when they were attacked on the Sabbath day. They soon thought better of this realizing that God did not command them to keep the Sabbath in order to be sitting ducks for their enemies on the Sabbath.

I wish I might persuade you all that from an eagle’s eye perspective, from God’s perspective, you and I need to keep one day in seven as a day holy to God. We need the discipline of this day to remember we belong to God; we need the discipline of the Sabbath day to help us remember that belonging to God means living a special kind of life; we need the discipline of the Sabbath day to help us remember that worshipping God together is essential to being a Christian. If one day in seven you specifically do this because God commanded it, it will help to instruct your heart to obey other commands Jesus gave.

In the past two weeks I have thought of what is distracting us as Presbyterians these days, and what distracts some of us at Faith Church. There are some things that bother some of us that we should simply let go; they’re not worth it. They produce needless discord. They have nothing to do with anything that is important. Let them go because Jesus tells you, “Forgive those who bother you so that I forgive you when you bother Me.”

But there are not only these tiny, unimportant matters that are hurting us. There are the positive things we should be doing out of obedience to Jesus that we do not do. Having begun to accept the principle that being a Christian means obeying Jesus, and obeying Jesus means something specific let’s go on to see what Jesus would tell us to do if He were visibly here with us. Let us go on for example from the discipline of keeping Sunday holy to doing for the people who live in the trailer court on Klondike Road what we can. How can we help them? How can we help those children we see there, and the many families there that are struggling to keep afloat? How can we show them that Jesus loves them by loving them?

As Katya Dubikovsky grows up in this congregation what will she learn that following Jesus means? Will she notice that people here come to church each Sunday because they think this is an important part of following Jesus? Will she see that we obviously love each other because little things don’t get under our skin, causing strife within the church? Will she notice that we see beyond ourselves because we have embraced the needy people who live near the church? Will she observe that we give generously because we have been given much, and that these resources go to care for people far and near whom we care for because Jesus loves them?

If Katya sees all of this we will be glad. And it is in your hands and mine whether she will see this. It is in your hands and mine whether Katya will think “believing in Jesus” is just a head thing or a whole life thing. I think I know what we would like Katya to see, and our little ones too, and not only our little ones. We help each other to see from a higher perspective when we choose to live according to this higher perspective.

In many ways this begins with accepting the Sabbath Day, Sunday for us. Keeping it holy. Always be here to worship unless ill or away and not because you had other things more pressing. Be here not for “a satisfying worship experience,” an outlook that asks, “Do I like the way they do things?” but be here to worship God. Be a part of those who worship here, demonstrating that being a member is more than a word. Love one another; serve one another; forgive one another as God has for Christ’s sake forgiven you.

Let Katya see this, and others will see it too. And perhaps God will find at Faith Church an outpost of the Kingdom of God that has ripple effects of great blessing. I pray it may be so.

Let us pray: O God, we bless you for the gift of the Sabbath day, for rest, for refreshment of heart and mind found in worshipping you. Give us grace to trust your word, that it is good to do. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47905

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

July 09, 2006

The Cost of Good Health

II Kings 5: 1-14
John 5: 1-9
July 9th, 2006

Many of Jesus’ great acts of kindness were to heal sick people. In those days there was no health insurance. It cost a lot then too for health care. The gospels tell us of a woman Jesus healed who’d spent all she had in hopes of getting well, to no avail. Being well has to do with a lot more than our bodies, but we all admit these silly bodies of ours are pretty important to us.

We moderns look back at ancient times—that we know only a little about—and sometimes think people back then were ignorant by comparison with what we know today.

But then we get on a plane and travel to some of the ancient sites and we start to get a different impression. What we see often amazes us. Some of you recently came back from Greece and were amazed when you saw the size and grandeur of the Parthenon in Athens. Those of us who went to Jerusalem and saw the huge granite blocks left from the western wall marveled at how ancient peoples moved those huge rocks into place with exact precision. As there were great architects then, there were brilliant doctors too. We know the names of a few of them.

Hippocrates practiced medicine on the little Greek island of Cos in the 5th century before Christ. Doctors today promise to follow the ethics of this great physician even though health-science has progressed, using Hippocrates’ method of exact observation of how the body works. Galen in the second century AD is still talked about for his hospital in Pergamum in Turkey.

But the finest of doctors cannot heal anyone. All they can do is help to orchestrate the conditions under which God’s ways at work in our body can bring healing.

Elisha was a special man of God to whom God lent some of His own power to actually overwhelm Naaman’s leprosy with Divine power. But Elisha’s purpose and God’s purpose in healing Naaman was much more than to cure him of leprosy. Why? Because eventually old age or another disease, or perhaps a wound in battle would end Naaman’s life. Naaman came away from his bath in the Jordan River aware not only that his leprosy was gone but also why it was gone. He realized that the God of Israel healed him. The God of Israel, the Creator of heaven and earth, far greater than the local deity he worshipped in Damascus.

If we read on a bit in II Kings 5 we read that Naaman said, “I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel.” So he took away as much earth from Israel as he could pack on two mules. He put this earth in the temple of the Syrian God Rimmon. When he went into the temple of his people in Damascus, instead of worshiping Rimmon he would worship toward the God of Israel represented in that earth he brought back home.

Naaman caught on to what Jesus intended when He did His miraculous deeds. See beyond the deed to the God who makes it possible.

This morning we read briefly in John’s Gospel of Jesus’ third “sign,” healing a man who had been sick thirty-eight years. He had been lying in a place in Jerusalem where the hope of healing drew a lot of other sick people. It was at a special pool at Bethesda—a name well known to Navy people today because a great Naval hospital in Maryland has adopted this name.

Bethesda is a Hebrew name that means “House of Mercy,” from bet, meaning house, and hesed meaning mercy. If we look for this pool today in Jerusalem we won’t find it. But it once was near the St. Stephen’s Gate. Pilgrims have obliterated the pool by building a succession of churches on this spot.

Why did John select this story to tell among the many events in Jesus’ life that would have interested us? Though it is not immediately obvious to us, there was important symbolism in this place that the Jews of Jesus’ day recognized. At the pool of Bethesda, this House of Mercy, there was a colonnade with five pillars. Why five colonnades? It had to do with the five books of Moses, the Torah, in which the Jewish people read of the ways of God.

Jesus said a few verses later in John 5, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.” Those five columns stood massively for the gift of life found in the Five Books of Moses, the Torah, the most important first section of the Hebrew Bible. But this poor fellow lay for thirty-eight years under the shadow of these five pillars and remained ill.

Then we see it was a pool of water by which he lay. Water too was important to the story of Jesus’ fellow Jews. Water destroyed sin, thus bringing wholeness. God delivered Noah and his family from the waters in which God destroyed the otherwise sinful world. God delivered Israel from the Egyptian bondage by bringing them through the Red Sea safely, after which the waters came rushing in to destroy the Egyptian army that pursued them.

And now this water at the House of Mercy, Bethesda, had special healing properties. Get into it at the right time and your illness is destroyed. How so?

Maybe you notice that in our reading there is a verse three and a verse five, but no verse four. Why? Some of you who grew up on the King James Version of the Bible remember the story included this verse: “An angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” This verse was found only in some questionable manuscripts so all more recent translations of this Gospel don’t include it.

But from what this man said to Jesus explaining why in thirty-eight years he’d not been able to take advantage of the healing properties of this pool it makes better sense when we read this verse left out of our version of the Gospel. If the pool always was able to heal anyone who got into it, surely at some moment in the long wait of thirty-eight years someone would have kindly helped him to the healing waters. But apparently only at special times, unannounced, was it able to heal. It had very limited usefulness. It helped a tiny percentage of those who needed healing. Only the first one who got into it after the angel touched it. It was a bit of a cruel joke for many to be so near and yet so far from the healing they needed.

But then Jesus came. Jesus asked a simple question, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man didn’t exactly say, “Yes.” Maybe he had given up on ever being healed so he forgot why he was there. He was there because that’s where sick people came. It became a place where the barest hope of healing lingered—unfulfilled for most. So instead of replying to Jesus, “Yes, I want to be healed,” the man told the sad reason why he had never been healed. “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up. While I’m trying to get into the water someone always beats me to it.” So its power was spent on some other desperate soul.

Jesus spoke a simple sentence in reply. “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And the man was healed instantly. But his healing was evident only when he took up his bed and walked away—and on into the Temple where some people recognized him. It was the Sabbath Day. “How did he get here, walking on his own two feet?” they wondered.

The story has more details than we can explore. But one significant detail we must notice this morning. Jesus replied to those who faulted Him for healing on the Sabbath, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” By this Jesus meant that God continued working seven days a week after the first Sabbath Day of creation-week.

If you look at our baptismal font you see it has eight sides. There were seven days of creation, on the seventh of which God rested. But then came the eighth day and God got back to work. We are living in that eighth day of God’s on-going work.

And Jesus too lived in that eighth day when God continued to work. It was part of God’s on-going work that happened to take place on this Sabbath Day as Jesus healed a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years of Sabbaths. Never in the vicinity of those five columns of Moses’ Law had he found healing. Never when he lay right beside the waters of the pool at Bethesda for all those years had it ever done him any good.

But when Jesus spoke one sentence, extending God’s on-going work still on the Sabbath Day, the poor fellow’s miserable body was healed. Jesus’ enemies saw things so wrong when all they could think of was that He’d violated their Sabbath rule and their definition of work. The tradition of the elders defined work on the Sabbath with good intentions, but their good intentions missed the boat. Whereas God only intended that people get rest at regular intervals, they forgot that the Sabbath was made for the benefit of people.

Rest heals us. How often have doctors said to us who think the world won’t make it unless we work 24/7, “You must rest.” Why rest? Because rest brings restoration to body and soul. Had Jesus’ adversaries thought a bit beyond their rules they would have seen that Jesus fulfilled the purpose of the Sabbath rest with one three-word sentence—in Aramaic. “Take up your bed and walk.”

For many years, ever since that March day in 1961 when I gave my life to Jesus Christ and claimed Him as my Lord, I cannot remember ever working on Sunday. As a student I didn’t study on Sunday. I never do yard work. For me anyway, it has been an important principle to keep the Christian Sabbath as a day of rest from work.

For many of you in the helping professions it is not possible to keep from working. Hospitals stay open on Sunday because people don’t take a Sabbath from their illness every seven days. Police and firefighters are needed every day. But I believe it is a principle still of the Christian life that God ordained that we should rest.

So it would seem that I’m siding with the Pharisees that Jesus found fault with in doing a work of healing on the Sabbath—that He might have waited till the next day to do. I don’t think so.

Part of what’s going on in the story is not only what Jesus did, but what the man did in response to Jesus. He obeyed Jesus. He took up his bed and walked. Later in the story we read that Jesus said to him, “Sin no more so that nothing worse happens to you.” In other words, more than physical healing came to this man when Jesus spoke the healing command, which the man obeyed.

You and I place great stock in what helps the body get well. Look at your medicine cabinet and count the cost of what you find there! But by far the greater need in all of us has to do with the inner person. We may have the best of physical health while clinging to our sins. And it is these sins to which we cling that far worse than poor physical health happens to us. Indeed, our physical condition is affected by our spiritual condition.

For me the discipline of keeping Sunday as a day of worship and rest has been an important discipline of the heart to remember that my life belongs to God. Remembering my life belongs to God has other implications that have to do with my relationship to people. When we talk about obedience to Jesus but do not obey at the very points that matter most to us, what’s the point of it all?

In a few moments we will gather around this Communion Table. Here, Jesus rests at the center and we who belong to Him gather around. We say we are one in Christ. Folks, let us be at one with one another if we are one in Christ. Let us pray: O Lord God, grant us to find the healing of Your Son, Jesus. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

July 02, 2006

The Burden of Freedom

John 8: 31-36
July 2nd, 2006
Worship on the Patio

The gift of the Jews to the world, it has been said, was monotheism, belief in one God. The gift of Christianity to the world was freedom. Jesus said in that memorable passage we heard this morning, “If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”

Jesus’ other teaching on freedom has been claimed as a motto by a number of universities. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” This is the motto of the University of Freiberg in Germany. I discovered in checking the web that this remark of our Savior has been claimed over and over again as the inspiration for higher learning.

But what is the truth that sets us free? Jesus was not telling us that truth is attained by an unfettered pursuit of learning. Jesus said, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.”

The truth that makes us free comes from continuing in Jesus’ word, which makes us truly His disciples. What is it to continue in His word? It is to continue learning of Him. This sets us free.
Paul echoed His Lord, “For freedom Christ has set us free.” “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods; but now . . . you have come to know God.” In Christ we are introduced to God as children so that we can call Him, “Abba, Father.” In Christ we come to “know God,” and this sets us free. This is an article of our Faith.

Since we have come to that time of the year sacred to all Americans let me remind you how our claim to freedom unfolded. In the late 18th century as part of the Enlightenment the winds of freedom were blowing in Europe. John Locke d. 1704 claimed this freedom much earlier in his “Second Treatise on Government.” There he wrote of all peoples’ “unalienable rights of life, liberty, health, and property.” Where did he get that idea of an unalienable right to freedom that contradicts the state of nature?
It traces back to what Jesus said, echoed by Paul: In Christ, God has set us free. Free from what? Freedom from the bondage of a law we cannot keep. Freedom eventually from death itself.

Christianity played such a part in the development of the Western World that gradually people claimed this freedom. But it was a freedom in a very limited sense, as release from all restraint. It was an idea of freedom that forgot that true freedom is inward and comes in being Jesus’ disciples. It is good for us to remember this even though Thomas Jefferson may have forgotten it.

Our American forbears claimed the rights of life, liberty, and property at the First Continental Congress, October 14, 1774. Then in June, two years later, Thomas Jefferson, realizing not all on our shores owned property, changed the last word in writing our Declaration of Independence. “All people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

It may be that with some lack of diffidence that people of my ancestry point back to the inspiration for this in the northern part of Great Britain in the early 14th century. Patrick Dunbar delivered the Scots Declaration of Arbroath on April 6th, 1320 to Pope John XXII. In this document the Scots told the pope, “It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.” This was a call for national freedom from tyranny, copied by those who framed our own Declaration of Independence.

All of this history interests us as Americans. We happily point to origins earlier than 1776. If we can point back to ancestors who had some part in the story of freedom, we are proud to claim it. Freedom is both a sacred and a political ideal.

But this morning I want to remind us all first that the freedom Jesus proclaimed is ours if we are truly His disciples—it is then that we will know the truth that sets us free. Second, I remind us all that freedom brings with it a burden to carry.

Freedom is far more than the political climate in which we can do whatever we desire. This so-called freedom, if under the bondage of miserable desires leads to terrible bondage. We see the sad spectacle of some young people who come to university as freshman, newly out from their parents immediate control, sometimes choosing to use their new freedom badly. They are lured into a culture of alcohol and sometimes drugs, and it goes downhill from there. Freedom, ill-used, is the source of such misery. In our free land there have been many entrepreneurs of evil, using their freedom from restraint to disgrace our humanity, drawing people into the lowest degradation.

But well used, freedom leads to the highest development of character. And with this high development of character our land has seen remarkable stories of human achievement.

We point with pride to all the first generation immigrants who came to our shores longing for freedom and opportunity. With honest effort and discipline they used well their freedom to create wealth, providing goods and services that served others well, enjoying the just revenue their labor earned.
It all goes back to Jesus’ words, “If the Son shall make you free you shall be free indeed.” The context in which Jesus said this begins back in the previous chapter. In John 7: 16, where Jesus said to His fellow Jews, “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me.” Who could possibly be more free than

Jesus, the Son of God? Who could possibly set any boundaries to freedom on the One “in whom all things hold together,” “by whom all things were created?” But Jesus freely chose to submit to the will of the Father. We find this hard to understand since our idea of submission includes the idea of dominance and subservience.

Jesus made it clear that not only did His teaching come from His heavenly Father, but His will was the will of His heavenly Father. It would seem that a person whose teaching and will are completely governed by the will of another is not free. He is a captive at the deepest level. But it isn’t so. Quite the opposite.

The secular anthem of America is “I did it my way.” Jesus could not have sung that song. His song was “I did it His way,” pointing to His heavenly Father. It was in this way that Jesus brought to us this freedom we claim.

As Jesus neared the end of His work He used His freedom in some strange ways. In John 13 we see the Master washing the feet of His disciples. Picture this. How would you feel if Jesus were at your feet with a basin, pitcher, and towel, washing your feet? He did this for three reasons: first, their feet were dirty. Second, Jesus loved them. Third, they needed to see how to use the freedom He gave them.

Two chapters later, in John 15, Jesus taught them how closely they must remain attached to Him if they would use their freedom well. “I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus taught. If they remained connected to Him, they would bear fruit. Apart from Him they could do nothing.

If you and I are in Christ, we read the same thing. You and I, if we are in Christ, are connected to Him. You and I are not solitary, unattached people with religious opinions, we are connected in Christ.

We easily forget this. We think of freedom as the privilege of doing as we want. Freedom is the right to come and go when and where I please. Freedom is being able to make my own choices, to do or not to do. Yet even if you think this way, when you read what Jesus said about freedom you realize it’s quite a bit different from merely being able to do and think what you please.

Our present dilemma as Presbyterians is that that the Peace, Unity, and Purity report adopted by our latest General Assembly takes away our connectedness to Jesus as branches attached to a vine.

It may seem to some a stretch to connect the teaching of Jesus to all that is taught to us in the Bible, but Jesus specifically connected His teaching to the teaching of His Bible, the Old Testament. And the whole of the New Testament is anchored in Jesus’ person and teaching. So that our freedom to interpret the meaning of the Bible has boundaries—if we are in Christ. We did not make up these boundaries. They are boundaries that are as necessary as railroad tracks are to an Amtrak train. We cannot be “in Christ” and disregard the Bible. Without the Bible we jump the tracks and our heavy wheels get bogged down in soft ground so that we cannot move.

George Matheson, a blind Scottish pastor, wrote these memorable words back in 1890 that capture the conditions of our freedom in Christ.

Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free.
Force me to render up my sword, and I shall conqueror be.
My heart is weak and poor until it master find;
_It has no spring of action sure, it varies with the wind._
It cannot freely move till Thou has wrought its chain;_
Enslave it with Thy matchless love, and deathless it shall reign.

One last truth regarding our freedom I must emphasize for us all. The Christian faith is a togetherness thing. This is a burden hard for many to bear. Christianity is not a loose and voluntary federation of independent individuals. It is many branches connected to the same vine.

These days we are being pulled apart because the idea of freedom has been detached from the Bible which Jesus said would have every jot and title fulfilled. “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Indeed, Jesus led us to think of the spirit of the law behind the letter of the law. You and I are not disconnected by private interpretations of the Bible; we are connected by our common submission to it, if we are in Christ.

It is my heavy duty to speak of this common submission we have to Scripture if we are in Christ in a day when the momentum of freedom tries to shake loose from every restraint. The Bible is famously poorly known and seldom read—though often cited in fragments. The News informs us more than the Bible—including as it quotes the Bible in bits and pieces.

If we here at Faith Church will freely choose to come together in submission to Jesus Christ, in submission to each other, in submission to the clear teaching of the Bible—on much more than matters pertaining to sexuality—we will discover a freedom that will make this congregation flourish as never before.

Now we are facing a severe test as a congregation. Will we be of one mind, heart, and will, deliberately and consciously asking, “What does the Bible teach us?” How do we freely submit to the will of Jesus Christ? And how do we do this together?

The burden that rests on you and me if we are in Christ, is to “truly be His disciples.” The burden is to “continue to be in His word.” It is a burden that falls on our shoulders as individuals. But it will bind us together. Jesus never taught us that individualism is the way to go. All His disciples sat at His feet, knowing that what he taught to one he taught to all together.

Paul explained this same truth in referring to us as a body. Let us be a body with parts that work together, contributing to the whole. This will come if we are in conscious submission to each other as well as consciously submitted to Jesus Christ, whom we call “our Lord.”

In the mid-nineteenth century President Lincoln faced a great test of keeping together our United States of America. He was able to achieve this by force of arms in a terrible Civil War. But at that time the southern Presbyterians broke away from the northern Presbyterians over the sorry issue of slavery.

Now we face a sterner test: will the basis of our togetherness be obedience to the word of God, the word that sets us free, because it binds us to the will of God? “My will is to do the will of Him who sent me,” Jesus said. What is our will? What is yours? Mine? Jesus says to us: “If you continue in my word you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” Some Presbyterians believe we should have a UNITY based only on respect for each other’s opinions. We indeed should be respectful to each other. But the only basis on which we can have unity is submission together to the will of God revealed in Holy Scripture—fairly and rightly accepted in what it means. We are now being reminded RIGHTLY that our unity and our freedom comes only if we are truly Jesus’ disciples—if we continue in His Word.

Let us pray: O Lord God, we bless you for our freedom in Christ Jesus. Help us to continue in His word and to truly be His disciples. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

June 25, 2006

Believing on Time

Psalm 84 / Esther 4: 1-14
John 4: 46-53
Children’s Sermon on Ecclesiasts 12: 1-7
(paraphrased immediately below)
June 25th, 2006

[1 Remember your Creator while you are young, before you grow old and no longer enjoy living.
2 It will be too late then to remember him, when the light of the sun and moon and stars is dim to your old eyes, and there is no silver lining left among the clouds.
3 Your arms will tremble with age, and your strong legs will grow weak. Your teeth will be too few to chew your food. Even strong glasses won’t help you see.
4 And when your teeth are gone, keep your lips tightly closed when you eat so food doesn’t spill on your clothes! The chirping of birds used to wake you up in the morning. But you will become deaf. And then you won’t be able to sing, or if you can a little, with a quavering voice.
5 You will be afraid of heights and of falling, white-haired and withered, dragging along. Your family and friends will know you’re about to die. And as you near the end they will watch sadly and cry.
6 Yes, remember your Creator now while you are young, before the silver cord of life snaps and the golden bowl is broken. Don't wait until the water jar is smashed at the spring and the pulley is broken at the well.
7 For then the dust will return to the earth, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.]
__________________________________________

Time matters. We just listened to the story of a moment in the history of the Jewish people narrowed down to a moment in the lives of two people, Mordecai and his niece Esther. If she went in to see the king of Persia uninvited, even though she was his queen, if he was in a bad mood, he could have her executed on the spot. If she did not risk going in at this moment a dreadful plan would hatch. Her people, the Jews, would be massacred throughout the land. Mordecai told her, “Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Time matters. She dare not let this moment pass.

As Christians we talk about “eternal life,” but time matters, even with regard to eternal life. Time flies. We use such terms as “Strike while the iron is hot.” We’re aware that opportunities come and go.

Among these opportunities are those moments when we consider what really matters in life. Among these moments are those when it seems the things of God suddenly matter very much, but then those moments pass and for some reason the things of God fade into the background of our thoughts.

But time moves on, and we draw near the end of life so soon I feel 32 but I’m twice 32. In my trade I am often with people as they near life’s end. And I’ve seen some look back and a far off look comes into their eyes. “If only I had” are very sad words to think.

The Apostle Paul reflected on time when he wrote “in the fullness of time God sent forth His Son.” God didn’t begin with Abraham dubbing a new gene into the human race that would cure the problem of sin, misery, and death. Instead God set in place a promise that would work out over many years. And it was important how and when people in this long heritage used their free will—a reflection of God’s image to respond to God’s nudge that would draw them into the momentum of this promise. Because the promises of God always come with a condition. We have to respond. And our responses come at particular moments in time.

Shakespeare remarked wisely in his play, “Julius Caesar,” “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune, omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

How many people look back with sadness in their shallows, realizing they did not respond when life was at high tide. This morning I want to remind you that it matters how and when we respond to the deep matters of life that God puts before us.

I have the feeling that an unfortunate residue of our Presbyterian confidence in the Providence of God is that God will make things happen very nearly without our input. Many of us don’t like “fanaticism,” which may mean simply the inclination to do something specifically for Jesus’ sake.

Calvin thought he was honoring God to report that God was sovereignly in control of literally everything, from the rise and fall of nations to the trembling of a blade of grass in the wind. Thus though it seems we make decisions, and are responsible for them, we simply work out the divine decrees.

I’m not sure the Bible teaches this, nor is it necessary to believe this if we believe that God is sovereign in the world He made. The Bible points us otherwise. Indeed, our experience points us otherwise. It matters how and when we choose to respond in life to God.

We read this morning of a moment in time that John freezes for us to see in his Gospel. It is a moment when a Roman official from Capernaum realized that his nearly dead son was suddenly healthy. He asked his servants when his son became well. They told him at 1 PM yesterday, precisely.

They remembered the time because that very sick little boy suddenly sat up on his bed, swung his legs over the side, and ran into the kitchen hungry. After all he hadn’t eaten for days. His little body gradually grew emaciated. They had all been hovering around him, bathing his forehead, holding his listless hands. And suddenly it was a different little fellow in the room, no longer on death’s door, but completely well. So they answered the father, “It was at the seventh hour,” or as we would say, 1:00 o’clock PM. The father remembered that was when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.”

Why did he ask his servants when his son became well? Maybe he was trying to decide if it was just coincidence that his son took a turn for the better. If his son started gradually to become well before 1 PM, then it was coincidental.

But it was AT 1 PM, exactly when he said to Jesus, “Sir, come to my house because my son is dying.” At that moment Jesus replied “Your son will live.” That was exactly when his servants saw him get up from his bed and act like a normal, hungry little boy. This timing was not coincidental.

Furthermore, the timing mattered when this desperate father left home to travel throughout the night and morning to find Jesus when he heard Jesus was nearby. He did not procrastinate, saying to his wife, “Honey, let’s wait to see if Jesus might come this way.” He said, “Now I must go ask this Jesus to come heal our son.”

He acted on his trust in Jesus at that moment. And his trust in Jesus meant that instead of a funeral for his son, he could have a party for him.

Often in matters of health or physical well-being we have a sense of urgency, but in matters of the heart it’s different. I wonder as I drive by the full soccer fields on Sunday after church if there are any parents there who hope their children will have focus in life beyond the moment of thrill at winning a soccer game. I wonder how many of those parents would say, “We are Christians.” And yet they could not spare one morning in the week to have them specifically “remember now their Creator in the days of their youth.” And if one morning cannot be spared, what is the gist of the rest of the week?

I reminded the children this morning of the wise remark of Solomon at the end of the Book of Ecclesiastes. “Remember your creator when you are young, before your body falls apart.”

How many have a very different view of being young. Youth is the time to sow wild oats, to party, have a good time. When college days are past and we get married, and we’re still young, it’s other things. I’ve got important things to do—family stuff, work stuff, leisure stuff. Getting ahead requires all my attention. God can wait. And God does wait.

The moments pass and we discover in retirement, particularly if we are prosperous, that we can still spend our lives in self-indulgence. So even these later years of wisdom are spent on ourselves. At the time we have the time to give to spend and be spent for the cause of Christ, we say, “I’ll wait till this time passes.” And these moments do pass. And very old age sets in. And then we realize the tide was not taken at the flood, leading on to a fortune that mattered.

What an interesting term “getting ahead” is. It pertains to everything we will leave behind one day.

What is it about eternal things that makes it so reasonable to procrastinate in taking them seriously?

I’m reminded of a series of stories of missed opportunities in the Book of Acts. It begins with the Apostle Paul standing before Felix, the Roman procurator. The High Priest, Ananias accused Paul of stirring up sedition, and sent him on to Felix. Paul stood there and Felix told him to tell his side of things.

So Paul spoke. And Felix listened intently. He heard nothing seditious in what Paul said. Indeed, he was intrigued. He wanted to hear more. So after a few days he and his wife Drusilla called Paul back and heard him speak about faith in Jesus Christ. Felix became alarmed and sent him away.

What was it that Paul said that stirred him? Paul undoubtedly told him about Jesus’ crucifixion and rising again. And they heard Paul stick it to them. They realized Jesus was not just a rabble rouser who had been given a slave’s execution. “To follow Jesus you’ve got to deny yourself and take up the cross that is the result of starting to follow Jesus”—if you are a Roman official.

Felix called Paul back several times to hear him, but he never decided, never made a choice. Two years passed and Felix was replaced by Porcius Festus. His opportunity passed.

Then we read of a like encounter between Paul and King Herod Agrippa, who was half-Jewish. He listened intently. But when the moment came to decide he put it off. He said, “In a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian?”

And thus in the Book of Acts we read not only of people like the three thousand at Pentecost, and a Philippian jailor, and like the Apostle Paul who learned of Jesus Christ and found new life in Him, but also of people who learned of Jesus, were intrigued, and remained as they were. And their moments passed.

When I was six years old we were living in Winona Lake in days when Billy Graham was beginning his ministry. I was sitting in the Billy Sunday Tabernacle with its sawdust floor one evening as Billy Graham spoke to the crowd in that amphitheater which was then plenty big. We were home on furlough from India and my dad was studying at a seminary in Winona Lake. I had the sense that somehow it was important to go forward that night. And so I did, though I soon forgot everything except the strong sense of urgency at that moment. Because I remember actually giving my heart and life to God thirteen years later towards the end of my first year of college.

The thought has never left me that there are seasons of life when God may move on us, and those season come and go. And if we do not respond to God when we sense His pull on us, we are not wise. In fact, a culture of Christian indifference may take us over—as is so easy in a time of prosperity.

My father told of a railroad crossing guard in India whose one duty was to respond to the signal of an approaching train and go out and lower the gates. One night he heard the signal and told himself it was a dream. Being tired, he ignored the signal. The train came through and a family in a bullock cart was in its path. And you know what happened. In the years that followed he was often heard to say, “If only I had.”

Time matters.

The future of our children depends on how we have responded to Jesus as parents. The future of the Church depends on whether this generation will take serious regard to Jesus’ summons, or whether we will continue a drift of passive disregard of Jesus’ summons, while saying we believe.

One of you sent me an article this week about the enormous changes overtaking the Western world as a result of the migration of Muslims into the formerly Christian West. I intend no denigration of Muslims in what I say.

Muslims are mostly much more serious about the practice of their religion than Christians. Some are serious to the radical point that is causing such calamity in Iraq and Palestine, in East Timor, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in many other places. Meanwhile we Christians maintain our placid, comfortable indifference to the way of life we say we believe is right. Indeed, we have watched our denomination bless and adopt the ideas and behavior of our culture, forsaking the ways well taught in days past.

The time has come for you and me to follow Jesus if we believe Him. And following means doing something and not merely saying, “I believe,” now leave me alone. It is time. It is time to awake all who sleep.

Let us pray: O Lord God, thank you for the new life promised us in Jesus Christ. Grant that we may accept this life and live it. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

June 18, 2006

Putting Up with Nuisance Prophets

Amos 7: 10-17 / John 4: 43-45
Heidelberg Catechism, Q & A 21
June 18th, 2006

This morning I want to think with you about the wry statement Jesus made, that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown. We may think Jesus is making a comment about “them,” people not like us. But I wonder if John reminds the Christians to whom he wrote that Jesus said this because if anyone is a hometown boy to Christians it is Jesus.

Jesus said some things that I’m tempted to say receive from Christians the ultimate indignity—they are simply ignored. Jesus said to His followers at the close of the Sermon on the Mount, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock . . . And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand.” We have our children sing a cute song with motions about this.

We reply, “We accept the Bible as the authoritative word of God. It is an article of our faith: “The Bible says it; that does it.” Jesus did not talk about articles of faith; He spoke of doing something, a way of life built on Him.

Is Jesus a popular prophet now? “Well,” we reply correctly, “He was not a prophet, but the Son of God.” And we say well.

The other three Gospels report this saying a bit more fully. In Mark Jesus says it most emphatically, “A prophet is not without honor except in his home-town (patridi), and with his next of kin, and in his own house.”

What was wrong with the prophets that those who knew them best didn’t like them at all?
Why? Well, for one thing, prophets sure could be grumpy. We prefer people who smile to people who frown. We picture Jesus as kindly and serious, the kind of man to whom children are attracted. The prophets frowned a lot. “Go to Toastmaster’s Amos,” I wonder if someone told him. Learn to smile more.

It is no wonder that the high priest of the royal shrine of the northern kingdom of Israel at Bethel told Amos, “Go back south to Judah and prophesy there.” Amos frowned far too much.

He frowned partly because he didn’t want to be a prophet to begin with. He preferred his peaceful job as a shepherd. Sheep don’t talk back. Sheep graze, willingly following the shepherd as “he leads them beside still waters,” anointing their heads with oil when they are hurt.

As a prophet Amos said some things nobody wanted to hear. He knew they wouldn’t like to hear it, and maybe that’s why he frowned too. Though when we read the beautiful poetry of the little Book of the prophet Amos, it lets us know that he had an eye and ear for beauty. Beauty would have made him very happy, as happy as evil made him sad.

He prophecied during one of the most prosperous times in the history of Israel. King Jeroboam II reigned forty years. During this long reign Israel stretched its boundaries and grew prosperous. People were optimistic and proud of their country. They saw their prosperity and military power as signs of God’s blessing—even if they didn’t worship strictly as Moses had commanded. They did what we might call “blended worship,” which I don’t intend as a cheap shot at what today is called blended worship. For them it was a blend of their own required standards and the most appealing of the neighboring countries’ religion.

They worshipped at shrines older than Jerusalem, where the Temple stood that Solomon built. Their shrines were more historic than Jerusalem, at Bethel and Gilgal. Bethel was where Jacob saw the ladder reaching from earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. He called it Beth–el, “house of God,” and said, “Surely God is in this place and I didn’t know it.”

Gilgal, just east of Bethel near Jericho, was the place where Joshua met the Commander of the Lord of hosts. There he “fell on his face to the earth, and worshiped.” Israel had launched the conquest of Canaan there. There Joshua set up the first sanctuary and altar as Israel claimed God’s promise of a Land. Bethel and Gilgal had history in their favor more than the Jebusite capital of Jerusalem.

But Amos saw what was going on behind all the religious pomp and circumstance at these two centers with such a rich heritage.

“Come to Bethel and transgress; to Gilgal, and multiply transgression; bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days . . . for so you love to do, O people of Israel.” “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . . Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

It was after stirring words like this that the high priest at Bethel told Amos, “Get lost!” But Amos kept right on going. “Hear this you who trample upon the needy, and bring the poor of the land to an end, saying ‘When will the new moon be over that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale, . . . that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and sell the refuse of the wheat?”

I sometimes wonder why Christians have used the prophets as though all they had to say was to predict the coming of the Messiah. Amos spoke from God. He was the voice of God; as we speak of being God’s hands and feet, so he was God’s voice. And this voice spoke timeless guidance. How we treat the poor is very important. How we show justice to people who are poor and in their very poverty are often trapped in ways of life that we then pounce on because of points of law. It is so much easier to administer harsh justice to the poor than to the rich. They can’t defend themselves and must have pro bono lawyers. We’re intrigued when Kenneth Lay and company get the book thrown at them because this has been so rare. We’re fascinated; and many CEOs are hoping we don’t get too intrigued with justice coming to the doors of the rich.

We sometimes hear Amos prediction quoted as pertaining to our day: “The days are coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.”

We quote this in defense of biblical preaching even when it is not popular. Biblical preaching I take to mean preaching that is prophetic, that lays it all out there for you to hear—as Amos did. I do not forget that he spoke God’s words of warning--but also words of blessing.

His prophecy ends, “In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen.” How ironic to refer not to the “house” of David, or the “kingdom” of David, but just the booth of David. It’s the Hebrew word succah that refers to the huts made from leafy branches. How welcome even a booth would be after having had the palace and the Temple itself in Jerusalem destroyed and Israel scattered to the ends of the earth. Oh, to have a booth, just a hut to call by the name of Israel’s great king. Oh to have a moment of genuine nostalgia for the golden days.

Amos’ promise was really generous. “The days are coming when the plowman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed.” It would be a day of such plenty that the harvest couldn’t be gathered in time to plow the ground for the next planting. If he said only this the high priest would have welcomed him.

Jesus’ situation was somewhat like Amos’. He was born in Bethlehem in Judea to the south, but spent his childhood up north in Galilee. The last public event where Jesus was present was at the Feast of Passover, at a moment when the Temple grounds looked like a market for sacrificial animals. He drove out the sheep and oxen with a whip of cords, and routed the moneychangers. No wonder He makes this wry remark: “A prophet has no honor in his own country.” There were those in the Temple that day who said, “Go back to Nazareth to do your prophecying.”

It was in Samaria, midway between Jerusalem and Nazareth, strange to say, that He found public honor. There not only did an outcast woman receive Him gladly, but she brought her entire town to receive Him gladly. He was on His way to His adopted town of Nazareth from His birth-village of Bethlehem. Cana was nearby, where He changed water into wine. Capernaum was there, a village on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, where He healed the son of a Roman policeman. In time, He would rouse skepticism in the region of His adoptive home too. But not yet.

Let us focus just a bit more on why a prophet is so unpopular. If nobody took a prophet seriously then it wouldn’t matter what they say. Treat them just as crazy blokes, malcontents who can be written off as frowning misanthropes. “Get a life,” we might say to them.

But we can’t do that because everyone knows that a real prophet is a public voice that resonates in that private place in us all called conscience. Conscience is where God speaks—if we will listen. I am troubled at how the great conscience clause in the Westminster Confession has been reduced and quoted in such a way that it seems to mean what it does not mean at all. How often have you heard someone say, “God alone is Lord of the conscience.” And who, we ask, is to determine what God has said that pertains to conscience? The term “spirit” is widely used today as though the ways of life that have become popular are the voice of the Spirit of God. Thus we listen to the “spirit” of things and say, “This is the voice of God to which my conscience listens.”

But the Westminster Confession is clear: “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in anything contrary to his Word, or beside it in matters of faith or worship.”

It is this voice of conscience that is the immediate, personal prophetic voice in us all if we will listen.

It is the voice to which David refers in Psalm 139, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me . . . You understand my thought afar off.”

Whereas we may so easily think that this or that place where we find ourselves we are away from the presence of God. So we act in a way we think nobody can see, or speak in a way that we feel safe from the ears of those we would want to impress better with our words. David admits to us: “Where shall I go from your spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend up into heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall your hand lead me . . . If I say surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light about me . . . the night shines as the day.”

The prophets called peoples’ attention to the real God, the One who is everywhere, not the God-substitute of their creation, the kind that liked their kind of people and took seriously their religious posturing. Someone wrote, “There is no reason to flee from a god who is nothing more than a benevolent father, a father who guarantees our immortality and final happiness.”

I proposed to our children this morning that we may think we’re healthy because we can do our pushups and crunches and we checked out OK with the dentist. But a doctor checks our blood and takes an X-ray and may find a lethal tumor inside us where the eye can’t see. The prophet was worse than a doctor, but better than one too. Because he could see with the eyes of God deeper than an X-ray or a blood test, into the heart, into the conscience.

We are fond of the prayer that comes at the end of the 139th Psalm: “Search me, O God, and know my heart, try me and know my thoughts; and see if there be any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting.” The God to whom David offers this prayer is the God for whom Amos spoke to Israel and to Judah, and to other nations too. Why? Because “God so loved THE WORLD that He gave His only-begotten Son, that who-so-ever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” The God to whom David spoke this prayer is a God we cannot escape, whose image we cannot shape, whose idea of faith demands belief, that is obedience from the heart.

This is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in whose presence we live every moment of every day and night, who sees into our depths, not looking to discover where He might find us thinking badly, but who looks at us with enormous love—a love so great that He cannot let us be content with a shabby faith.

The prophets were unpopular because they held people to account when their consciences went to sleep. They had no honor of the kind that people give to public figures who make them feel good. But in the end, look, we’re still reading Amos. And we’re still reading Isaiah, even though he was put to death cruelly in his own day by those who wanted their consciences left alone. And we’re still claiming Jesus as our Lord as well as our Savior.

And if Jesus is indeed our Lord, He is Lord of our consciences. Conscience is the deep place where we know God knows all about us. Many of us often drown the voice of conscience. We have shaped our prophets according to our idea of what we’d like God to say that we would like to hear. And we suffer the consequences. It is good that we become weary and heavy-laden, having come to the end of ourselves, thoroughly miserable and distressed. Because then we can come to Jesus and find rest. What kind of rest does Jesus give?

He gives His gentle yoke of actual meekness—to those who are finally aware how wearying a thing it is to pretend they are what they know they are not. He gives to them His burden of lowliness of heart—to those who have grown tired of posturing they are better than they know they are. Indeed, Jesus gives joy unspeakable and full of glory; a kind of happiness that martyrs had in their hearts facing execution; a kind of peace that the world cannot give.

I imagine sitting down at the table with Amos and Jesus. I wonder would Amos say to me, “What I really want to say is the last thing I said in my prophecy. The last word—‘I will plant them on their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land which I have given them says the Lord your God.” And I would think, “What an optimist! What a gracious man!”

And Jesus would say, “I did not come to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through me.” And I would wonder why Jesus and Amos were not popular in their hometowns, among their own kinfolk, in their own houses? Doesn’t it have to do with how we want to hear them? If I defend my sins, calling them by other names, and try to make my conscience agree with me, then how irksome is the voice of Jesus, or of the prophets who came before Him.

Let me close with Jesus’ words at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: “Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise person who built a house on a rock; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it was built on the rock. And every one who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish person who built a house upon sand; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against the house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.”

Let us pray: Thank you, Lord God, for your prophets, for Amos, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah and all these who spoke your word, and for Jesus who is your final word to us. Grant that we may love your prophets, and love more than them, your Son Jesus. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

June 11, 2006

An Unexpected Refreshment

Psalm 19; Genesis 29: 1-12
John 4: 5-15
June 11th, 2006

We have come this morning to one of the most beloved stories in the Gospels. A favorite song of some of you no doubt was stimulated by the story of the Samaritan woman at the well.

Like the woman at the well I was seeking
For things that could not satisfy:
And then I heard my Savior speaking:
Draw from my well that never shall run dry.
Fill my cup Lord,
I lift it up, Lord!
Come and quench this thirsting of my soul;
Bread of heaven, Feed me till I want no more
Fill my cup, fill it up and make me whole!

Oddly the song seems to express prejudice against the woman. Who says she sought things that could not satisfy? Who says she was responsible for having five husbands in a row? When one divorced her, perhaps for a trivial reason, she was chosen for her good looks by another man, and rejected for some reason by him. And the same by another, and another, and another, until she was no longer so beautiful, and gave up on marriage and lived with someone who would provide her a roof and a meal. She’ll do the hard work and endure the advances of a far lesser man than she started with in exchange for security. So it seems to me.

From her story we get the picture of a thirst that Jesus seems to say should no longer be there if we have drunk of Him. The water He promised the woman was a kind that would quench thirst forever. But our spiritual thirst keeps on and on, does it not?

I have often thought of this paradox. Jesus offered water that would continually satisfy, yet what one of us does not have a persistent spiritual thirst. I read the 42nd Psalm as my own testimony, “As the hart pants after water brooks, so pants my soul after Thee, O God. . . I thirst for God, for the living God.” I like these lines best in the old KJV where I first read them. Or the 63rd Psalm, “O God, Thou art my God, early will I seek Thee. My soul thirsts for Thee; my flesh longs for Thee as in a dry and thirsty land where no water is.”

In this troubled life, when the church as well as the world is often a source of distress, how can we keep from feeling such a thirst for God even though we believe every word Jesus said—that the water He gives takes away thirst completely?

So let’s look again at the wonderful story from which we read a snippet this morning. Jesus arrived at noon at Jacob’s well near the little village of Sychar located in the region once belonging to the tribe of Ephraim. Ephraim was Joseph’s younger son. Manasseh, the tribe descending from his older son, got land on the other side of the Jordan. Jacob’s well, beloved for its connection to the place where the great patriarch met his beloved wife, Rachel, was in the region given to the younger son.

This in itself is noteworthy and bears on this story. In ancient times it was the eldest son that expected the special blessing. Younger siblings got the scraps left after custom made sure that the first and strongest seed of the father got preference in a sort of Darwinian rule of primogeniture.

But time and time again in the Old Testament the younger son gets chosen—Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph, the youngest for a while, over Reuben in Jacob’s family. A modern Jewish writer notes that this pattern may be reflected in Christianity seeming to be favored instead of Judaism, its ancient source. We are Gentiles, the non-chosen people, now seemingly favored over the Jews by history if not by God.

And thus God continues to show His care for the one that would be neglected naturally. This you and I need to remember who may often feel of little importance in our day that favors the strong, the wealthy, the brilliant, the privileged, and the well-known.

Now Jesus arrives at Jacob’s well where He meets this very neglected woman, so insignificant that we don’t even learn her name. Here we begin to see the boundaries of God’s love expand for the world. God’s love embraces the known and the unknown.

In John 3 we saw Jesus focus His attention on a man whose name we know, Nicodemas. He was one of the favored among the favored people of God, the Jews. Now we meet an unnamed woman among the dis-favored few, the small sect of Samaritans—from whom Jesus drew an example of what it is to obey the law of God, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The Good Samaritan was a Samaritan too.

God embraces those whom people no longer love—even a Samaritan woman, loved and married five-times, divorced five times and living with someone she’s not married to. I have noticed how society naturally thinks little of people who have had troubled lives.

This woman was in this class. She is so despised by her own people for her troubled life that she is reduced to coming to draw water from the deep, old well in the heat of the day. I picture her letting down that long rope with the bucket at the end until it arrives at the water, way below. She pulls up that long rope under the beating sun. Perhaps she hauls up two buckets to save the walking, carrying them home while the sun beats down on her. And she sweats profusely and her back is bowed with weariness.

How opposite was the picture we saw last Sunday. The contrast is significant in the message of God’s love for the WORLD found in this Gospel.

Last Sunday we saw Jesus deep in conversation late at night with Nicodemas. The Pharisees would study late into the night when it was cool. Nicodemas came to Jesus in the cool of the night. He was a member of the most highly esteemed of the Jewish sects, the one Josephus chose to belong to after sampling the rest of them. He was a Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin, the Israeli supreme court. Nicodemas was the crème de la crème among the Pharisees. He knew the law well—and kept it. But Nicodemas thirsted after God still. And his thirst for God brought him to Jesus. Jesus said to this good man, “You must be born again.”

Today we see Jesus in a very opposite conversation. It is high noon, the hottest time of the day. He is with an unnamed woman of low esteem, part of a religious group despised by the Jews. She said to Jesus, “The Jews don’t have anything to do with Samaritans.” She knew this from sad experience as she was doubly treated with the disdain—by Jews and by other Samaritan women who rejected her company when they drew water in the cool of the morning.

I find it interesting that Jesus did not repeat to this woman the words he said to Nicodemas, “You must be born again.” She needed this too, and knew it. He phrased His offer to her more gently. He offered her a drink from which she’d not thirst again.

But we wonder what did He offer her? What is this “living water?” It is a phrase found in Genesis 26: 19 and Leviticus 14: 5, at least in Hebrew. But there it only means “running water.”

The Samaritans didn’t accept the prophets of the Old Testament. If they had they would know that the prophet Jeremiah sadly wrote for God that “my people . . . have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” The later prophet Zechariah promised more cheerfully that at the fulfillment of the promise of the Feast of Booths, “living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem . . . in summer and in winter.”

Some have proposed that this living water is knowledge that grows. But the more knowledge we have, the more we want. The more we know the more we realize we don’t know. And we come to the limits of what we can understand.

Others think Jesus offered a new kind of religion, a kind that doesn’t need the old fashioned traditions of worship, but only to worship God in spirit and in truth. But do we not see how much variety people have in their views of what it is to worship right—so that worship itself becomes a means by which we push one another away? Away from God, it seems, when away from self-approved Christians. Tradition may be a wonderful avenue of worship, a humble acceptance of what we have received from beloved forebears. But in all of this something is lacking. It is not the source of living water.

Jesus Himself is the living water. Isn’t this what John is telling us when he described the wedding at Cana of Galilee? There Jesus turned lots of water into lots of the best wine. And wine, we learn in the Gospels is the sign of the blood of Christ.

In John 6 Jesus said something that was so scandalous that He lost some followers as a result. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” At Cana he changed water into wine and wedding guests drank it and were surprised how good it tasted.

Do you see what Jesus was doing? In this encounter with the Samaritan woman he does not change the water into wine, but gets right to the point. He offers her living water that will once and for all quench her thirst. He is this water—something Jesus says far more graphically and shockingly to great interpreters of the law in John 6. She asked Jesus, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst,” thinking about all she knew to think, that then she wouldn’t need to come draw water in the middle of the day. But Jesus meant much more—as He always does in His promises to us.

From Jesus' conversation with Nicodemas we learn about being born again. From Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman we learn about drinking of the water of life, a drink that provides endless satisfaction for a thirst that goes beyond our need for H2O—of which our bodies are principally composed.

Each time we take the Lord’s Supper we take just a little bit of wine. It is never enough to satisfy someone who is thirsty. Our Catholic brothers and sisters believe that when believers drink that wine it is a renewed taste of the blood of Christ, the living water that satisfies. We think along the same lines, but defined differently, that in the Lord’s Supper we are reminded that Jesus has satisfied the deepest thirst of all.

What is this deepest thirst? Thirst drives human society. Why do we think so much and work so hard for money? What’s the appeal of numbers on a bank ledger or green backs in the wallet or now plastic cards that say—“I’ll pay later.” We can’t eat money. We can’t drink it, or build houses with it, or cars, or speed boats. In itself money is totally useless except to start fires. Money is a sign of our endless sense of need. And it fails us when we come to the end of the road and realize we are going to die. There are no luggage racks on funeral cars, and no trailers.

What we need is far, far deeper than anything money can buy. The woman at the well needed more than to be freed from having to come draw water in the heat of the day.

It is not beside the point that the One from whom she received this wonderful gift looked like a human being and was a human being. Sure, Jesus was God made flesh—but she didn’t know this. She thought He was a prophet, that’s all, a great man, because He told her all about her sorry story. It mattered that she was offered this living water by a Person. She could not understand the theology of the Incarnation or of living water, but she sure could understand Jesus’ look, the tone of His voice, the body language of His gestures, his posture as He spoke with her. Look at how much space in this chapter is devoted to Jesus' encounter with her. He gave her time. He gave her every gesture she needed to trust that there was something more He had to offer, something she knew she needed.

The prophet Isaiah wrote: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings.” The physical apparatus God has given to us to communicate His love for the world is a conduit we often short-change. God has given you and me the apparatus to communicate the Gospel—our bodies, our hands, our feet, our faces, our eyes, our speech, our attitudes—all of which are agents with which we embrace the unloved, the hungry, the thirsty, the wounded souls that God so loves that He gave His beloved Son—that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.

Paul asked, “How shall they hear without a preacher?” What is a preacher? A preacher is a reproduction of the Incarnation. A preacher is a human being, any bodily representative of Jesus,--who spent time with a rejected woman as well as with an exemplary religious man, offering Himself as the vehicle of the Gospel to each. You may be the only preacher someone will ever hear. The only Gospel they see. Each of these people, Nicodemas and the unnamed Samaritan woman, went from their encounters with Jesus changed. Each saw into the face of God and noticed in His eyes that He loved them.

People need to see into your eyes, into your face, and to notice the love of God staring out of your eyes and mine. It is this love of God that Jesus not only poured out from His eyes, but from His veins, that is the source of everlasting satisfaction of our deep thirst. We bring this thirst to the community of faith on the Lord’s Day and if it is working right, we are reminded how Jesus satisfies us here, in this place. That is the welcome of this place. I pray this happens here.

Then let us go from here devoted to that One who loves us, from whose face and veins we have drawn this profound acceptance, this life-giving approval and forgiveness and a invitation to remain in His company—that is, to “follow me.” If we are with Him we have the living water. Let us live as though we believe this pertains to my life, and to yours.

The story ends with many Samaritans believing in Jesus because of the witness of this woman they all thought so ill of. They asked Jesus to stay with them. He stayed two more days. I wonder how those two days must have been. I wonder if from that day on the Samaritan woman was welcomed into the company of other women who drew water in the cool of the morning or evening. I wonder if the man with whom she lived married her, and from that day on cared for her and loved her so that she was never divorced again. I wonder if in one city of the Samaritans anyway no one thought of worshiping on Mt. Gerazim as the big issue of life.

Both those days Jesus no doubt got up early to pray. And perhaps they watched Him pray, and indeed, perhaps they were welcomed to pray with Him, and heard Him address God, “Abba, Father,” and knew that they too, though rejected by the Jews as Samaritans, were accepted in the beloved by their heavenly Father.” And so are you and so am I in Christ. And so let us live out our gratitude to Jesus who made this known to us.

Let us pray: O Lord God, creator of all things, father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our heavenly Father too, we thank You for the drink after which we never thirst again, that flows from Jesus Christ Your Son. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

June 04, 2006

Status in the Kingdom of God

Ruth 1: 15-18
John 3: 22-36
June 4th, 2006
The Feast of Pentecost

Today is Pentecost, as we have been reminded at the start of today’s service. We are accustomed to remembering Christmas and Easter. Few Protestants remember Pentecost. Today we’ve tried to do a bit better. Why, when there is nothing in the New Testament about celebrating special days? In fact, to the contrary, the Apostle Paul wrote to Christians in Colossae about special days: “Let no one pass judgment on you . . . with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.”

One way the religion of the Old Testament is very different from that of the New Testament is that the ancient Israelites were required to celebrate three great pilgrimage feasts to Jerusalem: Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. “Three times in the year you shall keep a feast to me,” Moses told the Israelites. These feasts at first were family celebrations. But then they expanded and became all-Israel events.

Why? Well, for more than one reason. They brought the people together so they remembered they were part of a great family with a common heritage that identified them. It was a way of keeping connected as God’s people.

But there was more than this. In Deuteronomy we read: “You shall rejoice in your feast, you, and your son and your daughter, and your man-servant and thy maid-servant, and the Levite, and the sojourner, and the fatherless and the widow, who are among you . . . You shall surely rejoice.”

We read in the 100th Psalm, “Let all the earth make a joyful noise to the Lord. Serve the Lord with rejoicing.” This may well have been an antiphonal song the Israelites sang when they gathered for these feasts. Whereas the daily routine of sacrifices was probably tiresome, even gruesome, the great feasts were happy events. At the last of these feasts young women would dance before young men hoping to attract their future husbands.

God gave three great feast days to ancient Israel to remind them of the on-going life with God that was their call—and that it was a happy thing to be God’s people. Little did they know that in each of these three feasts God was pointing to the length and breadth of His love for the whole world.

They had no idea, for example, that at Passover, many years after the Exodus from Egypt, that a first-born Son born in the family line of Judah would die for the sins of the world. All they knew then was that a first-born son died in a lot of Egyptian homes long ago as part of their deliverance from bondage in Egypt.

They had no idea that at Pentecost when they read the Book of Ruth together, that this story of a Moabite woman’s merger into the family line of the greatest king of Israel anticipated God’s reaching out to the whole world through the seed of Ruth, David’s great-grandmother. We listened this morning to those beautiful words of Ruth to Naomi, that remind us of what Jesus said to us, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” At Pentecost we remember not only the coming of the Holy Spirit one day long ago; we remember He has not forsaken us.

And it was beyond their dreams that at the third great feast, Succoth, a feast of in-gathering the harvest, they were remembering year after year that all nations would be gathered to Jerusalem. From Jerusalem springs of living water would flow to refresh every thirsty person.

Nobody at the time realized this was what Jesus was talking about in what we read in John 7: 37, “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, ‘If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, “ Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water”.”

And then John lets us know what this meant: “Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive.” Jesus used this last Jewish Feast of Tabernacles to proclaim the refreshment He would offer to all who come to Him to drink. It was the feast when we non-Jews were welcomed into the fold of God along with the physical descendants of Jacob.

If these feasts were so important to the Jews why were no counterparts established in the New Testament for Christians? Why are we not commanded to be happy together three times in the year? What a great antidote times of happiness together are to the woes of life that hound us! Laughter is great medicine, and all the more when it is prompted by the joy of the Lord.

I don’t know the answer to this question. Maybe the reason why we were not given Christian feasts is that the Jewish feasts come too infrequently. In Acts 2 we read of the early Christians that they broke bread together often, from house to house. We are to entertain each other often, being together over good food, sharing our homes week in and week out. We’re to have LOTS of church dinners. In these regular moments we suture our bond in Christ. These are our feasts that bring happiness.

Or maybe we were not commanded to celebrate formal three-times-a year feasts because the more organization there is the more incidental structure develops. And where there is structure there is administrative authority to make sure things get done. And where there is administrative authority people with strong temperaments rise to the top of the structure. And thus within the Church there develops the very thing Jesus said was not the case in the Kingdom of God. In the Kingdom of God the one who is master and Lord serves those over whom He has authority. But in the kingdoms people develop, those on top boss those below them on the totem pole. Jesus taught us: Do as I say; Do as I do!

We read this morning John the Baptist’s words that should echo loudly through every congregation: “He must increase but I must decrease.” Josephus tells us that Herod put John the Baptist to death because he feared this humble man was gaining too much political muscle. Little did he know how little interest John the Baptist had in political power. The last of John’s desires was that he could rule over people. His whole way of life rejected the things ordinary people consider important: comfort, security, status, or power. “Jesus, the Master who served, must increase; I must decrease.”

John the Baptist said this in the course of a conversation he had with some of his followers who had been talking with a Jew—which probably means a Pharisee, one concerned with interpretation of the Bible. John’s followers asked him about Jesus—to whom he had pointed one day as he baptized people in the Jordan River. John said then, “See, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” But this One of whom John spoke stood in line with sinners to be baptized. And now he was baptizing, or his followers were doing this as Jesus looked on.

John the Baptist’s disciples thought that only their leader did this kind of thing. Why was Jesus baptizing?

John was not in the least threatened by the people coming to Jesus for baptism. He called himself a “friend of the bridegroom,” with Jesus the bridegroom. In other words John said, “Everything is about Him; I’m just His friend. I am thrilled at the sound of His voice. I’m completely happy because I see people coming to Him.” Remember that in the other Gospels we read that John said, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’.”

Here we read John the Baptist’s words that point toward Pentecost, “He whom God has sent utters the words of God, for it is not by measure that He gives the Spirit.” And John’s Gospel here concludes with those stunning words I remember so often: “He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.”

Last week I closed reminding you of Bonhoeffer’s words that echo this truth of Holy Scripture: To believe is to obey; to obey is to believe. We cannot get away from this. Belief is not a matter of the head alone, of the heart where great mysterious thoughts are treasured. Belief demands our whole bodies by which we become the friends of Jesus. We are Jesus’ friends if we do what He commands us. Let us NOT let our good Reformed theology of grace push to the side this clear message of obedience that is life to receive and death to reject.

What does all of this have to do with Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was poured out? That is, beyond the fact that all things are connected in one way or another? Pentecost, I reminded you, was a great feast of the Jews. It was a time of rejoicing that took place at the barley harvest, and perhaps also celebrated God’s giving the Law through Moses on Mt. Sinai.

The connection with Pentecost is clear as John the Baptist pointed toward God’s giving the Spirit fully (not by measure). The connection with rejoicing is evident in referring to Jesus as the Bridegroom. At wedding receptions there is a lot of rejoicing.

And it is in this on-going, all enveloping rejoicing that we see an important aspect of God’s gift to us of the Holy Spirit. Being together as those who trust in Jesus is rightfully a happy thing—day after day, week after week, year after year. But this rejoicing comes with a price tag—deliberate submissiveness to God. Sometimes there is tension and little rejoicing. This says to us: What do I need to do to restore the rejoicing?

Put yourself among those who were waiting in Jerusalem when the day of Pentecost finally arrived. For nearly fifty days they had been together, patiently waiting for the promise of the Father of which Jesus spoke to them. What did they feel when they heard this sound as of a mighty rushing wind, a controlled hurricane, loud as thunder yet it did not blow out those flames of fire they saw on one another’s heads? Were they conscious of what was going on? Or were they filled with ecstasy of the kind that they weren’t conscious of what was going on?

Were their desires and personalities completely overwhelmed so that they could not do anything else but go into the streets of Jerusalem with the message of the Gospel? We think it must have been this way, that the disciples who flooded the streets of Jerusalem must have been “beside themselves.”

But I wonder if it wasn’t quite this way. I wonder if as they waited patiently those fifty days against all the tendencies that work against patience in you and me, that they learned to be completely submissive to God. Patience is a good teacher. What can keep 120 people together for fifty days when all sorts of “reasonable” considerations say, “Time’s up. It ain’t going to happen. Jesus meant well but He was wrong. He’s gone and we’re left with what you see—just us.”

There have been long years in which faithful Christians have asked, “What has become of the Holy Spirit?” not realizing He was still at work. I think, in fact, of our present distress over developments in our denomination that sometimes make me feel like a feather before the wind, blown this way and then that by forces beyond me—whether within this congregation where some of you are angry at the denomination, or outside our congregation where I am a part of a larger framework.

Where is the Holy Spirit when we need Him? Perhaps we look back with romantic visions of what happened at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit just took control and made people do what they would not ordinarily do. It may have been this way, but it would not keep on being this way after this.

Indeed, even then, it was only because people were submitted together to the will of Jesus who said, “Stay in Jerusalem until you receive the promise of the Father.” Even then, had there not been a spirit of submissiveness to God, I wonder could the Holy Spirit have done that strange and wonderful work described in the Book of Acts. Submission to God is very hard to achieve. It happens from person to person. Submission means waiting beyond the bounds of patience. It means putting up with conditions that are annoying. It means seeing beyond the present moment a higher purpose at work.

And for us who cannot expect the Holy Spirit to descend again as He did on the first Christian Pentecost, it means waiting until God causes to arise within us a consensus that we will recognize as the will of God—and act on it together.

I have been reminded by quite a few people since I mailed my letter to the congregation that it is crucial what we believe. Indeed it is important what we believe. Believing right includes correct doctrine. But part of believing right is maintaining a spirit of submissiveness to the will of God—indeed to the will of God that we do not always know for sure what it is. Waiting on the Lord is never comfortable. We want to be on with things, to fix what is broken.

As Americans we’re proud of “no taxation without representation,” and of that assertive outlook that made our forebears scratch and claw a great country out of the wilderness to which the Pilgrims came.

I would urge us now to learn to wait on the Lord, to wait patiently for Him. And in due time He will make clear what is right for us to do. How long this “due time” is from us now I don’t know. But I know that being submissive to God often will require us to quietly wait. And while we wait let us be busy with believing, that is obeying our Lord Jesus in the wide range of tasks He has asked of us.

Let us look at these tasks in faith, believing that they are the agenda over which we have some control. The agenda Jesus gave us is to believe and to obey, and to do the works of belief and obedience. Among these are to walk faithfully, as individuals, the walk of faith to cherish our spouses, children, friends and to do our duty as unto God. Among these are to speak winsomely of Jesus to others. Among these are to build up one another within this congregation. Among these are to serve one another in a spirit of gentleness, undemanding, sincerely, tirelessly. Among these is to remember as our dander rises, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

Today we come to the Table of the Lord. Look beneath that white cloth and you see the emblems of the body and blood of Jesus that He lay down freely out of submission to the will of the Father. Let us eat of Him. Let us drink of Him. Let us learn of Him meekness and gentleness of heart, and we will find rest for our souls.

O Lord, grant us to be instruments of your Holy Spirit. In our day. In this time. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

May 28, 2006

What is it to Believe in Jesus?

Psalm 24 / Isaiah 51: 1-6
John 3: 17-21
May 28th, 2006

Maybe you noticed yesterday’s New York Times editorial headline: “God and Man on Screen: Big Questions as Entertainment.” The media keeps trumpeting the Da Vinci Code and has created a market for this novel that a lot of people believe portrays facts not fiction. But this fascination is possible because matters of faith are very interesting to people. See Newsweek articles, May 22nd, “Belief watch…” Indeed, matters of faith today are like pictures in an art gallery that people love to look at. When the Art Institute in Chicago advertised that it had a special exhibit of van Gogh and Monet paintings, you had to make reservations to go and look. Bonnie and I flew up there with the Thompson’s to see this. You only have to go to the theater or bookstore to look at matters of faith.

Christianity Today devoted the cover story of the last issue to Dan Brown’s book, followed up by an article on the interest in Bart Ehrman’s books, Misquoting Jesus, and Lost Scriptures that call into question the Christianity represented in the New Testament—and a piece on the second-century work from which our Prayer of Consecration comes after taking the Lord’s Supper together, the Didache. There were other wrinkles in the developing religious world before and after Jesus was born, lived, died, and rose again—all in one small corner of the world. And some of these old wrinkles are finding new interest.

I am tempted to get into the issue of why our New Testament survived and the many other responses to Jesus faded away—but won’t just now.

Equally interesting is why belief itself has faded away from much of Europe’s heartland while it seems to be thriving on our shores. Pope Benedict XVI wrote for his fellow Europeans Introduction to Christianity before he became pope that begins with exploring the crisis of belief in Europe. The first major section of his remarkable book tries to explain what belief is to his country people. They have forgotten.

And I wonder if part of the reason for this is that in the centuries since Jesus awoke faith in God and in Himself as the Son of God something happened like what He described in the Parable of the Sower. You remember it.

When the farmer went to plant seed some of the seed fell on the road and the birds ate it or it got crushed. Some fell among the rocks at the side of the road and initially sprouted but then since there was no dirt the fledgling plants burned up. Other seed fell among the weeds and the roots got choked by the weed-roots that got tangled with the roots of the good seed so that though these seeds grew, they remained bare stalks. They produced no grain. But some seed fell on good ground, grew, and produced a harvest.

This has how it has been in many places where the good seed of the Gospel has been heard. Some people hear the Gospel and it has no effect, like seed on the sidewalk. Other people hear the Gospel, respond quickly, but tough times come and it never takes root, so that their response is short-lived. Others hear the Gospel, respond for a while, but then the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of money, and other distractions come along so they become what we call “nominal Christians,” Christians in name but not in fruitfulness.

Then there are those who hear and the seed grows in their hearts so that they produce results. Their lives change. Other people see and hear them and catch on too. Some in whom the Gospel takes effect produce thirty-fold, some sixty-fold, and some a hundred-fold.

The reason why we still have the Bible, and the reason why there is that gnawing sense of most of us that there is something enormously powerful for good in the Gospel is that there have been those along the way in whom the seed of the Gospel took root and produced a harvest. These people passed along to us the Gospel and in our generation we who hear it respond in the ways Jesus told in His parable. Only some who hear it respond in a fruitful way.

We may reasonably wonder if the reason why the Gnostic Gospels and other books that were not accepted into the Bible faded away was because they were not the kind of seed that is of any use. Every spring Bonnie and I plant a garden and every spring some seeds simply don’t germinate. You see spots in the rows of beans where nothing comes up. These dead seeds are like the lost books newly being found. They are of interest, but only as a witness to what did not rightly reflect the truth of God in Jesus Christ—not because they were suppressed, because the New Testament books too were the target of many enemies, but because they had no life in them.

I have spoken of these things because they bear upon the theme that Jesus taught in the few verses we read from John’s Gospel this morning. The passage actually begins with John 3: 16, that glorious announcement of God’s love for the world shown in sending His only-begotten Son, so that whoever believes in Him has eternal life. The next verse tells us God’s Son did not come here to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through Him. Jesus did not come to condemn the world because sin brings with it its own condemnation. We reap what we sow. Jesus came to interrupt this principle, so that we may reap what we did not sow.

But there was a hitch. Something did not take, not because God’s Son was not effective in providing a cure for the desperate problem of reaping what we sow, but because God does not impose on people this solution to the problem of sin. God will not impose something so precious as eternal life. Some who saw Jesus did not believe in Him. Why? Because when Jesus came it was like a ray of light shining into a room in which all sorts of things were happening in the dark.

It reminds me of how so many places where people go for entertainment the lights are dim. And it’s not just the “romantic” kind of dimness as some nice restaurants provide with soft candle glow and pleasing music that stirs the heart, but a darkness with flashing strobe lighting stabbing the dark from many angles, that hides your face; keeps you from recognizing people and that distracts others from what you might be doing. If the lights were turned on and cameras were to flash in some of these places, the next day there would be a lot of embarrassed people. The media loves to print embarrassing pictures.

Jesus was like this bright light that flooded the world. People could see themselves in this light. People could see Him. And they could see themselves. And they turned away from Him, hating the light, preferring the darkness, because their deeds were evil but familiar and appealing. Not all “evil deeds” are glaringly wicked—the kind described in kinky magazines and movies glamorizing evil. Some evil deeds are like those being exposed in the trials of some corporation executives these days. How minutely courts are now looking for evil in the windfalls of rich CEO’s. This evil lurks behind in the shadows, with respectability bought by the glamour of wealth, “success,” and the glow of celebrity status. This glamorous sin make impossible any serious regard of the Gospel, while claiming the veneer of the Gospel as suggesting an appearance of goodness.

John tells us it is because their deeds are evil that some did not come to that light and sunbathe in His glow. But all who do, the truth come to the light in order that their works might reveal that their works are the works of God.

Here we find a snapshot photograph of faith from one angle. Here we see the word “works” brought in, in a way that may confuse us. It almost seems as though John is telling us that Jesus is a light that reveals some peoples’ works as already the works of God. This is why they come to the light because they are not ashamed of their works.

How can this be when Paul tells us we are saved by grace, through faith, and it is not of works, lest anyone should brag, “I pleased God on my own by my own good deeds?” I remind you this is one snapshot of faith. We read on in the New Testament and we see faith exposed in a more rounded way. We will see in John 3: 36 two phrases in parallel: “Those who believe in the Son have eternal life; those who do not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests on them.” Faith is not something that happens only in our heads, or hearts; it occupies the energy of the whole body.

The Apostle Paul took many photographs of faith. His letters are like a photo-album of faith. His letters in the New Testament illustrate how faith and obedience are two sides of the same thing. In Romans 1: 8, for example he tells the Christians in the empire’s great capital, “Your faith is proclaimed in all the world.” Then in 16: 19 as he wraps up this letter he writes, “Your obedience is known to all.” In Romans 15: 18 he writes, “I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has wrought through me to win obedience from the Gentiles.” To the Corinthians he describes faith as “obedience in acknowledging the Gospel of Christ.”

Looking more broadly at the glimpses of faith that we see in the New Testament we discover that faith, though essentially seen in obedience, is not an accomplishment in which a person who has faith would want to boast. Because the good works done by a person who has faith in Jesus are the result of a will that has been submitted to Him. But this surrendered will asserts itself. James wrote, “Faith without works is dead.” Faith loves to live vibrantly. We are all sensitive to the principle of walk the walk or don’t talk the talk. But walking the walk, doing the works of faith does not earn God’s favor. Rather, if we are doing the works of faith it is because we have been lured into life with God.

One thoughtful Christian put it this way, “Faith is the experience of being rightwised, fellowship with Christ.” And when we have been rightwised in step with Jesus Christ, our faith produces hope, and peace, and patience, and self-control, and many other characteristics that you and I notice when we inspect closely the life of someone in whom the Gospel has really taken root.

What Paul calls the “fruit of the Spirit” does not get harvested in a Christian automatically. But it is remarkable how across the range of personality types of people who come to Jesus, across the spectrum of backgrounds from which we come, when people have come to the light of the Gospel and bask in its brightness rather than running from it—there is similarity in the Gospel’s effects.

I get the feeling when I think of Jesus’ parable of the sower in light of how the Gospel is popular today, it’s as though there is a great bin full of seed that is fascinating as a museum piece is fascinating. You go to the Art Institute in Chicago and you are expected to look, and certainly NOT to touch. But when you go to a restaurant, if you only look, and do not only touch but also take into your mouth and into your tummy the good-looking food you see, you would be thought very odd.

I get the feeling that the Gospel, if received by faith, by true faith, by what faith really is, is like eating good food. Indeed, when we take the Lord’s Super we illustrate this. We eat the bread and drink the cup. Then what happens to what we eat?

What one of us who eats good food would brag at the good health we enjoy as a result of eating good food rather than junk food? Great crowds will flock to hear the Gospel, and it can be presented with entertaining accoutrements that can compete with a rock concert. But it is when that Gospel finds a place in your heart and mine, and is allowed to germinate, that faith has happened. Because faith is not just interest in the Gospel. Faith is the result of taking the Gospel into our hearts as we take food into our bodies—with this difference.

What happens in our bodies with food happens without needing us to say, “Stomach, digest that food, or kidneys, process what I drink, or intestines, absorb the nutrition the stomach has made available in a form we can absorb.” But when we have received the Gospel by faith, though God will do something beyond what we will and choose, we must choose to do something motivated by the faith we claim.

In good times such as these it seems that faith may operate without our having to make many life-interrupting decisions. But when we only believe in our minds or hearts and do not then choose to apply to our lives what we say we believe, the belief does us no good. If because you believe in, that is, want to obey Jesus Christ you cultivate your thoughts toward knowing God, and if you take assessment of the gifts God has given you to use, and choose to use them for the good of others, then you are doing what faith does.

On Wednesday evenings a number of folk have been gathering in our family room to discuss Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship. We have been stirred as we think of how many Christians in Germany in the 1930s, Hitler’s era, were satisfied with cheap grace, that is, receiving the good news of God’s grace in Christ with no cost to themselves. They thought they could bask in the glow of God’s unmerited favor while great evils incubated in their land. Indeed, the church in Germany in those days did nothing to impede the growing evil and sometimes furthered Hitler’s cause—prying God’s blessing on it!

So an underground church developed where Christians realized that following Jesus must cost them something, perhaps even their lives. Because what they did and what they believed had to agree. Bonhoeffer was hanged, a young man of 39, for his role in this movement of costly grace.

You and I don’t seem to be caught in a situation quite like Germany’s in those days, though one of the insidious things about deep evil is that it is often not recognized as evil. But in our prosperity and safety we are lured into cheap reception of grace as though all that mattered was that we say we believe the right ideas. We may become piously defensive of the New Testament against the challenges of the Da Vinci Code and Bart Ehrman’s books, while all along our lives continue to be lived by principles of convenience and self-centered values.

What difference has believing in Jesus made in your life?

Here is the challenge. The one who believes in the Son of God has eternal life. Those who do not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on them. Faith is obedience. Obedience is faith.

Let us pray: Heavenly Father, we bless you for the Gospel of Your Holy Son, Jesus. Grant that we may believe it with all our hearts, and that the fruit of our belief may be beautiful in your sight. Amen.

Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM

May 21, 2006

God Loves the World

Numbers 21: 4-9 / John 3: 1-16
May 21st, 2006

This morning very early I went out the front door of our home and looked up at the clear, star-filled sky. And again it struck me how odd and remarkable a thing it is to preach, to speak on behalf of Almighty God, the Creator of this vast sky with all its stars, to people like myself.

I’ve been thinking about the two passages before us this morning over the past week—two passages that come to us by the will of this God who created that great star-filled sky. Written a long time ago they still speak to you and me. They are timeless, given by the eternal God.

The first of these Scriptures tells of a disastrous span of time late in Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness. God had just delivered them from Canaanite enemies, but led them around the land of Edom, instead of conquering Edom too, perhaps because the Edomites were descendants of Esau—brother of their patriarch Jacob.

The people became impatient with this detour. They spoke against God and against Moses. They loathed the worthless food God was giving them. They thought it worthless. God did not. They loathed Moses for not supplying them better—when he apparently had the ability to make God give them what they wanted—or at least better than this.

So God sent venomous snakes that bit many of them. They crawled about everywhere. It was a far worse case of what happens in Arizona these days as housing developments are built out into the desert, the natural home of rattlesnakes.

The people couldn’t escape them. Avert your eyes one minute from looking down at the ground and you’ll be bitten. The people recognized the connection between this onslaught of snakes and their complaining. They begged Moses to pray to the Lord to take the plague of poisonous snakes away. So Moses prayed, but instead of simply taking away the snakes, as He conquered the lethal Canaanites, God told Moses to make a fiery serpent and set it up on a pole. Moses couldn’t make a snake so he made a bronze serpent that looked like these deadly snakes and set it up on a pole, and everyone who had been bitten would live if he looked up at that snake.

That bronze serpent had an afterlife in Israel. Understandably it was preserved as a relic of great significance because it granted a new lease on life to people who thought they were as good as dead. “Only look up and you will live,” was a word that desperate people were glad to follow. But a problem developed when people forgot that bronze snake was only useful because God was teaching His people how completely dependent they were on Him for life. It was not the snake but God. Ironically, it was a snake in the Garden of Eden that was the cause of death to Adam and Eve. And it was a snake God used to bring life to His sin-bitten people. I sometimes think we miss God’s sense of humor.
Israel didn’t catch the humor. They took that snake very seriously for far too long. It was preserved and found its way into the Temple in Jerusalem as an object of worship. But good King Hezekiah took it down and broke it in pieces “because he trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel.”

But we just read of this snake again as Jesus brought it up in speaking to Nicodemas, a Pharisee, a man learned in the law of God. Jesus uses that snake as a symbol of Himself, to whom all can look to find eternal life. Those who looked up at the bronze snake in the wilderness would all die eventually. But those who look up to Jesus find eternal life.

But I’m getting ahead of the story. Seldom do we read of conversations Jesus had with particular people. Here we read of a friendly conversation with Nicodemas, a Pharisee, a ruler among the Jewish people, which means, a member of the Sanhedrin. I wish we might read this together in the Greek because John tells us of this conversation so suggestively. Nicodemas came at night—maybe in order not to be seen by others, or maybe because he’d been studying the law late into the night and realized he’d come to the end of his possibilities. So he came to Jesus, finally, after having labored in his studies into the night.

Nicodemas is speaking for more than himself. “Rabbi, we know you have come from God, a teacher.” How did those for whom he spoke know this? Because nobody could do the signs Jesus did if he were not from God.

Someone has proposed that John is here showing us not just a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemas, but more than this, a conversation between the Church and the synagogue. That is, between God’s chosen forerunner and God’s chosen fulfillment of His plan from of old. Nicodemas comes to Jesus in a friendly manner to learn the secret of life after studying late into the night. We don’t know what passage of Scripture he had been studying. Might it have been the passage from Numbers we read together a few moments ago?

It seems that Jesus changes the subject. Nicodemas says good things about Jesus. He recognizes that Jesus could not do the signs which he had heard about unless God was with him. Jesus leaps from this to speak of the Kingdom of God. “Unless someone is born from above he is not able to see the kingdom of God.” Heaven is up. The Kingdom of God is where His will is done. Jesus would later teach His disciples to pray, “Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” Nicodemas recognized that Jesus is doing here on earth something only God can do. He must have been puzzled at Jesus’ reply.

The word Jesus spoke in replying to Nicodemas can have two meanings. The Greek words gennethe anothen can mean either “born from above,” which suggests where heaven is, or it can mean “born again.” Nicodemas took it the second way, maybe because he was thinking of how God gave a second lease on life to those who looked up at the bronze serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness.
He pressed the question taking “born again” very literally. “How can an old person enter his mother’s womb and be born again?” Jesus replied still more cryptically: “Truly, truly I say to you, unless someone is born of water and spirit he is not able to enter the Kingdom of God.” Nicodemas last word is a question: “How can these things be?” Jesus seems to scold him for not being able to understand.
But we too labor to understand. It seems Jesus expected Nicodemas to understand what he meant when he said, “Unless someone is born of water and spirit he is not able to enter the Kingdom of God.” What did Jesus mean, “Born of water and spirit?”

Perhaps “born of water” referred to the new thing John the Baptist introduced, where baptism was a sign of repentance and cleansing from sin. But some who have thought about this have proposed that Jesus may have been speaking of something more “earthly” than this. God’s first act of creation was to separate water from earth. Take away water and what are we? We’re a tiny little bit of minerals that can fit in the palm of your hand. We are born with water as our most constituent part.

Not only that, but the first clue that a child is about to be born is when “the water breaks.” Maybe this was the “earthly thing” which Jesus expected Nicodemas to understand. Maybe John’s baptism; maybe the basic element of all living things as water; maybe being born physically out of the water in our mother’s womb.

Being born of spirit suggests the first thing that happens once we are born—in an earthly sense. When you were born the first thing you had to do was breathe. The word for wind and spirit is the same in several ancient languages—Greek and Hebrew among them. Jesus expected Nicodemas to understand this earthly description about birth. This because the heavenly sense follows from the earthly sense.

The clue to the heavenly sense Jesus was teaching He found in the story of the bronze serpent. Because here the new lease on life not only depended on an act of God, but also on the will of the person who wanted to live. No baby that is born chooses to exist. When you and I were born it was altogether as a result of the love of our parents.

But if we are to be born again, born from above, we must look at the One signified by the bronze serpent that was lifted up on a pole in the wilderness. That act was so small, so helpless, but it had to happen. A person who was bitten by a snake might know all about that bronze snake on a pole and say humbug!, refusing to look. And that person died. But the one who swallowed his pride and looked at the snake got a new lease on life.

That look is the earthly symbol of the faith by which we look to Jesus to get eternal life. The faith by which we find the “new birth,” that gets for us eternal life, the life of God, is as helpless as a look up at the bronze serpent in the wilderness.

But we should not rest on that realization because if we have been born again it means we have entered into a new kind of life. It is very obvious that this new life does not just happen of its own.