July 17, 2005
The Holy Spirit: The Lord, the Giver of Life
Isaiah 32: 9-20 / Galatians 5: 13-26
July 17th, 2005
I’m glad to be standing here this morning. We pulled into town last evening around 7PM, so don’t go to our house now for an exhibit of perfect housekeeping. As things turned out my being in the pulpit today is a bit of an island in being away from the pulpit more than ever before in my years in the ministry.
We have just been off for two weeks to visit our aging mothers and grab a bit of R & R—a time sandwiched in between hurricanes as it turned out. We rode bicycles around the circumference of Key West, Florida last week and saw what havoc Hurricane Dennis inflicted on this beautiful little island. The beaches were piled high with rotting seaweed. Trees were uprooted. The debris stacked along the streets made it precarious to ride bikes. We told our hosts at Nassau House that thankfully we only have tornadoes and blizzards in Indiana.
Beginning next Sunday I’ll be off for at least a couple weeks more. On Thursday I’m getting new knees, and tough as I am, it will take a week or so for me to be able to get around with my new apparatus.
Last Sunday I worshipped with a very small C & MA congregation in Ft. Myers. It was so good to hear another pastor preach the Bible’s message as found in the prophet Jonah. When the pastor discovered I was a Presbyterian pastor I think it un-nerved him, but it needn’t have. I discover that when I get to hear preaching I’m a bit like the deer referred to in Psalm 42 that “pants” after flowing streams in a dry forest. I prepared this morning’s sermon in the wee hours of the morning over the past couple weeks. In my trade it is impossible to escape the sense of duty I feel in preaching.
Today I return to the Nicene Creed, which I began to explore with you a few months ago. We dive in mid-stream on the final section of the Nicene Creed that describes the Holy Spirit. “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life.”
We read this morning the prophet Isaiah’s comforting promise to the nation of Judah that after a time of national suffering for sin, the Spirit of God would be poured out on her. When things bottomed out morally and religiously God withheld His hand of care. The nation collapsed in on itself in injustice and every other kind of immorality. It went spiritually bankrupt. Its priests and prophets lied and stole and preyed on the people they were to serve in God’s behalf. So God let the nation have its way. He did not forget His covenant with them, but He removed Himself. As Isaiah said, “God hid His face.” It seemed as if more than this had happened. It seemed God had withdrawn completely from His people. They were abandoned in a world of powerful and cruel enemies. But Isaiah peered through the mists of time and saw that God would pour out His Spirit on the entire people.
The word for “poured” here in the Hebrew Bible is astounding. Its root meaning actually is “be naked,” and is used nowhere else in this way. The Spirit would be made naked on Israel. It is a very revealing word, we might say. Is the prophet telling us that the Spirit of God would be revealed more vividly to the whole of God’s people than ever before even to prophets, priests, artisans, and kings? They were given this special personal attention from God, but never before the whole nation. But the time would come when God would “expose” His Spirit to His people as never before.
This is actually the second promise found in this chapter. Isaiah 32 begins with the promise of a righteous king whose princes would be “like a hiding place from the wind, a covert from the tempest, like streams of water in a dry place, like the shade of a great rock in a weary land.” So here we have Isaiah describing God not only as Father, but as King and Spirit.
It’s as though the prophet saw the manifestation of the second two persons of the Holy Trinity, the King of kings and the Holy Spirit—the Son of God and the Holy Spirit. This Triune God is the subject of the Nicene Creed. The Holy Trinity is not a uniquely Christian doctrine. It is there in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.
Now I must back up a bit and remind you that we are trying to understand the Nicene Creed. The Creed isn’t scripture, but it has been of great blessing in keeping Christians on track about the teachings essential to Scripture. It was the first deliberate statement of faith that Christians from all over the world composed because of a threat to the faith that popped up in one of the most important Christian centers in the first quarter of the fourth century.
Actually, the statement of the Creed before us this morning was not composed at the Council of Nicea. It was added to the Nicene Creed later perhaps after the Council of Constantinople that took place in AD 381. This was sixty-one years after the close of the Council of Nicea. Those who composed the Nicene Creed were dead. A whole new body of Church leaders met at Constantinople to address new challenges to the Church.
When we read what the Scriptures teach about the Son and the Holy Spirit it is evident that they are in some mysterious way at one with the Father. They were equal in eternity, equal in power, equal in dignity—yet distinct.
The first thing this expanded Creed said of the Holy Spirit was, “[He is] the Lord, the giver of life.”
It is interesting that they called Him “the Lord.” The Greek word kyrios, “Lord,” was the word the Greek translation of the Old Testament used consistently to translate the unpronounceable name of God in the Hebrew Bible—that is often pronounced today Yahweh. Jesus had been called “Lord” in the New Testament. The Apostle Paul also wrote of the Holy Spirit, “The Spirit is the Lord.” In calling Him “the Lord,” the Holy Spirit was treated with the full respect given to God the Father and God the Son. The Apostle Paul did not quote the Old Testament in describing the Holy Spirit in this way, but I wonder if one of the passages he had in mind was the passage from Isaiah we have read today.
Then the Creed described the Spirit as “The Giver of life.” Perhaps these early Church teachers had in mind the work of the Spirit of God in creation. Genesis 1 tells of the start of creation when the ruah elohim, the wind of God, the Spirit of God blew over the surface of the waters. It was God’s Spirit that preceded everything that follows—the separation of light from darkness, the separation of dry land from water and sky. Are we to assume that every other act of creation was also the product of God’s wind hovering on this planet?
These are mysteries beyond us—how physical life unfurled. But when we turn to the New Testament, and particularly to Paul’s letters we learn details of the kind of inner life the Holy Spirit gives. This is our concern. In his letter to the Galatians he explains that there is a kind of life produced by the untamed flesh. Its result is to make us bite and devour one another. All of the trouble now afflicting every place of conflict on this planet is the result of the kind of life spawned by the untamed flesh.
But the Spirit of God gives a different kind of life. Let us read aloud together Galatians 5: 26. We’ll need to open our Bibles to read this whole passage because our bulletins go only as far as verse 23. Here is a summary of the kind of life given by the Spirit of God.
When we read this and then survey our own lives we may wonder why the Holy Spirit is not more powerful. If the Holy Spirit has been exposed fully to us how can we resist being altogether loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, gentle, good, adaptable, and full of trust? One of the paradoxes of the Bible is that the God who can create galaxies chooses to present Himself before us helpless in us apart from our welcome. You and I have the choice of submitting deliberately to the Spirit of God, or saying “I will be religious in my own way.”
As this has happened in the story of Christianity, the Church has often been a ruthless, cruel oppressor. During the Middle Ages the Church in the Western world was engaged in a power struggle with kings and emperors. When the Church was winning, it was hardly a model of grace. It argued tragically, that the Pope was the Vicar of Christ—who was King of kings. But Jesus never flexed His muscles to dominate people. He never asserted power over Caesar.
This is not the kind of power God exercises over His people. When God’s Spirit is in control, He graciously empowers from within. But what has to happen is a deliberate submission of your will and mine, thoughtfully, reasonably, with understanding, to the will of God. Being a Christian is a thoughtful discipline. God’s will is spelled out so carefully about how we are to live together, how we are to think of ourselves, how we are to love Him. But neither God nor we who have leadership in the Church have a ghost of a chance of imposing God’s will on you. You and I must freely submit our wills, thoughtfully, day after day, to the will of God. It is a kind of discipline we all find hard.
It is here that the Holy Spirit exposes Himself to us in His weakness and power. When you and I are pliable in spirit, the Holy Spirit does His work. We enjoy a kind of inward reward when the Spirit of God is alive in us. I don’t believe in a “feel good” Christianity, but beyond dispute the Bible shows us that when the Spirit of God is at work in us, we will, dare I say it, “feel good.” This is borne out by personal experience.
But when we are hard and strong-willed, the Holy Spirit politely waits. He is the very model of courtesy. The Bible gives you and me a litmus test by which we can know if the Holy Spirit has been given access to us.
Are you and I filled with love for others? Are you and I at peace? Do you and I have joy? Are you and I patient? Are you and I gentle? Are you and I adaptable? Are you and I good? Are you and I trustworthy? In all our range of personalities we display these traits if the Holy Spirit has control of us? If we are otherwise, we may be religious. We may even be Reformed. We may say with conviction, “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” but it’s only theory. And nobody is right before God and other people theoretically. We are or we aren’t submitted to the Holy Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit of God is the measure of our standing before God and others.
As the miles rolled by yesterday, I was chewing on this last idea and wondering why it is so hard to submit to the gracious Holy Spirit. And I thought of the demands we place as a society on people who have been seduced by drugs and alcohol. How inflexible the County Correction System is with those who have been caught. Tests are given regularly to see if those who were terribly hooked have dabbled at all in drugs and alcohol. And if they have, they are tossed back in jail.
And yet all of us who are hooked with our various personality limitations—high irritability, anger, impatience, sexual temptation, temptation to lie, temptations to think life is good when we own lots of stuff (self absorption)—when we continue to be hooked by this we plead, “It’s only natural.” This is the battle the Holy Spirit gently fights with us—to overwhelm what is “only natural” with what is good. And for the Spirit to win this battle, that He fights gently, you and I must submit our wills as fully as our court system demands that people snared in drugs and alcohol submit. We’re often hard and harsh on people who have been caught with problems we may not have, but very soft on our own problems.
“We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life.” So we say. And indeed, He is the Lord and the Giver of outer and inward life. But He is this to us at our invitation. I pray you and I are good hosts to the Holy Spirit. I pray He has been invited to sit on the thrones that we have in our hearts, the place from which we are ruled in our thoughts, words, and deeds.
Let us pray: O Lord God, grant to us to welcome your Holy Spirit that He may be Lord indeed, and the Giver of the kind of life that we live. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
May 08, 2005
Jesus Arose As the Bible Said
Psalm 16 / Isaiah 53: 10-12
I Corinthians 15: 3-4
May 8th, 2005
Today is Mother’s Day. Few ideals can touch the heart like “mother.” I wonder how many soldiers have had “MOM” tattooed on their arms when far from home. They look down and see those three letters and think of the one who holds them in her heart no matter what.
How did Mother’s Day get started? In the 17th century in England the practice began of keeping the fourth Sunday in Lent as “Mothering Sunday.” The working poor folk who lived away from home serving in the homes of the wealthy got to return home for Mothering Sunday.
In 1872, Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” helped organize Mother’s Day meetings in Boston. Thirty-five years later, Ann Jarvis from Philadelphia persuaded her mother’s church in Grafton, West Virginia to celebrate Mother’s Day on the second anniversary of her mother’s death, which happened to fall on the second Sunday in May. She began writing to pastors, legislators, governors, and to others who could spread the idea. It caught on.
By 1911, Mother’s Day was an established day in most of our states. Three years later President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May national Mother’s Day. We bless you mothers who gave us life! Bless you all who were born to mothers. You reflect not only the features you inherited from your parents. You are made in the image of God.
This Mother’s Day our theme is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Easter and Mother’s Day have this in common that they both call our attention to a burst of new life. You came from your mother a baby human being. You will rise from the grave a new being never to die again.
The reason I draw Easter into our thoughts this morning is because you may remember the Nicene Creed is guiding our thoughts. We have come to the phrase in the Nicene Creed, “The third day he arose according to the Scriptures.”
It is a nearly exact quote from part of the passage in I Corinthians we just heard. Paul wrote, “I delivered to you of first importance, and that I received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.”
The whole Gospel is summed up here. It is the primary interest of every Christian. It is the bond and glue that holds us together. Here is the look to the past that gives us hope for the future. It is no wonder that Paul wrote, “I delivered to you what is of first importance,” because the church to which he wrote was being torn apart by matters that were not of first importance. These words leaped out at me. It was and intentional emphasis.
The chapter just before this contains the most Presbyterian verse in the Bible. In the last verse Paul tells us, “Let all things be done decently and in order.” He wrote this because of two matters that had gotten out of hand. Both of these things have modern counterparts. The first was speaking in tongues, something not too many Presbyterians do, but which a lot of Christians do in some sectors of the Church. The second matter had to do with the role of women in the Church.
Speaking in tongues became a very important part of early Christian experience after Pentecost. Before that, in the fifty days since Jesus was crucified, the only issue was that Jesus died and rose again. These two concluding events in Jesus’ ministry were the glue that held His followers together. Jesus insured they would actually stay together by telling them to wait in Jerusalem until they received the promise of the Father. They didn’t know what that meant, but they found out in no uncertain terms.
On Pentecost morning the room in which they were together was filled with the sound of a mighty rushing wind. The usual word “wind” and the word “Spirit” are the same in the language of the New Testament. But here we find a different word for “wind” (biaios) which means a strong or violent wind, not just a breath-like wind, which is the word used for the Holy Spirit.
Looking around then each saw what looked like fire on each other’s heads. They burst from that room into the streets of Jerusalem speaking the Gospel in languages they’d never even heard. Some people in the city thought they were drunk when they heard language not their own. They were, in a sense--drunk with the Holy Spirit. How their hearts must have burst with this new wine, this Divine energy surging in them!
It is no wonder that after this ecstatic speaking should have found some place in the church. The speaking in tongues that happened on Pentecost was the speaking of actual languages. But these languages came with feelings of great enthusiasm as people spoke. The church grew in a huge thrust. Three thousand people in Jerusalem were baptized that first Pentecost.
But as often happens among people, some got side-tracked and thought of the tongues-speaking, the ecstatic speech, as the thing of importance. So speaking in tongues became a problem. It got out of hand. Speaking in tongues became a sort of test of spirituality. If I can do it and you can’t, guess who’s the better Christian? Not everyone could speak in tongues. In I Corinthians 14 Paul set down rules for speaking in tongues during church. There has to be an interpreter or it would only sound like gibberish to the rest. One should speak at a time (14: 27) and only two or three at most should do it during a service. Just because it got out of hand, let no one for that reason forbid it in the church.
Speaking in tongues was dividing the Church instead of building it up. Paul needed to remind them what was of first importance.
We don’t understand what Paul was getting at when he wrote that women should keep silence in the churches. In other places in the New Testament women had speaking roles. He must have been addressing a particular problem at Corinth.
In 14: 36 he asks some women who were causing difficulty, “What! Did the word of God originate with you, or are you the only ones it has reached?” Sometimes when people have a moving experience they are so fascinated with their experience that they impose it on others, expecting them to see right away how specially anointed by God they are. When others don’t recognize this immediately, things can get sticky.
Both of these issues could have risen to the top of the heap, making Corinth a seething church, seething not with the power of the Holy Spirit but with tension and division. So Paul wrote, “Here is the Gospel in which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it fast—I delivered to you as of first importance—Christ died, was buried and was raised on the third day all according to the Scriptures.”
This church, so important to the spread of the Gospel, so privileged to receive some of the most basic ideas of the Christian faith, fought a lot. This is one of the great puzzles of early Christianity. They had received so much. They were squandering their good fortune by divisiveness. Each said the other was the reason.
Internal strife was the first problem Paul addressed in this church. Why speak to the problem of strife, which is only natural when people have different points of view? Because if Jesus taught anything that should characterize His followers it was this, that they should be known by their love for each other. Continuing to love doesn’t happen easily. If anything makes this teaching of Jesus seem out of place, we have a problem.
Jesus prayed to the Father that we would be one even as He was one with the Father. Jesus prayed this referring to those who were yet to come, that is to you and me, and not only with regard to His twelve disciples—one of whom would betray Him.
So Paul appealed to these folk, “I appeal to you brothers and sisters by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same judgment (1: 10).” It seems an unreasonable expectation. How is it possible to get people with different and very earnest points of view to agree.
“OK,” some seem to have said, “We’ll all agree so long as we follow Peter.” Peter was one of the twelve. Paul was not. Perhaps Peter had come to Corinth too and impressed some of the folk who had become Christians more than they were impressed with Paul. Paul probably rubbed some people the wrong way. So they went to hear a “real apostle” speak when Paul was speaking in another assembly in the city. They liked him better. “Peter’s the one,” they said. Others disagreed. They would follow Paul. He was the one who got the whole thing going. He was their spiritual father. Besides, Peter had botched things pretty badly when Jesus needed him most.
Still others said, “No, do you not see that we’ve been blessed with this great orator from Alexandria, Egypt—Apollos? He is God’s fresh gift to us. Paul and Peter are of the old school. Apollos has the fresh anointing of God’s Spirit. When he speaks the air is alive. People could not help but call out “Amen, brother!” when he spoke. They would break out in applause, interrupting his eloquent message. They went home feeling electrified after church. No one ever felt like that when Paul spoke.
Perhaps the most divisive of all were those who said, “Jesus only.” They were impossible. They wouldn’t listen to anyone, only their own fertile imaginations as they thought of Jesus. All who fostered strife in the church in Corinth had a spiritual reason for doing it.
In the second chapter we discover that the church had become sophisticated. The city of Corinth had inherited the wisdom of the great Greek philosophers. Greek paideia, the educational system that formed the character of every well-established Greek person, rubbed against the simplicity of the Gospel.
I remember in seminary trying to figure out how to apply Whitehead’s idea of “process in history” to the Gospel as was popular in those days of Process Theology. I remember trying to get the hang of Paul Tillich’s existential theology. Karl Barth’s very appealing theology of crisis seemed to collide with the commonsense, logic-based ideas about the Bible that dominated in the surging evangelical community. And thus the church stumbled over its own cleverness during the years I was in seminary. We were lured into identifying ourselves by which school of theology we agreed with.
This is how it was in Corinth. So Paul, though highly educated, poured out his soul. “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
It is quite something to imagine this courageous man who could stand up to Roman authorities fearlessly, now tongue-tied before the people in Corinth to whom he had introduced the Gospel. “I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom.” This hardly sounds like the Paul we have in mind. It can be very odd to try to preach the Gospel into strife. I have sometimes found that nothing is quite so inhospitably received as the clearest things Jesus taught, when this message collides with a different spirit at work in the church. This was Paul’s experience long before me.
What did he mean when he spoke of his message being reduced to “a demonstration of the Spirit and of power?” He had been like the birth-mother of this church. Perhaps in his quietness, his tongue-tied silence, it was evident that what surged in his heart was authentic, and the tense lines of controversy in the church could then appear as simply human contentiousness.
It seems that a significant number of those at Corinth must have recognized their problem. They saw themselves as others saw them and were alarmed with themselves more than with others. They were again hungry for the truth that was at the heart of their faith. And thus this letter which Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth came to be a treasure to share. They did not tear it up and throw it away. They preserved it so that every church afterward that faced the problems that had rendered their fellowship and worship sterile could find an antidote and get back on track.
I hear very often these days about the problem in our denomination. People are transferring to non-Presbyterian churches in bunches. Our rolls dwindle every year. Why, our leaders ask? We think of this or that remedy. Let’s go modern. Drums and guitars will replace the classic organ. Our songs will be like the songs popular in secular culture, only with Christian words. We’ll cut out the formality. We must appeal to the youth. They are our future. So many answers address particular problems.
But the secret to our success, the secret to the success of the Body of Christ in this tormented world, is for us to remember what is of first importance. So long as anything but what is of first importance is at the focus of our attention, we will be focusing on what is secondary or maybe even not important to the cause of Christ at all. For sure, the moment humility and a contrite heart evaporate, God does not find us a homey place to be.
When what is of first importance grabs our hearts, we are filled with gratitude. Gratitude is a wonderful stimulus to a kind of life that cannot be planned. Gratitude incites to a kind of action that no program can bring. Gratitude is very liberating. It moves the imagination. We love to sing, “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” That’s a grateful song. Sometimes I freshly encounter a person whose life seems to be moved by gratitude and it is beautiful.
Last Sunday I helped to ordain three deacons at the Korean Presbyterian Church. One of these I have had occasion to watch for quite a while. She has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and has done first-rate research. But I didn’t learn this of her right away, and it was clearly not important to her. She is happiest when doing what you and I would consider menial service in the church. I felt so privileged to take part in her ordination, to preach and then to lay my hand on her head as Pastor Kim prayed.
I met her one day down on the floor laying tile in the bathrooms of their new facility. I’ll not soon forget that picture in my mind. She had such a radiant face. She bursts with kindness. She is happiest, her pastor told me, when doing something for someone. She is first on the doorstep when someone is ill and needs a meal. She delivers it giving the sense that she is lucky to get to do this. Why? Somehow I hope you may come to know this remarkable, simple lady. There seethes in her heart a spirit of gratitude to God. This is the real thing. It is so beautiful.
Paul wrote, “I have delivered to you what is of first importance, which I have received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, and that he rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures.” Because of this you and I have hope in this life. And we know that when we trust in Jesus, when we die we will go to heaven. And that’s a pretty good deal—“Amazing grace that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” That’s a happy song.
Charles Wesley put it equally touchingly: “And can it be that I should gain an interest in my Savior’s blood? Died He for me who caused His pain? Amazing love! How can it be that Thou my God should’st die for me.” A pretty good deal, I’d say.
My people, my friends, my fellow Christians, this is of first importance.
Let us pray: O Lord God, heavenly Father, thank you that Jesus died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2005
Jesus Suffered Death and Was Buried
Q. 60, Heidelberg Catechism / Isaiah 53: 1-6/Matthew 27: 57-61
May 1st, 2005
This morning I would like to speak about why Jesus suffered death and was buried. I think that we customarily think of Jesus’ death as the means God used to take care of the problem of sin—as far as He was concerned. We may fail to see how Jesus died to take care of the problem of sin as far as we are concerned. I would much rather stand before the bar of God’s justice than to stand before a human court. God’s mercy, after all, is everlasting on those who fear Him.
The holy God looks at your sin and mine and says to us who ask forgiveness, “I forgive you for Jesus’ sake.” He bore in His body on the cross your sins and mine. But a human court looks on the offending person and thinks one thing: punishment.
We carry this outlook over into ordinary life. We notice one another’s faults and find it very hard to forgive. We who sin are hard on the sins of others. How keen and indiscriminate is the gift of memory. We who are forgiven live maintaining crossfires of condemnation that can make of life a very painful experience. Depression and anxiety are major causes of physical illness because we have perpetuated guilt before one another.
Jesus died not only to grant us peace with God, but also in order to give us peace with one another. After God has cared for sin at such cost, have we not tried to perpetuate the sense of being offended?! This is why Jesus suffered death—to put an end to this problem between people as well as before God.
In a way it seems odd to say Jesus “suffered” death because probably nothing is less painful than death itself. But I have taken this term, “He suffered death” from the Nicene Creed as we have it in our Book of Confessions. In the sentence before this in the Nicene Creed we read that Jesus was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate. The crucifixion was the painful part.
Again we heard today the stark words of Isaiah 53 that remind us of the ancient prophet’s words that it was “incredible” it was that this perfect One should suffer. “Who can believe our report?” The Gospel of Matthew lays out the details of the incredibly grim day of Jesus’ suffering and death. From noon until 3: 00 o’clock PM there was darkness enshrouding Jerusalem. At 3 o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Then, after refusing a sip of vinegar from a sponge—offered, some think, to relieve the pain, but perhaps it was pressed to His parched mouth when He had no longer the energy to turn His head away from it to revive Him and prolong His pain, Jesus cried out again and yielded up His spirit.” That is, He died.
At that moment the veil in the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. There was an earthquake and many tombs were opened in the city. A number of us here have seen those ancient graveyards in Jerusalem, one of which has the tomb of King David. Did he rise that day? I wonder. Many bodies of holy people came to life and walked into the city. Imagine the consternation in those who saw this! The centurion who administered Jesus’ crucifixion was filled with awe. He said, “Truly this was the Son of God. A number of women watched this from some distance. We don’t know how long these events took to unfold. Perhaps within the space of a few minutes. And then silence settled over Golgotha where Jesus was crucified. Three hours or more passed with Jesus hanging there dead.
Evening came and a rich man from the city named Joseph a follower of Jesus who Mark’s Gospel tells us was a member of the Sanhedrin went to Pilate asking to care for Jesus’ body. Perhaps it was a guilty conscience that compelled Pilate to command that this rich man be given Jesus’ body. I wonder how Joseph and his servants cared for Jesus’ body. Did they lift the cross out of the hole in which it was planted, laying it flat on the ground. Or did they use ladders to reach his hands? They had to get those spikes out of his hands and feet—which must have been hard to do because they were pounded deep through His hands into the wood.
Joseph wrapped Jesus’ body in a clean linen shroud and had it carried to his own tomb which had been carved from rock in a hillside. He had a large stone rolled in front of the tomb, perhaps to keep Jesus’ enemies from desecrating it. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary stayed behind, sitting in front of the sepulcher. We don’t know when they left to go home. Perhaps they stayed through the night till the Temple guards arrived the next day. They were sent to guard the tomb so Jesus’ disciples wouldn’t steal it and then say He was risen.
Why all of this? During Holy Week we pass through these details so fast, mostly remembering the general effect of that dreadful Friday before Easter’s joyous victory. But the Gospels spell out the details of Jesus’ death first. Why did Jesus suffer like this? We think the answer is theological—to satisfy a holy God who so hates sin that the only way He could love us was to expunge our sin at this kind of cost—the Incarnate Son of God’s body.
I have many questions. Our questions are legitimate.
Why all of this? God could have taken care of the chaos of sin as swiftly as He took care of the chaos before creation, with a word. “Let there be a separation of sin from humanity,” and instantly Pilate and the Sanhedrin would have been changed to become saints, as holy as St. Francis of Assissi. Jerusalem would have changed into a gracious city with all the wealthy people immediately caring for the street people, inviting them home, sharing those extra rooms that stood vacant, letting them feast in their dining rooms. And all who were in prison released—the criminals instantly reformed, the political prisoners no longer with the cause that made them hostile to Rome. Why did God not accomplish this reordering of society with a Word?
God made His Son suffer, die, and be buried so as to include the sequence of life to its end as miserably as any human being can endure it. Because God, for reasons known only to Him, needed to take on Himself the sin and its full misery that afflicted the human race. He recapitulated in the life of Jesus the full possible misery of human life—injustice, abandonment by friends, physical pain, and then death.
The Apostle Paul summed it up: “God made Him who knew no sin to become sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” We usually think of sin as category of offense to God, little realizing how offensive you and I find sin too. Jesus died to take care of the sin problem that bothers us as well as the sin problem that bothers God. Because it is the sins that bother us that are the cause of so much distress in this life.
We imagine God to be angry with sinners. But are you and I not angry with the sins of others?! And how many are the categories of offenses that we maintain!
Paul Tournier, a Swiss Christian psychiatrist, wrote a report of his clinical experience with this problem in a book he called Guilt and Grace. He wrote, “All people are continually making mutual accusations.” “A guilty conscience is the seasoning of our daily life.” He summarized how burdened we are with guilt for so many “sins,” many of which are not sins at all.
A child who grows up in a home with parents who were sharply critical carries with her through life a feeling of guilt for not measuring up to their expectations. She is eating at the dinner table. She asks for the butter, and when it is passed to her, rather than cutting from the end that has already been cut, she cuts from the uncut end. And father chides her, “You should cut from the other end.” Then silence. No happy conversation. And so meal time breeds indigestion.
For some young people it comes naturally to study and to do well. But not for all. It may surprise you to know I was not at first a good student. I know I’m perceived as a scholar with this spiffy doctoral robe and all that—but that came later. I’m grateful that in America we have an educational process that gives second chances.
For reasons I think had something to do with moving from one culture to another, from one school to another the first fourteen years of my life, I never found stride in grade school and high school. It was hard for me. So I can sympathize with those who are afraid of report-card time. While some are getting their valedictorian pins and National Honor Society commendations, you lurk in embarrassment at Cs and Ds on your report card, maybe even an F or two. But you don’t know how to do better. And in a society that rewards achievers, you feel guilty.
I have known young people who feel guilty simply for showing up, so accused do they feel. They hug the shadows, desiring not to be seen. Their complexions embarrass them. They cannot love themselves because they have learned to feel condemned—not by God, but by their peers and by grown-ups. Some children so cringe before criticism that they never find their way in life. They imagine criticism to add to their burden. Other children rebel. They are protesting against the guilt they can stand no longer.
What is the source of eating disorders? I feel guilty because I’m fat. Even if I am lean as a beanpole I may be suspicious I’m fat, so I eat and purge. I feel guilty for not looking like the model of good looks established by society. Or I am taught to feel guilty for being of the “wrong” race. In our religious differences we hold others to account for not seeing things as we do. Sometimes we speak to each other in ways that we intend to arouse guilt as a means of making them do what we think they should do. All of this should not be!
There is valid guilt, of course. It is a wholesome guilt that comes in response to doing wrong—violating trust, telling lies, hurting someone by word or deed. But even for legitimate guilt God offers us such a simple solution: confess your sin. Acknowledge you did it. Be forgiven. That’s it, accept that you are forgiven, then pass along the forgiveness and be on with life.
But all guilt is not valid guilt. And in so far as we maintain a society of false guilt, as Christians, we have failed to enjoy the benefit to us of Jesus death on the cross. He died that we could live to Him who loves us that much, in order to create a community of forgiveness in which we embrace one another.
There are times when I think the Christian faith and the Church are the most wonderful things possible in life. I certainly had this in mind thirty-three years ago when the idea hit me that I should spend some time serving in the church. I thought it would maybe last two years, a sort of tithe of my life the way Mormon missionaries do.
The Christian faith, after all hovers under the spell of the Gospel. The Gospel is God’s love poured out for the world. The Gospel provides you and me a context in which to think about everything and everyone. God’s love at huge cost—on His part. His love in me—on my part. The Christian faith is spelled out vividly by the Apostle Paul when he wrote, “He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” What a possibility. The perfect goodness that God approves and that you and I long for, given to us—handed to me on a golden platter of grace. All you and I have to do is to accept it with a grateful heart.
The Church is the society of those who have received this grace. It is the community of all people throughout time who have received the favor of God. It is homes like this. It is Bible studies like this. It is congregations like this.
But you and I have not always found it this way. How often we live accused, and accusing. And each of us is right. When I am found wanting, I must agree. The one who accuses me has hit the target. If only that one knew the full extent of my fault!
The Apostle Paul wrote, “Who shall lay any charge against God’s elect?/ It is God—but then God justifies, declares us to be as though we had never committed a single sin or ever been sinful, having fulfilled myself all the obedience which Christ has carried out for me.” We live unforgiving, and unforgiven, accused and accusing. How far this is from the Gospel life!
Why did Jesus suffer death and was then buried? To take on Himself the complete burden of our real guilt, to take it to the grave where it could decay. Jesus bore our sins in His body to free us from them, to make it unmistakably clear how much God loves us. He did this to create in us a clean heart and to renew a right spirit. And it is the Christian way to live basking in this forgiveness, and then spreading to others the blessedness of this way of life.
Thus may our children be nurtured in such a way that they know how God loves them because of how we love them. Thus may we nurture each other, building up one another. Let us lure each other into the grace in which we believe we stand before God. Here is the antidote to false guilt, to that insidious disease that makes of life such a miserable thing for so many. Here is the love of God manifested in a way that we can see it and feel it. This prods us to good works, to works of mercy, to works of blessing—all out of gratitude for the grace of God shed abroad in our hearts.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we are astounded at the magnificence of your mercy. Give us the grace, now, to accept your mercy, and to enjoy it fully. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2005
Jesus, Crucified for our Sake
Jesus, Crucified for our Sake
Psalm 22 / Isaiah 53
Matthew 27: 11-26
April 24th, 2005
Good Friday came just last month but it is time to think again of the cross. I chose to preach on the cross today because we have come to that part of the Nicene Creed, which tells us, “Jesus was crucified for us also under Pontius Pilate.” But it wouldn’t matter if I had preached on this for the past fifty-two Sundays in a row because Jesus crucified is at the heart of our faith.
In fact the Apostle told the people in Corinth, “I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Nothing but this? Wouldn’t this get a bit old? Paul knew the Old Testament well. He said it was written for our benefit. What about “the whole council of God,” good expositional sermons that we were taught in seminary were needful for the nourishment of the faith of our people? “Unlock the treasures of the whole Bible,” we were taught.
Yes, but if we all become encyclopedias of knowledge about the Bible and miss the message of the cross, the Bible has become a red herring to us. The heart of our faith is found in Jesus Christ crucified—for me. This message is at the core of my faith, or our faith.
If you and I remember that Jesus was crucified for our sake we may well be overcome with horror at the brutality of His death. This is a natural feeling. But the lasting response I need is to remember it was my sin that put Him there. The great Swedish New Testament scholar, Kristor Stendahl responded to Jews who believed Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” incited anti-Judaism: “No, what that movie stirred in me was awareness of my sin that made Jesus suffer on that cross.”
What is my sin? The Westminster Catechism defines sin as “any transgression of or violation of the law of God.” And so it is. But sin lurks in that unconquerable view of the centrality of myself that now presides in the Western world. Hidden under our demand for rights and personal gratification that we protect with great determination is a self-centeredness that undermines the effect of the Gospel. Let me take stock of this self-centeredness in me, this insistence on being personally gratified, so that I do not deliberately hang on to what compelled Jesus to hang on the cross.
Thus, from person to person a church can be made up of people aware of why Jesus died, and grateful for His grace so lavishly displayed—so that we may lavishly live under the spell of grace. Grace should be on dominant exhibit in the life of a congregation.
The Apostle Paul wrote, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me.” It is the only workable foundation for the Christian life. It tells of what God has done that we could not do, but also of what we can do as a consequence. “The life that I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Here is the Christian life explained, a life lived in gratitude for the love of God to us exhibited at such cost on the cross.
We don’t have a cross in this sanctuary not because we don’t believe the cross is relevant to our faith, but because it is at the heart of our faith.
Our Reformed forebears lived in a day when images festooned the churches. There were crosses with garish statues of a dead Jesus in every church. Statues of saints stood on pedestals everywhere. And all at great expense paid for by poor people who gave their meager income, afraid of hell. The cross was a magic shape for them to be traced in the air, across the chest, or worn around the neck.
Perhaps in over-reaction, the Reformers in whose heritage we come set out to cure the problem cold turkey. No crosses. No images. Nothing ornamental to distract from the majesty of the grace of God that operates within the human heart. Though the cross has deep attraction to me, and to many of you, this is the reason why there is no cross prominent in this sanctuary.
The Reformers who launched our sector of the Reformation were convinced the cross was so important it should never become a religious ornament. The meaning of symbols easily fades when they become commonplace. Perhaps there will be a cross in this sanctuary some day, but not because it is a popular ornament for churches.
The cross was God’s antidote for sin. Sin has been a dreadful blight on humanity since the beginning. Before the foundation of the world God planned to send His Son to absorb the sin of all people of all time. The Son of God spent His short life on this earth experiencing the sin of people. He saw it. He saw its effects on personality, on communities, on synagogues, on religious leaders, on nations. He experienced it in its most cold and brutal form in the ways of the Romans who occupied Palestine. And then, having experienced the sin of others, fellow Jews and Romans, He died by crucifixion as though He were guilty of having committed all those sins, even though He never did, said, or thought one wrongful thing.
Today sin is a dreadful problem. We have airbrushed it but behind nearly every problem you and I have personally, or in society, or in the home, or in our communities, or between nations, or in church sin is the cause. It is a disease of the soul spread by unprotected self.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth words that have kept echoing down through the ages of the church. “I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” That simple message has echoed down through time’s corridors as the great corrective when Christian community life lost focus. If this were the subject of every sermon, maybe we’d catch on eventually.
Let me trace the line from the prophet Isaiah, through the Gospels, the life of the Apostle Paul, and the Creed so that it may find its way into my heart and yours.
Isaiah 53 at first lured many people to Jesus in the days after He suffered and died. Jewish people who knew their Bibles read this chapter, wondering what it meant. Then the disciples of Jesus pointed out that what happened on that Passover during the tenure of Pontius Pilate was foretold by Isaiah. We don’t read in the Gospels that Jesus ever called this to their attention before He died. Sometimes Jesus told how He was fulfilling a prophecy, but He let the most forceful prophecy speak for itself at the time it was fulfilled.
The prophet began by asking a question I read from the Jewish Publication Society translation: “Who can believe what we have heard?” It was a question laden with shock. “I can’t believe it!” We sometimes say this in shock.
The prophet went on: “He was despised, shunned by men.” Who was so despised and shunned? Why was he despised and shunned? What terrible offense made him a disgrace to the nation? Was this one a traitor perhaps?
Nobody, not even the prophet knew to whom he referred. Isaiah was treated badly by his people, but it wasn’t him. So was Jeremiah but he wasn’t the one. The prophet repeats himself, sick at heart, “He was despised, we held him of no account. Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing, our suffering that he endured.”
The picture painted by Isaiah brims with injustice. “It was for our sickness that this one suffered?” What kind of sickness? Not cancer or leprosy; something much deeper. It was a deep sickness of soul, a disease infecting the soul.
When the disciples of Jesus pointed out these words to people in light of what all knew happened to Jesus, it hit home. In Acts 8 we read of a Jewish visitor from Ethiopia reading Isaiah’s words as he rode in a chariot. He asked Philip what it meant. When he realized the prophet spoke of Jesus who was crucified not long before, he trusted his life to Jesus and was baptized on the spot.
Those words that Isaiah wrote about Jesus echo in my mind. “He was wounded because of our sins, crushed because of our iniquities.” Such correspondence between a specific prophesy in the Hebrew Bible and the life of Jesus!
All four Gospels have been called Passion narratives with long introductions. The Gospel of Matthew from which we read this morning shows us Jesus standing before Pilate. Pilate asked, “Are you the king of the Jews?” We cannot hear his tone of voice. Was he mocking? Was he curious? His wife had dreamed nightmares about this moment. She told him, “Have nothing to do with this just man!” Pilate tried to wriggle out of the problem by offering to release another man named Jesus, whose last name was Barabas, a well-known very bad man. Perhaps they would for their own safety choose this Jesus instead of the Jesus of Nazareth. When they wouldn’t allow this he tried to wash his hands of responsibility. He claimed innocence by washing his hands. The people yelled, “His blood be on us and on our children,” in the frenzy of a moment as political appointees among the Jews who hated Jesus incited them.
Many Jews have been tormented because of that line. But Christians who persecuted the Jews diverted their attention from their own sin that put Jesus on the cross. They violated the Gospel in turning on the Jews, forgetting the warning of Scripture addressed to Christians that in doing this they “crucified the Son of God afresh.”
The Apostle Paul wrote Christians in Corinth who had given him fits, ““I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Forget this and the fabric of the faith dissolves. Forget the cross and the Christian faith dissolves into just another philosophy, a world-view about which all sorts of clever, opinionated people can express an opinion.
The church in Corinth was ridden with strife and immorality. It reflected the life of the bustling city in which it found itself. It was a sports-conscious city, well to do, a great trading center situated on an isthmus with an overland route to pull ships across. It was intellectually alive. Paul had to warn the Christians there, “The wisdom of God is the wisdom of the cross that is foolish to people who think they are wise.” In the church there folk sure had their opinions—about speaking in tongues, about who was the best leader, about how to keep one another in their place, even about how deeply one could go into sexual sin and get away with it.
Things had become so distracted from the basic fact without which Christianity is nothing at all that Paul confessed to being afraid, feeling weak. He felt tongue-tied. “How did it come to this, when it began with the simple preaching of the cross to which you were drawn because of the sheer grandeur of the love of God poured out in Jesus?” “He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” And you want to concentrate on the things that are tearing you apart, shredding your character, and destroying your credibility in Corinth?!!
A like setting faced the Christians in Alexandria, Egypt three hundred years later. One of the clever and out-spoken elders named Arius claimed to know better than the historic teaching about Jesus. The One on the cross on Good Friday was not really God at all. He was a good man, to be sure, a very honorable man, in fact, given a high task by God. But he was just a man. The divisiveness of this unruly elder who had lost the irreplaceable quality of humility, stopped listening, and began speculating on things no one can comprehend, led to a crisis that reached far beyond the city. And so the emperor had to call a worldwide council to solve the problem.
But thank God at this Council of Nicea they pieced together the Bible’s teaching and claimed again its teaching that the Jesus who died for our sins on the cross was indeed God, indeed man. Here was the capstone of God’s remedy for the problem of human sin. And thus Christians ever since have confessed, “He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate.”
One of the questions from the Heidelberg Catechism we ask often here during our morning worship is, “What is true faith?” And the answer to that question pinpoints that true faith applies to me, to you, to each of us personally the truth of the gift of salvation. This salvation offers my life now that re-ordering grace that it needs, so that I can live my life exhibiting the kindness, the mercy, the justice, goodness, and truth of God.
I pray that each of us may not only stand looking up at that cross, aghast at the cost of God’s love displayed there, or even that it was our sin that put Jesus there. Rather let us probe with all our hearts to understand the wisdom the Apostle Paul understood when he said, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
O Lord God, how do I speak adequately of the wonder of Your Holy Son Crucified for me? Take and seal to us this great message of love, and grant that its claim on us may not be lost. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2005
Jesus: How much God? How much Man?
Jesus: How much God? How much Man?
(For us and for our salvation he . . . became truly human.)
Daniel 7: 9-10 / Revelation 1: 9-18
April 17th, 2005
These are really remarkable times. I’m tempted to keep each copy of Newsweek because in ten years I’ll wish I had done so. “These are the best of times and the worst of times.” A Scottish novelist wrote those words in the 19th century about an earlier time.
Has there been any period in the story of humanity when it was otherwise, the worst and the best of times? Augustine of Hippo thought the end of the world was at hand as the Barbarians crushed the last breaths of life out of the Roman Empire in the early fifth century. In the thirteenth century Thomas (Aquinas) was writing his masterpiece about God while “Tarter hordes” were galloping on their ponies through Europe’s heartland slaughtering every man, woman, and child. My mother will ask me when we talk on Saturday mornings in this twenty-first century, “What is the world coming to? Surely the Lord will come soon.”
Well, it was into such a world that the Lord was born. He was this one “whose raiment was white as snow,” who was served by thousands, of whom Daniel wrote in pre-recognition of days to come. In the days this Son of Man was born things were pretty raw too. Crucifixion was as common then as jail terms are today. Seventy-three years before Jesus was born, a slave named Spartacus led an unsuccessful revolt of slaves against Rome. He was defeated. The Romans lined the Apian Way leading into Rome with six thousand of Spartacus’ followers, nailed to crosses to remind anyone who needed reminding not to meddle with Rome. On crosses these wretched men ended their lives in agony without mercy.
It was at such a time, into such a world that God did something most wonderful. He became part of human existence. He became a man. Why? “For us and for our salvation.”
The Nicene Creed was composed about three hundred years later. Then the triumph of the cross of Jesus Christ finally seemed to give promise of a Kingdom of God on earth. The emperor was a Christian. He put an end to crucifixions and other legal torture. His mother, Helena, who loved Jesus and was largely responsible for her son’s becoming a Christian, searched everywhere to find every last splinter of the old rugged cross on which Prince of glory died. It was said she found enough splinters of the true cross to build Noah’s Ark. She had churches built in many places throughout the empire where people could worship Jesus.
But in one of the oldest churches in Christendom a tempest started to blow. An elder with a strong personality in Alexandria, Egypt was teaching that Jesus was only a great man. The elder’s name was Arius. He didn’t listen to his teachers. He told them, “Listen to me.” His attitude turned his speculation into a great problem that divided Christendom.
Though the Gospel of John said of Jesus that “He was in the beginning with God and was God,” Arius said this could not be because, after all, wasn’t Jesus born as everyone is born?
He may have read what we just read of the exalted Jesus of whom John wrote in the first chapter of Revelation. Jesus, as John saw Him in this vision, looked far different from the Jesus who walked the dusty roads of Palestine. Arius was annoyed by those who had so played up this image of Jesus Christ that they forgot He was a real man, Things had gotten out of hand in thinking about Jesus after He left them.
Some influential and pious Christians, desiring to honor Jesus, taught that Jesus had only the God nature, and no human nature. Others said He only seemed to be a man. Some thought that the very idea of God going through the birth process was a horrid and evil idea.
As often happens, one mistake bred another mistake that tried to fix the first one. Arius emphasized that Jesus was just a human being. He argued that to say Jesus was divine was only an honor ascribed to Him, a bit like saying Pope John Paul II is a saint. But this understanding of Jesus rejected everything that the Bible teaches about Jesus’ God-ness. “Before Him every knee will bow, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” “Lord” was the name of God. What God is Jesus is, the New Testament makes so clear.
So the thoughtful and wise pastors and bishops who met at the Council of Nicea hammered out words to make sure we understand that Jesus was really God. He was “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made.” It very nearly seems they tried too hard to make the idea clear, but it was a truth that could not be too clear. It is half the heart of the Gospel.
The other half of the Gospel is that Jesus Christ was really man too. He did not just seem to be a man. He was really and truly and fully a man. Human nature and the Divine nature were both in Jesus, not all mixed together like some Divine-human dish of scrambled eggs, but distinct in His humanity and in His Deity. Does that sound pretty impossible to you? Well, maybe paradoxical, but not impossible.
Actually, it was just one word in the Greek language in which this creed was written. The Son of God was enanthropesanta. That sounds like Greek to you, but it sounded to them like English does to you and me. Some know the phrase from the English word formed from the Latin translation, incarnatus est, which means, “He was in flesh.” Our word “Incarnation” comes from this simple, stark statement. The Latin is more stark than the Greek. He became flesh sounds more radical than “having been made human.”
(I feel self-conscious to use Greek, Latin, or Hebrew words as though I’m showing off. But remember that over the centuries the Gospel was taught in many languages. Once Greek and Latin were as ordinary as English. It was in these languages that people first heard these great truths. And we do well to remember as clearly as we can how they understood the great truths, and then passed them on to us.)
This is a remarkable truth. God became a human being. David asked in the 8th Psalm, long before Jesus was born, “What is man that thou art mindful of him or the son of man that thou visitest him?” It is a good question. David asked this question, it might be, because he saw the dark side of human nature, and not just the wonder that human beings are created in the image of God.
He knew his own heart. At one time he could write rhapsodic psalms praising God, and at another time he drooled with raw lust, leering at the body of his neighbor’s wife—to the point that he had her husband killed to claim her for himself. Maybe this was in his mind when he asked, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?”
But humanity is pretty grand too. What you and I know of humanity is a flawed creature. We see the double-mindedness of our own hearts that contributes to our suspicion of other people. People who have the capacity for amazing acts of self-sacrifice may live driven by greed, never being happy with what they have because they suppress their God-like nature to share. People who have the capacity to love suppress their love because they are fearful. People who yearn for acceptance judge others for the silliest things. People who are equipped in body, mind, and spirit for the greatest happiness, cling to ways guaranteed to make them unhappy. They major on what is minor and treat as least important things of the heart.
I flick the channels on the television when my coffee is brewing in the early morning and I see program after program about how to get in shape, how to eat right, how to have a great sex life, how to get rich. And all the while the people who watch the programs live so as to make sure they stay overweight, use their money badly, and are loveless towards their spouses. These programs flaunt their misery before miserable people who can’t sleep.
It was because of what we can be that the Son of God actually became a human being. “It was for us and for our salvation.” Salvation is not just being rescued from eternal hell. Salvation is being healed to the very core. We are made in the image and likeness of God, and He is not willing to consign what is made in His image to the trash-bin of this life or of eternity. God became a human being so we could be lifted to claim the fullness of what God intended in creating us in His image. He took our image to restore this image.
If only all who claim to be “born again” were as saved as God intended! Turn your thoughts inward and see what Jesus came to remake! See inside where a gracious heart lurks, longing to infect your mind. Look inside at that generous person who longs to act. Look at yourself as you are disappointed with yourself and have turned that disappointment against other people. Look at your fears, at the dreams you are gradually thinking cannot ever be realized. Accept that Jesus came to dissolve those fears and help you to aspire to and fulfill your best self.
There are aspects of God reflected in every part of creation. The beauty of God is reflected in flowers. How intricate is the beauty of the lilies and phlox and roses that surround the homes in which we live. How lavish is the beauty of a magnolia tree in the full bloom of spring. How fragrant are the gardenia and lemon blossoms. The elegance of the dolphins as they swim through the oceans reflects the power, symmetry and elegance of their Creator. Think of the soaring eagle, strong and beautiful. We could go on and on describing the majesty of the tiger “burning bright in the forests of the night” whose fearful symmetry proclaims God’s handiwork.
But nothing in all creation compares with a human being. God became a human being to show what a human being is as God intended. For some reason people hated that beauty when they saw it in Jesus. They couldn’t stand Jesus. He was too good, too kind, too noble, too forgiving. So they killed Him. We say we love Jesus. People just like we are sometimes despised what they saw Him.
We are so confused. We don’t know whether to desire beauty or ugliness. We are torn between admiring decency and being drawn by the culture we live in to what is indecent. The privacy and opportunity we have lures us to do in secret what we would claim to despise. I see the young people on campus wearing T-shirts that read on the back, “Go Ugly Early,” and know it has to do with a popular spot for hanging out. But I muse on the idea that such a term could be so intriguing for them. Why not, “Come Beautiful Early and Late?” Every co-ed that has on her back “Go Ugly Early” wants to be thought beautiful.
How grand a thing it is to be a human being, but we miss seeing it. God doesn’t, and that’s why He sent His Son as a complete human being. We cannot comprehend that God could ever stoop to taking on our botched humanity. But I remember that we represent God’s finest creative impulse. We are the capstone of creation. And it matters to God what happens to the finest exhibit of His creative impulse—the part onto which He stamped His image and likeness.
This is why God became a human being. Jesus was completely human first, to bear the consequences in His body of what we have done in distorting the Divine image in us, and then, second, to lead the way to our reclaiming all the wonder of being created in the image of God. That’s why we sing, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus.”
Ponder this. Thing on this as you think of yourself. You are a promise, a possibility, as our children have sung in days past. Think on this as you think of others—if you are more impressed with their flaws than of the wonder that they are created in God’s image.
I remember that C.S. Lewis wrote of what he thought when he looked at people—candidates for divination. One day I will look at you and remember what I knew of you in this life. I will be amazed. “So that was what God had in mind when He created you,” I will think. Why then did I not treat you with greater regard? We will wonder, “Why didn’t our life together blossom with all our possibilities for God-likeness?” It still can.
I pray God will, by His Holy Spirit, remind us as we look at Jesus, the author of our faith, what it is that He created us to be. And then I pray we may press on to enjoy to the fullest, in the way of Jesus, this life for which the Son of God was born a baby, suffered death, and rose again.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we cannot comprehend the mechanics of how you sent us Your Son to become a man for us, to become even sin for us, that we could truly live. But we thank You that You did. Help us to accept this favor with a trusting heart. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2005
The Scandal or the Wonder of Jesus?
The Scandal or the Wonder of Jesus?
Psalm 100 / Isaiah 7: 9-11
Matthew 1: 18-25
April 10th, 2005
I would guess that the season that warms our hearts the most is Springtime. Winter can be beautiful when the ground is covered with snow and the air is crisp. Summer can be wonderful, particularly when you are swimming or canoeing at a lake, or enjoying the smell after a summer rain. Autumn for me is a close competitor to Spring.
But Springtime! Life bursts out all over, and it happens gradually. Each morning I go out to inspect the trees I planted seven years ago, to see how the buds are coming. Rabbits are running all over. Finches are at the bird feeder again. Life bursts during the Spring.
I think there must have been more than one thing in God’s mind in having Jesus’ death and resurrection take place at springtime. First, God wanted us to see and feel the burst of new life in nature itself as we remember that Jesus came out of the tomb alive on Easter morning. Maybe it would not have gripped our hearts nearly so much if it happened in the cold of winter, or as leaves were falling from the trees, or when the days were hot and humid during summer.
Second, Jesus rose from death at springtime because the Jewish Feast of Passover described in the Bible came during the Spring of the year. Then the sacrifice of a lamb prefigured Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
It was a miraculous event we say when Jesus came alive on Easter morning. Each of the ways that God interacts with us for our good involves both a very ordinary aspect of life and something extraordinary.
Two weeks ago we thought of the extraordinary event on Easter. This morning I want us to think particularly about Christmas when Jesus’ life began on this earth. As the resurrection of Jesus’ body took place when all of life was bursting forth at springtime, so Jesus was born as every baby is born, but with strange, miraculous new twists.
The first Christian statement of faith described Jesus’ earthly beginning this way: “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.” There are four parts to this statement. First, it was for us and for our salvation. Second, Jesus was in heaven before He was born on earth. Third, this happened by a special work of the Holy Spirit of God. Fourth, Jesus was born of a virgin mother. These are the four unique aspects of Jesus’ birth.
Jesus was born because you and I who were born needed to be rescued from a predicament that starts at birth. This predicament is called sin. How do we know about sin? Look at how we hurt each other. We say things we shouldn’t. We forget to say what we should. And that’s just the start of how we hurt others.
We offend God by misusing His wonderful gifts. For some people their misuse of these gifts result in very unhappy lives. Sin is a total yuk! Jesus was born, died, and came to life again to lead the way in undoing the curse of sin. This is what salvation means. It was for our salvation that Jesus was born, lived, died, and rose again.
Second, Jesus came down from heaven. Before you and I began we may have been a twinkle in our parents’ eyes, as they say, but we did not exist. We were a hope, a dream. When we get married and think of having children we imagine having a little girl or a little boy and dream of what that little one will become. But there is nothing there until we came together in that loving embrace that begins a human life. Wonder fills our hearts as young parents when we realize that we have done something very God-like. Our love “created” a new human being where there was no one before.
I remember so well when Bonnie and I were told we were going to be the parents of our first child. We had been married four months and fully intended to have no children until I’d finished school and we could afford the expense of all those diapers and formula and all the other expensive paraphernalia that goes with having babies. I worked from mid-night to eight in the morning to earn our keep, while carrying a full load of graduate school credits. We were scraping to make ends meet. Now this!
We lived in a tiny one-room efficiency student apartment. Our couch pulled out to make a bed, and the kitchen was so slight that only two newly weds could fit into it at the same time comfortably. Now, we learned we were to add a third person to our little nest, someone much smaller than we were who would occupy a lot more space than we did!
But we forgot the hurdles to be overcome. We were ecstatically happy. All the complications this little being would bring could not compare to the joy he would bring—not only in his birth, I might add. It seemed a miracle when Bonnie gave birth and I held this little guy in my arms. And it was a miracle, but one that takes place very often. He didn’t exist before. Now he existed—as he reminded us every hour of the day and night.
But before Jesus was born and made Mary and Joseph happy, He already existed. He was the Son of God, existing before time began with the Father and the Holy Spirit in heaven. The Creed says He “came down from heaven,” because we always think of heaven as up. We may as well say that heaven is up because it is a mysterious realm inaccessible to us just now. We have cartoon-like images of angels sitting on fluffy clouds in heaven, strumming harps, but these are only ethereal ideas suggesting how heaven is different from earth.
The Apostle Paul tells us that, “God is not far from each of us. In Him we live and move and have our being.” Heaven is where God lives, and He is not far from us. This makes me think that heaven is not nearly so much a place far away as it is a perfect state of existence that inter-penetrates this world and who knows, perhaps all space. Because God isn’t limited by space and time as we are.
When the Son of God started to form into a human baby in Mary’s womb, He didn’t have very far to go. He was “in the world, and the world was made by Him,” and “in Him all things were holding together.” In a mysterious Divine act the Holy Spirit moved the Son of God at the loving will of the Father so that He entered our time and space in the womb of the Virgin Mary.
From there on Jesus’ birth was like every birth.
The passage from Matthew’s Gospel tells us how things looked from Joseph’s perspective. I wish there were time to look through Joseph’s and Mary’s eyes and follow the course of this extraordinary birth. There were some who thought it a scandal because they weren’t married. Others realized the pertinence of what the prophet Isaiah wrote--that Ken Wark read for us--this was a wonderful new act of God, who was doing something good beyond our ability to understand—something with long-range effects. This morning we celebrate something very wonderful that God is doing many years later as we baptize a dear young man, Cory Wettshurack.
What happened in the birth of Jesus is like what has happened in Cory’s heart and life. What happened when Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit was a figure of what happens inside of us when faith is born in our hearts.
There is nothing harder to change than the human heart. We call people “stubborn” who will not change from some terrible behavior or attitude. But when we see a person change from being a bitter, cynical, angry sort of person into a person filled with kindness, cheerfulness, and goodwill, we recognize that something has happened inside. But there is more to it than this.
Naturally, since we can’t see God, we’re tempted to think that God doesn’t exist. Naturally, since we did not see Jesus born and were not witnesses to the miraculous events surrounding His birth, we are tempted to think that Jesus was not the extraordinary person the Gospels tell us, even born in a unique way. Naturally, since we didn’t see Jesus die for us and rise again, and since there is no way we can imagine that such a thing should mean that God was taking care of the problem of sin in this way, how are we to believe it?
But when our natural Inability to trust that these things are true somehow changes and our hearts are filled with trust, it is because the Holy Spirit has caused something to happen in us. The Holy Spirit doesn’t force us. He simply makes it very plain to us that there is something to all of this to which we feel compelled inwardly to respond.
The Holy Spirit uses various means to give faith to us. If you were born into a home with parents who trusted in Jesus, who were loving to you, the Holy Spirit used them to teach your heart about Jesus. Or sometimes God the Holy Spirit lets us be in the company of people who show us in how they live and by what they say to us that there is something mysteriously more to life. And they become the means to trusting in Jesus, and being “born again.”
We’ve all heard that term, “born again.” Jesus used it in speaking to a Jewish teacher who was as puzzled at the idea as you and I might be. He thought it meant something physical, like a grown up climbing back into his mother’s womb and then coming out again.
Jesus used this term because what happens when our hearts are changed is every bit as unique and radical as being born the first time. When God changes our hearts, it starts very small, the way a baby begins very small it her mother’s body. And gradually, over time that little human zygote turns out to be a full-fledged human being. And after God plants the seed of faith in our hearts, it grows until we discover we are “new creations in Christ.” It is the Holy Spirit who makes this happen in us—as He made Jesus start in the body of His mother, the Virgin Mary.
When Cory stands before us and confesses his faith in Jesus, and I place the waters of Baptism on him, we are celebrating the work of God’s Holy Spirit who put the seed of faith in His heart. And Cory is publicly baptized to claim that what God’s Holy Spirit planted in his heart has grown so that he trusts in Jesus.
Trusting in Jesus brings to us God’s gift of eternal life in a mysterious way we can’t understand. But this shouldn’t surprise us since all of life, physical and otherwise, is mysterious to us. But this is a mystery of a different kind because it has to do with what we do and what we let God do with our lives afterward.
We read in the Bible, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,” and again, “You are not your own, you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body.” From now on, Cory, like each of us who has been baptized and confessed our faith in Jesus Christ, has a new purpose in life. Our purpose is to use whatever we are, whatever God has given us as gifts of mind and body, to please Him. God is pleased when we enjoy His gifts in thankfulness to Him.
Baptism and trust in Jesus is only a beginning, like a new birth. Every Sunday morning at the close of our worship service you see me raise my right hand, place my fingers in an ancient sign of the Holy Trinity, and pronounce a charge and blessing to you that is drawn from the Bible. “Now the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you what is well pleasing in His sight.”
Here are the marching orders of every baptized child of God. Let God work in you what is well pleasing in His sight. Let God perfect in you and me every good work. Let go and let God. God’s goal with you and me is like the aspirations we parents have when we are granted a little one into our home. We aspire that our children will be healthy, happy, good, and useful. We want them to know we love them, and that this love will be like a wind in their sails, as they sail through life joyfully.
Jesus said, “I am come that you may have life and have it more abundantly.” Jesus plans for you, Cory, and for each of us who has come to Him in trust, an abundant life—a good life, better than we can imagine. Let us then thoughtfully plan to live our lives to the glory of God, loving Him with all our hearts, loving one another with a full heart, faithfully, and all our neighbors as ourselves.
If any of you know you have not begun this new life perhaps God is stirring in you this morning the desire to find for yourself this new life He promises to those who trust in Him. Please speak to me if I can help show you the way. In any case, don’t let pass the moment when you recognize something new tugging at your heart. It’s probably God whispering to you, “Come to me and I will give you a new life.” God has put a certain twinkle of light in the heart of everyone who is born, by which we can see that life is more than a physical event. God promises you and me, “I will give my Holy Spirit to plant the seed of faith in your heart—and you will know what that “something more” is. Now respond, let that seed grow until you find the abundant life.
Let us pray: We are amazed at the wonder of a newborn child, Lord. But we are more amazed at the wonder of Jesus’ birth, and to know it was for our sake, that we could enjoy the kind of life that gives most joy. Help us to trust in Jesus, and to live in trust, day after day. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2005
Jesus Christ—from Heaven
Jesus Christ—from Heaven
Psalm 104: 1-4 / Hebrews 1: 1-8
February 6th, 2005
This morning we again partake of the Lord’s Supper. We don’t do this as often as some churches do but more often than others. But nearly all churches remember Jesus with some regularity in this way because we must remember that Christianity is about Jesus. Jesus told His disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me.”
Things we don’t remember regularly we forget. Students review before writing an exam. Reviewing is practice in remembering. The best students refresh their memories often as they go along.
Christians who don’t remember Jesus often forget that Christianity is about Jesus. We say of Him, He is the head, and we are the body. Cut the head from the body and you know what happens—a dead body. It matters what we remember of the Head, of Jesus Christ. This is why we say we should read the Bible often as well as take the Lord’s Supper often. They remind us of Jesus.
Over the past twenty years or so there has been a lively discussion about Jesus prompted by a group of New Testament scholars called “the Jesus Seminar.” The Jesus Seminar is interested to discover what we can know for sure about the Jesus who worked in a carpenter shop in Nazareth, who walked the dusty roads of Palestine, taught, healed, and in the end was crucified and then was reported to have been seen by numerous people afterward. This seminar has pressed very hard on a challenge that arose after the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
This challenge was that there is a difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. This challenge raised a big question: Did Jesus grow in peoples’ imaginations so that He changed from being a wise, inspirational faith-healer, but just an ordinary man, into a God? In other words, have Christians remembered Jesus all wrong?
The movie Mel Gibson created about the last twelve hours of Jesus’ life tried to turn the clock back two thousand years so we could visualize as precisely as possible Jesus’ last twelve hours. Even Martin Scorscese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” tries less reverently to bridge the gap between the One in whom Christians believe and the Jesus of Nazareth.
The Jesus Seminar has walked across this bridge in a way that specifically challenges what the New Testament tells us about Jesus. On the basis of the vote of twenty-four committee members, the things Jesus actually said have been whittled down to about eighteen percent of the words the New Testament tells us Jesus said. The rest, they say, was made up and put into Jesus’ mouth.
Similarly, the Jesus Seminar assumes that Jesus’ reputation has swelled from the peasant sage of Nazareth who was born in the ordinary way and crucified by Pontius Pilate into the Son of God and King of Kings and Lord of Lords born to the Virgin Mary—who could literally walk on water.
Who was this Man, Jesus? In past weeks we have remembered the words of the Nicene Creed that was written three hundred years after Jesus left the visible scene. It says, “For us and for our salvation He came down from heaven.” Did He really? If the astrophysicists and even ordinary people now know that the words “down” and “up” don’t really fit when talking about the universe, what does it mean to say Jesus “came down from heaven?”
There are no bad questions. But it matters if we ask questions with the assumption that we won’t accept the answers unless they fit within boundaries we understand, that we’ve set before hand.
And it matters if we understand something of the larger picture within which the answer can fit. One of my good tennis friends is a sub-atomic physicist. I asked him one evening in the locker room what he studies. He chuckled and told me, it’s sort of like following rabbit tracks in the snow to find a rabbit when you don’t actually see the tracks but know they are there. I may not have got his answer quite right. But he wanted me to know his work wasn’t all make-believe. After all, he’s paid good money for snooping into those unseen rabbit tracks. And money is tight for universities these days.
This morning we read together the opening lines of a letter written nearly two thousand years ago that describes Jesus with these words: “He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power.” I have the inkling that what the writer is telling us is a bit like what my physicist friend was trying to tell me about his work. Only, the rabbit tracks in the snow in studying Jesus are His footprints in the dusty roads of Palestine, and the memory of his words to the people He met on those roads.
But the “rabbit” making these tracks in the snow is far more amazing than the intricacies of the physical world that my friend studies so brilliantly.
We don’t know who wrote this letter we call “The Epistle to the Hebrews.” At first they thought it was the Apostle Paul, but now almost nobody thinks this. Some think it might have been written by Priscilla, a very wise woman well known to Paul. But more than human wisdom was needed to penetrate the “space” between the ordinary and the extraordinary source of our creation and salvation.
The author begins with what all devout Jews and Christians knew from reading the Bible. They knew about the prophets, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. These were strange men often enough. But their strangeness was due to their extraordinary task, to speak from God. Often their messages were cryptic, hard to understand.
But there came this one in the prophetic heritage, of whom they spoke and wrote, who was different from them all. “In these last days God has spoken to us by a Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He created the world.” Jesus lived as close in time to those who read these words as John F. Kennedy lived to our time. My grandchildren will learn the details of this president’s life as I learned the details of the First World War. But there was this difference. There was something about Jesus more mysterious than President Kennedy or World War I. With Him it wasn’t just a matter of remembering what He said and did. There was something more about Jesus, something connected not only to the history of the Jews, but even beyond that.
The author of this letter wrote more explicitly than any other New Testament writer in describing the link between Jesus and Israel’s sacred history. We are lured back, not just beyond, but also behind the words of the prophets to the realm of God. You might think that people would have tossed out this letter as imaginative nonsense for saying of Jesus, “When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.” They knew about the crucifixion, and that Jesus died for our sins. But now they read of grandeur beyond what they could have dreamed.
What did it mean to say that Jesus “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high?” It is the language of mystery we would say, but to write such things in actual words plunged into the fog of mystery to describe something like real facts. The right side was the side of honor. In some way, Jesus who was crucified, the greatest human indignity, not only had a place of honor with God, but He was the one “through whom God created the world.” And by “the world” they didn’t just mean our planet.
We read in the 104th Psalm, that the Creator “stretched out the heavens like a tent.” If we follow the rabbit tracks doubling back through the forest of this New Testament book of Hebrews, to the Old Testament book of Psalms, we get images of unspeakable grandeur. God is one who “covers Himself with light as with a garment.” We don’t see light itself. We see by means of light. Light begins to break on the world in the morning. As we say “the morning light breaks on the eastern sky, or the crack of dawn.” I look out the window in the wee hours of the morning and gradually I can see the outline of trees out there and the shape of houses, whereas before I could “see” only darkness. God, whom we can’t see, wears the light.
Our minds drift to Psalm 8 with its sound of wonder, describing the heavens as “the work of God’s fingers.” We say this is metaphor. God has no fingers as we do. But the idea is there that the grandest things that we can see, the sky, for example, are small potatoes to God.
And when we think of Jesus, we have to go far beyond the tiny metaphor of the things He did with his fingers in breaking and distributing five small loaves and two small fishes to feed 5,000 men plus women and children, to His real greatness. By metaphor I don’t mean just a figure of speech. Jesus, I believe, actually turned water into wine, and actually fed multitudes with a tiny lunch, but these were merely the fringes of His compassion and power. They were all anyone could see and recognize. But they pointed to something far greater even more than a metaphor refers to a great idea.
And so we read that Jesus is superior to angels. Some people today think that angels are imaginary creatures. I don’t. All of us believe there are some things that really exist that we can’t see. Some things are too small, like quarks, for even electron microscopes to see, but we trust the scientists who say they are there. Some things can’t be seen for other reasons—like angels. We know that animals are aware of things we humans are not aware. There is an invisible realm of the spirit that far from being merely imaginary is beyond the imagination. Who Jesus was exceeds this imaginary realm.
We read in the Bible of the connection between Jesus and this beyond-the-imagination realm. Hebrews 1 reminded us this morning of the second Psalm, “Thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee,” as though they are written to an Israelite king. But even the great (adulterous) King David didn’t qualify—though in a way he did. The prophet Nathan told David that God said to him, “I will raise up your offspring after you . . .and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son.”
But these words never fit with anything in the boundaries of David’s lifetime or even the lifetime of his descendants. David’s dynasty seemed to end in 597 BC. The words of the psalm pointed to something beyond. But nobody dreamed how far or much beyond it pointed.
When my physicist friend tells me about rabbit tracks in the snow it’s a bit like what the Bible is telling us of Jesus. All that the Bible tells us of God as the ancient Israelites knew of Him it tells us of Jesus, who was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth.
The second chapter of Hebrews begins, “Therefore we must pay the closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.” How easy it is to drift away from remembering who this Jesus is who is represented in the bread and wine before us on this table. Some well-meaning scholars tell us that what the New Testament tells us about Jesus is pious imagination. And thus they mysteriously reduce Jesus to the creation of pious folklore. And in doing so, they step away from the One of whom an eyewitness said, “We saw His glory the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
There are some things no science can study. There is a point at which questions fail to find the right words and faith has to take over. Faith does not believe in spite of the evidence. It trusts as true what no evidence is capable of showing. We do the Christian faith no disservice when we admit that we have arrived at a boundary we cannot cross by inspecting the records of the past with even devout skepticism. With Thomas who doubted we either will say “My Lord and my God,” or we will dally all our lives in whimsical dithering.
I present to you this morning Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” He invites you, “trust in me and I will save you in every way that matters.”
Let us pray: O Lord, enlighten our hearts to trust what our minds cannot possibly know, that out of great love You sent for us and for our salvation Jesus Christ; that He came down from heaven to be born of the Virgin Mary, to live for us, and to die for our sins, and to rise again on the third day according to the Scriptures. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
January 23, 2005
Jesus Christ—of the same essence of the Father
Jesus Christ—of the same essence of the Father
Isaiah 35: 1-4 / John 14: 8-11
January 23rd, 2005
This past week President Bush took his oath of office for a second term. Part of the interest of this was seeing his dad in the background. Because his father was also a president we cannot help comparing them.
We call a boy “a chip off the old block,” meaning he sure reminds us of his dad. I have a niece who is so much like her mother—a mother we all love to bits that we eagerly look forward to the kind of woman she will become. But there is an ebb and flow from one generation to the next. As Samuel Butler remarked quaintly in his novel, The Way of All Flesh,
We are as days and have had our parents for our yesterdays, but through all the fair weather of a clear parental sky the eye of Fortune can discern the coming storm, and she laughs as she places her favourites it may be in a London alley or those whom she is resolved to ruin in king's palaces.
While we are all interested in this kind of thing as we watch the generations unfold, there’s not a lot at stake in what we discover.
Now I have a point in all this talk about parents and children. And it goes beyond encouraging all us parents to live well before our children. The Bible tells us that Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus is “the author and finisher of our faith.” That means Jesus was the model that we look at and He and the Father were one.
Jesus was not just a man who lived an exemplary life. Jesus was also God. Even though Jesus was God made flesh, He prayed to One whom He called, “Father.” In fact, Jesus called this One to whom He prayed, “Abba,” which was an intimate term like our term “Daddy.” What was the relationship between Jesus and this One to whom He prayed? Jesus said to His disciple, Philip, “The one who has seen me has seen the Father.”
This morning I want to speak to the question of the relationship between Jesus, who was God the Son, to the One to whom He prayed, to God the Father.
What does it matter to understand this, you may wonder. Is this just another word-game? Or does it matter for some practical reason? I believe it matters for very practical reasons.
First, perhaps is that to think about this is to elevate our minds and hearts simply by focusing on Jesus. If all you and I think about is the day to day grind of life, stuff about home, about work, about money, about sports, about our health, about who said what to whom, about what we’re going to do when we grow up or retire, or the like, then our lives will focus only on our own little world. And you and I are reduced as people. We become small.
We become larger by thinking of Jesus. It’s part of loving God to think about Jesus. We become in some small way consciously a part of God’s enterprise when we expose our minds deliberately to God.
But there is more to thinking about Jesus than this. I use the name Jesus and God interchangeably on purpose. Our faith needs to know it has a sure anchor in truth. Truth may not be entirely within our grasp when it comes to matters about God, that is, God is much greater than we can understand. But what we do understand we want to be true. And we have to work to try to understand what is true about the big stuff.
The reason why Sunday School matters, why such activities as Confirmation class for young people matters, and why Inquirer’s Class for membership matters, and Bible studies matter is that we are training our minds to think about the “big stuff.” It’s not beside the point that we also get to know and care for each other.
A day is coming to each of us when it will be clear that it has never really mattered what kind of house we live in, or how large or small our financial resources are, or what our education is, or whether the Boilermakers are winning or not.
Every now and then we come to moments when there flashes before us that we’re playing in a much bigger arena than the little world of every day life in West Lafayette, Indiana. This week I met a man I’d not seen in a while. He looked strangely different. I asked him what it was. He told me he had only a few months to live. He asked me to pray for him. Or perhaps you are driving along and you realize you’re about to be hit by another car, and thought flashes before you, “I might be in tomorrow’s obituary.”
When two jet airliners plunged into the twin towers of the World Trade Center four years ago, suddenly a lot of self-confident people felt very vulnerable. I used to think 911 was a number that represented help in time of emergency need. Now I think of it as a number spelling “how totally vulnerable the strongest nation in the world is.”
When safety is no longer possible, what lies beyond the present life? We need to feel that our faith is anchored in truth and not in some fashionable religion. I’m convinced that what we “know” about Jesus is influenced by what we “feel” as well as by the ideas we think. And what we feel is nurtured by coming together often to study together the great matters. And Jesus Christ is the greatest subject we can study together. I am fortified in what I feel by seeing the deep interest of others in the group with which I meet on Wednesday evenings. I am fortified in my faith by being in the presence of those I get to pray with on Wednesday morning. The feelings we have help us to appropriate the big stuff. Our feeling of trust in God grows in community.
So what about Jesus, God the Son, and God the Father?
When Jesus was born and lived out His brief life here, the Bible teaches us “in Him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” This means that Jesus was all that God is. God became a human being for a reason: in order to rescue us from a terrible predicament, the predicament of sin—the human blemish that is a fatal flaw. Sin wrecks everything. Sin makes ugly what is beautiful. Sin ruins friendships. It destroys trust between people. Sin pollutes personality. Sin is a principle of corruption that sours the sweetness of life. Sin isn’t fun at all. Sin is total yuk.
The Apostle Paul told us, “He became sin for us who knew no sin that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” This seems impossible, but it is true.
It was obvious to those who saw Him that Jesus was a man. It gradually dawned on those who saw Him that something was going on in Jesus that defied definition. Jesus’ disciple, Phillip, said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father and we shall be satisfied.” Jesus replied, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
Phillip and others who cared about these things knew about God the Father only in bits and pieces. Israel in Moses’ day saw the lightning and thunder and dark clouds surrounding Mt. Sinai when God spoke to Israel the Ten Commandments. They saw the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night that led them through the wilderness. They knew this meant God was with them. Phillip knew about all of this from his Bible.
In Exodus 24: 10 we even read that Moses, Aaron, and seventy elders of Israel saw the God of Israel.
Later on we read that Moses set up the Tabernacle outside the camp of Israel in the wilderness. The people saw a pillar of cloud standing at the door of the tabernacle. People would kneel at the opening of their own tents and look at that distant tent where Moses met with God. We read: “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face as a man speaks to a friend.” It is a strange and awesome passage. Moses actually says to God, “You have found favor in my sight.” What an odd thing for a man to say to God, “You’re doing OK, God.”
Moses then asked God to go with them. “Is it not in thy going with us, so that we are distinct, I and thy people, from all other people that are upon the face of the earth? God was with them, but they could not identify with God personally.
Four hundred years later the prophet Isaiah told Moses’ descendants who were clutching for survival, “Behold your God will come and save you.” You and I read this and think this means something like “God will take care of you.” But when Jesus lived those thirty or so remarkable years here, there were those who realized that what Isaiah wrote was no remark about God’s general care. “God will come,” meant just that. God would show up.
People in Jesus’ day knew the rest of the passage from Isaiah from which we read the first few words this morning. It went on to say, “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb will sing for joy.”
They had seen Jesus literally open the eyes of blind people. They watched as he fixed the ears of someone that didn’t hear. They heard Jesus tell a man crippled from birth, “Get up and walk.” He did every detail of these words from the prophet Isaiah—which the prophet said after saying, “Your God will come and save you.”
How was this Jesus one with the God mentioned in the Old Testament, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
At the Counsel of Nicea in AD 325 they debated this question because an elder from the church in Alexandria was teaching that Jesus, though divine, that is, God-like in some uncanny way, was only a man. Jesus had a beginning like every other person had a beginning. “There was when He was not,” this man said boldly. His name was Arius.
Arius taught before Jesus was born he did not exist as God the Son.
When we say Jesus was the only begotten Son of the Father we’re talking about a relationship unlike the earthly relationship between fathers and sons. Arius taught that the Son was not only subordinate in function—as Jesus told us, but that He came into existence at the will of the Father, just as every child is the result of an act of the parents. Jesus was not the eternal God born to human mother.
Arius didn’t talk about this over coffee in private conversations with friends as some of us might discuss a big theological problem. He taught it boldly, even arrogantly. Arius had an aggressive personality. He is an example of how to think badly, without submission, without listening. He showed us how NOT to discuss great matters. How we listen is as important as how we speak. Attitude matters in how we talk of God.
In the debate that followed in the Council nearly everyone realized there was something fundamentally wrong with Arius’ position. If Jesus said, “I and my Father are one,” then what described the Father also described the Son. Since the Father was eternal, the Son too was eternal. Isaiah had given among the names of this Son who would be given, “everlasting father.” “He was in the beginning with God and was God,” as John’s Gospel put it.
This was hard to understand. Some said Jesus was like the Father, not the same. But others remembered Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” This meant that they were not just alike, but “the same.”
In the end when they voted, the only way to settle the problem, the majority realized that to say the Son was only of “like” the Father could be interpreted to mean there was only seeming unity in the Godhead. But Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” This doesn’t mean that the Father is the Son. It means, as Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Of Jesus, the Son, it was said as it was said of God the Father, “He was full of grace and truth.”
So what? you ask. So everything. Because Jesus was actually God, He represented the deepest investment in humanity that our Creator could make. When God became man we see in Jesus God’s idea of humanity, image of God reflects on God. Our idea of humanity is a flawed idea. Our ideas from watching each other allow us a lot of slack that messes things up for us. We copy flawed models. Study Jesus, God made flesh.
I have tried to understand with you today the truth that what God is, Jesus is. If you and I will study Jesus we will come to know God better—the God who loves us, before whom we live every day, and before whom we will all stand one day. It matters then, to ask not only what is God like, but how can I come to be more like His Son, Jesus—so that when we stand before God, as we all will, God the Father will recognize in us the ways of the family of God.
I urge you all to study Jesus together. It will strengthen your feelings that help you appropriate the truth that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. If we study God we will come to know Him, and thus become our God-designed selves. Jesus said, “The one who has seen me has seen the Father.” And He gave us the challenge, “Let it be that when people see you, they see me.” We can become God’s message of hope and in the process find hope ourselves.
Let us pray: Heavenly Father, we think you for showing us what you are in showing us Jesus. Help us to know Him. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
January 16, 2005
God and the Tsunami/Jesus Christ, Begotten not Created
God and the Tsunami
Jesus Christ, Begotten not Created
Psalm 32 / Psalm 2
Luke 2: 26-27, 30-31, 34-35
January 16th, 2005
The theme of my message this morning hovers around a statement in that very old Christian document, the Nicene Creed. It describes Jesus Christ, the Son of God as “begotten not created.” There is an exclamation point after this phrase. The big issue for those who hammered out the Nicene Creed was, who was this Jesus of Nazareth?
If Jesus was just another man, a great religious teacher, His whole benefit was as a role model or teacher. But nothing was done about the human condition. All the miseries of life are unaffected. We’re no better off than a common oyster, as a great cynical Scots philosopher put it. Life has no significance beyond trying to make it through with as little misery as possible.
But the Gospels made clear Jesus was not just a great teacher and prophet. He was God fully entered into the human predicament as a man.
But how can God become a man? Nobody can say how. But when Jesus said, “I and my Father are one,” and “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” and when the events surrounding His birth and death were filled with such mystery and majesty, it’s clear something too marvelous for exact description was going on. It mattered that those who trusted in Jesus know “in whom they believed.” This is why we find in the Nicene Creed this string of strange statements describing Jesus, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, and now, “begotten not created.”
Only the Creator was uncreated. This fit too. Of Jesus the Gospel says, “By Him all things were made that were made.” The New Testament goes on to say of Him, “In Him all things hold together.” This is the stuff God does. Jesus Christ was God entering His creation.
This was the idea behind Mark Twain’s story “The Prince and the Pauper.” Prince Edward Tudor, son of Henry VIII, sees Tom Canty, a poor boy living in squalor in London’s Offal Court in Pudding Lane, being roughed up by palace guards. The prince stops them. To make a long story short, they trade places. The Prince says to Tom Canty, “Doff thy rags, and don these splendors, lad! It is a brief happiness, but will be not less keen for that. We will have it while we may, and change again.” They can pull it off because they look so much alike that nobody can tell the difference from appearances. And so the prince wanders in London’s unfamiliar streets, to the degraded slums of Offal Court on Pudding Lane. And there the noble lad discovers what life is like as the poorest of the poor in his city, while the pauper discovers how out of place he is in the palace.
Many of you know the story, but had you thought of it as an illustration of what happened when Jesus was born? Now the Son of God did not trade places with man on the spot but made it possible for us to be children of God. But on the spot the Son of God came to Offal Court in Pudding Lane, only it was called Bethlehem. Now a great mystery found full expression. The Immortal One became mortal, the Author of Life could see and feel what life for us was like, and what death was like and the fear of death, in fact, the worst kind of death—full of humiliation and pain.
Why? To rescue us from the full human predicament. The human race was reeling in the grips of a natural disaster—a disaster that hit human nature worse than anything happening outside “in nature.” Something was terribly wrong that needed repairing. God should do something about nature. God went to see the disaster personally.
When a natural disaster hits we expect our high government officials to go on location. Very often a president will go to see the flooding to see in person the mud slides, to stand amid the ruins after a series of tornados. It is an encouragement to know he cares.
But a president or a governor can go only so far. The most powerful man in the most powerful country on earth cannot bring back to life one person who drowned in a Tsunami. I wonder if this sense of futility made President Bush pause before responding recently.
The most recent Tsunami killed at least 155,000 people. The earthquake that caused it, exploded with destructive energy comparable to 23,000 atomic bombs the National Geographic reported. A lot of people think this was not only an unfriendly act of God, but also irresponsible, if not criminal.
When someone has been drinking and gets into her car and drives straight towards some motorcycles coming down the other side of the road, maiming two people for life, the courts throw the book at her. Many people would like to throw the book at God now for permitting the monster tsunami that wrecked havoc beyond what we can imagine on December 26th.
The shock of this sudden disaster leaves us numb in more ways than one. If God is good and in control of the universe, why such dereliction of duty? Others think God had nothing to do with it because tsunamis are beyond God’s control, if indeed there is a God.
John Wesley preached a sermon after a similar earthquake and tsunami hit Lisbon, Portugal on November 1st, 1755. Some reports were that 60,000 people died in Lisbon out of a population of 230,000. Ten thousand more died in Morocco from the tsunami it caused. Seven years earlier a monster earthquake and tsunami hit Lima, Peru. Wesley spoke to a London congregation:
“Why should we not now, before London is as Lisbon, Lima, or Catanea, acknowledge the hand of the Almighty, arising to maintain his own cause? Why, we have a general answer always ready, to screen us from any such conviction: “All these things are purely natural and accidental; the result of natural causes.” But there are two objections to this answer: First, it is untrue: Secondly, it is uncomfortable.
First. If by affirming, “All this is purely natural,” you mean, it is not providential, or that God has nothing to do with it, this is not true, that is, supposing the Bible to be true. For supposing this, you may descant ever so long on the natural causes of diseases, winds, thunder, lightning, and yet you are altogether wide of the mark; you prove nothing at all, unless you can prove that God never works in or by natural causes. But this you cannot prove . . . Therefore, allowing there are natural causes of all these, they are still under the direction of the Lord of nature: Nay, what is nature itself, but the art of God, or God's method of acting in the material world? ...
A Second objection to your answer is; It is extremely uncomfortable. For if things really be as you affirm; if all these afflictive incidents entirely depend on the fortuitous concourse and agency of blind, material causes; what hope, what help, what resource is left for the poor sufferers by them?
What defense do you find from thousands of gold and silver? You cannot fly, for you cannot quit the earth, unless you will leave your dear body behind you. And while you are on the earth, you know not where to flee to, neither where to flee from. You may by intelligence, know where the shock was yesterday, but not where it will be to-morrow,-to-day. It comes! The roof trembles! The beams crack! The ground rocks to and fro! Hoarse thunder resounds from the bowels of the earth! And all these are but the beginning of sorrows. Now, what help? What wisdom can prevent, what strength resist, the blow? What money can purchase, I will not say deliverance, but an hour's reprieve? Poor honourable fool, where are now thy titles? Wealthy fool, where is now thy golden god? If any thing can help, it must be prayer. But what wilt thou pray to? Not to the God of heaven; you suppose him to have nothing to do with earthquakes.... But how shall we secure the favour of this great God? How, but by worshipping him in spirit and in truth; by uniformly imitating Him we worship, in all his imitable perfections? Without which the most accurate systems of opinions, all external modes of religion, are idle cobwebs of the brain, dull farce and empty show. Now, God is love: Love God then, and you are a true worshipper. Love mankind, and God is your God, your Father, and your Friend. But see that you deceive not your own soul; for this is not a point of small importance.
I wish I might have been there to hear Wesley preach that sermon. But other matters come to mind having to do with that realm of nature we call “human nature.” What are our expectations of God with regard to human nature?
I find it remarkable that we are accustomed to the millions of people in sub-Sahara Africa whose lives have been devastated by AIDS for many years now. Their situation is made worse by famine, and by governments that oppress them instead of helping them. But who is asking about God’s role in this immense disaster—because we know how AIDS is transmitted?
We respond with questions for a while when disasters on a large scale happen suddenly, or when tragedy hits close to home, but we become numb to on-going disasters that cruelly crush far more people elsewhere, for generations.
Or think of this: Each time I am with someone whose freedom has been taken away by the courts for some misdeed, I am struck by what an awful thing it is to lose freedom. To be locked in a small space for years on end, or for a lifetime—what a hell! Yet I don’t hear people asking, “Why did God let that person commit that crime?”
I don’t hear people asking, “Why has God allowed alcohol to become a menace to society so that even “respectable people” get drunk and get behind the wheel and make their cars into weapons of mass destruction. Instead we sell alcoholic drinks by the case in our grocery stores. People can, if they want, pop a lid and drink on the way home. The very one who arrests or tries in court someone else caught drinking and driving may do it himself. If anyone suggests prohibition, we scorn the idea. Let me be free! Is God to blame for how we use our freedom?
I never hear people asking why God permits various kinds of habits that destroy the body? I have stood by the bed in a hospital more than once watching someone die of suffocation after years of polluting his/her lungs. Nobody asked, “Why did God allow this?” The one dying and I both knew the connection between the cause and the effect of death. Where is God in all that we do in which we insist on the freedom to make choices we know are bad? People seldom challenge God’s responsibility even though far more people die more miserably every year than died suddenly during the recent tsunami.
Or when I follow the course of marriages after they begin before me in front of a church, and discover that the many pairs who pledged their life-long love to each other and then went to expensive receptions, have exchanged that brief fond attitude for life-long selfishness, so now multiple married pairs live in misery, who challenges God for letting this happen? Who asks “How can God allow this?” when people freely choose to act with gross incivility to each other in the home and society? We have freedom of speech – but how tragically we freely use our freedom! We insist on separation of God from real life except as we choose His role.
Who can calculate the damage done by untamed tongues, or by untamed tempers, or so many other foibles we defend as “human nature,” that in their consequences far exceed the damage of a tornado, a flood, or a tsunami.
We so easily ask questions of God related to nature “out there,” but don’t ask questions about God’s control of human nature. Oh, we may ask about God’s responsibility when a great tyrant like Hitler unleashes the Holocaust against all whom he hates, but who asks the question of God when, from person to person, whole populations of people live in painful desperation, the result of their own choices?
We see so selectively the misery of life. We see large or momentary tragedies and lay the blame on God, and fail to see how far larger the scale of damage is from the ordinary miseries we inflict on ourselves and on one another. Is God to blame for these miseries too?
So we pastors preach monotonously, “Submit your life to your loving Creator. Accept Jesus as the Lord of your life. Acknowledge and confess your sins. Accept the forgiveness of your sin and then move on claiming Jesus’ authority over your often foolish will. Let His loving authority govern your impetuous and unreasonable will.” And people may yawn and ask for more interesting thoughts on a Sunday morning, and claim their right to do as they please.
I believe that God has something to do with natural disasters that happen, but I have no means to know what or why. Did God send the tsunami that hit Indonesia and countries all around the Indian Ocean? I believe God is the Lord of creation. Perhaps he sent this tsunami for a purpose. Why there? Why not elsewhere? If God did, is it our place to challenge the Almighty God’s morality, particularly when all the damage of that tsunami was only to the body? Jesus said to His followers, “Don’t fear the one who can kill the body, fear the one who can do in your soul.”
God is merciful. I don’t know, neither can anyone, how merciful God has cared for the invisible souls of all those who suffered death and destruction this past month. All we can see is what took place outwardly.
I believe you and I are to be reminded how altogether fragile is physical life so that we respond wisely. If in the death of 155,000 people, and in the destruction of the means of life for millions more, more multiplied millions of those who remain find their lives re-ordered in wisdom, we might even say the sacrifice was worth it.
After all, we send thousands of young soldiers, in the flower of their youth to the battlefield to defend the freedom of millions with their bodies. In our world wars all nations cruelly sacrificed millions of their young people for the sake of the freedom of older and younger who stayed at home. For sake of freedom soldiers obey the order of their superior.
If we waste our thought on impossible-to-answer questions accusing God, while clinging to the imprudence of selfish living, we show our hypocrisy and waste much of the good that might come of this recent tragedy.
In the New Testament we read, “It is appointed unto people once to die and after this the judgment.” We know we will die, everyone of us. For some it will happen sooner, for others, later. When death approaches we realize that all of life has been a preparation for this moment.
I can offer you no better wisdom than to freely give your life to God, who created you, who cares for you at the deepest part of you. Jesus was God become a human being to take the rap for my sin and yours, and then to give us life better than we can dream of. But you and I must accept this gift of life, and then turn over our lives to the loving authority of Jesus to receive the benefit.
You and I must study Jesus to know how he governs us, because Jesus will never violate the freedom we claim. I invite you to begin this life, if you have not, by freely giving your life to Jesus. And if you have begun, but have lost sight of what it is to want to follow Jesus, begin again and keep on. Let those who have died and suffered in the tsunami not suffer in vain. Wake to the serious meaning of life.
Let us pray: O Lord, we pray for those who still suffer in the lands hit by the tsunami. We pray for that greater multitude that suffer from natural disaster within. Help us, O God, to accept your relief, in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
January 09, 2005
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Daniel 7:13-14 / Colossians 2: 6-10
January 9th, 2005
It seems to me that Christmas flew by this year, barely stopping to say hello on December 25th. Here we are in the thick of a new year—2005, if you can imagine it. You can almost see time fly. This week on the plane back from seeing our daughter and her family in Annapolis I read much of Harold Bloom’s recent book, Where Shall Wisdom be Found? The title caught me as I browsed in Border’s Book Store in Annapolis.
I think a lot about the questions, “Where can I find wisdom?”, “How can I live my life as my Creator intended and help guide others in this way?” There are so many distractions. I look at the busyness of life, the focus on buying and selling, on maximizing our pleasure, on the trashing of the glory of our bodies, pop music & entertainment industries, on hiding the effects of over-indulgence and time on our bodies, on trying to find success—only to realize as I get older that success is a totally elusive goal.
I look at the confusion in the church, the cacophony of voices, the strutting, fretting, disagreements, disappointments and posturing. The church gives me a lot of almost sleepless nights. Where can wisdom be found? I need wisdom. Bloom wrote of the trickle down effect into society of great minds as found in the biblical Books of Job and Ecclesiastes, in Plato, St. Augustine, Freud, Marcel Proust, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and others.
He suggested one idea I have found to be right. He recommended memorizing great literature and repeating it, letting it influence our minds. Psalm 119: 11 suggests the same idea: “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against Thee.”
The reason why I began thinking about the Nicene Creed with you last year and continue now is that here is one of the great bequests of the past. It is worth fixing in our memory banks and trotting out to ponder. The Nicene Creed is a deep statement of what is most basic to your life and mine if we have trusted in Jesus Christ. It ponders God, the triune God “in whom we live and move and have our being.” If I am a Christian, the most important focus of my life is Jesus Christ. I’m tempted to major on many minor things, but Jesus is the major focus of my life. “My life is hid with Christ in God.” My life. Your life too if you are a Christian. I need to think of Jesus Christ often, and so do you, to look at Him, to turn Him over in our minds.
This morning before us is that small phrase in the Creed describing Jesus Christ, “true God from true God.” Or as an older form of the Creed has it, “very God of very God.” Why this repetition of phrases, “God from God, light from light, true God from true God?” What does each new phrase add to what we know of Jesus? While it may not add to what we know, when we probe to understand Jesus Christ as the Creed leads us, we come to realize that we can’t describe Him once over lightly. We are hunting for the wisdom of God when we stretch out these phrases probing someone indescribable and mull on these phrases as a means of focusing on Him.
I want us to focus on the Apostle Paul’s words in Colossians 2 this morning. The Creed tries to capture in a few words what Paul writes here. But first let’s look briefly at the Apostle Paul who wrote this remarkable passage.
His parents named him Saul, after Israel’s first king. His life began in a devout Jewish family in southern Turkey. He grew up in a province of the Roman Empire so he was a Roman citizen as well as a Jew. His religion was more important to him than his Roman citizenship, but he was proud to be a Roman citizen.
As a young man Saul was like some other young people I know for whom their faith is the most important thing in life. For some it’s a stage of life they pass through and then maybe become jaded at the disappointment that comes so often in the church. People disappoint us. Maybe we think too much about our disappointment. But for Paul it was no passing stage.
Somewhere along the line he learned a trade, making tents, but it was only because he had to earn a living. His greatest interests were God and his Jewish faith. He went from his home city of Tarsus to Jerusalem to study with Gamaliel the Elder, heir to the great name of Rabbi Hillel who was Gamaliel’s grandfather. Gamaliel was the most highly esteemed rabbi of his day. He is quoted a number of times in the Mishnah, the core of the Jewish oral tradition. It was said of Gamaliel, “When he died, the honor of the Torah ceased, and purity and piety became extinct.”
Saul was Gamaliel’s prize student. He was probably in Jerusalem when Jesus was tried and crucified. Saul detested Jesus. In those early days he shared the opinion of the men who accused Jesus of blasphemy and breaking the Law of Moses.
So it must have been a great shock to the leading Jews of Jerusalem when Saul of Tarsus suddenly changed. Saul not only came to believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah of Israel, but he devoted his life to spreading this Good News, this Gospel as widely as he could. He even changed his name from Saul, the name of Israel’s first king to Paul, which means “small” in Latin.
From then on Paul was interested in three things: First, Jesus Christ. He wrote at one point, “I determined to know nothing . . . but Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Second, how to bring every aspect of his life under the lordship of Jesus Christ. And third, presenting Jesus Christ to other people so they would trust in him--in particular the kind of people he once despised, non-Jews.
I want to explore briefly each of these three new aspects of Paul’s life, but first it is important to realize that Paul did not just change one kind of “fanatical” interest for another. Very often the most intense “religionists” are converts.
I watch the Catholic TV station sometimes. I am interested to see the program where former Protestant ministers who have become Catholics try to persuade other Protestants who might be watching to “come home.” They are the most devoted to Mary who before spoke against the place Mary has come to have in the Catholic church. They are the most ardent in submission to the pope who before rejected papal authority. They become zealous in adoring the Eucharist who before spoke against the “bloody sacrifice of the Mass.” This was not Paul’s way.
Paul did not transpose his fanatical Pharisaic Judaism, which lashed out against Jewish converts to Christianity, into fanatical Christianity that lashed out against fellow Jews who didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah. The pride that he had felt in being correct as a Pharisee didn’t change into pride in being correct as a Christian. His pride was subdued. He became modest in his view of himself. Jesus filled his mind and his heart. He diminished in importance to himself as Jesus Christ filled his focus. He was taught this by looking at Jesus who was so modest.
I wish with all my heart that this were the picture we Christians would present to the world. If only this is what the world would see because this is what we are—“crucified with Christ, nevertheless we live, yet not us, but Christ who lives in us.” What a difference it would make in the appeal of the Gospel. Paul believed it when he said of himself, “I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle.”
It all has to do with Jesus Christ who is the center of everything. How is this so?
Paul described Jesus in a way that he knew that Jesus had been hinting at when He said modestly of Himself, “I am my Father are one.” And “If you knew me you would know my Father also” While this was the basic truth, Jesus left out all the amazing details of what this meant. Jesus didn’t spell out this unity of identity between Himself and the Father, but Paul dug deep into Jesus’ confession and saw what was going on.
Paul recognized the paradox that Jesus “though He was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself.” Yet at the same time, “In Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily;” and a few verses earlier, “in him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Finally, “He is the head of all authority and power.” But who could see this as Jesus walked the dusty roads between Nazareth and Jerusalem?
He looked so ordinary. But does not true greatness always look ordinary? People create glamorous exterior ornamentations to give the impression of greatness. We go to fancy colleges & big name seminaries, concoct fancy titles, honorary degrees, and the like—all outward stuff. But God “looks on the heart.” God in becoming a human being did not festoon Jesus with outward signs people would associate with the idea of God. As God looks into our depths to see our hearts, so God filled the Man Jesus from the inside. “In him the fullness of Deity dwells bodily.”
Who can imagine the fullness of deity in a man? All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge—the reservoir from which was conceived quarks, DNA, galaxies, and all that is larger than large, and smaller than small in this intricate system around us? The epitome of authority and power in all the universe—not in the tiny atom that can explode, but in Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever. All of this in the heart of someone who looked like an ordinary man. That’s pretty heavy-duty praise. But Paul was not praising Jesus. He was not just reaching for superlatives; he was simply describing Jesus.
Paul’s purpose in writing this was not merely to say the right things about Jesus. In Paul’s day people were used to Roman emperors saying all sorts of extravagant things about themselves. The miserable Emperor Caligula whose death Josephus described in its full, gory detail, proclaimed himself Divine. He was not satisfied that the Jews offered sacrifices in his behalf, he wanted sacrifices offered to him. As a result of his arrogant and evil life, Caligula suffered an ignoble death—which I’ve discovered was how ancient historians often depicted the end of proud, evil people.
Jesus too suffered an excruciating death, but it was not a miserable death. Indeed, it was, for all its pain, a glorious death so that we call the day Jesus died, Good Friday.
But Paul was not just trying to describe for us who and what Jesus is in order that we should hold correct ideas in our heads about Him. This is good, but it is about half of being a Christian.
Paul writes to us, “As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in Him, being rooted and grounded in Him and being built up in the faith which you have been taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” Here is what it means to be a Christian. It ends with continuous thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, a continuous sense of gratitude caps off the Christian life.
But who can possibly achieve this? Even so single-minded a fellow as the Apostle Paul confessed that in him there was an incessant warfare going on, the desires of the flesh against the desires of the spirit.
What Paul is telling us is that even though this warfare goes on inside all of us too, don’t give up on being a “working Christian.” How can we be and remain functioning Christians? How can we get out of the rut of talking about the faith, of wistfully thinking about it, singing about it, listening to sermons about it, and then returning to ordinary life full of blunders, of self-centeredness and the unhappiness that comes with a fixation on myself?
We begin by actually thinking about this Jesus in whom we say we believe. The Creed helps us in an odd sort of way. Memorizing Scripture that tells us of Him helps us. Take the time to memorize and think about these things so that other thoughts are crowded out. Then start deliberately to “walk,” to live, your thoughts “rooted and grounded” in Him. Each of us is rooted and grounded in something. Our natural rootedness is in ourselves. Our natural idea of who and what is most important is the one we see in the mirror when we wash our faces in the morning. Replace that one you see deliberately by thinking about Jesus. This is how the life in Christ must begin.
What fitting matters to think about as we ordain deacons this morning and again consecrate elders and deacons to serving in Jesus’ name! “Let this mind be in you which was in Jesus Christ . . . he emptied Himself and took the form of a servant and became obedient—even unto death on the cross.” Let this mind be in us, in me, in you. And then let’s see what God can make of this congregation, this session, this board of deacons in the days to come.
Let us determine to adopt three goals: First, to keep Jesus Christ before us personally. Second, to bring every aspect of life under the lordship of Jesus Christ. And third, to present Jesus Christ to other people so they will trust in him. I pray that our lives may be the greatest argument for trust in Jesus Christ, walking, living rooted and grounded in Him.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we have tried to see something of Jesus this morning. Help us to see Him and to keep on seeing Him, and to walk in Him, rooted and grounded in Him. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
December 26, 2004
Jesus Christ, Light from Light
Jesus Christ, Light from Light
Psalm 43 / Isaiah 42: 5-9
John 8: 12
December 26th, 2004
Newsweek magazine’s final pages of the last issue were called “Final Bows.” Last year, President Reagan took his final bow at the ripe age of 93, after a long spell with Alzheimer’s disease. Had he been able to see the way ahead as an undergraduate at Eureka College, in Illinois, to glory days as a beloved president, if he had had any choice I suspect he might have bartered that painful, private decade for the love he evoked from our country. He would have smacked his lips. “Can’t wait!” But of course, he had to wait, and also of course, he could not see ahead.
Christopher Reeves also died, though far earlier in life, as a consequence of one day’s horse ride in 1995 that changed the course of his life. He went from playing Superman to being a real-life helpless paraplegic. He couldn’t see the way ahead to a destiny that now seems to many the definition of his life far more than his movies as Superman.
I mused as I read those familiar names and others that none of us can see into the darkness ahead. It might make us over-confident if we could, or it could be pretty scary.
We read together this morning the 43rd Psalm. It was a prayer as much as a Bible reading when we said together, “Oh send out thy light and thy truth; let them lead me, let them bring me to thy holy hill and to thy dwelling.”
Those words begin with the little exclamation, “Oh!” But the Hebrew doesn’t include the word “Oh!” There it’s a command to God. The translators tapered down the command, making of it a plea, out of courtesy to God. We cannot command God. So we say, “Oh, please, God, send out your light and let it lead me. Let me see the way ahead, and please let it be good.”
There are a number of Scriptures I would have liked to have us read and listen to this morning, but I could only choose three to remind us that God has shed light on the way ahead. In the chapter before our Old Testament reading, God speaks to us as He told ancient Israel, “I have chosen you and not cast you off; fear not, for I am with you, be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.”
In the chapter following the one Sergey read for us God reminds us that when we go through the deep waters or through the fire, two very opposite kinds of trial, He is right there with us. We will not drown. We will not be consumed by the fire. He is there. He promises us He will be there.
Then you heard Sergey read for you, “I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind . . . Behold the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.” I remember that Sergey and his family now look to God to show them the way ahead. I hope you hear God’s promise to you, “I give you light for the way ahead.”
We read aloud together Jesus’ words, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Oh, so we have to follow such light as we are given. Light can be wasted.
Earlier in John we read of Jesus, “The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.” We wonder what that means. The Quakers accept this teaching of Jesus that puzzles us as a cornerstone of their theology. Most of us don’t know what it means. How did Jesus enlighten Saddam Hussein, or Joseph Stalin, or Scott Peterson? They must have wasted their light.
More personally, I wonder how has Jesus enlightened me? I sure don’t feel enlightened often enough. I look ahead to my ministry here and I pray, “Lord, show me the way. Show us what you want us to be.”
A cornerstone of my faith is that there’s more going on than any of us can see. Light comes in particles or wave lengths imperceptible to my eyes and yours. God leads us through dry times and these are part of the way. When Israel wandered forty years in the desert, this was in the plan of God for them. God’s way is not always through “shady green pastures.”
I chose to speak of these things this morning because I decided last year to let the Nicene Creed guide our thoughts for a while. And with interesting timing the next phrase before us describes Jesus as “light from light.” I didn’t know my duty would be to speak of Jesus in this way on the threshold of a new year.
The early Christians who described Jesus as “light from light” lived in days when their destiny seemed much brighter than it had been fifteen years earlier. Christianity emerged from the darkness of persecution into the light of being the most favored religion of the Roman Empire. But I don’t think this was in their minds when they so carefully described Jesus as “light from light.”
They had one purpose for sure, to define Jesus as the “true light,” because this was the kind of light He was. As we read in John 1: 9, “He was the true light.” They called Him, “light from light,” to make clear He was different from that false light, the disguise that Satan adopts as an “angel of light.” Satan’s “light” came from darkness. Satan’s light was a luminous veneer spread on a very dark heart. The kind of light the powers of darkness shine before us doesn’t reveal terrible consequences from following its allure. How many people wring their hands and say, “If only I had not!” as they think of what they did in response to what seemed a bright, golden opportunity.
In Proverbs we read, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.” “The way of the wicked is as darkness.” But this darkness seems like light at the moment. Opportunity seems to blaze with light at the moment, but oh, the consequences of following that false light.
Jesus was not that kind of light, a light hiding darkness. He is light from light. His kind of light appeared in this world at the beginning when God said, “Let there be light.” John wrote of Jesus as this kind of light, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”
There is an instructive mixing of the verb tenses as John wrote this. Jesus as the light “shines,” which means that this light is always shining--in the present. “The darkness did not overcome it” seems to describe a past action.
But it means something different from that. Practically speaking we might realize this because darkness is always trying to overcome the light. You and I can testify to this in the way that we see the battle in ourselves between light and darkness, good and evil, a dark side battling a light side. With Paul we admit, “The good I want to do, I don’t do, and what I don’t want to do is what I do!” The Gospel is telling us that the darkness will never win over the light of Jesus.
The early Christians who wrote down this so-detailed description of Jesus, wanted to make sure that we would distinguish between the seeming light that really is a disguise of darkness, and the real light, the light that can never be overcome by darkness—that is Jesus.
But this was more than a definition of Jesus, based on the Scriptures statements about Him. It was also an expression of hope. I think of them looking ahead into an unknown future.
They didn’t know that after four hundred years of the penetration of the Christian faith into North Africa and even into the barbarian West that a new religion would arise in Arabia that would threaten to stamp out Christianity. In the early 8th century Islam swept across North Africa, once the most vigorous region of the Christian faith. If Charles the Hammer had not pounded successfully on the Muslim armies in France in AD 732, the light of the Gospel would have faced a real challenge to fulfill the words of the Gospel—the darkness did not overcome the light.”
These early Christians didn’t think about a political, military challenge to the light of Jesus. They had seen how the Faith of Jesus Christ grew in brightness during the darkest days of persecution. Its apparent powerlessness was stronger than the mighty religions favored in the Roman Empire. As we have seen in our generation the resurgence of the Faith in China and Russia demonstrates that the light of the Gospel will not be extinguished.
But I wonder if there was something deeper than this that these early Christians had in mind, something more personal. When you and I come to Jesus by faith, I doubt that many of us have in mind the broad sweep of history, or the technicalities of correctly describing Jesus. We want to feel this light for ourselves.
Even though the Gospel tells us that Jesus was the light that enlightens everyone, we do not always feel an inward confirmation of this truth. Often we live in hope. As Paul tells us, faith, hope’s ally, is more like blindness than like sight. How often the turn of phrase comes to me, “faith is a special kind of blindness.” I trust in God though I cannot see ahead.
The anxieties that affect our faces, changing the optimistic brightness of youth into the pessimism of later years, writing fear and sometimes anger across our foreheads, and putting distress into the lines of our faces, and into our very eyes--are the effect of the darkness we cannot penetrate.
It’s well and good that Jesus is light from light, the true light, and all of that, but I cannot see the way ahead, and I’m scared. There are clues that come to us all that the way ahead isn’t all a spiral upward into glory.
I notice a couple changes in my body that the last decade has brought. I used to be a nearly tireless runner. I could run for miles, and stopped mostly because it was boring. I passed on this endurance gene to our son who has run the Chicago Marathon. But now my knees threaten to quit on me. I can’t run. Gimpy old knees, you know. My eyes once could read fine print. Now I can’t seem to get glasses that really do the trick. Cataracts have begun to form, the eye-doctor tells me. In some ways I feel like I’m still in my thirties. But I have a few reality-check points.
We all know the last advice in the book of Ecclesiastes: “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw nigh, when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them.” It goes on to describe how our body parts fail us, one by one. First our eyes, then osteoporosis, and then our teeth drop out, our ears fail, and finally, “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the Spirit to God who gave it.” All of this happens to us, who have an insatiable appetite not only to live, but also to be forever young.
A lot of plastic surgeons are getting rich promoting the make-believe that a scalpel, a hypodermic needle, and a suction tube can turn back the body clock. Health clubs rake in many people’s extra dollars as they buy memberships they hope will make them slim and trim. If only buying a membership could do the trick!
At midnight next Saturday, we put up a new calendar. What will the year bring? We don’t know any details. Maybe it will go well for us. Maybe ill will come to some of us. But the light Jesus shines into our lives offers a hope more sure than any passing detail of life can extinguish. The Apostle Paul wrote, “I have learned to be abased and to abound. I have learned in whatever state I am therewith to be content.” We’d not like to reproduce personally many of the situations in which he learned to be content. We hope for better than this.
Come what may, train yourself to look steadily at the light of Jesus. You and I cannot actually see light. We just see what light makes it possible to see.
John Henry Newman’s life-story was of great influence on me in a pivotal time of my life when the way ahead seemed very dark. He could be helpful to me because his way seemed very dark to him. I have had since I was a young man a deep sense of longing for God that made life feel like wandering through a labyrinth. It was while returning to England from a trip to Rome in which He searched for God’s direction and peace that he prayed words that many people have sung as a plea to God:
Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom. The way is dark and I am far from home. Lead thou me on. Keep thou my feet. I do not ask to see the distant scene. One step enough for me.
We should probably all learn this hymn. Its tune is not the kind many people favor today. When we cannot see our way ahead, God lets us look through the prism of other peoples’ life experiences. We see they made it through times as perilous as our own. And they show us that blind faith, hope, and trust in God is actually shining a light before us, even when all light seems to have faded before us.
I pray that God will give you and me enough eye-sight to see the ray of light He shines before us all, just enough for the next step. We must leave to God’s care the steps after that. Let us move on together into the year before us, trusting God to show the way individually and as a congregation.
O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come. Be thou our guide while life shall last and our eternal home. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2004
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Jesus Christ—True God from True God
Psalm 103: 1-6 / Psalm 86: 1-10/ Acts 17: 22-32
November 21st, 2004
I think some of you who patiently listen to my preaching these days may wonder why I keep on with the Nicene Creed, a very old statement of faith, when the world is in such turmoil. My own conscience tells me I should be explaining how to trust God in spite of all the problems.
Perhaps you are thinking, as you sit out there so patiently week after week, “Give me an idea of how to think when a selfless relief worker who gave twenty years of her life to helping people in Iraq is shot in the head in a cold-blooded act of murder. Explain to me how God is good when nineteen-year-old daughters and sons from our country are being killed in Iraq.” Visions of what’s happening in the Sudan, the violence, the poverty, make you numb. “Remind me of the goodness of God with good illustrations, images that will stand up against the terrible things I’m seeing on the TV news.”
For some reason I’ve found myself drawn to things people were writing back during the days of the First World War. It was one of the cruelest, most senseless wars. Barbara Tuchman proposed that World War I was a result of what she called fin de siecle, an end of the century sickness. The world fell apart at the seams when the nineteenth century passed and the twentieth century arrived. The cruelest icon of this falling apart at the seams was when millions of young men charged at each other in brave nineteenth-century warfare, only to be mown down like grass by twentieth-century machine gun bullets.
I look around me today and often feel the world is falling apart at the seams, too. Even that wonderful diversion of sports is demeaned with violence. Self-control is hostage to unfettered self-expression in the arenas that seem to hold our country in thrall—sports, money, and sex.
Maybe it’s the arrival of the twenty-first century that is to blame. Not only the world, but also the Church is falling apart. The cover story of the most recent issue of Commonweal, a thoughtful Roman Catholic journal, addressed the question whether the Catholic Church could survive the sexual scandals that have cost it far more than the money to pay lawsuits. Trust is evaporating from devout Roman Catholic people.
People are fleeing our denomination that preserves a rich heritage, like rats from a sinking ship. The PCUSA has such a rich history that I refuse to give up on it.
The word “relevant” has replaced “obedience” in our idea of worship. New denominations and independent churches with powerful personalities in the pulpit are springing up. People are flocking to these churches hoping to hear a word from God, having given up on the traditional denominations that faithfully handed down the Gospel for centuries. Good theology is leaking out of the mainline denominations in many places.
But the divorce rate in the Bible belt is the highest in our country even where this new fashion of worship thrives. You’d think that where the Bible is preached most fervently Christian life would reach its peak. Not so. More than 75% of the sexual immorality charges among pastors come from churches most conservative in theology. What bothers me the most is that the most vocal followers of the Prince of Peace are not the most avid in longing for peace.
In days such as this, when the heart is really weary, I find my thoughts burrowing down deeply into the bedrock of our faith. What I really need to hear is a reminder of the Great Truth. “Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today and forever.” I find the words of a great old hymn going through my mind, “My faith has found a resting place not in device nor creed. I trust the ever-living One, His wounds for me shall plead.”
In times like these, to focus again on the Nicene Creed is to be reminded of what is most basic to our faith. Who was this “ever-living One” whose wounds on the cross are the basis for our hope?
The second part of this ancient statement of faith addresses that question. Our forebears in the faith wrote, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only-born Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” It seems an over-statement. Wasn’t it enough to say of Jesus Christ that He was God made flesh, as the Gospel of John tells us? Why not just quote the Gospel’s statements about Jesus and leave it at that?
Detailed statements like these that seem over-kill, respond to drifts of thinking that watered down or changed the Gospel’s simple statements about Jesus. Heresy, a word that today conjures up images of raving fanatics pointing fingers at those who disagree with them, once referred to ideas that undercut the very foundation of Christian identity. If thoughtful people had accepted with awe and reverence the words the Gospels use to describe Jesus, we all would have had a heritage of wonder, of speechless wonder as we thought of “the glory of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” How do you go about defining “glory?” How can anyone define the content of God’s grace and truth impersonated in Jesus?
There were two kinds of thinking about Jesus Christ that, if they had prevailed would have stripped the heart out of the Christian faith. There were those who said Jesus wasn’t really a man, but only seemed to be a man. Then there were those who said Jesus was only a man, an extraordinary man to be sure, but just a man. The Christian faith hinges on the trust that Jesus was both God and man.
Briefly put, this conviction comes from reading in the Gospels that Jesus really was a human being—He was born as we all are. He ate food. He wept when He was sad. He had flesh that bled when He was beaten and crucified at the end.
It was also clear that the Gospels taught unmistakably that Jesus was God. He wasn’t just “divine,” that is, a person inspired as the prophets were. When Peter said to Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus became very excited because He realized that at least for a moment, someone in this pivotal little group of people who were so important to human destiny really understood who He was.
“Son of God” was a new idea relating Jesus Christ to God the Father generically. Father and Son were in the same category of Being, different from anyone else who could say, with reverence, “God is my heavenly Father.”
Jesus said of Himself, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” “The Father” was the way the Jewish people knew to refer to God. The Creator of heaven and earth was personal to them. He was “our Father in heaven.” Either Jesus was a lunatic with hallucinations, or He was telling the most basic information about Himself.
When those who knew Jesus best watched Him closely, echoes from their Bible, the Old Testament came strangely to mind. I wonder who read the 86th Psalm, that we read this morning, and found themselves thinking, “That sure describes Jesus?” They read, “Thou, O Lord, art good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call on thee.” As they watched Jesus tenderly forgive the woman accused by self-righteous men of adultery, did they realize that here was on exhibit the love of God, good and forgiving to this woman who lay in the dust before Him, waiting to be stoned by her accusers? “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more,” Jesus said.
As the disciples were packed in the room where Jesus was teaching in Capernaum, and saw a man lowered on a stretcher through the ceiling, debris falling over them, they heard Jesus say to the paralyzed man on the stretcher, “I forgive your sins.” And they too wondered, “Who besides God can forgive sins?” But they had never seen a God, a real God before. You can’t see God, after all. The words of the Psalm echoed in their minds, “There is none like thee among the gods, O Lord, nor are there any works like thine . . . For thou art great and doest wondrous things, thou alone art God.”
And so the followers of Jesus slowly came to see that this Jesus of Nazareth, though a man, was no mere man. Something new walked with them, ate with them, slept next to them, laughed and cried with them. This something new was God in human form. He was no less God for being man, no less man for being God. Only God could do what He did. To think of Him as anything less than God just didn’t fit. To think of Him as not really a man didn’t fit either.
At the Council of Nicea in AD 325, the thoughtful men who gathered from many places in the Roman empire faced the challenge of a very persuasive man from Alexandria, Egypt, who was convincing people of what seemed more naturally plausible about Jesus, that He was just a man, however remarkable a man he might be. This is the view of much popular theology today. It doesn’t work. Christianity is not Christianity if Jesus was just another great human being.
Each of these phrases that seem to go beyond necessity in making the point about the identity of Jesus Christ, answers a particular challenge to His identity as both God and man.
“God from God” answers the challenge that the God Jesus was, came from some curious thoughts about God that made God seem less than God. Maybe this idea of God was some lower celestial being responsible for creating the earth, a place full of evil. No. Jesus Christ was the only God, who was with and who was the One who created all things, things seen and unseen—all of which were good.
“Light from light” answered the view that Jesus Christ was a light that shined as the result of God turning on some light that did not exist before He turned it on. You hold a flashlight in your hand as you walk a path at night. Until you turn on the flashlight, it produces no light. But when you turn it on, you can shine it on the ground as you walk. The light comes from the flashlight. But Jesus Christ was light, not from some heavenly flashlight, but He was the Source of the light as well as the light that shined.
The first thing God did in creating the world was to invoke His light into visibility. When God said, “Let there be light,” it meant “let there be light in the world.” Till then, all was darkness in the created order. The light that God shined in the world was from the True Light that existed before there was any world at all. The Creed says of Jesus Christ, that He was “Light from light.”
Then, “true God from true God.” This was to clarify that in calling Jesus the “only-born Son of God,” it didn’t mean He came into being in terms of time in the way that a human child comes to life from her parents. “Son of God” and “true God from true God” were equally correct in describing Jesus Christ.
Now, whenever I try to understand these things I wonder why I should do this. Isn’t it true that God will be God no matter what any of us thinks about God? God does not need us to define Him in order to feel good about Himself. You and I might like to hear flattering comments said about us. “Joe is a very intelligent, creative man,” feels good to hear for Joe. “Sandra is a very bright, kind person” makes Sandra feel good to hear it. Particularly if the ones making these complimentary remarks are people of high standing, the compliment feels good. A Nobel Prize seems good to get because everyone thinks the prize comes from a source that makes valid judgments of worth in people.
But what advantage can the Creator possibly get from our saying nice things about Him? It is for our sakes that it is important to think rightly about God. It is important for us to preserve the refined perception the Gospels give us about Jesus for two reasons at least.
First, because ideas tend to get watered down with time and much familiarity. After a while the most sublime ideas can lose their punch, reducing to ordinary platitudes. The closely defined words of the Creed preserve for us what is truly extraordinary.
Second, our hope in God, the confidence we have that sustains us in troubled times, rests on the truth of what Scripture teaches us about Jesus Christ. If Jesus was not really a man, how can He possibly understand the predicament of my humanity? If Jesus was not really God, what did He have to offer me beyond a good example -- that I can’t hope to follow?
Jesus Christ showed you and me the heart of God. Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Jesus wept at the death of his friend, Lazarus. Jesus reached out to outcasts, to people judged unredeemable sinners by people who classed themselves as uniquely good in God’s eyes. In all this profound compassion, Jesus Christ showed you and me the heart of God. So I can trust Him with my life, and so can you.
When we think of God we naturally think of a Being wholly other than we are, beyond us, our Creator, but how in the world can we think of Him as friend? Jesus showed us how friendly God is. All that Jesus was to people, because He is eternal God, He still is to you and me.
In a way, this is just a lofty idea, you might say. But it is a well-founded lofty idea. And lofty ideas are the ideas that move us, that shape our thinking and our behavior. We live in a very troubled world, but so did Jesus. In fact, His world was even more troubled than ours in some ways. There was no anesthesia before surgery in His day. Today we are aghast when we learn of torture taking place in prisons—as well we should be. But in Jesus’ day, men and women were crucified by the thousands. Jesus shined into that dark day, and He still shines into our dark day.
He shines, but you and I have to open our eyes to see Him. I hope that your eyes see more than the surrounding darkness of our day. This Jesus of whom you hear so much, is alive because it was a property of His life not to die. He was not just divine, a great man, but God from God. He was not just a source of radiance, but Light from light. He did not just come from God. He was true God from true God. These things we cannot understand, but we can accept them—knowing there is very much we cannot understand.
And then, trusting in Jesus Christ, we can live out our pilgrimage in this life in hope no matter how life seems to be coming apart at the seams. I pray that we all will turn our eyes Jesus’ way, and remember who this One is, in order to rightly and successfully find and enjoy His healing, His salvation.
Let us pray: O God, we bless You for being present with us in Jesus Christ, our Savior and our God. Amen.
Stuart Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
November 14, 2004
Jesus Christ—Begotten from the Father Before All Ages
Jesus Christ—Begotten from the Father Before All Ages
Psalm 2 / Isaiah 25: 6-10
John 1: 1-2, 14.
November 14th, 2004
Last weekend Bonnie and I were in Jacksonville, Florida to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday. She read to us a brief summary of her life, with some details of how things have changed since she was a little girl. Think of all that has changed in the past ninety years. My mother rode a horse to her early piano lessons. Can you young folk picture that? Does your piano teacher’s house have a hitching post? Her country home as a child didn’t have indoor plumbing or telephone. Imagine going to an outhouse in mid-winter! Do you all know what an outhouse is? Imagine a world without telephones. Radio wasn’t very common yet. But one thing that has stayed pretty much the same is human nature.
My mother was born the year the First World War began. This was then called “the Great War.” The machine gun was introduced in World War I. It mowed down young soldiers like grass because the military still used the old-fashioned battle tactics, waves of soldiers charging at the enemy. Two of my Scottish great-uncles were among the millions slaughtered in France in 1915, clad in their Gordon Highlander kilts. Wouldn’t it have been better if we kept getting places on horseback, and outhouses, and changed what makes for war.
We’re used to the idea of war now, and can hardly imagine a world without people killing each other somewhere. But try to imagine a world where it is different than this. Imagine a world where the kind of environment you wish to live in were the common condition of all people. No war. No selfishness. No poverty. No law courts. None of the miseries people inflict on one another.
I say, “Try to imagine” such a world because you and I know that this is just an idea now. We have to adjust to the real world, and get on in it the best we can. The way people—ourselves included—really are.
We say we want to do this as Christians, that is, living a way of life as taught by Jesus. This takes some doing. We know we all fall short of Jesus’ way. One reason we emphasize the great doctrine of justification by faith alone, that we are not and cannot be saved by doing good deeds—besides the fact that it is true--is that we are painfully aware how defective, spasmodic, temporary, off again, on again our best deeds are.
Without the grace of God, His unmerited favor, we haven’t the ghost of a chance of being people God would find the least interesting to include in heaven for eternity. There are some people you and I would not want to have at our dinner table. Bad manners make for miserable dinner company. You and I would be that kind of people at God’s dinner table—miserable boors without a trace of heavenly etiquette.
We cling to songs like “Amazing Grace,” even if it means we have to sing, “that saved a wretch like me.” Why? Because we know that if we were put under God’s magnifying glass we’d all really look pretty grim. “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” King David prayed, “and renew a right spirit within me.” Others can see we need this. We don’t always notice.
Instead of seeing ourselves as others see us, we play at seeing others as we imagine God does. When your little daughter listens to your hear-beat with her toy stethoscope in the play-doctor kit she got for her birthday, you think it’s cute. She puts the plastic thermometer in daddy’s mouth and tells him to keep it under his tongue and not talk—just like the Dr. said to her at her last check up. We love to see children playing games like this that might result in a career as a doctor. It’s cute to see their impressions of what a doctor does.
But it’s not in the least cute when we presume to know the innermost secrets of the hearts of others, judging even their intentions. In our attempt to play God, we have short-changed loving as God loves, forgiving as He forgives, and giving with His lavish generosity. We who are not God, play God-games badly.
It was something like this, I think, that must have been in the minds of the men who hammered out the words about Jesus in the Nicene Creed. Aware of the grievous problem afflicting us human beings who play God with each other in all the wrong ways, they stressed how God “played” being a human being to teach us how to play the game of humanity right, which is our real game.
We have come to the section of the Creed that hones in on who and what Jesus Christ really was. This second section that tells of God the Son starts out: “And [we believe] in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only born, the one born of the Father before all ages.” Three times the Creed stresses the idea that Jesus was born—He is Son, only born, born of the Father.
These ideas do not correspond to what really goes on in heaven because there is no marrying and so no being born in heaven. These are ideas that have to do with this world. “Born” is a word that only makes sense in earthly life. You and I all were born. We are sons or we are daughters.
In being born, in starting life as everyone does, God began “playing the game of human life.” He would play it exactly as we ought to, beginning with the very beginning as a baby. I proposed to you how you and I play God in condemning even the innermost motives of people—and doing a pretty bad job of it. Well, God turned this project on its head, playing at the game of humanity. He Who always was started from the very beginning with birth.
The Gospel lesson this morning made this clear. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Here is the basis of the Creed saying, “before all ages.” John is talking about Jesus, the one born to Mary in Bethlehem, who had an analogous relationship in the Godhead to the Person we call “the Father.” John makes clear something Matthew and Luke’s Gospels left to him to stress. “He was in the beginning with God and all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” This is the God-stuff that people had no way of recognizing when looking at Jesus.
What could be seen, that John wants to help us understand is that God really began playing the game of humanity. He writes in verse 14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” How did He become flesh and not just seem to be a babey, with baby skin—such a crude way of putting it, really? Underneath the skin we see is flesh. We don’t want to see the flesh. It’s the baby’s skin we love to touch.By being born a baby.
The word “dwelt” comes from the word “tent,” in Greek. He “tented” among us. You who love to go camping leave your comfortable homes and put up a tent out in the forest somewhere and love to rough it away from civilization. You pretend you are frontier folk again. This is similar to how God “played” our game.
We try to play God and fail badly. God played the game of humanity and did it well. John describes the impression Jesus made: “We have seen his glory as of the only Son of the Father.” There was no mistaking Jesus had flesh and blood. Cut Him and he’d bleed. “But boy! how magnificently he lived real life before us, “John says.
What was this “glory” of which John wrote? Jesus didn’t have a halo around his head calling attention to him. He didn’t use “King James Bible” kind of language, different from how others spoke. What John saw was “grace,” that is, unfailing graciousness toward others, and truth—personal honesty to the core.
We tend to “theologize” these two comments and think John meant that Jesus’ displayed a loftier kind of behavior than we can imagine when we say, “a gracious person.” Perhaps we want to imagine that the “truth” of which John wrote was of a higher sort than the honesty we expect of one another. But I don’t think this is necessary.
Jesus “played” the role of human being better than we play the role of God. Jesus, God made flesh, played man at his best, gracious, truthful. Why? Because beyond doing the big work of grace, dying to pay the penalty for your sin and mine, He needed to show us how to play the game of life. Scrap the idea of trying to play God. Instead, take up the ways of grace and truth.
I proposed that we read two passages from the Old Testament as well as John’s well known statement about Jesus as God who became flesh. First, in Psalm 2 we read David’s words describing God’s view of the world, with its ambitious nations that each one thinks it is the reason for the existence of the world itself. “He that sits in the heavens laughs.”
We who live in the most powerful nation in the world should remember that God laughs when He sees any pretentious nation thinking it is the reason for everything. David may have thought he was writing about himself, since God appointed him to the heavy duty of being King of Israel with long-range task. But he wrote of someone else in writing God’s remark, “I have my king on Zion, my holy hill . . . He said to me, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession.”
David died and his dusty remains are in a Jerusalem graveyard. But someone was born into his family line to whom all of this pertained. Isaac Watts summarized this in his great hymn, “Jesus shall reign where e’er the sun does its successive journeys run. His kingdom spread from shore to shore, till moons shall wax and reign no more.”
Isaiah wrote of this one in a section of his prophecy where he peers into the future with great hope. “It will be said in that day, ‘Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
How would anyone recognize this One to come? Because He was born a man. He entered life, he played our game. He came to us who play God with one another so badly, and played the game of humanity perfectly—so winsomely. “Perfectly” probably sounds cold and sterile. But Jesus’ perfection was winsome.
We are apt to think of Jesus as “man” at Christmas and on Good Friday. We picture the humble baby boy and all the charm of the manger scene. We picture Jesus suffering excruciating pain on the cross. But in between Jesus birth and death, and upon His resurrection, we have styled Jesus as being more God than man. Indeed, the temptation for devout folk is to so stress the Deity of Christ as to make insignificant Jesus full humanity.
But the Creed emphasizes Jesus’ birth—stressing that he was son, a human category, and twice that he was born. When we say “God the Son,” we are dabbling in describing an eternal relationship within the Godhead for which the terms “son” and “father” are the best analogies in human language. But when we speak of Jesus as “son” we are accepting as well as we can a fact actually true: Jesus was a son, a born human being. Jesus played the game of human life, starting at the very beginning. Why? Because we human beings were playing so badly the game of Deity, judging, condemning, underplaying tragically the Divine roles of love, forgiveness, and grace.
As I think about the Nicene Creed that Christians have taken so seriously for the past seventeen-hundred years, I realize that God does need us to explain to Him what He is like. But we need to try to understand what God is like because He went to such effort to make Himself known to us and in a way that shows how we should live—who were made in the image of God. If we think of God aright, we will live not only by faith, but by gratitude.
I am grateful that God did not impose on us some crazy mythology, mystical “cartoons” such as the ancient Greeks and Romans had as they tried to probe the heavens and got no farther than Olympus. Their gods behaved like the worst human beings. We don’t think of God as the Incas did, who slaughtered their most beautiful daughters and sons in rituals that tried to give their best, costliest offerings to God as they thought of him.
Instead we think of God most accurately when we take in the fact that He became as we are, to lift us up to life together and life with Him. As Clement put it, “He became as we are, so we could become as He is.” Jesus was really born so we could see Him in human terms—the only terms we can really understand.
“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, only born Son of God, born of the Father before all ages.” And all this for you and for me. I pray that we may remember this and be thankful, and thoughtfully live out our gratitude.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we bless you for creating us in your image, and then for taking on our likeness in Jesus Christ, born for us. Help us to trust in Him, and so to find life. Amen.
Stuart Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
October 31, 2004
Jesus, Only Son of God
Jesus, Only Son of God
Daniel 7: 9-14 / Matthew 3: 13-17
NT: Matthew 3: 13-17
October 31st, 2004
Today is Reformation Sunday. Reformation Sunday doesn’t celebrate an event in Jesus’ life. It remembers a reform within a movement that began with Jesus and grew in ways beyond the wildest imagination of the Apostle Paul.
The Church began as what is often referred to as “a Galilean affair.” It was a few men who left everything to literally walk with Jesus along the dusty roads of Palestine toward a goal they didn’t understand. Then Jesus was crucified. Three days later as they were numbly contemplating their loss Jesus came back to life. They realized that God had introduced something different and new to life. It did not end with death. Furthermore, God dealt with the fundamental flaw in humanity, sin. How? He provided a way to be forgiven, through trust in this Jesus who died and came alive again.
Fifty days after Jesus was crucified something happened in Jerusalem that catapulted this Good News worldwide. This took place at the Jewish feast of Pentecost. Word about the purpose of Jesus’ death and resurrection infiltrated many sectors of the known world as devout Jews in Jerusalem heard the Gospel, believed it, were baptized, and took the word back home when the Pentecost celebration was over.
The long story of this thing Jesus began is mind-boggling. It got involved with the Roman government in the fourth century after a Roman emperor became a Christian. It grew into a culture transforming movement, but in the process culture transformed the Christian faith as well. Wealth and power came to the Church, and its best-known struggles during the heart of the Middle Ages were with kings over the question, “who’s the boss.” The simple Gospel got lost.
On Reformation Sunday we remember the recovery of the great truth that became lost in the shuffle of Church history. We are approved by God only because of His grace displayed to us in Jesus Christ. Grace is favor God gives without regard to the merit of those who receive it.
This morning I ask you to think with me about this Jesus who brought this grace to us. He is the focus of the Gospel, the Good News of God’s grace. The Scriptures teach us this Jesus Christ was both Son of God and son of man.
I suspect not many of us have thought about the implications of how God poured out this favor through Someone who was both Son of God and son of man. Perhaps it’s not necessary to think about it. What’s important is simply that it is true. I heard on the radio this past week that the Red Sox out-fielder whose home runs were a great factor in their World Series success said that they played better when they didn’t think about it. They just played the game. Perhaps we would do better not to think too much about the mysteries of our faith, about how God did things, and just live it.
But when we read the Bible we see things written there that we do think about, and should think about. Otherwise, why were they written? The Bible tells us Jesus was Son of God and son of man.
The Nicene Creed affirms that the one Lord, Jesus Christ was the only-begotten Son of God. The version of the Creed in our Hymn Book reads, “only Son of God.” But the Greek in which it was first written says monogenes, “only born;” not just “only.” And the Latin into which it was first translated says unigenitus, “Only born,” rather than simply “only” (unicus).
This was to distinguish between Jesus Christ as Son of God and what the Old Testament refers to in a few places as sons of God. In Genesis 6 and Job 2, and elsewhere, we read the term “sons of God,” bene elohim. But none of these sons of God were born. They were angelic beings God created; none of them were born. I don’t know how angels multiply, or even if they do. The Creed refers to One who was uniquely Son of God, capital S, who also was born to a human mother.
When we say Son of God we refer to Jesus’ identity as God, as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. When we say “son of man,” we affirm that He was really a flesh and blood human being—just the same as you and me.
I want to speak of these two titles, Son of God and son of man, in a way I hope you find of use not only in understanding your faith, but also in living your faith. Christianity is essentially a life to be lived.
Perhaps you have seen the recent CNN broadcast on Christianity in America. Conservative Evangelical Christianity, that largely holds to the heritage given to us by Jesus’ apostles and the earliest Christians, has become a massive cultural force in our country. The great ideas at the heart of Evangelical Christianity are the truths I believe. But I feel a sense of dread when great truths are popularized and merge with a cultural movement. The influence passes both ways, from culture to faith, and from faith to culture. If you and I want to live out the kind of life that responds to the grace of God we must stop and think about what’s going on around us.
Jesus warned about a broad way that leads to destruction. He didn’t thereby blow a cloud of suspicion over all popular movements that draw masses of people. Indeed, He invited a lot of people to Himself when He said, “Come to me ALL you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” But He also informed us that this business of coming to Him requires walking after Him carrying something heavy and cross-shaped on our back. You have a cross to carry, and so do I. Those who are caught up in movements must still face themselves in the quiet moments and ask themselves, “am I walking, carrying my cross behind Jesus or just following the crowd that says ‘Jesus’ a lot?”
“Jesus walked this lonesome valley. He had to walk it by Himself. Nobody else could walk it form Him. He had to walk it by Himself.” And you and I need to be aware that it is a lonesome valley for us too when we really walk the Jesus way.
When we think of Jesus as son of man we see One like ourselves. Son of man was an apocalyptic title used, as we shall see, in the Old Testament. Apocalyptic terms referred to times yet to come when mysterious purposes of God would burst on the world. Often they referred to what the seers and prophets believed were the end times, when the world as we know it would be destroyed. But the prophets who used the term “son of man,” specifically had in mind a real person and not some angelic being as the term “sons of God” suggested.
We read from the prophet Daniel this mysterious vision that ends with the coming of “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, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.”
This comes after a mysterious description of a little horn that came up from the midst of ten horns on a fearful beast. As you may suppose, very different spins are put on this little horn. This little horn had eyes like the eyes of a man and a mouth speaking great things. Some early Protestant Christians who were hostile to the Catholic Church thought it referred to the Catholic Church. I think it may refer to a Greek king in the second century before Christ that tried to destroy the Jews. His name was Antiochus Epiphanes. He thought he was an appearance of God, which is what “Epiphanes” means. This little horn comes up from the midst of ten horns on the fearful beast that tried to stamp out the people and the family line into which God’s promised Messiah would be born.
The vision moves from topic to topic quickly, but then introduces us to “one that was ancient of days [whose] raiment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool . . . a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him . . . and the books were opened.”
We read of one “like a son of man [coming] to the Ancient of Days [to whom was given] dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him . . . an everlasting kingdom which shall not pass away.”
How similar this picture is to the picture John describes in the first chapter of the Book of Revelation. He heard a voice behind him, a loud voice like a trumpet. When he turned to see the source of the voice he saw seven gold lamp-stands—that stood for seven churches in Asia Minor. In the midst of these lamp-stands he saw “one like a son of man . . . his head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow, his eyes were like a flame of fire.” And we know that John is seeing a vision of Jesus Christ in an exalted state because this son of man says to him, “I died, and behold I am alive for ever more.”
These two mysterious visions connect directly with what we read of Jesus when He was baptized by His cousin John, just before beginning the three years of work before His suffering and death. A voice boomed loud from the heavens as Jesus emerged from the water, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Jesus spoke of Himself when He said, “the foxes have dens and the birds of the air have nests but the Son of man has nowhere to lay His head.”
The grand purposes of God come together from three angles. First, there is the foretelling of a son of man, a unique human being to come, by an Old Testament prophet. Second, there is the event when God the Father speaks of this unique One, who called Himself, “son of man,” saying, “This is my beloved Son.” Third, there is the vision by the Apostle John when he sees the heavenly image of this beloved Son receiving the worship described in the Book of Daniel.
When the Creed leads us to see that the One Lord, Jesus Christ was God’s only Son, it points us to see this connection between the prophet’s vision of the “son of man” and the man of whom the voice said, “This is my beloved son,” and then this glorious and exalted Being who stands up from the midst of the seven churches.
Why did the early Church leaders describe Jesus as “the only-begotten Son of God?” In coming weeks we’ll see how they described Jesus in even more precise detail. But here they referred to His being born because there were some Christian teachers who said Jesus only seemed to be a man. They represented a distinct strain in early Christian thinking about Jesus. One fellow taught that Jesus came through the Virgin Mary as water comes through a pipe, without being affected by His mother’s nature at all (Tatian). Another man proposed that Jesus was plunked down on earth as a man at the time of His baptism, and wasn’t even born at all (Marcion).
In fact, the tendency among devout Christians is to minimize the man-ness of Jesus and accentuate His God-ness. We feel irreverent in thinking too much about Jesus as a man. We scarcely dare thinking of how fully Jesus knew the limitations we have as people. Could He really be tempted to sin? Did He know as little about the future as we do? In Paul’s letter to the Philippians we read, “He emptied Himself.” Emptied Himself of what, we wonder? And it’s healthy to wonder these things. Undoubtedly we’re often wrong in our ideas, but we do no wrong to try to understand things the Bible doesn’t explain.
But we are to understand that despite what we can’t understand, we are to know for sure that the Jesus Christ our Lord was born to a human mother just as we all were. And so He can understand fully the joys and sorrows of life that pull and tug at us.
But there was an even greater reason why Jesus was born as we are. Jesus, who was fully human, but never sinned, was able to give us the remarkable gift of taking on Himself the complete sum of all our sin because He was a man.
If each of us owed the bank a debt way beyond what we could pay and someone came along and signed his name to our debt, so that we were debt-free, we would appreciate that person, don’t you think? This Jesus did for us.
If the Son of God had not become man, He would have had a category problem in caring for the debt-load of sin. It took a person to take on Himself the sins of people. Presumably an angel could absorb the sins of angels. But it took a human being to do this for us human beings. Jesus, who freely chose never to sin, lovingly chose to accept the blame for the sins we freely choose to commit. This is the benefit to us of Jesus being “son of man.” He could absorb our debt.
But He was also Son of God, which means that we see how fully committed God was to this plan to rescue our troubled world. We think of God as transcendent, as standing apart from this world, even though we feel His influence within it. But the Gospel teaches us that God did not stand aloof, but entered human history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
When you and I look up at a night sky and realize that our planet is a very tiny spot in our solar system, and that there is so much vastness beyond, it can seem ridiculous to think the Creator of all this was interested in such a tiny thing as our planet. But this is just what we do believe. And believing this, rather than moving us to pride at our importance, moves us to gratitude. This moves me to want to live deliberately and thankfully, trying to follow the ways of the son of man, who was the Son of God.
I can relate to Jesus as a fellow human being. Jesus’ life is worthy of the closest inspection. He lived as it is best and wisest to live. But He is more than an example—I could never emulate fully. In accepting the blame for my sin and yours, He gave us a gift that only God could give, free and complete forgiveness of our sin. And with this forgiveness God gives us hope. And where there’s hope, there’s life.
This is why it is useful to realize that this Jesus about whom we hear so much was born as we were. And that He was Deity as well as humanity. Why all this? Because we are precious to God. I hope you have responded to this great love of God, and thankfully trusted in Jesus as your Savior and Lord—and then deliberately set out on the life-long business of patterning your life after the life of Jesus.
Let us pray: O Lord, our God, thank You for Jesus Christ, Your only begotten Son, whom we thankfully trust, and desire to follow in the way we live. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2004
We Believe In One Lord, Jesus Christ
We Believe In One Lord, Jesus Christ
Psalm 2 / Genesis 18: 1-8
Matthew 16: 13-20
October 24th, 2004
When we speak of Jesus, we sometimes call Him just “Jesus;” or “Jesus of Nazareth,” or “Jesus Christ,” and sometimes the longer name, “the Lord Jesus Christ.” When we say “Jesus of Nazareth,” it’s because Jesus was a popular name, Joshua or Yeshuah in Hebrew. It’s a particular Jesus we have in mind. The Gospels distinguish between the Yeshuah—the Jesus who died for our sins, the Son of Mary who grew up in Nazareth, and every other Yeshuah –Jesus of that day.
Some who say “Jesus Christ” may think that “Christ” was in some way Jesus’ last name. But “Christ” was really a title. More properly we should say, “Jesus, The Christ.” Because “Christ” was a Greek term corresponding to the Hebrew term “Messiah,” or anointed one. Calling Jesus “the Christ,” means He was The Messiah, the specially anointed One promised often in the Old Testament.
Very often those who feel a strong love for Jesus call Him “The Lord Jesus Christ.” It feels good to say that if you love Him. The words belong together. But I wonder if it’s clear to us all what we mean when we call Him “Lord.” Calling Jesus “Lord” is not like referring to “Lord Peter Wimsey,” Dorothy Sayers’ fictional detective, or to “Sir Walter Raleigh.” These are just titles of nobility.
When we call Jesus, “Lord,” we’re using His proper name. The special name for God the ancient people of Israel used was “Adonai” which means “Lord.” Actually God’s name was too sacred to say. The most devout Jews called God’s name “ha Shem,” which means “the Name,” instead of saying Lord or pronouncing the four letters which spelled Yahweh or Yahoo.
When we call Jesus Christ “Lord,” we’re referring to the name of God that fits Jesus as well as it fits God the Father. We should always use that name reverently.
You remember in the Christmas story that the angels announced to the shepherds on the night of Jesus’ birth, “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ, the Lord.” This baby is the Savior, the Christ. This baby is “Lord.”
What?! These Jewish shepherds were excited. They ran to Bethlehem as fast as they could. Why were they so excited? Because though they might not have known very much about the terms Savior or Christ, they knew that “Lord” was the name of God. What would Lord-God look like as a baby?
The shepherds ran to see what God looked like—as a baby. I wonder what they expected Him to look like. When they got there surely they didn’t gawk the way we stare at a sideshow. What a shock it must have been to feel the reverence that took them over in that cattle stall. They looked into the feed trough, with hay sticking out of it and saw a little baby all wrapped up to keep warm. This was the Lord-God the angels told them about?!!
The manger scenes we see at Christmas depict sheep and oxen sitting near by. This is how animals kneel. The shepherds too must have knelt down. Their hearts were hushed, aware of the contradiction that the baby Lord-God should be so humbly laid. They left that cattle stall and told everyone what they had seen. And all who heard them wondered at what the shepherds told them, even though shepherds as a class of people were held in general contempt.
At the time of the Council of Nicea, 1700 years ago, these early Christians thought it was of first importance to clarify who this Jesus was. An influential elder named Arius, from the great church in Alexandria, Egypt was teaching that Jesus was someone very special, but He was not actually Lord-God as the Gospels said. Arius said Jesus was divine, meaning there was something extraordinary about Him. He said God was somehow uniquely with Jesus as He had never been with any one before. But he balked at saying He was “Lord” as God told Moses in the Old Testament that His name was “Lord.”
In a later sermon I hope to clarify some of the complexity of this controversy. But I believe the problem for Arius was, in a nutshell, the issue many people have today. No one can understand that a baby human being was God. It’s a mystery. Some people believe it is nonsense.
If God became a baby, who was running the universe then? It is the kind of question people wonder about at Jesus’ crucifixion. Did God die when Jesus died on the cross? Well, yes and no. As Samuel Wesley put it, “’tis mystery the immortal dies.” The doctrine of the Trinity tries to address these mysterious questions. Jesus was God, and the Father is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, but there are not three Gods, just one. God was still managing the universe when the Son of God became a baby in the Virgin Mary. God was still in control when Jesus died on the cross. It is a mysterious matter that defies our ability to explain. But we can get some inklings of the purpose of this, even if we can’t understand it.
James S. Stewart, the pastor of North Morningside Church in Edinburgh in the middle of last century, remarked in one of his sermons that “It is the glory and doom of man to have been made for fellowship with God. Of all the faculties and capacities which he possesses, incomparably the greatest is his capacity for God . . . Reconciliation with God is therefore the cardinal issue, far and away the most crucial problem, confronting the soul of man today.”
Alienation is the great problem in the world. Look at the mess we’re in! There’s hostility, alienation all over. Iraq seethes with alienation. We live in social, cultural disintegration. Alienation is writ large over the world, over nations, communities, churches, and families. The cure to alienation is reconciliation. How can we be reconciled? To whom should we be reconciled?
Reconciliation between people who are estranged is very hard to achieve. Think of people with whom you once were close, perhaps a former boyfriend or girlfriend, perhaps a husband or wife, a teammate, a classmate, a colleague at work, a former friend at church. Something happened. There was a moment of sharp disagreement, a harsh word was spoken. You can’t forget. Perhaps it was unfaithfulness. She cheated on you.
Maybe it was something even worse than this. In some societies bearing a grudge when someone offends you is like wearing a badge of honor. Revenge is seen as a sacred duty.
Alienation between people is the cause of the great and enduring sorrow. In a family alienation is dreadfully painful. I conducted a funeral once where a son and his father were bitter enemies. The son told me so with tearless eyes when the funeral of his dad was over. I didn’t know what to say.
The slaughter of little children in the school in Beslan, in Russia, a few weeks ago was a vengeful act intended to produce the greatest sorrow. The alienation between the Chechnan Republic and Russia is deep. It is so deep that ordinary men who love their own children slaughtered the children of other parents who they knew loved these children. This would cause the bitterest pain of all. The cycle of alienation can fuel generations’ worth of violence that becomes part of the culture of a people.
The root of all this alienation is found in peoples’ alienation from God. Sin is the cause. Sin separates us from God, making Him seem repulsive. Sin is a disease that makes us yearn for what is ugly and perverse while being disgusted with what is good. The ultimate expression of sin is disgust with God who is seen as a competitor with myself as “god.”
It was this cycle of alienation that God stooped to conquer when He sent His Son to be born so humbly in Bethlehem. Jesus, the Son of God, was born and became human in order to put a human face to our alienation from God—and that, in order to put in human terms how to be reconciled to God.
When God was born in Bethlehem, He came face to face with us in the gentlest, most tactful way possible. He did not confront us in power that would overwhelm us but as a baby to disarm us.
As a rule the best way to try to end alienation is to go to the person who offended you unaggressively and say something like, “I want to restore what we lost.” Perhaps you bring a meaningful gift, a book on a theme beloved to the one to whom you want to be reconciled. You bring something that cost you something to break through the barrier of mistrust.
If you and I are alienated and we come face to face so that you can look into my eyes and I can see into yours too, there is a chance for reconciliation. Our eyes are the windows of our souls.
Well, when God, whose name is Lord, longed for reconciliation with us who had hurt Him, he stooped to become the most humble kind of human being, a baby, to get us to look into His eyes. God gave the costliest gift to us, wrapped in the most disarming form, a baby. And God wasn’t fussy about how we accepted this gift.
Remember that baby Jesus had a stable for his first crib because nobody would give up his room in the inn for Mary even though she was about to give birth. What discourtesy is found in Luke’s words, “She laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn!” Of course, they didn’t realize Mary was about to give birth to God. They thought it was any old baby that this poor country girl would bear. I remember that Jesus later would teach us that whatever we do to the least of people we do unto Him. His mother looked like “the least” kind of person.
When God sent His Son to reconcile us to Himself, He did not take offense at this lack of hospitality.
The Apostle Paul wrote of Jesus, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” This reconciliation began when He received human discourtesy at the time of His birth. It continued as “He came to His own people and they didn’t receive Him.” It reached its climax when Jesus hung from the cross.
The Apostle John tells us what this God-man says to us, “Look, I stand at your heart’s door and knock. If you will hear me and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you.” Why does the Bible say this? It seems it is saying something similar to when Mary and Joseph knocked on the innkeeper’s door asking for a room where Jesus could be born. In the Christmas carol we sing so fondly, “Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.” But the grown-up Jesus says, “Let me come in and eat with you.”
How courteous that God should come to us requesting that we invite Him in, as though we’re doing Him the honor. God’s humility before us is one of the most striking things about the Gospel.
Many people today still don’t know it is God who is knocking on their heart’s door. The gnawing they feel, the restlessness, the purposelessness of life are like the insistent sound of God knocking softly at the door of your heart and mine.
The purpose of the Creed in saying, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,” is to clarify just who this One is who knocks at our heart’s door. It is God reaching out to you as He does to others, personally, to reconcile the world to Himself one person at a time.
The question then becomes, have we responded to God’s gentle request, “May I be born in you? May I come eat with you?” In one way it is very simple to respond. All we must do is say, “Yes, Lord-God-Jesus, here’s a bed to be born in; you are welcome at my dining room table.”
But Jesus doesn’t come in to us only to let us maintain all our other alienations. Our rejection of God often looks like the rejection of other people. Our refusal to forgive them is part of our refusal to accept that we need, desperately need, God’s forgiveness of our sin.
If you accept God’s offer of reconciliation to Himself, He draws you to be reconciled to those you have pushed away from you.
You can’t love God if you don’t love your brother or sister. Reconciliation is a package deal. A Christianity that keeps compartments, one for God and another for people, is schizophrenic.
For this reconciliation to God and each other to happen we have to offer back to God our will, the seat of our affections. Because when God reconciled us to Himself, He also gave us the ministry of reconciliation. It is a deliberate act. I urge you give Him your heart. You wonder how to give Him your heart? Begin by saying it, “Lord, take my heart and make it your throne.” There is great power in the words we say when we don’t know what words to say.
Clement of Alexandria, who lived in the third century, thought about all this and wrote, “God became like us in order that we might become like Him.”
I pray that we all do accept and believe with all our hearts that Jesus Christ is Lord. And I pray that we may all allow the reconciliation to happen that was the purpose of this vast act of Godly kindness. Trust that God was born in Bethlehem, and died on the cross to reconcile you to Him. Trusting this is so, let yourself be reconciled to others. It will be for you a sign of your reconciliation to God. Then deliberately start to act out your reconciliation. Say at the start of each day, “Lord, my life is yours today to use as you will.” Then remember throughout the day whose you are. Remember God has summoned you to join Him in the ministry of reconciliation, saying to the world in deed and word, ‘Be reconciled to God.”
Let us pray: Heavenly Father, we are grateful for the gift of Your holy Child Jesus, born as we were born to restore us to fellowship with You. Grant us grace to live as we believe. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2004
We Believe in one God the Creator of All Things, Seen and Unseen
We Believe in one God the Creator of All Things, Seen and Unseen
Genesis 7: 11-17 / Acts 17: 22-28
October 17th, 2004
There is a passage of Scripture we often remember at funerals. The Apostle Paul wrote, “We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” This is a comfort at death.
But we seldom think of unseen things as actual things God created. The Nicene Creed says, “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” My unchallenged assumption when I thought of God as the creator of things seen and unseen was that He created things big enough to see and things too small to see. He created large dinosaurs and tiny atoms. The Creed was saying, as the lovely hymns puts it, “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.” But it was material things, none the less.
But the Creed describes God as the Creator of things not just large and small but visible and invisible.
But when the 318 early Church leaders got together in AD 325 to think about God, other things than size were on their mind in describing God this way. They faced the challenge of influential people who had a low view of the material world. They believed that spirit was good and matter was evil. They believed the God of the Old Testament, the one who created the earth, was not the good God. The good God was the Father of the Lord Jesus. He was the God who would rescue them from the evil world of matter, and deliver them to the good spiritual realm.
In answer to these anti-materialists, the Nicene Creed affirmed that the one God, the only God there is, created everything, both the material world that we can see and the spiritual world that we can’t see. It was a way of affirming that the material world as well as the unseen spiritual world was good. After finishing creating the heavens and the earth, Genesis tells us that God saw that it was very good.
Nowadays there are not too many people who think of material things as evil. In fact, we find an opposite challenge. Nowadays material things are the whole picture. We hear the joke, “The one who ends up with the most toys wins.” It’s a self-conscious taunt at ourselves, at the materialism that holds nearly everyone in its grasp. What’s really important? It’s how much you’ve got. It’s material security. We worry about Social Security being around still by AD 2030. Who worries about the future of unseen things like goodness and love?
In Fosdick’s hymn that for some reason is very popular we sing, “Shame our wanton selfish gladness, rich in things and poor in soul. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage lest we miss thy kingdom’s goal.” Rich in things and poor in soul. We believe in the material things God has made. Our problem is in taking seriously the spiritual realm.
What we think of as the spiritual realm we may think of as the domain of competing religions. I had two good-looking young Mormon fellows come by our house last week. They looked at me with what seemed an element of pity when I told them I was Presbyterian. I didn’t tell them I am pastor of the white church up on the hill over yonder. They were confident they had a better take than Presbyterians do on the unseen things.
Islam is the fastest growing religion of all. You and I may think of the radicals, the terrorists like Osama ben Laden when we think of Islam, but a fast-growing multitude of people have a finer view of Islam and are converting from Christianity and other religions to it.
On the Purdue campus I’ve seen two Hare Krishna folk handing out literature by Stanley Coulter Hall. These are Hindu evangelists. The spiritual realm, the unseen arena has a lot of competitors. In fact, there are so many of them that religion nowadays can seem an entirely made up kind of thing, a cultural thing.
It wasn’t quite this way in Paul’s day. Then religions mostly didn’t compete for converts. The Jews tried to make converts because they believe in one God, the Creator of all people. Jesus told His followers to proclaim the good news everywhere that this God loved them. But back then most religions were territorial. To convert someone to your religion was like a Boilermaker driving down to Bloomington trying to make converts of Indiana Hoosiers.
The Apostle Paul referred to the unseen realm when he wrote of Jesus, “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.”
Elsewhere he referred to the “principalities and powers,” as having gone disastrously wrong. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”
Something went disastrously wrong in the unseen realm. The prophet Isaiah wrote of the King of Babylon words that earlier Christians believed described the fall of part of the invisible part of God’s creation. “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.”
What is this realm of principalities and powers, of the world rulers of this present darkness? Who was this Day Star, son of Dawn? The old King James Version translated the Hebrew word helel in Isaiah 14: 12, “Lucifer,” which it got from the old Latin Vulgate translation. Lucifer comes from the word “light,” lux.
Isaiah described the fall of the highest angel that God created. And when he fell, he brought into God’s creation a wickedness that was almost as strong as the goodness God created. Pride made Lucifer fall. He preferred to reign in hell rather than to serve in heaven, as Milton put it. “To wage by force or guile eternal war, Irreconcilable to our grand Foe, Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven.”
And so we have cruelty, and the abuse of women and children, and genocide, and war, and every evil. But we soon lose sight of the fact that every evil is the twisting of something good. God created the unseen hosts, the realm of angels, as ministering spirits. They were entirely good. But they fell through pride, and thus turned what was good on its head, and evil entered our world. Many of us moderns are too sophisticated to believe this kind of thing. As C.S. Lewis noted in The Screwtape Letters, the enemy has won a great battle with us when we do not even think he exists. He can wreck his havoc unseen, unrecognized. Who can doubt that something has gone terribly wrong in our world?
But I believe that when we say we believe in God, the Creator of all things unseen, there is yet a region of this part of His creation that is unsullied. The Gospel of John begins, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.” The word for “word,” logos, really needs several words to get at what it means. Logos doesn’t just mean “word,” as we commonly use this term. God, as it were, brimmed with thought, energy, and power. The creation of everything was God’s deliberate unleashing of His logos, energy, and power.
People were made in the image of God. And we reflect this creative impulse of God. Everything we “create” begins with an idea, with something reflecting the logos. Leonardo da Vinci thought about flying machines and boats that could travel beneath the water. He imagined what later technicians achieved as the Wright brothers got flying machines off the ground. He imagined the submarines that have become so much a part of oceanographic research and one of the most frightening instruments of modern warfare. Ideas precede the development of industry. Ideas in the minds of artists find form in great statues, paintings, and music. We know a little bit about how “idea” comes before creation.
But we have thought of this primarily in terms of the material effects produced by ideas. But isn’t it so that it is ideas that are the behind-the-scenes movers and shakers in our world? When you are gripped by an idea, your life finds a focus, and you can do wonderful things. Without ideas, material things lie unused. Without ideas, great purposes are left unachieved. Iron ore rests peacefully in the rocks until someone gets the idea of smelting iron ore. Steam blows happily through a hole in a teakettle until someone gets the idea of harnessing that steam as a source of energy. But it’s not only in manufacturing things that the ideas work.
Think of how your spirits rise when you are encouraged, and then how different is the texture of your life. Hope is a powerful unseen part of creation. God created hope. God is the God of all hope, Paul writes. People who are discouraged may live wasted lives, all their gifts and talents unused. But when a discouraged person hears a word that lifts her spirits, how different her life becomes! God created encouragement. It’s part of the logos, the Word that was in the beginning with God. God created love. Love makes a mother care for her baby, sacrificing her sleep, sacrificing energy that might be put into moneymaking work. What a creative force love is!
When Paul wrote of the “fruit of the Spirit,” –love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and self control, he referred to unseen things God created. Perhaps you have not thought of the fruit of the spirit in this way. But God created these unseen things that we think of as “qualities.” There would be no love if God did not overflow love from His logos.
And so there is this unseen realm very different from the “principalities and powers, the spirituals hosts of wickedness” that wage war against the soul. And this unseen realm moves in the world with a resistless force. Because in every war, heroic acts of goodness spring up all over as well as desperate acts of wickedness. The ones who abused Iraqi prisoners make the headlines first. But we also learn of soldiers who befriend, and help, and even sacrifice their lives for the sake of Iraqi people. These stories come out much later. What is the source of this good? Who is the source of this good? It is God, the Creator of all things, the seen and the unseen.
The reason why Jesus left us the example of submitting His will to the will of the Father, was so that we could let the God who created us direct the workings of that inner part of us that move us to every action. When we intentionally submit our wills to the will of God, God shapes the ideas that make us act. We become, then, part of God’s on-going creative energy, rendering good out of evil, light out of darkness.
When the will of God directs medical research, unborn children are never at risk. When the will of God directs our community development, the poor never suffer. When God’s ideas shape our ideas, we move on the “formless void” and become agents of God’s bringing joy out of sorrow, healing out of suffering, blessing out of cursing. All of this is part of God’s unseen work of creation.
We believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. “We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” In what things do you and I place most value? For what do we strive? If we believe the unseen things are eternal, and the things we can see are passing, how should we then live? Think on these things, and let them guide us to live with eyes set on what is enduring, rather than on what will pass away.
O Lord God, creator of all things, things we can see and things we cannot see, of things that pass away and of things that endure, help us to fix our minds on things that endure, and so to live. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
October 10, 2004
We Believe in the One God, Creator of Heaven and Earth
We Believe in the One God, Creator of Heaven and Earth
Genesis 1: 1-5 / Revelation 4: 1-11
October 10th, 2004
I wonder what the folk who composed the Nicene Creed would have thought if they knew how a cell breaks down proteins that are damaged or have outlived their usefulness. Two Israelis and an American won the Nobel Prize in chemistry this past week because they discovered what God did when He said, “let there be cells,” and complicated organisms composed of cells and the world within each one came into existence. Whenever I pick up tidbits of insight about how nature works, I have a sense not only of looking back down the tunnel of time to a distant moment of creation, but of how God is still involved in the workings of this world.
Is it any wonder that Paul wrote, “ever since the creation of the world God’s invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” Since the beginning of time people looked at nature, at the wonders of conception and birth, of planting and harvest, of the cycle of the year, of the interacting parts of the body and found their minds drawn beyond what they could see. They not only looked up, but they looked around and felt God’s invisible presence. This presence radiated uncanny power holding things together. It bespoke Deity, a Being altogether other than humanity.
Paul could not see into the intricacies of a cell, but he could see enough. He saw what most of us who are not scientists can see, that the world is a very amazing organism. The world swirls with life. Within the world we now know are billions of tiny worlds teeming with life—indeed, of life within life. In an atom is a universe.
The world has wonders that defy the microscope to see, intricacies revealing an imagination that not only plans tiny intricacies, but sustains their role in the whole. When I catch word of bits and pieces of the intricacies of creation I ponder the interconnectedness of all this.
I think of the words of Scripture, speaking of the Son of God, “God has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will . . . to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” The mystery of God’s wisdom and insight holds things together, not as a kind of glue, but somehow personally in the One we call the Second Person of the Trinity. Folks, this is mystery. We’re out of our league here.
This holding things together has to do with more than the pieces of created matter. “Though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet” in the affairs of this world. The chaos you and I now see, of terrorism, of rampaging diseases destroying millions of people, of genocides, of injustices, of the out-of-control whirl of sex and violence that dominates in our country are like spasms that God permits a momentary fling. But as He holds together what seems to us the delicate balance of nature, He is holding together as well the delicate balance of humanity, that special part of creation made in His image.
I chose Revelation 4 for our New Testament reading this morning because here we see something of the grandeur of the One who holds all things together whom we so easily call the Lord Jesus. We think of the Incarnate Son who was born to Mary, a tiny baby, who lived as we do. John describes this same one in another way. He was given a rare glimpse into what to us seems the future, but in truth it is a description of the eternal governing center of the universe. This passage ends by exclaiming, “Thou didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created.” From the end, so to speak, he looks to the beginning, and all time flashes in between.
He saw a throne with Someone sitting on it he couldn’t find words to describe. He gives the names of precious stones that radiate light. This one was altogether Light. The light this one gives off is like an over-arching rainbow made of emerald. Round the throne are these twenty-four elders, which may refer to “lieutenants” of God, angels we would say, that superintend His work. From the throne there come flashes of lightning, voices and peals of thunder, and before the throne are seven torches of fire. In front of it is a sea of glass, like crystal. What’s going on? Something defying description is going on.
Here the Scriptures reach into the meager fund of human words to describe something beyond words. It seems to me that the opening lines of Genesis are in the same category.
They are full of wonder. It is not clear exactly how to translate the first verse. Is it as our translation has it, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” even though there is no word “the” before the word “beginning” in the Hebrew text? Or is it, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void.” We get the sense in of staring into mystery. To read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” supports the idea of creation out of nothing.” And I believe with wiser people than myself that God did create everything out of nothing. But the opening lines of Genesis don’t say this explicitly.
Then, on the first day God said, “Let there be light,” and there was evening and there was morning, one day. But there was yet no sun. That would come on the fourth day, after there were plants and trees. What was the light of the first day? It wasn’t the light you and I know. And to whom did God say, “Let there be light?”
I wondered if God’s speech here was a deep sound that brought order to the formless void. It was the kind of sound described in Revelation 4. The voice was like a trumpet blast, peals of thunder. What is described in Revelation 4 was already there in Genesis 1. And I wonder if the light that God said should come into being was the beginning of order overtaking the formless void. You and I can’t imagine this formless void because everything we have seen has form. Even mud we know is a mix of dirt and water.
Do you not sense as I do that we have been shown mystery here? We are beyond where words can go. Before God brought order to this something it was tohuvevohu, formless, shapeless, undefined. A brooding darkness with no contrasting light anywhere was on the surface of the abyss.
It is language that suggests the very opposite of the intricate world you and I know a tiny bit about. There was nothing intricate then. There was a formless something that words cannot describe. Words describe things that we can identify—clouds, water, dirt, rock, animals. But how do you describe what was before there were words, or anything identifiable with words?
Since the middle of the 19th century, when Charles Darwin published his book, The Origin of Species, the question of how God created the earth has generated much discussion among Christians. Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary disagreed with Darwin on all counts. But his son, Archibald Alexander Hodge, and B.B. Warfield had no difficulty accommodating Darwin’s “facts” to the “facts” of Scripture. Most Christians in our country who thought about these things hovered between the opinions on this matter that their cherished teachers taught. All wanted to be faithful to scripture, and all recognized that they had to accommodate details unraveling in science that went far beyond the summary statements of the Bible.
A famous trial that took place in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925, has set the pace for much discussion about creation vs evolution ever since. A young physics teacher, John Scopes, assigned reading from a textbook, A Civic Biology that taught evolution. This violated a Tennessee law against teaching evolution. The trial that followed caught the public imagination thanks to the help of plays like “Inherit the Wind,” performed by some of America’s greatest actors, and two movies that first featured Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow, and then Kirk Douglas in the same role.
People who believe that God created everything precisely as Genesis 1 and 2 describe were caricatured as dim-wits, and all who thought that God may have unfolded the world as we now see it gradually were type-cast by their opponents as atheists.
Today thoughtful and devout Christians stand on both sides of this divide. They concur actually on more than one thing, that God is the Author of creation. Even those who hold to literally twenty-four hour days of creation believe that the signs of development within species are the result of valid science. And those who believe more generally in development are no less sure that God has moved it along.
I am not equipped to argue the intricacies of this debate. But I get the impression that behind the discussion is the concern that the idea of natural selection ultimately means denying God as the Creator. Some Christians eminent in biological science do not see it this way. Kenneth Miller of Brown University has written a thoughtful book arguing just the opposite.
My own experience has been that people I have prayed with and worshiped with, who have witnessed of their faith in Jesus Christ so that others came to believe in Him, believe that God has gradually unfolded the world as we now see it. And other people I have prayed with and worshipped with, and who have witnessed to their faith in Jesus Christ so that others have come to believe in Him believe in a young earth, and that God created things specifically as they are.
I think of the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews, written long before any of this discussion took place between thoughtful Christians, “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.”
To be faithful can often seem to be a matter of taking sides on issues that none of us knows about in detail. And thus we may dim the fact that all we can affirm for sure, and that by faith, is that “we believe in one God, the Father almighty, the creator of heaven and earth.” When we say “heaven” we know we mean far more than we can see through telescopes, of what is beyond the galaxies, of the place where God uniquely dwells. And when we say earth we know that we understand only fragments of its complexity. And God does not hold us accountable to be certain of things that are beyond us. All He holds us accountable for is to believe that He exists and that He faithfully rewards those who seek Him.
Back in 1909, the Dutch pastor, politician, and scholar, Abraham Kuyper delivered six lectures at Princeton University that explained the Reformed outlook on life as applied to several important categories. The fourth of these had to do with Calvinism and Science.
And the fourth point of this lecture stressed that there is no conflict between faith and science. “Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.”
Kuyper argued that the real collision is between “normalists” and “abnormalists.” The normalists believe in untethered evolution, leading anywhere it goes, with moral views, and ideas about Deity that go along with it. Process theology is a development of what Kuyper called "normalism." God is developing as things develop. The present degradation in morals that is justified as “the community standard,” is all right because change is inevitable and where it goes we’re bound to accept because there is nothing else than what happens.
Abnormalists believe something has gone wrong, and that God has intervened. Sin entered the story of the world, but it did not and does not have the last word. Kuyper accepted the science of his day that argued that the world has developed since God began the process, but it is all still governed by God’s inscrutable decrees. God is still in control. God’s special acts of intervention are seen in the “miracle of regeneration” that can change the human heart, in the miracle of Scripture, by which He teaches us His will, by the miracle of the Incarnation, when God took on our flesh in the greatest interruption of the result of sin. The Son of God violated nature, as people thought, in coming alive after being brutally killed.
The resurrection really happened. And it was abnormal as we think of what is normal.
Trusting in God’s hand on every aspect of life, we dare to unloose every fetter and explore God’s creation for all we’re worth. The only bias we have is something inescapable, that it all didn't just happen at random. God created everything that we can explore. So that good, hard science is a great act of faith itself. You who explore the mysteries of life honor God as much as any of us who study the Scriptures. Because in each, God has shown us something of Himself.
As Calvin put it, the Scriptures give us in a nutshell what God wrote in creation. The big topic of the Bible and of all creation is God.
I told our son as I saw his mind developing with great questions in college that if we love God, we honor Him by exploring every avenue of creation. Because we believe God created all things, it is a great joy to discover what He made. It is an act of faith, in fact, that I believe God appreciates. Because, after all, we believe God is our Father, a personal God, and not a distant Creator. We believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. Love Him with all of your mind, all of your heart, all of your soul, and all of your strength. And do not fear that in loving Him with all your mind that you can go wrong, if in all your ways you acknowledge Him.
Let us pray: O Lord God, creator of heaven and earth, we trust in you. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2004
We Believe in One God
We Believe in One God
Exodus 20: 1-5 / Hebrews 11: 4-6
September 12th, 2004
This morning you all said together the Nicene Creed. For some of you it was the first time. Those of you who have attended Christmas morning worship here, you remember saying it. But few of us have dug into those carefully crafted words that express the core of our belief system.
The opening words of the Nicene Creed are, “We believe in one God.” Today to say that must seem to many people hardly exceptional. I suppose we think of the two options as atheism or theism; belief in one God or believing there is no god. Who thinks of many gods in the modern world?
Many scientists today think belief in God is nothing more than refusing to let go of an ancient outlook. Science has demonstrated that all there is, is all there is, after all. The more humble or indecisive sort say, “I don’t know,” and we call them agnostics.
Many others today think not so much in terms of one God as in terms of “spirituality.” Spirituality is a response to the feeling that there is something more than what we see. Folk I know interested in “spirituality” meditate rather than worship. Meditation is a discipline of concentrating on something other than the material world, something inside. It results in an odd sort of radical individualism, an “ism” of the self.
Some spirituality fastens on feminine images of what is beyond. Back in 1993, several of the mainline Protestant denominations Re-imagined God in terms of this feminine principle. There was a big conference up in Minneapolis at which many Presbyterian women played a leading role in re-imagining god as female Sophia. At the 1994 General Assembly that I attended I saw many people wearing little gray buttons saying “Sophia, Dream the Vision.”
New Age fascination with crystals with their remarkable refractions of light, or Wicca, which is essentially nature-religion, suggest how widespread are the ideas about the spirituality that avoids thinking in terms of one God.
But two challenges in particular face believing in one God today. These are both adaptations of ideas from long ago. First, there is the challenge of thinking of God as a national god rather than the one God who is over all. Second, there is the challenge of thinking in terms of the god who we can manipulate to control life. This is the god we call today “technology.”
These two challenges get at the very heart of life and roar their appeal largely unchallenged by most Christians. Oddly, they have become a part of “conservativism,” while being at odds fundamentally with what the Bible teaches us about God.
Paul Tillich, one of the most influential theologians of the last century, thought of God as one’s “ultimate concern.” He was, as I see it, both right and wrong. He was right in that God ought to be our ultimate concern, but he was wrong in that we may have an ultimate concern that is not God. I once asked Jules Mureau, a prominent Episcopalian theologian, how he thought of God. He paused for some time and then said, “I think of God as what is beyond myself.” He was also, as I see it, both right and wrong. He was right in that God is beyond us, but wrong in that God is considerably more and other than what is beyond me. What is beyond me may be just beyond me, or way beyond me, indeed, categorically beyond me.
When we ask, “What is our ultimate concern?” and “What is beyond myself?” and then look around us to find an answer, it can seem very much that the American way of life has become our ultimate concern. And the means to this high standard of life is the technology that makes what is beyond our capabilities possible. We little realize how we are rekindling ancient and pagan ideas about the gods.
Way back in Old Testament times we read of Dagon, the God of the Philistines, and Molech, the god of the Ammonites. Dagon helped the Philistines and Molech helped the Ammonites. Ancient Greece and Rome had pantheons in which the gods worked for the good of the favored people.
The conflict in Palestine now between Palestinian Arabs and Jews suggests a battle between the God of Israel and Allah, the God of the Muslims. We are not immune to this tendency. When I hear passionate singing of “God bless America”, I wonder if we have forgotten we should sing more passionately as Christians, “God bless the world,” because we believe “God so loved the world?” The God we worship is not an American deity.
The ancients worshipped the gods that make things happen. There was Mars, the god of war. There were fertility gods who controlled the fruitfulness of fields and flocks, who granted children to men’s wives. Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth in the land in which I was born. Worship these gods and you manipulate them for your good. These ideas seem quaint to us today.
But have we not bowed at the shrine of technology as the ancients bowed before their unseen agents that controlled what they wanted to happen? We run the risk of deifying technology with shrines on our great university campuses. More than ever we need to remember, as Christians, “We believe in one God.”
We reveal how fully we worship the deity of technology when we check to see if questions of ethics must bow to the god of technology. When what we can do is the first issue rather than what we ought to do, you know which god is in control. Those who devised the atom bomb quaked to think what powers of destruction they had let loose. Questions about the morality of stem-cell research hinge on the temptation to “harvest” fetuses as the greatest source of stem-cells. Huge ethical issues bow before the god of the possible. If we believe in God, the question of what we can do will be controlled by what we ought to do as discerned from conscience informed by Holy Scripture.
Plastic surgery, the technology that allows severely burned people to look better, that fixes babies with cleft pallets, has fallen from its lofty goal of helping people. Many plastic surgeons today deny the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm” as they hurt and distort human bodies in “make-overs” that attempt to manufacture “perfect” body parts in keeping with the modern sexual preoccupation. It seems quaint and impractical to ask the question, “Does God approve of the direction we’re taking?” But if we believe in God, we will ask this question.
So when, in church, we say together, “We believe in one God,” we open ourselves to a very different way of thinking than controls the mind of much of the world today—no longer just the Western world. America set the pace and some countries are catching up. What deities have we flashed before the world imagination? The deities we proclaim are the gods that we actually worship.
We look back with gratitude to the Council of Nicea, when 318 men came together from every part of Europe, Asia, and Africa and said with one voice, “Only one God!” They overcame ideas about national gods and technological gods who could be manipulated by sacrifices. Together they said, “We believe in one God.” That was a huge achievement.
We must wait till a future Sunday to look at what made all of these Christian leaders come together at Nicea and what were the broader issues they faced. It is enough this morning to recognize that when they said together, “We believe in one God,” they achieved something never before accomplished in the annals of history. It was not the product of a natural religious evolution.
What led to this huge moment that taught us how to think about God? First, it was the Israelites, the Jews, who taught us there is only one God. When we look at their story, we see it began with God undermining the nationalistic, territorial idea of a supreme being by having Abraham travel from one spot to another. He recognized that the God who led him from Haran to Canaan was more than the deity of one location. God continued to teach the Israelites this lesson as they went from one spot to another—to Egypt, and then out of Egypt to wander forty years in the wilderness. Of all places, out in the middle of nowhere, on the backside of the desert, God revealed Himself to Moses. How strange that God should speak to Moses from such a nothing of a place!
Then having primed Israel by moving this people from place to place, from Mt. Sinai, a tall hill in the middle of nowhere, God taught them, “You will have no other gods before me. You will make no idols.” And thus Israel had fixed in its thinking, “There is only one God, a God over everywhere—over Egypt, over the desert, over the land they longed to see. We cannot distort Him by making statues that suggest what He is like.” Why no idols? Because idols always take the form of something God created, limiting the idea of God of those who focus on the idol. One God. No idols.
Then in the fullness of time after many suggestive moments, when God appeared to Abraham, to Moses and seventy Israelite elders, and to Gideon, a great Israelite general, God appeared in a seemingly impossible condescension, as a little baby in an obscure village in Palestine. Nobody thought of the Creator of heaven and earth this way. Gradually the world took notice that something very strange, very grand happened in Jesus of Nazareth.
Josephus, the Jewish historian, living and writing in Rome where there was a strong fellowship of Christians, wrote of their Jesus:
He was a wise man, if one should call him a man. He was a performer of marvelous works and a teacher of those who received the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and Greeks. 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 on the third day alive again, the holy prophets having foretold these things and many other marvels about him. And even now the tribe of Christians, so called, has not disappeared.
This is a remarkable testimony from a non-Christian. It was because the message of Jesus dove-tailed so remarkably with the message of One God that the Jews had spread throughout the world that the Gospel of Jesus resonated with people everywhere it was preached. The reason why 318 men could come from all over the known world to the town of Nicea to talk about the central truths of life, was that the Gospel of One God and the Good News of one Lord Jesus Christ overcame the two tendencies that have always seemed most important to people: nationalism and the manipulation of the means of securing a good life.
When we affirm together, “We believe in one God,” we are pulling ourselves back from the temptation to worship the deity that favors America most, and from the temptation to worship the technology that can make life as we want it to be.
We need to think aright about God because our thinking about life can’t rise any higher than our thoughts about God. If our god is the god of America supremely, what will we do when we see the god of China gets more powerful than our god? If our god is the deity that drives technology, what will we do when ethical questions are swept aside with broad sweeps, and we find ourselves facing Mr. Hyde when we look into the mirror? It matters how we think about God. It matters that we say from the heart “We believe in one God.”
It was a huge achievement to recognize that there is only one God. It still is a huge achievement to realize not only that there is one God, but also that we submit to His sovereignty over all life.
I believe the reason why God gave Israel the Fourth Commandment, “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy,” was that keeping sacred one day in seven brought a continual reminder in the cycle of time that there is one God, and living willingly, indeed joyfully under His sovereignty is needful for life. It seems to me that the Lord’s Day has become less and less important to the Lord’s people as we have been lured to bow to the gods of nation and technology. Keeping the Lord’s Day is not just a matter of legalism. It is a matter of keeping focus that there is One God, in whom we trust.
How do you think of God? Today we have said together, “We believe in one God.” You said this with me. I said this with you. When we say this together, we willingly bow the knees of our hearts to Him. Let us leave this place this morning looking the week ahead in terms of this confession.
How shall we then live? We go out to answer that question. I pray you and I will answer it well, to the glory of God.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we bow before You and acknowledge You to be the Lord. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2004
We Believe
We Believe
(First in a Series on the Nicene Creed)
Deuteronomy 6: 4-9 / Mark 9: 14-24
September 5th, 2004
Jesus taught us that we should love God with all of our mind as well as with our heart, soul, and strength. This morning I begin with you a series of sermons in which I attempt to love God with my mind. I ask you to join me with your minds. I hope you will think about and talk together about what you hear.
We will begin to explore an ancient statement of faith in God, the Nicene Creed that was hammered out in the year AD 325, in a little town in northern Turkey. Why should we devote several months of Sundays to thinking about what Christians thought so long ago?
Because what they thought about is still important for us to think about. They wrote a very important expression of faith in God. The Nicene Creed was composed by Christians from many countries who came together not long after when to be caught as a Christian resulted in terrifying torture. At last they were free to come together to think about what was most important.
The Nicene Creed was written in a time when the young Church was also in terrible discord. We know something about that.
Today there is widespread disagreement between Christians, and that’s like it was back then. We need to remember what’s at the heart of our faith.
But our situation is different because it has been so easy for so long to identify oneself as a Christian. Then it was new to come together like this because so recently Christians were persecuted terribly. Edward Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, remarked that in the ancient world hostile nations embraced or at least respected the superstitious of other countries. . . except for the Jews, and after them, the Christians.
It’s so easy to be a Christian today that some Christians are very “in your face” about it. They aren’t alone. Being a Muslim, or being a Mormon, or being a whatever has become very “in your face.” This cacophonous hodge-podge of proud religions has bred a crisis of faith for a lot of people. When you see many sects proudly claiming, “We’re the one,” which one do you trust?
Ruth Tucker, a professor at Calvin College, wrote a book a few years ago called Walking Away from the Faith. It is full of stories of people who were once well known as Christians who abandoned their faith. Why? For many different reasons. But mostly because of the silence of God when people desperately needed to hear Him. For people overwhelmed with the silence of God it is puzzling to hear others who talk easily about hearing God.
Within the church as well as outside the church there are many people who really struggle with the silence of God. There are people who stay in the church who have questions very much like those of people who say they are not religious. I have the hunch many people who say they aren’t religious are just admitting they’ve not heard the voice of the God a lot of religious people say they hear.
Those who are in doubt are further put off by some of the effects of self-confident religion. Arrogance about unseen things is off-putting. But worse than arrogance is the terrorism that has become such a part of our religion-saturated globe. Whether it be Iraqi Muslims who blow themselves up in suicide-raids, or Chechnan separatists who butcher little children in Russia, or people who murder doctors at abortion clinics, religious-motivated terrorism does little to convince doubting people about God. Religion can seem to instigate evil behavior.
But it’s not just the religion of terrorism that is off-putting. Where’s any sign of humility, even token modesty in speaking of this unseen God?
I get up early every morning and walk out to get the newspaper. When I look up into the early morning sky on a clear night and see it filled with stars so far away that the light I see actually was generated many years ago, I feel dread that I make my living speaking about God every Sunday morning! I resonate with the psalmist who asked, “When I consider the heavens the work of thy fingers, what is man that thou art mindful of him?”
When I look up I’m moved to silence more than to speech. A lot of people feel awe. I have atheist friends who feel awe before creation. I believe the immodesty and violence with which the word “God” is flashed before the world today leads many thoughtful people who feel this awe to pull back from specific belief in God. What is the path from this awe to faith, to trust in God as a Personal Being?
Some people think that the progress of modern science has made it hard to believe in God. Stephen Gould argued in his little book, Rocks of Ages, that religion and science talk about two non-overlapping arenas. Many scientists politely disagree. John Polkinghorne’s thoughtful books about God start with his findings as a physicist.
I believe the partisanship of much talk about God is off-putting to many thoughtful people. How can you trust that I will offer anything more than a partisan view that hopes to win your trust in the competing religious market place? Maybe you wonder if I feel genuine modesty before the unspeakable grandeur of the universe when I speak of its Creator.
All I can say is that I sense myself very much to be a pilgrim, a fellow pilgrim with you. I have personally placed my faith in Jesus Christ, not as a partisan, but as a pilgrim who has an invincible surmise that there is a God and that Jesus was more than a mere man. Something weird happened on Easter that compels my trust in Jesus.
Furthermore, I have few competitive instincts in matters of faith. Some fellow Christians see this as a liability. I am lured to Jesus because it’s clear when I read the Bible He loved not just my kind of people. Loving Jesus does not mean I must hate the Buddha, or Mohammed. I love Jesus because “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son” to die for it. There is too much I don’t know to be arrogant.
God, the Bible tells us, is pleased to dwell in a humble and contrite heart. Not only God loves a humble and contrite heart. Particularly in matters of faith, doubting people are attracted to humility. I believe many people who don’t believe in God are put off by the absence of humility in many who say they do.
Another reason why people have doubts about God is how much suffering there is in the world. Particularly if we think of God as good and loving, and all powerful, why then in His world is there so much pain? How could a good God allow terrorism to go on? How could a good, all-powerful God have designed a system where the balance of nature depends on animals preying on each other?
But worse than all the predation in the animal world is the way human beings crush each other, creating a hopeless class of humanity, the poor who will never rise out of their suffering. How could a good God create people in His image, even religious people who say they love God, and then cause such suffering to each other?
In the lesson from the New Testament we read this morning a despairing father said to Jesus, “I believe, help my unbelief!” I suspect that his honest plea to Jesus is echoed in the hearts of an awful lot of people.
In the Bible we read that God told the ancient Israelites to remember every day one simple matter. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” These words were to be on their heart throughout the day. And this was the basic thing they were to teach their children.
It wasn’t a complicated teaching. It wasn’t an arrogant teaching. Moses taught them this after they’d seen amazing things happen in their nation’s history. The more thoughtful of the Israelites knew that their nation’s history had a higher purpose, to bring blessing to all the earth. The God whom they worshipped said to Abraham, “In your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” The sense of this universal blessing was to keep their focus on God rather than on themselves as the conduits of God’s blessing. So long as they remembered to remind one another that they were to love God with heart, soul, and strength, their life had purpose.
Perhaps some would say that it was “brain-washing” that took place in devout Israeli households. Many people today favor a different kind of brain-washing, a kind that pummels young and old minds with the idea that all that matters is how much you have and how much you can consume and winning, whether it be games or battles.
The Nicene Creed was composed after Christianity won in a long struggle with other ideologies in the Roman world. But it did not systematize a spirit of triumph. Instead it reminded Christians of the God the ancient Israelites confessed morning and evening when they said, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.”
A creed is a statement of faith. The word “creed,” comes from the Latin word that means “I believe.” But I have called my remarks today, “We believe.” In some of the early editions of this creed the first word was “we believe,” and in others it was “I believe.” But “we believe” is how this statement of faith was apparently first written..
The rampant individualism of today in our democratic society makes many people think it dishonest to say, “We believe.” After all, how do we know that others who say, “we believe” actually believe what I believe?
There is another Creed better known to most of us than the Nicene Creed. The Apostles’ Creed which was composed as we know it after the Nicene Creed was written, starts, “I believe.” It was a statement of faith people would say when they were baptized. It is an individual statement. The Nicene Creed is a statement of faith in which we humbly dare to presume that the object of our faith is larger than my personal opinion. I join with you and you with me as we say, “We believe.”
There are two questions that have haunted people of all time, to which the Nicene Creed offers an answer. The first question is “What’s next?” The second question is, “What else?”
I doubt that there is anyone who doesn’t wonder, “What’s next?” Movies like “Ghosts,” fascinate us with tales of the lingering unseen presence of people who have died. Haunted houses at Haloween would have no interest if folk didn’t wonder what’s next? Not only old people die. Young people die too. Even babies die. As I get older and read the daily obituaries I’m struck by how many people younger than I am have already finished their lives. Then what? The Nicene Creed offers a simple answer to that question that thoughtful people have found intriguing. We will ponder than answer.
Hinging on the question “What’s next,” is the other one. “What else?” We live in fabulous homes, drive fabulous cars, eat fabulous food, play and work with fabulous computers, but every one of these fabulous things leaves us unsatisfied. I think one reason alcohol and drugs may be so popular is that they erase the question, “What else?”
It’s a question that defies your desire to have proof. A simple answer may be the best one. What else? Well, God, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” The ones who wrote this Creed did not try to prove the existence of God. And humbly they admitted together, “We believe.” It’s a liberating trust. Generations of people have found release from their striving, from their anxiety in resting in and assenting to the basic Fact of God.
This morning we gather around the Communion Table. On this table are the two elements of bread and wine, simple, common elements found in our kitchens. We remember that the God in whom we say, “We believe,” was present, and people saw Him and heard Him. Some were amazed and some were appalled. And those who were appalled crucified Him, little knowing that in doing this they lifted Him up high where all people could see Him.
If you can say with me, “We believe” in this Jesus, you’re welcome at this Table. If you do not believe yet, it is best not to take this bread and wine, because it will be meaningless to you. But know that it is here before you as an invitation you can see, “Come, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” Jesus said. I invite you to trust in God, in this Jesus whom God provided for us to see and hear, and see if it doesn’t bring some peace into your heart.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we believe; help our unbelief. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)