I haven’t preached in a morning worship service since the last Sunday in April 2007. As I prepared for this morning’s sermon I confess to considerable fear and trepidation! This morning I was still wondering, “What really should I say?”

I chose my sermon topic, ‘Why Have the Bible?” because it’s an important question. And of the six courses I’m been teaching at Purdue since I ceased to be your pastor five of them have to do with the Bible so I thought maybe it would be pertinent to offer you something on this question.

All of you would say you believe the Bible is God’s Word. But we all would probably confess that as important as the Bible is we don’t read it as much as we should. Maybe there are parts of it we’ve never read, or if we did, we read them pretty quickly because they were hard to understand or seemed to have little to do with your life.

We read three portions from the Bible this morning, from the Book of Psalms, from the Book of Nehemiah, and from the Gospel of Matthew.

The 90th Psalm is dear to me for several reasons. The Scottish poet Robert Burns, wrote a paraphrase of its first six verses I have repeated at Scottish dinners in town. “O Thou the first the greatest Friend of all the human race, whose strong right hand has ever been their stay and dwelling place. Before the mountains heav’d their heads beneath Your forming hand; before this pondrous globe arose at thy command. That pow’r that stays and still upholds this universal frame for ever and unending days has ever been the same.” This is just one example, precious to those of Scottish descent of how the Bible infiltrates our literature and vocabulary. We speak Bible words and ideas not even realizing it.

I’ve never intentionally memorized all of Psalm 90 but most of it has found a place in my heart. It is the only psalm that tradition tells us was written by Moses.

I think often of verse twelve: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” I pray often, “Lord, teach me how to think.” We are what we think. Our thoughts prompt what we say, what we do. So we like Moses need to pray often, “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.”

When I remember that the one who prayed this was the great Lawgiver of Israel, Moses, it gives me pause. According to the tradition Moses composed the first five books of the Bible. It was these words, or some of them, about which the Lord spoke to Joshua, “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night.” Why? “For then you will make your way prosperous and then you shall be successful?” Do you think God had in mind the prosperity Gospel peddled incessantly by TV preachers today?

We need to be wise to know what is real prosperity and real success. I remember often praying when I was a pastor as I saw church growth treated like an industry, “Lord, give us the kind of success as a church that matters.”

Then Moses prayed that God would establish the work of his hands. That is, that his life’s work was worthwhile. All of us hope our lives are lived in a worthwhile way, that our work, whatever it was, was indeed what God called us to do. We may find ourselves praying with Moses, “Establish the work I did.”

Certainly Moses’ life’s work was worthwhile. He had no way of knowing his efforts produced the first installment of Holy Scripture. Indeed, the rabbis taught that even God studied the Torah, the five Books of Moses in heaven.

Moses’ began a heritage of listening intently to God’s word that was to be one of the duties of the people of Israel. In Deuteronomy 31 we read that “Moses wrote this law . . . and he commanded them, ‘At the end of every seven years, at the . . . Feast of Booths . . . you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing . . . and be careful to do all the words of this law, and that [your] children who have not known it, may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God.”

Before the identity of the Israelites was established as a nation Moses made the point clear that obeying the Torah, the Teaching of God, was an essential part of their life as a people.
seven years might seem not often enough for the people of Israel to hear these words so as to obey them.

But this was NOT the only exposure they would have to the Teaching of God—teaching is what Torah means.

Twice earlier in Deuteronomy we read that in the home-life of every Israelite family this teaching of God should be echoed throughout the day. First in Deuteronomy 6: “These words . . . you shall diligently teach to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall
Every inHebrewisoften translatedobey. ____Theword forhear
bind them as a sign upon your hand . . . and as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” The same thing is echoed in Deuteronomy 11. Why?

Well we can guess, can’t we? Because it is when we are exposed to something often it makes an impact on us. Families in which the children hear the Bible read a lot learn what the Bible teaches. When they see that obeying the teaching of the Bible is important to their parents, the idea is not lost on the children.

I have been teaching biblical Hebrew at Purdue for ten years now. This course is enjoying increased enrollments each year. This semester I had 27 students sign on in August for first year Hebrew and only one fell by the way— petrified at those pigeon tracks that read from right to left. Only two of these that I know of are going into the ministry. Why would so many engineering, chemistry, mathematics, sociology, history, nursing and communications majors, sociology majors want to learn to read the Old Testament in Hebrew?

It is because many earnest young folk realize that there is something exceedingly precious in this Book that we have received. It is so precious that it is worth the bother of trying to learn to read it in the language in which it was given, even if that language is written in those peculiar letters that read from right to left. This is an idea that is catching on.

I’m so glad that here at Faith Church you have the opportunity to learn New Testament Greek in Sunday School. hope many of you will take advantage of this privilege.

I think that there is more than one reason why these young folk are so eager to learn to read and study the biblical in its original languages. First, they’ve read it a long time and seen multiple translations that sometimes read quite differently. They want to know, “What does the Bible really say?” Second, they see it as a way of honoring God to take the effort to learn to read the Bible in this way.

But it is the first question that really drives them. I’ve pondered this matter of all the translations. An issue of the Duke University Divinity School bulletin was devoted to evaluating several of the translations that appeared in the twentieth century and one of the conclusions was that some of them seemed to target a particular theological audience. They were aimed at sectors of conservative Christians that wanted to feel they understood the Bible better. So, we might say that these translations air-brushed the Bible to make it seem more attractive to the reader.

What has happened as translations multiply is that the translators have air-brushed the picture so as to take away the wrinkles in the text. When you read the Bible in its original languages you’ll see at the bottom of the page footnotes that show the readings found in other manuscripts of the Bible. Sometimes it’s really hard to make sense of the Hebrew and Greek text. So we polish up what is rough when we translate it, even if the polishing up renders something not quite what the original version meant. If it sounds about right, that’s OK.

It is somewhat like what takes place when we go to the photo-studio for family pictures. The photographer takes the image she found on her digital camera and spruces it up with a technique that used to be called air-brushing. So grandpa and grandma look at the proofs and see that they don’t have as many wrinkles in the picture as they see when they look in the mirror. And mom and dad look nearly as young as in their high school pictures and little Charlie and Sarah look like absolute cherubs— no hint of the tantrums thrown the morning before.

The old King James Version was a wonderful translation made in 1611, quite literal, that served many generations of Christians. I grew up on it, and its cadences still seem to me the “right way” to hear the Bible in English. Its principle defect was that its translators didn’t have access to the many very old manuscripts of the Bible that became available in the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, they knew nothing of the Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1947. Some people still swear by the KJV and think the KJV is the way God gave it all to Moses and the prophets. But people in the twentieth century don’t talk like people talked in the 17th century.

So in the mid-twentieth century the Revised Standard Version appeared that made use of manuscripts that became available after the King James Version was translated. But afterward it was published many Christians didn’t like the wording of some its passages so they prepared translations that they liked better. And so the twentieth century saw multiple translations of the Bible appear in which the text was more pleasing to particular groups of Christians. Some of the changes had to do with inclusive language. A lot of it has to do with what is thought to be a better way to express the meaning of the Bible. Sometimes it seems the translations try to protect theological viewpoints.

When you read the Bible in the languages it came to us none of this is important. Instead you have to really think to see what those unusual words and sentence patterns mean. Before we read Scripture in church we offer a prayer that God will illumine the page that we read, to help us understand it so as to obey it. How much more this prayer is needed before you tackle the text in Hebrew or Greek. And I found, over the years, that the hard work of listening to God’s word in its original language meant that I listened more intently.

When we realize how the next has been passed on for thousands of years, and that the script in which Moses wrote was not the same script Israelites in David’s time read the Torah, and the script used in David’s time was not the same as the way of writing found now in the Hebrew Bible you may get some idea of what went in to the transmission of the Bible. You can’t help but realize the miracle of our having this sacred book at all. No other sacred text from ancient times has been preserved so completely as the Bible.

In our New Testament reading this morning we listened to Jesus say, “Till heaven and earth pass away not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law till all is accomplished.” The iota is the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet. The dot, ______ refers to the little hook found at the top and bottom of this letter.

Jesus was passing on a teaching that began with Moses. It continued with the prophet Isaiah who said that the word that proceeds from God’s mouth is like the rain and snow that come down from heaven, watering the earth. “It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” We remember the words of the Psalmist, “Forever, O Lord, your word is settled in heaven” (Psalm 119: 89).

When Jesus, Isaiah, and the Psalmist refer to God’s word, I think they don’t just mean the Bible. Remember “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament His handiwork.” All nature, without words, is part of the way God speaks to us. We love to sing, “Summer and winter and springtime and harvest, sun moon and stars in their courses above, join with all nature in manifold witness to thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.”

Not only that but the Bible itself lets us know that the acts of God in history are part of God’s communication to us.

We believe that if we earnestly ask God for wisdom He will give it to us. Some people go so far as to say, “God spoke to me.”

But the Bible itself is perhaps the most specific part of God’s word to us.

Jesus spoke of the Old Testament when He taught that not an iota nor a dot would pass away till it was accomplished. So it was important to pass on every smallest letter and the smallest parts of each letter of the Torah, the teaching of God’s word. Moses tried to get this going in ancient Israel. In the spring, I will teach for the third time a course on early interpreters of the Bible. Part of this course shows how later written parts of the Bible interpret earlier written parts of the Bible. This shows that to some extent what Moses taught was followed.

But when you read the historical books of the Old Testament you read very few references to the five Books of Moses. What happened? I wonder how much the ancient Jews read it. In fact, the two places where we do read about the Torah being read it comes as a surprise to the people.

During the reign of King Josiah, a copy of the Book of the Law was found in the Temple, hidden away in the treasury. When he heard the written Law of God had been found he didn’t know what it was. The Bible? What’s that? The high priest found Huldah, a lady prophet who told him what it was. Then King Josiah had it read publicly to a command gathering of all the people in Jerusalem. They heard it and joined the king in promising to keep the commandments of God with all their heart.

Not long after the Jews were taken into exile, and after seventy years permitted to return to rebuild their temple that had been destroyed. After the temple and the city wall of Jerusalem were completed the event happened that we read about this morning in Nehemiah 8. All the people of Jerusalem and its suburbs were gathered inside the square before the Watergate to listen to a reading of the Torah, their Bible. Ezra the great teacher read from the Bible from early morning until midday. Most of thse that listened didn’t understand it because they no longer understood Hebrew. Yet, it was very important to hear. Numerous elders mingled with the people and translated what they heard into the language they understood. And thus was born the first translation of the Old Testament.

The response to this reading and translating of the Bible was astounding. All the people wept. Why? It seems they wept because they had not heard this before and knew this was a great loss. It was a day of mourning.

But Ezra told them not to weep but to rejoice, to feast and make merry. Why? Because you have heard and understood the words that were read to you from the Bible. It is good that we have a coffee hour after church so that we can get together and be happy together that we have heard and understood the teaching of God.

And so we have the Bible, restored to the Jewish people in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah and preserved ever since. What did Jesus mean by saying that every smallest letter and part of the smallest letter of the Law would be accomplished?

The Bible isn’t made up entirely of commandments to be obeyed or prophecies to be fulfilled. It has a lot of other kinds of material in it. It has stories. It has some stories, in fact, that don’t seem all that edifying. It has poetry and parables. It has rules about offering sacrifices in the Old Testament that maybe most of us think aren’t very pertinent to life so we skip over them. It tells of commands God made to exterminate Israel’s enemies. Understandably such commands of God are hard for us to understand. How could a good God command His people to wipe out every last man, woman, and child of the Amelakites?

All of this will be accomplished. What does that mean?

The Law of God is being accomplished in us when we obey the Ten Commandments, or when we pray with Moses for wisdom. The Word of God is being accomplished when try to obey Jesus’ teaching to love God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves. When we trust that Jesus died for our sins and gratefully live in obedience to everything He taught that we understand, the Law of God is being accomplished.

I think God’s word is being accomplished when the overall effect of the Bible makes its impress on us so that we have a humble attitude before God. The very difficulty of understanding parts of the Bible pummels us into submission before God. We can look at difficult passages and either say, “I don’t believe it,” or “There’s no way God said that.” Or we can say, ‘Boy, it’s hard to understand what God intends for me from this.” I think the latter way of thinking not only makes sense but may be part of God’s design in offering us in Scripture those parts that are bewildering to us.

Third, I think God’s intentions for this world are hinted at in Scripture and are being accomplished in ways we’ll never recognize until the end of time.

When Jesus said all would be accomplished I am suspicious that He had in mind something that does not depend on our ability to understand the Bible. Indeed, I am confident that in ways none of us can understand in the warp and woof of the Bible, including the many parts of it we cannot understand, the purposes of God are spread before us. Some of them we may understand, but we are not saved by what we understand correctly. We are saved by grace alone, through trust alone.

So our biggest task as Christians is to live before God, one by one, with a heart well disposed toward God, toward others, and toward ourselves.

Thus we sing in Charles Wesley’s great hymn,

Finish, then, Thy new creation;
Pure and spotless let us be.

In the first two chapters of Genesis two different sets of words are used to describe God’s work of creation. In chapter one the two words are created and make. In chapter two the two words are from and build. The word used to describe God’s making of Eve from Adam’s rib is “build.” God built Eve from Adam’s side. I see a useful progress here. God began by creating and making us. Then His project was to form and build us.

What is God trying to build in us? A home for Himself. In Solomon’s prayer of dedication of the Temple he noted that if heaven and earth can’t contain God, how could a temple made with hands. But the place where God really wants to live is in you and me. But God won’t impose Himself on us. He wants our welcome. If we are to welcome God into us we must offer to him a humble and contrite spirit.

In our competitive and often angry world it seems that humility and a contrite spirit is a bad idea. Instead, go on the attack. Defend the truth as you see it against all enemies. But if you and I have such a spirit, God will not feel at home in us. And in the end those whose idea of right thinking is to attack all who are their enemies will self-destruct. But if God is at home in our hearts, giving us wisdom, giving us His peace even in a troubled time, then God will be accomplishing in us exactly what He wants and that will give us peace even in troubled times.

Pastor Emeritus Stuart Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906

Before offering you the message that is on my heart this morning I want to publicly thank Rev. Ralph Smith for serving as Parish Associate here the past five years. Many of us have enjoyed the benefit of his visits when we were in the hospital. He has acceded to my request every time I’ve asked him to preach when I was away. After I leave, Ralph has made clear his willingness to continue being useful here. Thank you, Ralph.

There are many of you I would like to recognize for your ministry to me as well as to the congregation as a whole. Nadya with the choir and Marilyn at the organ have blessed us week after week with their ministry of music. I’m amazed at how Nadya creates such music, whether the numbers on the Lord’s Day be at full strength or somewhat less. Marilyn spends hours during the week at the organ—a labor of love that she testifies to for us all on Sunday morning.

Your Session with Jurgen Honig its clerk and Deacon Board with Charlie Short its moderator have not only taken their work seriously, but they have become two small groups within the congregation of mutual encouragement. Stephanie Cardwell, our administrative assistant, has been a beloved help to me and to us all in the church office. Many of you don’t see Tish, the effervescent and industrious lass who keeps the building tidy week after week. She and Stephanie are a cheerful and faithful duo I have enjoyed immensely and will miss in days to come.

I think many of you are aware that there are a number of people in this congregation who respond instantly when they see a need. I hesitate to begin naming these because I feel bad to omit anyone. But you know who they are. These have made the title “church lady” a great honor that includes men as well as women. They exemplify what it is to be a member of the body of Christ. These testify by life what it means to be a “member” of the body, everyone using the gifts they have usually with no word of thanks—neither do they seek this. I have benefited immeasurably from your shared care within this congregation. I pray the ranks of the “church ladies” will grow until it includes everyone.

But now I must get into the heart of my final word from this pulpit. I remember when I first stood here after being invited to come. I wondered then what should be my first word, as I have pondered the duty of offering my final word.

I chose for the first Sunday in August, 1986 the passage from Isaiah 6 where the prophet sees the Lord in the Temple. It was a total religious high, we might say. But the purpose of this encounter with God in the Temple was not a thing in itself. The Lord asked a question that others beside Isaiah in the Temple may have heard. “Who will go for me? Who will I send?” Isaiah replied, “Here am I, send me.” And the Lord sent him on an urgent errand to his people. The point of this encounter with the Lord was heavy in my heart as I began with you. What happened with Isaiah in the Temple seemed to me parallel to what is to happen each Lord’s Day in every church. Here we want to encounter God, not just for a religious high, but in order that we may leave this place about the Lord’s business in this horribly troubled world. What goes on at church has a purpose higher than feeling uplifted for one hour in the week.

George MacDonald remarked in one of his sermons, “Life and religion are one, or neither is anything.” I believe this utterly. There is no value to religious highs if they do not translate into high character and high usefulness for God in a life well lived to the glory of God.

This was the goal of our Lord Jesus with people when He began His ministry. Mark tells us that Jesus began with a simple message: “The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the Gospel.” Repent means turn around. It was a message everyone needed to hear and everyone who responded was fortunate. Repentance has a beginning point, but it shows that it has happened in the trajectory of life afterward. There are those who “repent” momentarily. They are like those who start off on a journey, but turn again to where they came from time and again because where they came from is familiar, and the way ahead is unfamiliar. True repentance displays itself in leaving where we came from for places unknown to which God will lead us.

Our Lord ended the well-known parable of the Lost Sheep with these words: “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” Jesus told this parable for the benefit of some folk who thought well of themselves who had chided Him for receiving sinners and eating with them. They didn’t realize that they were as much in need of change as the one’s whose behavior got them labeled, “sinners.”

It is very hard to change the depths of a person, that engine inside that drives a life. When Jesus said, “Repent and believe the Gospel” He was pointing to this deep change at the deepest depths that alters a person’s way of life. Often we are suspicious of those who, in dire stress, seem to have repented. Mike and I value our ministry at the Work Release Facility so much partly because we feel we are with people who really feel the need to change. Indeed, it is often personally challenging to see the desire to change, to repent, among those who share that time with us on Tuesday evenings. Yet we encounter skepticism among some people about the honesty of this desire in those who are incarcerated. This skepticism accuses them of just trying to impress someone enough to get them released. We don’t do anyone much good by being skeptical when their hearts are moved to change so that they desire to live according to the precepts of the Gospel.

Friday night I awoke very early thinking of a moving story that Cheri and Glenn Sparks shared with us about an English aristocrat, a peer in the House of Lords, who befriended a serial killer in prison, was used by her for selfish ends. He became aware of this, yet he bore his grief silently and never gave up on her. He was jeered in his obituary when he died two years ago at age ninety-five, as Lord Wrongford. And yet, despite having used Lord Longford at first, this woman in the end genuinely repented—or so it seemed to me in the story. He visited her in prison as she was dying of emphysema and she apologized, now with nothing to gain except his forgiveness. And who are we to presume to doubt the sincerity of another person’s repentance? The words of Jesus came to my mind, “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” Why? Because repentance was the entire purpose of Jesus’ work. Jesus came not just to suffer and die for our sins, but to then “finish then the new creation” that is to attain God’s will for each of us. This will is that we turn from what we have become with all our unfortunate choices, our sins that so easily come to us, and discover the high road which Jesus walked before us.

I wonder how much genuine repentance Jesus saw as the result of pouring out His life in behalf of people. How many people came to Him only to get a quick fix of their disease, or because they were hungry. Yet He kept on pouring out His grace on all sorts of needy people.

Jesus believed in people. He trusted that God don’t make no junk. His ambition even for people society reckoned “sinners” was very high. God’s ambition for us all is so high. In fact, God’s ambition for you and me makes shambles of the ambitions advanced in some theological estimates of God’s expectations. I am often bewildered at the self-confident things bright people have said about the ways of God toward us. I’m convinced God believes in us, and asks us to meet Him by believing in Him in return. God is committed to us. He welcomes our commitment to Him. This is the purpose of the Gospel, to draw together God’s and our commitment to one another.

Each Sunday at the close of the service I remind you of God’s ambitions for us. After hearing my father intone Hebrews 13: 20-21 as a benediction over the years after preaching, it struck me that these words carry God’s ambitions for us. Here is found Jesus’ hope and expectation of the benefits of the Gospel. Repentance starts the path toward perfection in every good work to do God’s will.
What does repentance look like? This chapter of Hebrews spells out some of the answer. “Show hospitality—ordinarily we don’t because the common view is that our homes are our castles.

Remember those in prison—the normal instinct is to steer away from “criminals,” as though they were a unique breed of people. Keep marriage exuberant and faithful—I believe we err in not letting our marriages grow in delight by pouring into them all the energy of affection we offer in when we begin our in-loveness. Don’t be greedy for money—when our native survival instinct is to horde against tomorrow. Trust your leaders in the faith—something that comes hard in our day of such independent-mindedness. And then, that benediction—that blessing with its impossible line pointing to the quality God expect out of “new creations in Christ.” : “Now may the God of peace make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is well pleasing in His sight.” I’m so glad many of you now know this by heart. It has been fixed in your hearts, the last words you hear on a Sunday morning. Let it be your ambition to see God’s ambition fulfilled in you.

Having observed myself for all these years I’m very aware how short of perfection I am. And I might be tempted to think that the word “perfection” is for that reason over the top. Not 100%, not even 90% or 80%. Maybe an honest bare pass of 60%, an honorable D in the sight of people will do.

Because the higher the standard is set the more is expected of me. If the standard of behavior and faith is kept low then I may appear above average.

I have come to wonder if our emphasis on the doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone has a different motive that Paul had in his great Epistles. After explaining the marvel of grace he asks, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” He answers emphatically, “God forbid.” But it is my perception that when we stress the grace of God it is in such a way that we minimize trying hard to live out the new life we have been granted by grace alone. How the Church universal suffers from this. I imagine what impact on this troubled world there would be if all of us who claim Jesus as our Lord lived a life of deliberate repentance. How could the world resist a Savior and Lord who makes such remarkable people, who bring so much joy and healing?

It was as an antidote to our lassitude of heart that the great benediction at the end of Hebrews is aimed. It is God’s intention that after having created us in His image, we should move by the process of repentance toward conformity inwardly to the character of Jesus.

I hope there may be lasting benefit for you as the words of that same old benediction have found a place in your heart, working from your depths, making you desire to see its exhortation fulfilled in you. I pray that those who serve you next from this pulpit will help to nudge you still more along the way of this unspeakably grand pilgrimage. And at the last I pray that God will say to you and me when we stand before Him at the final assize and say, beaming broadly, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of your Lord.”

Let us pray: O Lord God, grant that it may be so. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything precious to them was gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Bonhoeffer put it, to believe is to obey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Usually we read from Zechariah 9 on Palm Sunday. This prophet who prophesied as the Second Temple was being built five-hundred years earlier, wrote one line that captured the attention of early Christians: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ought” means far more than a suggestion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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