Sermon June 30, 2024 Don’t Be Afraid, Just Believe

            A few years back, when Covid was still a very scary thing, we eventually ended our quarantine and began venturing out… carefully.  Most folks were wearing masks, and we were still very carefully social distancing, and if we were out and about and someone coughed or sneezed, they got the side-eye from everyone around them, didn’t they?  Everybody moves a few steps away from them, and if it was you that coughed or sneezed, you felt like you had to make an explanation.  “It’s allergies”, or “I was just tested this morning and I’m negative”.  And hopefully you won’t cough a second time because now you are just a pariah.  Not too long after my store re-opened I got bronchitis.  I was tested multiple times during that bout of bronchitis and was negative, I didn’t have Covid but still, I would cough, and my customers would straight up walk out of the store.  I stayed off of the selling floor as much as I could while I was sick, and literally tried to walk out the back door if I felt a cough coming on.  I really felt like an outcast; like people genuinely did not want me around.

            When we talk about the Jewish laws that related to ritual uncleanness, I’m not sure that we understand just how alienating it was to be declared unclean.  But just as much as a person coughing during Covid felt like an outcast, I’m sure that it was much worse for the ritually unclean of first century Israel.  You were completely excluded, not just from the assembly, but from your own friends and family.  If you were unclean, anyone with whom you came into contact was made unclean also.  And so you were really excluded from absolutely everything.  You couldn’t work, you couldn’t socialize, you couldn’t attend worship, your whole life pretty much came to a standstill.  But, for the most part, as bad as it was, it was still, for most folks, just an inconvenience.  A day or two of isolation and then everything was back to normal.  But for some folks, lepers, shepherds, and the woman in our story today, it was a permanent inconvenience; and then some, because the isolation became debilitating.  You couldn’t live with your family, you couldn’t buy anything at the market, you weren’t even allowed at the market.  You couldn’t eat at your own home; you couldn’t sleep at your own home.  This woman who was bleeding would have lost her home, her husband, her children, everything.

            But today’s reading doesn’t start with the woman’s story, so we’re going to have to come back to that.  Our story today actually starts with Jairus.  Jairus was the head of the local synagogue, he was important, he was influential, he was almost certainly wealthy, and he had a 12 year old daughter, Luke tells us that she was his only child, and she was dying.  In the Greek, Jairus referred to his daughter as θυγάτριόν (thy-gat-ri-on) which was a diminutive that would appropriately be translated “my baby girl”.  His daughter wasn’t a baby, she was 12, but I’m sure that every parent here understands exactly what it was that Jairus was saying.  Jairus’s daughter was everything to him.  Now, given the fact that by the time these events took place, the synagogue was, in large part, in opposition to Jesus, Jairus was risking his career and his reputation in coming to Jesus, but the only thing that mattered to him at this point was his “baby girl”. 

            Our story tells us that “when [Jairus] saw Jesus, he fell at his feet.  He pleaded earnestly with him, ‘My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live’.”  Jesus immediately went with him.  I’d like to focus for just a minute on the faith of Jairus.  It took a great deal of courage for Jairus to even come to Jesus.  Perhaps Jairus had heard the priests talking about healings that Jesus had done, or maybe Jairus investigated on his own and heard stories, or maybe he even saw a miracle in person.  But for whatever reason, Jairus believed that Jesus could heal his daughter.  And so he risked the ostracism of his peers, and turned to the One who he believed was his baby girl’s last hope.  As is so often the case, people will turn to God most readily when things seem to be most hopeless. 

            But on the way to Jairus’s house, there is a delay.  An unnamed woman (Though Catholic tradition identifies her as Veronica) has been bleeding for 12 years.  She believes that if she is able, just to touch the hem of Jesus’s garment, she will be healed.  With a large crowd pressing Jesus in from all sides, she makes her way through the crowd, touches the hem of Jesus’s garment, and instantly realizes that she has been healed.  When Jesus feels the power that healed her go out of Him, He asks who touched Him.  The disciples, probably incredulously due to the crowd pressing Him in on all sides, basically said to Jesus “What are you kidding?  A hundred people have probably touched you”.  But Jesus knew that someone had touched Him in order to be healed, and now the woman has another problem.  Remember our discussion about being a Covid pariah?  Well, every single person that she had touched in that crowd as she worked her way towards Jesus has now been made unclean, as has Jesus.  I would imagine that the woman was hoping to touch His garment, be healed, and slip away into the crowd unnoticed, but Jesus wasn’t about to let that happen; and for a very good reason.

The text tells us that she “fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.”  She told Him the story of her disease, how long she had suffered with it, how much she had lost, and how she believed that she would be healed if she were just to touch the hem of His garment, and I would imagine that she also apologized profusely to all of the people that she had just made unclean, especially Jesus.  At this point, I am sure that she expected Jesus to rebuke her for having made so many people unclean, but what Jesus did next was remarkable.  Jesus first told her that her faith had made her well, but then, Jesus called her “Daughter”, and she is the only person in the entire New Testament who Jesus did call “Daughter”.  If we stop to think about this, this woman had been through a 12 year long, terrible ordeal.  I don’t think that we can even imagine the depth of what her illness had cost her, but her loss wasn’t just physical.  Her marriage, her family, her friendships and relationships, all lost.  Whatever money she may have had she spent on doctors who were unable to heal her, she had to live on the fringes of society, probably scrounging to find food to eat and a suitable place to sleep, and undoubtedly routinely being scolded by people who discovered her illness and who may have been upset because they had been made unclean by her.  In short, she was an outcast in the worst possible way.  When Jesus healed her He didn’t just heal her physically.  In calling her “Daughter” and in telling her to “Go in peace” Jesus was restoring her to the community from which she had been excluded for 12 long years.  Warren Wiersbe commented, “To be made whole meant much more than receiving physical healing.   Jesus had given her spiritual healing as well.”  And Mark L Strauss expands on this thought with, “For Jesus to say “go in peace is not simply [telling her] not to be afraid of what she has done, but to go in the wholeness and completeness of life because [she] has been rescued by the Lord”.

            Just as Jesus is about to return His attention to Jairus, some people came from his house and told him that his daughter had died.  One can only imagine the frustration that Jairus must have felt.  If only this woman had not interrupted Jesus, we may have made it home in time…  But Jesus hears what is said, and He tells Jairus “Don’t be afraid, just believe”.

            When they arrived at Jairus’s house, there was already a crowd of paid mourners, as was the Jewish custom.  The Jewish Mishna, the book of oral traditional laws, says, “Even the poorest in Israel do not hire less than two flute players and one wailing woman”.  Jairus was wealthy, so there must have been quite a crowd of paid mourners.  Jesus asks the crowd “Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.”  Knowing full well that the child was indeed dead, the crowd’s mourning turns to derision.  As they laugh at and mock Jesus, he throws them out of the house.  In the Greek, the word used to describe Jesus’s action was ἐκβάλλω (Ekballo) which, according to Thayer’s, means to drive out with a notion of violence.  This is the same word that was used when Jesus threw the money changers out of the Temple.  And there is a whole sermon in this verse alone.  Our most sacred responsibility as believers is to love God AND to love one another at all times and in all ways possible.  In the midst of grief that was only moments old, try to imagine how painful it was for the family to hear all of this laughing and mocking coming from those who were supposedly being paid to support the family in their grief!  As is so often the case, when Jesus becomes angry, it is because someone has done something that is hurtful to others.

  As Jesus unceremoniously clears the house of everyone but the family and Peter, James, and John, Jesus takes the child’s hand and tells her to get up.  The girl immediately rises and begins walking around.  Jesus tells the family to give her something to eat, then He commands them, and the disciples, sternly, not to tell anyone about what happened.  I spoke a few weeks ago about Jesus’s requests that His miracles are kept a secret.  There was a great, though decidedly unauthoritative, quote from the TV show “The Chosen” that explains this.  In the show, after the Jesus character tells the family not to say anything, He says “It is not yet time for the commotion that will result.  None of you need the attention, not all of it will be good.”  Even though this isn’t authoritative, I do believe that it helps us to understand the dynamic of Jesus wanting to keep the news of His miracles quiet.

One of the things that jumps out from our story today is the issue of uncleanness.  Touching the woman who was bleeding made everyone ritually unclean for one day.  Jesus touching a dead body rendered Him unclean for a whole week.  While the ritual cleanliness laws were scrupulously observed by most first century Jews, Jesus would not permit laws born of oral tradition to interfere with His loving care of His children.  The disciples were probably aghast the first time they saw Jesus touch a leper.  In fact, just in the last few weeks we have seen several occasions where Jesus violated a law in the interest of filling a need.  Healing a man’s hand in the synagogue on the Sabbath, allowing His disciples to pluck heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath, and here ignoring the cleanliness rules twice in one day.  Do we think that maybe this should teach us something? 

We can snicker at some of the rules and regulations that the Pharisees demanded that everyone follow.  They may even seem a little silly to us, but the 21^st century church is steeped in tradition and we need to be cognizant of the fact that we also need to be on our guard that we don’t allow our traditions to interfere with the real work of the church, which is to be bearers of the Good News, to love and care for others, and to worship God in spirit and in truth.  (Not necessarily in that order). 

In studying Jesus’s actions, time and time again we see love placed above all else.  Though it may not always be apparent at first glance, the love and concern that Jesus shows to His beloved children is displayed throughout the Gospels in situations exactly like our two examples today.  Why do we think that the first thing Jesus did after raising Jairus’s daughter was to ask the family to give her something to eat?  Her physical needs, and the bleeding woman’s spiritual needs were the first priority to Jesus after He healed them.  And both were actions born of love.

Mark L Strauss had a wonderful observation on today’s reading, “[Another] important theme in this episode is Jesus’ care for those of low social status.  Jesus turns away from Jairus, a religious male of high social status, to meet the needs of a woman whose gender and illness render her of little value by society’s standards.  As both a female and a child, Jairus’s daughter would also be low on the social pecking order.  Through Jesus’ willingness to touch and heal these two women, He challenges both social norms and purity laws and demonstrates the restorative power and inclusivity of the kingdom of God.”

But there is one more lesson for us to look at today.  When we look at the miracles of Jesus, what we think we are seeing is Jesus somehow bending the rules of nature, doing something extraordinary and supernatural.  But that isn’t the case at all.  What Jesus is actually doing is not something that is contrary to the way that things are supposed to be.  What He is doing is returning things to the way that they were intended to be.  He starts with a world that is broken with sin and illness and death, and through forgiving the sin, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, giving hearing to the deaf, and even raising the dead to life, He is restoring the world to the way that God always intended for it to be. 

Strauss says, “From a Biblical worldview, human death is not a natural part of an endless “cycle of life”.  It is a tragic intrusion into God’s created intention for humanity, an aberration resulting from a fallen creation.”  When Jesus tells us not to be afraid but to have faith, what He is telling us is not that He is going to save us from all of life’s trials and tribulations, what He is telling us is that He is in the process of restoring the world to that which it has always been intended to be.  A world without pain or suffering or death.  A world where we will be able to love God and love one another unencumbered by the sin that has polluted our world and polluted our actions.  In telling us not to be afraid but to Believe, what Jesus is telling us is that, as God’s beloved children, our place in His new heaven and His new earth is assured.  Is there any better news than that? 

Earthly Things and Heavenly Things: Sermon 5/26/24

            Have you ever looked at someone who just said something to you and you had to say to them “What in the world are you talking about”?  Well, this week we find Nicodemus in that exact situation.  Nicodemus hadn’t even asked a question yet, and already Jesus had him completely confused.  So, let’s take a look at what happened.  To begin with, this meeting happened late at night.  There is some scholarly disagreement over why Nicodemus wanted to meet Jesus at night, and I think that the general assumption among more casual readers is that Nicodemus wanted to keep things quiet and not to have the other Jewish authorities know that he was there, but look at the text again.  Nicodemus didn’t greet Jesus saying “I”, he greeted Him saying “we”.  So, Nicodemus probably didn’t come to speak to Jesus on his own, Nicodemus was probably speaking on behalf of at least a few members of the Sanhedrin, if not all of them.  As to why the meeting was at night, I suppose it’s possible that Nicodemus was too busy to meet Jesus during the day, or maybe Nicodemus wanted some uninterrupted time with Jesus, which would make sense given how the crowds tended to gather around Jesus whenever He was accessible.  Or it could be that Nicodemus just didn’t want to be seen meeting Jesus for some reason.  So, any of these could be a potential reason for why they had their meeting at night. 

            Now, who is Nicodemus anyway? And why did he come, or why was he sent, to meet Jesus?  Nicodemus was a Pharisee.  According to the Jewish historian Josephus, there were about 6,000 Pharisees in Jerusalem in the early first century.  The word “Pharisee” means “separated” and was actually a disparaging name given to them because of their highly separatist attitudes.  The Pharisees actually called themselves “The Brotherhood”.  Pharisees would enter into “The Brotherhood” by taking a pledge in front of three witnesses that, for the rest of their lives, they would observe every detail of the Law found in the Torah, or the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.  But the operative word here is “detail” because it wasn’t just about following the Ten Commandments, and it wasn’t even just about following the 613 Mitzvot or written laws from the Torah.  In addition to all of this, the Pharisees also followed the minutiae of a large body of rabbinic commentary that later came to be known as the Talmud and the Mishna.  But the Talmud and Mishna were not committed to writing until the second century.  So, in Jesus’s time that part of the law was always taught teacher to student.   Because of this the teachers of the law held a very important and responsible position.  And they were especially important to the Pharisees who spent years learning what all of the laws and interpretations of laws were, just so they could follow them.  And so, Nicodemus was a Pharisee and a teacher of the Law.  Now, the NIV does not do a good job of translating verse 10, but in the Greek Jesus says to Nicodemus, “You are THE teacher of Israel and you don’t know these things?”  Notice that Jesus didn’t say A teacher of Israel, He said THE teacher of Israel, so Nicodemus was a teacher’s teacher; a man at the top of the Jewish educational hierarchy.  And as if all of this wasn’t enough, Nicodemus was also on the Sanhedrin.  The Sanhedrin was the ruling body in Israel consisting of 70 members.  The Sanhedrin had the final say in both government and religious matters and so they were kind of Congress, Supreme Court, and Presbyterian General Assembly, all rolled into one.  The Sanhedrin had their own police force and had authority to arrest and imprison people, though capital punishment was a right reserved by Rome.  In light of all this, it’s probably fair to say that Nicodemus was very important, very well respected and likely very well off.

            Later on in Jesus’s ministry we find several instances of members of the Sanhedrin meeting with Jesus in order to try to trap Him into saying something that would get Him into trouble, but I really do not think that that is what is happening here.  I truly believe that Nicodemus was intrigued by Jesus and was sincere in his opening greeting when he said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”  Clearly, by the time that Nicodemus and Jesus met, Jesus had already attracted a lot of attention.  The fact that this itinerant preacher had performed healings and miracles was common knowledge around Jerusalem and indeed Nicodemus had referenced those miracles, calling them signs, in his initial greeting.  And so, what I think is going on here is that Nicodemus, very possibly on behalf of the Sanhedrin, is hoping to find out exactly who this Jesus is, maybe where He received His training, and most important, what’s the deal with the miracles!  I would imagine that Nicodemus came expecting a spirited theological debate.  But I’m sure that he didn’t expect what came next.  Because where Nicodemus’s intent was to try to gather some information, to learn something about Jesus that he could bring back to the Sanhedrin.  Jesus was intent on helping Nicodemus to understand his own personal spiritual state.  As far as Jesus was concerned, this meeting wasn’t about the Sanhedrin or the Law or the Jewish faith.  THIS meeting was about Nicodemus, and Nicodemus only.  “Very truly I tell you”, Jesus said, “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”  And notice that where Nicodemus, when he was speaking to Jesus, was saying “we”, but  Jesus, when speaking to Nicodemus, said “You”, directing his comments to Nicodemus personally.

            Before we continue, I’d like to take a moment to examine what just happened.  To understand a little bit about Pharisaic thought with regard to how the Pharisees viewed their status before God, let’s take a look at how the Apostle Paul described his Pharisee self in Philippians 3, “If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more:  circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.”  Pharisees, though cognizant of the fact that only God is perfect, nevertheless viewed themselves as the epitome of righteousness before God.  The very reason for the derogatory name “Pharisee” originated in their haughty approach to anyone who wasn’t a Pharisee.  The Pharisee’s truly believed that they were God’s most righteous people, and that everyone else was beneath them.  And the lengths to which the Pharisees went to follow the Law meticulously, were truly remarkable.  They were an extraordinarily faithful people… in their actions.

            Any Christian who has ever shared their faith, somewhere along the line has probably had someone say to them, “As long as I’m a good person, that’s all that matters”, but is it?  As far as behavior was concerned, the Pharisees were probably just about as good as people are ever going to get, and yet here we have Jesus telling a Pharisee’s Pharisee that he will not see the kingdom of God unless he has more going for him than simply his actions.  Nicodemus must have been stunned.  The Pharisees were universally admired by the Jewish people as being the most righteous and devout members of Jewish society, and yet here, Nicodemus is being told that all of his righteousness is still not enough for him to be able to see the kingdom of heaven.  Is it any wonder that Nicodemus’s next comment was “How can this be?” 

            There is a worldly way of thinking, and there is a kingdom way of thinking.  A few summers ago, I spent several weeks preaching through 1^st and 2^nd Peter, and talking about the kingdom strategy of thinking as Peter described it.  For Peter, there is a clear choice between choosing to live according to the precepts of this world and choosing to live according to kingdom precepts.  Those who are of this world take the worldly view that personal goodness is what really matters.  But those who are of the kingdom understand that God, and only God is able to declare humans righteous.  And even then, it’s not because of what humans do but because God honors human faith in Him and He imputes, or bestows, righteousness because of that faith.  The Pharisees took the worldly view, defining righteousness as right behavior.  And the Pharisees fully expected to be granted entry to heaven based on their own personal goodness.  But the point that Jesus was trying to make to Nicodemus was that righteousness comes through faith, and not through behavior.  Nicodemus still didn’t get it, and Jesus replied, “You are Israel’s teacher, and you do not understand these things?”  Jesus seems almost surprised that Nicodemus is having a hard time understanding what He is trying to teach.  After all, the Hebrew Bible is filled with passages that Peter echoed when he spoke of his kingdom strategy.  All the way back in Genesis 15 when Abraham encountered God for the first time, the text tells us that “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness”.  It wasn’t Abrahams actions that made him righteous before God, it was his faith.  Habakkuk 2 tells us that “The righteous person will live by his faithfulness”.  And Psalm 32, Speaking of King David says, “Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord does not count against them and in whose spirit is no deceit.”  Somehow, the Pharisees had misunderstood the true source of righteousness.  This misunderstanding was the source of their difficulties with Jesus, and ultimately, their inability to grasp the kingdom way of thinking would lead to His crucifixion.  One would think that the words of Psalm 14 would have helped the Pharisees to see the source of their error.  Psalm 14:2-3 “The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God.  All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.”  But in spite of all, that the Hebrew Bible teaches about faithfulness being entirely a product of God’s grace, the Pharisees still believed that their rigid obedience to the law would make them right before God.  For the Pharisees, and for Nicodemus, it was all about the worldly precept of “If I’m a good person, that’s all that matters”.  But Jesus wasn’t ready to give up on Nicodemus.  Jesus continued to try to teach Nicodemus that righteousness isn’t about what we do, it’s about who we are, or more accurately, about whose we are.  Our righteousness is a gift to us from God, given through the Holy Spirit, as a direct result of our faith in Jesus Christ.  It’s not something that we will ever earn.  It’s a gift. 

The good news from our story today is that it appears that Nicodemus eventually did understand.  In John 7, as the Jewish authorities were beginning to openly oppose Jesus, Nicodemus stood up and asked the assembly, “Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing?”  This was a bold move by Nicodemus as he was speaking in opposition to the Sanhedrin that was, by now, quite antagonistic towards Jesus.  Even more bold was Nicodemus’s joining with Joseph of Arimathea to ask for the body of Jesus after He was crucified and bringing with him 100 pounds of embalming spices.  I think it is probably fair to say that as far as Nicodemus was concerned, Jesus made His point.

            So, how about us?  Has Jesus made His point with us?  Are we following the world’s way of thinking that all that matters is if we are good people?  Or are we understanding that OUR faithfulness is built not on what we do but on who we are in Christ?  Here is how it works.  Most instances of the word “sin” in the Bible are translated from the Greek word ἁμαρτία (hamartia), and ἁμαρτία is a word that an archer would use if they shot their arrow and hit the target but missed the bullseye.  It is a word that means a missing of the mark or a failure to meet a set standard.  And it is a word that could appropriately be translated as “imperfection”.  Now, if the Biblical standard for righteousness is perfection (and it is) then what would it take to be sinless?  Being sinless would require us to be completely Christ-like all the time.  Any failure to be exactly Christ-like is an imperfection, or ἁμαρτία, or sin.  Now, perfection simply isn’t possible for us.  But God knows this, and He doesn’t expect the impossible from us.  All He asks of us is that we recognize that His way is the right way.  God calls us to believe in Him.  And when we do that, God sends His Holy Spirit to live in us, and His Spirit, over time, will transform who we are.  As God’s Spirit guides us what happens is that our values and are goals will align with God’s values and goals.  That which is important to God becomes important to us.  We will share His likes and His dislikes, and ultimately our behavior will change, not out of a desire for reward or out of fear of reprisal, but because the new person that we become will begin to reflect the personality of Jesus who is our guide and our example.  Goodness is not the goal.  Relationship with God is the goal, goodness is simply a by-product of that relationship.

            This is who we are as Christians.  An imperfect people who have chosen to believe in God, and have chosen to allow God, through the Holy Spirit, to transform us into a people whose hearts look like God’s heart.

“For They Are Yours” Sermon May 12, 2024

For They Are Yours

May 12, 2024

            Have you ever wondered why when someone in the Old Testament is given a name, the Bible so often explains what the name means?  For example, the name Isaac sounds like the Hebrew word for “laughter”. When Sarah gave birth to Isaac, she said “God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.”  She said this because Isaac was born when Sarah was much too old to be having a baby.  When Jacob was born to Isaac and Rebecca, he came from the womb grasping the heel of his twin brother Esau.  In the Hebrew, Jacob means “he who grabs the heel”, but “he who grabs the heel” is actually a Hebrew idiom meaning “he deceives”, think of grabbing a heel to trip someone up.   When the prophet Samuel was born his mother Hannah said she named him Samuel “Because I asked the Lord for him”.  Hannah had been barren and the Hebrew for Samuel sounds like the phrase “Heard by God”.  So, why does all of this matter?  Why does the Bible go to all the trouble of telling us what names mean?  Why did I go to the trouble of looking all of this stuff up? In ancient Hebrew thought, a person’s name was more than just a label to identify them.  A person’s name was intended to relate something about this person’s life or mission or character.  To know a person’s name was to know something about that person.  I would imagine that most of us know the story of Jacob and Esau.  Esau was the firstborn, but Jacob stole his fraternal twin brother’s birthright, essentially declaring himself to be the firstborn and therefore the heir who would receive a double portion of his father’s estate.  “He deceives” indeed! 

            Our Gospel lesson today begins with Jesus praying to the Father, saying, “I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world.”  The word “revealed” has been translated from the Greek Ἐφανέρωσά (Ephanerosa) which is where our word “Epiphany” originates.  According to Strong’s Lexicon Ἐφανέρωσά means “to make manifest or visible or known what has been hidden or unknown, [and] to manifest [this], whether by words, or deeds, or in any other way”.  And so here, Jesus is saying that He has revealed something that has previously been hidden, and that He has revealed it both through His words and through His actions.  But what was it that Jesus was revealing?  Continuing His prayer, Jesus said “I have revealed Your Name”.  And here, our word “name” comes from the Greek ὄνομα (Onouma) which, in keeping with traditional Hebrew thought, is not just a name but is a revelation about or a manifestation of one’s character.  In other words, revealing a person’s name also explains who they are and what they are all about.  In this prayer, Jesus is reporting back to the Father that He has revealed to the disciples not only everything that the Father had given Him to say to them, but has also revealed the very character and nature of God.  And further, He reports that the disciples have accepted those words, and are completely convinced that those words did indeed come from the Father.  But let’s take a step back for just a moment in order to absorb what Jesus has just said.  The fullness of God the Father, His name, His character, His priorities, His mission, have all been revealed to the disciples, and through the subsequent teaching of the disciples, to us.  This is what Jesus has been doing for the last three years.  Remember last week we talked about how the phrase “just as” meant an exact representation or a mirror image?  Well, Jesus has been revealing to the disciples, through His own life and teaching, the exact representation of who God is.  Every act, every word, all of the love, all of the empathy, all of the compassion, everything that Jesus has shown the disciples through His words and actions have been revealing to them, and by extension to us, exactly who it is that God is. 

            But now, the disciples have a mission, and Jesus is intent on making sure that they have what they need to complete that mission.  Jesus has stated that He will no longer be in the world, but that the disciples still will be, and He knows that the road before them will not be easy.  Jesus tells us that just as He is not of this world, neither are the disciples, and the world will hate them because of that.  And so, Jesus prays to the Father, asking Him, not to take the disciples out of the world, but to protect them and to keep them safe from the evil one.  Warren Wiersbe has a great insight on why it is so important for the disciples not to be separated from the world when he says, “[Disciples] must not be isolated [from the world], because the world needs [their] influence and witness, but [followers of Jesus] must not permit the world to infect or change them. Separation is not isolation; it is contact without contamination.”  While Jesus was in the world, He protected the disciples, and He reports to the Father that He “Kept them safe by the Name you gave me” and lost none except for the one doomed to destruction.  But now that Jesus will no longer be with them, He asks the Father to “protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one”.  And we will talk more about that statement in just a minute. 

            What comes next could be just a little perplexing.  Just having asked the Father to protect the disciples from a world that hates them, Jesus now says that “I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them.”  Yeah, I’m always joyful when everyone hates me.  But there is a good reason for this joy about which Jesus speaks.  Jesus asks the Father that the disciples be sanctified by the truth, which is God’s Word, and that just as the Father had sent the Son into the world, so now the Son sends the disciples into the world.  Pastor John Ashton explains “As [Jesus] encourages [the disciples] sanctification, He expresses His intention to send them into the world, just as He Himself had been sent.” The implications are momentous.  The role of the [Christian] community is plainly the same as that of Jesus himself.”

            So, why would our joy come from sanctification?  What IS sanctification anyway?  Ray Stedman explains, “[Sanctification] means to separate, or set apart, to a specific purpose; [or] to put to an intended use”.  As we are sent into the world just as the Father had sent the Son into the world we are being set apart for the purpose of revealing to the world that which Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, has revealed to us.  Scott Grant expands on this idea when he says, “We are set apart in Christ to know God so that Jesus might send us into the world, just as the Father sent him into the world.  Jesus carried his relationship with the Father into the world, which he loved.  Likewise, we carry our relationship with the Father into the world, which we love. We are set apart first of all to know God and second of all to be sent into the world. [And] if we are going to be sent into the world, we had better be set apart to know God”.

            Which brings me back to the part of our lesson where Jesus said, “so that they may be one as we are one”.  In this prayer that Jesus is praying, He is speaking exclusively to the disciples.  But if we continue just a few more verses in John 17, Jesus expands His prayer to include all believers in every time and place, saying, “My prayer is not for [the disciples] alone.  I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me, and I am in you.  May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.  I in them and you in me, so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me”. 

            Before I continue, I would like to read a very short passage from Isaiah 42:8 “I am the Lord; that is my name!  I will not yield my glory to another”.  And so here we have God, speaking to Isaiah, telling him that God will not yield His glory to another, yet in John 17 we have Jesus telling us the He has given US the glory that God has given Him.  What is going on here?  What happened that God, initially unwilling to share His glory, is now willing to give that glory to those who are in Christ?  Well, I think that what is going on here is unity.  What is going on here is the “just as” about which we spoke last week.  What is going on here is that we have been called to be exact representations of Jesus.  That we have been entrusted with the TRUTH of the Gospel and are now being sent into the world BY JESUS to be the bearers of the Good News that we worship a God whose love for us is so great that He laid down His life for us that we may follow Him into His resurrection.  A God who loves us so much that we may be with him in a place where He will dwell with us and we will be His people.  A place where He will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and death, and mourning, and crying, and pain, will all be no more because the old order of things will have passed away.  Could this message get any better?  Is there anything that we can seek in this world that can equal the future that awaits us in Christ?

            Our lesson today ended with verse 19, but I feel that the lesson is incomplete if we don’t continue on through the last few verses of the chapter.  John17:24-26:  “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.  Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me.  I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

            Just as the Father sent the Son, so have we all been sent into the world in order that we may show the world an exact representation of God’s love.  A love that is to be reflected in our own lives, and words, and actions.  Are we up to the task?

This Is My Command: Love Each Other Sermon 5/5/24

There is a word in Greek, καθώς (kathos).  It’s a simple word that is often translated into English with the phrase “Just as”.  We find this word in today’s reading three times, Again, John 15:9-12: Jesus says, “I love you just as the Father loves me; remain in my love.  If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in His love.  I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.  My commandment is this: love one another, just as I love you.”  In all, John uses the word καθώς 31 times in his Gospel, and as it turns out, this little word is an important part of John’s theology.  So, let’s take a look at this for just a moment.  The English phrase “just as” is an appropriate translation but doesn’t tell the whole story.  You see, Καθώς implies an exact representation, a mirror image if you will.  In John’s continual use of this word, he is trying to paint a picture of how the Father’s love for the Son, is exactly the same as the Son’s love for His disciples, and how the disciples love for one another should be exactly the same as Christ’s love for them.  Reading this passage without an understanding of the depth of meaning of the word καθώς, just doesn’t do the passage justice.  That “just as” is calling us to an extraordinary task; the task of each of us working to become a mirror image of Jesus.  Dr. James Boyce says, “To abide in the Son’s love is to know oneself as abiding in that same love which originates in the relationship of Father and Son.”  In other words, we are called to love Jesus, AND to love one another with exactly the same love that the Father has for the Son, and that the Son has for the Father.

            When we look at today’s Gospel lesson, we learn that we are to abide, in Jesus’s love.  In the Greek, the word “abide” is μείνῃ (Meinee) which means to remain in unbroken fellowship with, or to be under the constant influence of.  And we are called to abide in Jesus’s love in exactly the same way that Jesus abides in the Father’s love.  We learn that we are to obey Jesus’s commands in exactly the same way that Jesus obeys the Father’s commands, and we learn that we are to love one another in exactly the same way that Jesus loves us.  Last week when we were talking about the vine and the branches and asking ourselves what it means to bear fruit and how do we go about bearing that fruit, we came to the conclusion that our bearing of fruit happens as a result of love.  This week we take a step deeper into that idea and find that just as Jesus’s love for the Father manifests itself in obedience to His Father’s commands, so it is that our love for Jesus must manifest itself in our obedience to His commands.  Dr. James Boyce again comments: “These commands which Jesus calls upon his disciples to keep are simply an extension of the commands of the Father which Jesus has already kept. Jesus asks nothing of his disciple community that he has not already modeled in the abiding love which he has with the Father. In this way abiding, loving, and keeping commandments are all bound up together in a mutual relationship.”

            This idea is echoed in our Epistle lesson this morning where John wrote “This is how we know that we love God’s children: it is by loving God and obeying his commands.  For our love for God means that we obey his commands.”  The love of Jesus for the Father is our guide.  Jesus demonstrates His love for the Father by obeying His Father’s commands.  So it is that our love for Jesus should lead us to obey His commands.  And Jesus’s overarching command is to love.  And we learn to follow this command to love by using the love of the Son to the Father and of the Father to the Son as our guide.

            But there is one little problem.  God, in His Trinity, is eternal and infinite.  We are not.  And so sometimes we struggle.  Sometimes people can be just a little bit too cantankerous for us to love easily, or situations can be just a little bit too challenging for us to overcome, or grief can be just a little bit too overwhelming for us to bear.  Of course, God already knows all of this, and that’s why He has promised to supply grace equal to every need.  But for those of us who are stuck in the here and now, even God’s grace may sometimes seem to us like it just isn’t enough.

            There is a person who is quite famous.  This person died a few years back, and a book was recently published containing letters that this person wrote to a number of spiritual mentors.  These letters are bluntly honest and reveal a person who struggled mightily with their faith, even to the point of occasionally questioning God’s existence.  This person, at the beginning of their ministry, wrote to one of their mentors about a prayer that they had prayed and a response that they believed that God had given them.  The prayer was, “Jesus, my own Jesus–I am only Thine–I am so stupid–I do not know what to say but do with me whatever You wish–as You wish–as long as you wish. [But] why can’t I be a perfect [disciple] why can’t I be like everybody else?”   And the answer from God as this person relayed it was, “I want [disciples], who would be my fire of love amongst the poor, the sick, the dying and the little children … You are, I know, the most incapable person–weak and sinful but just because you are that–I want to use You for My glory. Wilt thou refuse? 

          This person did not refuse and embarked on a remarkable journey of service to the Lord.  But in spite of their faithful service, one of their letters that they wrote describe some deep doubt and uncertainty.  They wrote, “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love–and now become as the most hated one–the one–You have thrown away as unwanted–unloved. I call, I cling, I want–and there is no One to answer–no One on Whom I can cling–no, No One.–Alone … Where is my Faith–even deep down right in, there is nothing but emptiness & darkness–My God–how painful is this unknown pain–I have no Faith–I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart–& make me suffer untold agony.”  This person was beset with feelings of inadequacy, feelings of being lost and without support, feelings of having lost their faith.  They suffered through these feelings and repeated these feeling often throughout the letters published in the book.  And yet this person had a very long and very fruitful ministry.  This person, was Mother Teresa… Saint Teresa.

          Through all of her doubts, through all of her feelings of inadequacy, she steadfastly continued to devote her life to her mission of caring for the poor and the needy.  What began for her as a one person mission to the poorest people in one of the poorest parts of India, a mission that one Catholic official referred to as “Teresa’s Folly”.  That “folly” became the Missionaries of Charity; a worldwide organization with well over five thousand members serving in 139 countries.  Their mission (in Mother Teresa’s own words) is to care for “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.” 

            This is what bearing fruit in an imperfect world looks like.  Bearing fruit isn’t perfect people doing perfect work under perfect circumstances.  Bearing fruit is people persevering through trials and doubt and difficulties because they know that what they are doing matters, and matters eternally.  Bearing fruit isn’t even always about what WE have done.  In fact, our bearing fruit sometimes happens in spite of what WE have done.  It is God who provides the opportunities.  It is God who provides the wherewithal to accomplish His purposes, and it is God who provides the increase.  But none of this happens if we don’t have a willing heart.  Whatever it is that God has called us to do, He will equip us to serve Him as we have been called.  But first, we need to allow ourselves to be used by God.  Mother Teresa stayed true to the prayer that she prayed when she asked God to “do with me whatever You wish–as You wish–as long as You wish.”  Mother Teresa persevered through some dark times in her life, through doubts in faith, and through difficulties that sometimes seemed insurmountable.  And she did this not on her own, but by relying solely on God to equip her to serve.  In the speech that she made when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, she said, “It is not enough for us to say, ‘I love God, but I do not love my neighbor.’” She then said, “Since in dying on the Cross, God had “[made] himself the hungry one–the naked one–the homeless one.” Jesus’ hunger, she said, is what “you and I must find” and alleviate.”  Because the award was given in late October, Mother Teresa referenced the upcoming Christmas season and said, that “radiating joy is real because Christ is everywhere– Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive.”

          So how ARE we to love just as the Father loves the Son?  The answer is to be found in the idea that at its best, love isn’t a feeling.  At its best, love is an act of the will; a conscious decision to place the needs and the wants of others ahead of our own.  The answer is to recognize love as a verb and not a noun.  The answer is to persevere, to continue the act of loving others, even when we don’t feel like doing it.  One of the last things that Jesus did before He was arrested was to ask the Father if His cup of suffering and dying could be taken away.  But Jesus’s love was rendered in perfect obedience to His father’s will, regardless of His own personal feelings.  We, as His disciples are called to no less than perfect obedience also, even when we don’t feel like it.  Dr. Charles Stanley, a brilliant theologian and preacher explains, “Since Jesus’ death on the cross was the supreme example of His love for us, we too must be willing to lay down our life for others. Although some Christians have literally died for fellow believers, our sacrifices are generally a matter of giving ourselves in service for others, spending precious time to help them, or simply denying ourselves and our desires in order to do what is best for someone else. To have Christ’s sacrificial attitude, we must selflessly consider others’ interests as more important than our own.”  We find this thought echoed in Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi in 2:3-4, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”  C. S. Lewis wrote that we “should not think less of ourselves but think of ourselves less.”

            And so it looks like we have our work cut out for us.  All we have to do is to do the impossible, right?  No, that’s not right, God does not expect the impossible from us.  What He does ask is that we are persistent in our willingness to be used by Him.  To be used by Him for the purpose of reflecting His love to a world that is in desperate need of finding that love.  Let us all love one another just as Jesus loves us.

Bearing Fruit Sermon April 28, 2024

Bearing Fruit

April 28, 2024

            I was probably about five years old.  It was late in the summer, it might have been Labor Day weekend, and my family was having a picnic.  We were having watermelon for dessert, and I was getting annoyed by all those little black things in the watermelon, so I asked my mom “what’s the deal with these little black things?”  My mom explained to me that they were seeds, and that if you planted them in the ground, you would get a watermelon plant that would give you watermelons.  Well, I thought to myself “how cool is that?”  And I like watermelon, so five year old me took one of the seeds and planted it in the back yard… in late August.  I went outside every day and watered my little watermelon seed, and two weeks or so later, a little watermelon seedling sprouted, and I was so excited.  I went and got my mom to show her the little seedling, and I asked her how soon we would get a watermelon.  My mom said “soon”, and so the next time that she went to the grocery store, do you see where I’m going with this?  She bought a watermelon, went out to the back yard, and put it next to my little seedling, then came and got me to show me the watermelon that I had “grown”.  Even though I eventually figured out that I hadn’t REALLY grown it, I was hooked on gardening, and from that time, all the way up until just a few years ago, I was an avid gardener.  While I lived with my mom and dad, every year I went out, prepared the ground, fertilized, planted the seeds, weeded, watered, and tended the garden, and every year we had corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, and whatever other fruit or vegetable I felt like experimenting with that year. 

            Being slightly OCD, I always planted everything in the same place.  You know, corn belongs here, tomatoes belong here, cucumbers belong here…   But after a couple of years, I began to notice that my corn wasn’t doing as well as it had originally done.  The plants weren’t as tall, I wasn’t getting as many ears of corn, and it seemed to me that the corn didn’t taste as good.  So, I asked my mom about it and if I recall correctly, she took me to the library to look it up.  Anyone remember going to the library to look something up?  And I found out that corn takes a lot of nitrogen out of the soil.  I also found out that about two thirds of the nitrogen that corn takes from the soil, it will only take from sources that occur naturally in the soil, and will NOT take from fertilizer.  So, when you grow corn, fertilizing the soil doesn’t do a whole lot to help the corn.  The only way to get consistently good corn is to let the soil rest, and the way that you do that is to rotate your crops, so that your corn in growing in a different place every year.  When I started doing that, I began to have regular harvests of really good Silver Queen Corn. 

It turns out that soil has a profound effect on the quality and often the quantity of what grows in it.  I am not a wine drinker, but Jennifer is, and since we’ve been dating, we have visited a couple of vineyards, and, as someone who has always been interested in gardening, I have found it fascinating to discover some of the intricacies of wine making.  The soil and the weather cause the grapes to have a slightly different character from year to year and this affects the taste of the wine.  Vintners carefully prune their vines in the winter to remove new growth with the goal of having each vine produce the same number of buds every year.  If the vines are not carefully pruned, the quality of the grapes, and the wine, will suffer.  In fact, people often spend two or three years learning the right way to prune the vines, because it is a skill that is essential to producing quality fruit.

In our reading today, Jesus tells us that He is the vine, that we are the branches, and that the Father is the gardener.  Jesus says that the Father prunes the vine, breaking off every branch that does not produce fruit, and trimming the vine so that the fruit that is produced is of the highest quality.  So, as the branches, our lives are carefully pruned by God in order that we may produce the highest quality of fruit. 

So, the first question I have to ask is, how does God prune us?  Today’s reading tells us that Jesus’s teaching has made us clean, and that if we remain in Him, He will remain in us, and that in Him we will bear much fruit.  One of my favorite Christian commentators, Warren Wiersbe expands about what it means to remain in Christ:  “The abiding relationship is natural to the branch and the vine, but it must be cultivated in the Christian life.  It is not automatic.  Abiding in Christ demands worship, meditation on God’s word, prayer, sacrifice, and service – but what a joyful experience it is!  Once you have begun to cultivate this deeper communion with Christ, you have no desire to return to the shallow life of the careless Christian.”  So, just as a farmer nourishes the soil and rotates the crops to provide the best outcome for the harvest, God nourishes our relationship with Jesus, leading us to a closer walk with Him, steering us away from that which is detrimental to our relationship with Him, and helping us to avoid that which is detrimental to the kind of fruit that our lives produce.  Without Jesus in our lives, we can do nothing of value, but with Him, there is much that we can accomplish for the Kingdom. 

Just as fruits and vegetables are profoundly affected by the soil in which they grow, so it is that we require a solid connection to Jesus in order to be fruitful.  Ed Jarrett from Christianity.com has an important distinction to make on this point when he says “As disciples, we are told to remain connected to the vine, to Jesus.  And, if we do that, we will be fruitful. It is important to note here that bearing fruit is not another thing [we are] commanded to do. Instead, it is the result of remaining in Christ. If we are connected, we will bear fruit.”  And our lesson today tells us that in our bearing of that fruit, God is glorified. 

            So, what does our bearing of this fruit look line?  Dr. David Chancey tells us that the fruit that we produce is about three things.  “First is the fruit of Christian character. According to Galatians 5:22-23, our lives should be characterized by love, joy, peace, [patience], kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  Second is the fruit of Christian conduct. Right character results in right conduct.  Not only must we look like Jesus; we must act like Jesus.  Third is the fruit of converts. God wants us to take as many people with us to heaven as possible.”

Ultimately though, the truth is that bearing fruit looks different for each of us.  In Romans 12 Paul discusses this when he says “We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.” 

Even though fruit bearing looks different for each of us, the essence of all of our fruit bearing is love.  If we were to have read just a few verses further in our Gospel lesson this morning, we would have come to the part where Jesus tells us that “If [we] keep His commands [we] will remain in His love.”  And so love is an essential part of our bearing fruit.  The part that I just read from Romans 12 continues,” Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.”  And Paul makes an interesting choice here in his choice of the Greek word that he uses that we translate “good”.  The usual word used in Greek that we translate as “good’ is “καλός” (kalos) which means something that is pleasing or without defect, but Paul chooses instead to use the word “ἀγαθός” (agathos) which means something that is intrinsically good, or good to the core.  The good of which Paul speaks here is a good that flows from a heart that is deeply connected to Jesus.  As I so often say, it’s not about what we do, it’s about who we are.  Warren Wiersbe, commenting on today’s epistle lesson says of love “Love is a valid test of our fellowship and our sonship [or our daughtership] because God IS love.  Love is part of the very being and nature of God.  If we are united to God through faith in Christ, we share His nature.  And since His nature is love, love is the test of the reality of our spiritual life”.

            In a little while, we will be singing the Offertory.  Our offertory this morning is a song called “Live Like That”.  It’s a new song for the praise team, so you may find it unfamiliar, but I chose it because of its message and I would like to highlight some of the lyrics here.  In the first verse the songwriter asks:

Was I love

When no one else would show up

Was I Jesus to the least of us?

The second verse reads:

Am I proof

That You are who You say You are

That grace can really change a heart

Do I live like Your love is true

People pass

And even if they don’t know my name

Is there evidence that I’ve been changed

When they see me do they see You*

            The songwriter says that he wants to live like that.  Do we?  Are we willing to allow God to enrich our relationship with Jesus in such a way that our lives become ever more Christlike?  Wiersbe comments that “The branches do not eat the grapes; others do.  We are not producing fruit to please ourselves but to serve others.”  Just as Jesus said that He did not come to be served, but to serve, so it is for those of us who are reaching towards Christ likeness that our actions are geared towards serving the needs of the kingdom.

            Love God and love others.  This is the essence of our message today, in fact, according to Jesus, it’s the essence of the entire Gospel.  Our finest fruit is produced when we allow the love that God has for us, to shine in our own lives that others may see the joy and the beauty that comes from having a deep connection with Jesus.  When we stop and think about the grape vine, bearing fruit is, well, its most fruitful purpose.  As our connection with Jesus becomes ever deeper, our prayer is that bearing fruit will become our most fruitful purpose as well.

* CCLI Song # 6221421

Ben Glover | Ben McDonald | David Frey

© 2011 9t One Songs; Ariose Music; Mike Curb Music

For use solely with the SongSelect® Terms of Use. All rights reserved. www.ccli.com

CCLI License # 515123

I Have Other Sheep That Are Not of This Sheep Pen. Sermon April 21, 2024

For the last few weeks, we have been talking about the disciples not understanding what it was that Jesus was trying to teach.  While we have focused on Jesus’s death and resurrection, that subject was, by far, not the only thing that the disciples didn’t understand.  Last week we had a discussion about WHY the disciples failed to understand a lot of Jesus’s teaching.  Remember, we talked about how only God is capable of understanding the mind of God, and that we, as finite creatures, need the help of God’s Holy Spirit to even begin to comprehend God’s plan for us.  Bearing that in mind, we are going to take a look at today’s lesson from John and see what it is that the disciples missed this time.  As Rev. David Cotton once said, “They didn’t call them the duh-ciples for nothing!”

In today’s lesson, Jesus declared Himself to be the Good Shepherd.  This shepherd imagery that Jesus used would have been reasonably familiar to the disciples as sheep were a very important part of the economy and the lives of the folks in first century Palestine, But I doubt that we have any sheep farmers among us today.  Show of hands?  Sheep farmers?  And so, before I continue, please allow me to give us just a little bit of insight about sheep and shepherds to help us to get a better idea of what it is that Jesus is teaching. 

Sheep, while not being the brightest creatures on the planet, are actually quite socially adept.  Sheep are able to recognize voices and faces, retaining these memories for years.  In fact, sheep probably have a better memory for faces and voices than people do.  Sheep have the ability to read human facial expressions, actually showing a preference for smiles. Sheep tend to maintain lifelong friendships with a select group of sheep in their flock.  Part of the sheep’s social makeup is that they are followers and will follow whoever they determine is their leader.  In a flock of wild sheep this leader will be whatever sheep in the flock is dominant, but domesticated sheep will accept the shepherd as their leader.  Sheep will run away in panic from voices that they don’t recognize, but when they hear the shepherd’s voice, they will come to them. 

            As far as the shepherd is concerned, the sheep rely on the shepherd for protection and guidance.  The shepherd keeps careful watch, looking out for sheep who stray, keeping the flock away from poisonous plants, avoiding predators, and sometimes carrying sheep who become injured.  Since sheep are easily frightened, the shepherd needs to have a kind and calming presence and must herd the sheep with gentleness and patience. The shepherd recognizes the individual voices of the sheep, would immediately know when a sheep was in distress, and would come to the aid of that distressed sheep.  The shepherd would be attuned to the sheep’s moods and would be quick to soothe a scared or anxious animal.  At night the shepherd will lead the sheep to the pen to sleep.  The pen has only one entrance, and the shepherd would sleep, lying down in the entrance, so anything that entered the pen had to go through the shepherd.  The good shepherd does literally lay down his life for his sheep every night.

            The more we understand about sheep and shepherds, the more we understand what Jesus is teaching us about His being the good shepherd.  The good shepherd cares deeply about each member of the flock, knows them individually, understands their needs, provides for them, cares for them, and protects them.  The members of the flock develop a deep and abiding friendship with the shepherd, know his voice and his face, follow him unequivocally, and trust him implicitly.  In this analogy, we see a wonderful picture of love, working in both directions, as the shepherd lovingly cares for each individual member of the flock and the flock lovingly follows without hesitation.

            And so, we come to today’s reading.  And I have to wonder how much of this discussion about sheep the disciples actually understood.  We already know that the disciples didn’t understand what Jesus meant when He said He would lay His life down for His sheep, and they continued not understanding this until Jesus gave them the gift of the Holy Spirit when He met with them AFTER His resurrection.  The disciples may well have had some understanding of Jesus’s discussion about the difference between the good shepherd and the hired hand.  Jesus had already proven Himself to be a loving and compassionate friend and mentor.  But one thing that we know for certain that they missed is something that, when the truth was revealed to them long after the resurrection, they were shocked at what was revealed.  In our lesson today, Jesus said “I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.”

            NINE YEARS after Jesus’s death and resurrection, (Nine years!)  Peter was sitting on a rooftop. He was hungry and he was waiting for dinner to be prepared when he had a vision.  In this vision, something like a large sheet was lowered from heaven, and the sheet was filled with animals that Jews were not permitted to eat (think… bacon).  To Peter’s shock and surprise, a voice from heaven commanded him to “kill and eat”.  “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The voice from heaven spoke a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”  This whole scenario was repeated an additional two times, then the sheet was taken back to heaven…  With Peter still wondering what this vision was all about, three men arrived who had been sent to see Peter by a gentile Roman Centurion named Cornelius. 

Now Cornelius and his family were all devout, God honoring people who prayed regularly and were well known for their generosity in giving to those in need.  An angel had appeared to Cornelius and said to him, “Your prayers and gifts to the poor have come up as a memorial offering before God.  Now, send men to Joppa to bring back a man named Simon who is called Peter.”  These are the men who showed up just as Peter was trying to figure out what that vision was all about.  Now, as I said, Cornelius was a gentile.  According to Jewish law, there was an insurmountable divide between those who kept the Law, and those who didn’t.  A ritually clean Jew would never enter the house of a gentile, or even keep company with gentiles, and that was just the Jewish theological argument against gentiles.  Culturally, first century Jews regarded gentiles as idolaters, sinful, and most important, UNCLEAN.  Gentiles did not keep the ritual laws that the Jews were required to keep and so contact with a gentile would make a Jew ritually unclean too.  On top of this, we add the resentment of the first century Jews over Roman rule, and the excesses of that rule that were abhorrent to the Jews.  So, to say that Jews regarded gentiles with disdain would be an understatement.  And it is with this understanding that we find Peter, Christian yes, but still an observant Jew, being called to visit the house of a gentile.

Peter, with several fellow believers from Joppa, went to see Cornelius.  When they arrived, they found that Cornelius had invited friends and relatives to his house and the place was packed… with gentiles.  Peter said to the group “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean.  So, when I was sent for, I came without raising any objection. May I ask why you sent for me?”  Cornelius told Peter the story about his visit with the angel and then told Peter ‘Now we are all here in the presence of God to listen to everything the Lord has commanded you to tell us.” 

            Peter first tells the assembly “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.”  He then proceeded to outline the Gospel for his listeners.  While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit was poured out on the gentile believers, and they began speaking in tongues and praising God.  The Bible tells us that “The circumcised believers (that’s Peter and his followers) were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles.”  But Peter, finally a step ahead of everyone, said “Surely no one can stand in the way of their being baptized with water. They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.”  And so, the entire assembly was baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.  Finally, after nine years, Peter understood what Jesus was teaching when He said, “I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen”. 

            It’s interesting to me that this whole idea of Gentiles sharing in the blessings that God has showered upon Israel was so misunderstood, and the reason that I find this interesting is because all the way back in Genesis, when God called Abraham, God said “All the people of the earth will be blessed through you”.  In fact, I count 58 times in Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, 1^st Kings, 1^st and 2^nd Chronicles, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, that the Hebrew Bible tells us that Israel will be a blessing to ALL people.  Somehow, practically everyone missed that.  (This is probably a really good example of how difficult it is to understand God’s word without the benefit of illumination by the Holy Spirit).  So entrenched was this prejudice against gentiles that even the first century followers of Jesus excluded gentiles from the assembly.  And even after Cornelius led the way for gentiles to be included, there was a big brouhaha over some Christians insisting that gentiles could only become followers of Christ after converting to Judaism, obeying the Law, and being circumcised.  It took a church-wide meeting led by Peter and James, the half-brother of Jesus to put an end to this requirement.  But ultimately, it was quite a while before gentiles were readily accepted into the assembly of the followers of The Way. 

            But you see, here’s the thing.  It doesn’t do any good to accept someone into the assembly unless you also accept them into your heart.  If you are going to accept them into the assembly, you need to love them also.  It doesn’t do you, or them. any good to accept them into the assembly unless you are willing to love them also.  From the boss and the best friend to the clerk and the janitor and the trash collector, if you are going to accept them into the assembly you also have to accept them into your heart.  From the loving and the caring and the compassionate to the difficult and the crabby and the cantankerous, if you are going to accept them into the assembly you also have to accept them into your heart.

            And so, the big question for us becomes, what is it that we have to learn from this?  Are there people who we are excluding from the assembly who we shouldn’t be excluding?  Are there people who we are excluding from our hearts who we shouldn’t be excluding?  Who among us gets to choose who God will accept?  Are we, the Christian Church in the 21^st Century willing to trust God to know who is or who isn’t called to faith?  Do we think that maybe 2^nd Peter 3:9 gives us a hint as to who God may choose to be included?  2^nd Peter 3:9 says, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” 

            If it is God’s desire that everyone come to repentance, is it possible that His grace might cover the sins of any willing heart that seeks Him, no matter who they are or what they may have done?  I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a universalist.  I do not believe that everyone will be saved, for the simple reason that I don’t believe that everyone has a willing heart.  But I do believe that the willingness of another person’s heart is not a matter for me to judge.  My job is not to judge, my job is to love.

            Yes, the Pastoral Epistles do speak of correcting error in the church, but discerning error in the church and working lovingly to address that error is absolutely not the same thing as making judgments about who we think will or will not be accepted by God.  There is not a one among us who is worthy to stand here today in God’s presence.  We are not here because of anything that we have done.  We are here because of what HE has done.  We are here because we have accepted the gift of grace that God has so lovingly bestowed on each of us.  Are we willing to accept the fact that God’s grace will be poured out according to His good pleasure on anyone He so chooses?  Let us all not call impure, that which God has chosen to make clean.

Then He Opened Their Minds Sermon 2024.04.14

Then He Opened Their Minds

April 14, 2024

            Last week we talked about how we come to faith, and we focused on how personal witness is one of the primary ways that we come to know Jesus.  I mentioned the other two ways, the witness of the Word, and the witness of the Holy Spirit, but we were focused on personal witness.  Since our reading from John last week is paralleled in today’s reading from Luke, I’d like to continue my thoughts from last week.  Though there are some differences in the details of last week’s and this week’s passages, most scholars agree that both of these passages describe the same event.  If we were to harmonize these two readings, one of the most noticeable differences in detail between the two would dovetail into a pretty good explanation of what happened.  In Luke we read that Jesus told the disciples “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.  Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.”  In the reading from John we are told “And with that [Jesus] breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit'”.  So, taking the two passages together we find that the way that Jesus opened the minds of the disciples so they could understand what all of the scriptures had to say about Him, was to give them the gift of the Holy Spirit.

            Today I would like to focus on one of the other ways that we come to faith, and that is through the witness of the Holy Spirit.  But what, or more accurately, WHO is the Holy Spirit?  When we talk about the Holy Spirit, I’m not sure that all Christians are always on the same page.  There was a big charismatic movement in Christianity in the late 20^th century, among many such movements over the years, and so we may find that there are some questions relating to the work of the Holy Spirit between some of the Spirit’s more charismatic works and some of the Spirit’s more day to day works, and while I will talk a little bit later about the charismatic aspect of the Spirit’s work, right now I would like to zero in on the work that the Sprit did for the disciples in today’s reading, and also does for us as the illuminator of the Word. 

Dr. Jonathan Pennington tells us that “The Spirit of God alone comprehends the thoughts of God.”  Makes sense, right?  The Bible tells us in multiple places that God’s ways are not our ways and since God is infinite, it really isn’t possible for us to fully understand God, but we already know that, and God knows that too, and God would never expect us to do the impossible task of understanding Him on our own, and so God gives us understanding, and He does that through the work of the Holy Spirit.  So, just as Jesus had the Holy Spirit open the minds of the disciples, the Holy Spirit works in each and every one of us in exactly the same way, to help us to understand that which is critical to our faith, to understand that which God knows that we need to understand in order to know and to follow Him.  David Schrock explains this beautifully when he says “The only way a [person] can rightly understand the mind of God is to have God Himself reveal Himself to [that person].  This occurs first in conversion (when we first believe), but then progressively in sanctification as the Spirit continues to instruct the saints through God’s Word”. 

And so, the Holy Spirit may not be quite as mysterious as we thought.  In fact, the Holy Spirit is no more, and no less mysterious than God, or Jesus themselves, because the Holy Spirit is co-equal with God and Jesus as one third of the trinity.  And explaining the Holy Spirit’s role within the trinity, the theologian, Dr. Arnold Come says, “The Holy Spirit is understood strictly in Trinitarian terms. The Trinity is a doctrinal way of referring to the three ways God has of being God — all three simultaneously, and each always in active relation with the other two. This means that our experience of God as Holy Spirit always involves also our relation to God as Creator (Father) and to God as Mediator-Savior (Son).”  And so, if we are thinking that the Holy Spirit only works in charismatic ways, that’s really not entirely accurate.  A lot of what the Spirit does, He does quietly as He guides us in our Christian walk, illuminating the scriptures and advising our actions.  This may be a relief for some of us to know if are uncomfortable with some of the more demonstrative forms of Christianity.  Presbyterians didn’t get the nickname the “Frozen Chosen” for nothing!  I suppose that there are corners of our Christian world where Presbyterian worship seems to them to be somewhat devoid of the Spirit, but you all may be surprised to hear what the theologian B. B. Warfield had to say about the founder of the Presbyterian faith, John Calvin.  “The doctrine of sin and grace dates from Augustine, the doctrine of satisfaction from Anselm, the doctrine of justification by faith from Luther, [but] the doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit is a gift from Calvin to the Church.”   Yes, our heritage as Presbyterians is built on the foundation of Calvin’s understanding of the theology of the work of the Holy Spirit instructing and guiding us.  Or, in Calvin’s own words, “We cannot come to Christ unless we be drawn by the Spirit of God.  And without the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the Word can do nothing,”

So, for the sake of understanding, let me talk a little bit about the charismatic works of the Holy Spirit.  I have to confess, that when I first became a Christian, I was told by a very theologically conservative Christian friend, that the charismatic events described in the New Testament were events that were unique to that time, and that as Christian teaching became more prevalent, charismatic acts like speaking in tongues or ecstatic behavior, or mass healings were no longer applicable; no longer theologically necessary in modern Christianity.  And I may have gone on continuing to believe that were it not for a dear Christian friend of mine.  Without violating privacy by going into too many details.  This friend had a rather difficult life, caring for a severely disabled child.  As we became friends, I discovered the fact that this friend had spoken in tongues, and not once, but often.  And to me, this made perfectly good sense, because I was able to see this as a loving God, providing grace equal to a person’s great need.  Does that make sense to you?  Can we understand how God might choose to use His Spirit in an extraordinary way to fit an extraordinary need?  Since that time I have known of instances of miraculous healing where people probably had no chance of being healed, and yet they were.  And I’ve seen miraculous changes in people’s lives when the Spirit moved them in powerful ways, and the conclusion that I have drawn from all of this is that I never again want to be one to limit in my mind what I think that God can do.  His ways are not my ways, but I do trust His love to the point where I know that He will provide grace equal to every need of all of His beloved children.

I’d like to return to the words of Dr. Arnold Come from a very excellent discussion that he had about the Holy Spirit that was printed in a publication of the Presbyterian Mission Agency, “The Holy Spirit is God’s most intimate, powerful and mysterious presence with and in us.  God, as Creator gives us our very existence and life, and sets the context and course in which we are to live it out. But this working of God is hidden, at a level not open to our discovery or direct awareness.  God, as Word, speaks to us through the wonders of nature and the discoveries of science, through the proclamations of prophets and the great events of history, and ultimately reveals the very being of God, and God’s will for our lives through Jesus the Christ. But all this remains somehow external, outside of us. We may know the way we should go, but lack the will to follow it. We need a deeper, inward helping. So the God who created us, and who, when we lost our way, took the step to come after us in Jesus Christ in order to open the way to eternal life, now takes a further step. He invades our inmost central being by the power of his love, enabling us to see that all that he has done and is doing in Christ is for us, out of love and compassion for us.”

So, if the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives is “hidden”, or “not open to discovery or direct awareness” then how are we to know if the Spirit actually IS active in our lives?  This is really the easiest question that I’ve asked all month!  Does anyone have Galatians 5:22 and 23 memorized?  If you are so inclined to memorize a verse of scripture, this wouldn’t be a bad one to memorize.  In Galatians five, the Apostle Paul, is writing to the church in Galatia and discussing what a life lived by the Spirit looks like.  Paul tells us that those who are living by the Spirit exhibit the work of the Spirit in their day to day lives, and that the evidence of having the Spirit active in their lives is that they show the fruits of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

I speak often about the fact that our Christian walk is not about what we do, but about who we are in Christ.  I speak of the importance of having a heart that is being transformed into a heart that looks like God’s heart, and all of this of which I speak is the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  It is the Spirit that teaches us and guides us into living a life that pleases God, with the end result that these fruits of the Spirit are exhibited in us not as a matter of behavior, but because these fruits are produced by a heart that the Holy Spirit is in the process of transforming into a heart that loves as God loves.

            And so, as the Holy Spirit works in each of our lives, our call as Christians is to strive for Christ-likeness; to seek in every aspect of our lives to display the love, the justice, the empathy, and the compassion of Jesus to a world that is in desperate need of experiencing that love for themselves.  In describing his conversion experience, John Calvin said “God, by a sudden and unexpected conversion, subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame”.  Like John Calvin, may each of our minds be brought to a teachableness that allows the Holy Spirit to guide us into living lives that glorify God and living lives that act as living witnesses to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Seeing Is Believing Sermon 2024.04.07

April 7, 2024

Seeing Is Believing

            I’m going to do something a little bit different this morning.  I’m going to start at the end of the lesson and work my way backwards.  The reason that I want to do this is because the end of today’s lesson is the most important part as it relates to us, and so I would like for us to have the main focus of the lesson in the front of our minds right from the start.  The verse to which I refer is 20:29 “Then Jesus told him, ‘because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’”

            The disciples were locked in a room together.  The Jewish authorities had just arrested Jesus, tried Him (Illegally, I might add), turned Him over to the Romans, and had the Romans crucify Him.  The disciples were undoubtedly terrified that the Jewish authorities would be coming for them next, and so, they were in hiding.  And there, behind carefully locked doors, Jesus suddenly appeared among them.  When we read the parallel account of this story in Luke, we read that the disciples were frightened because they thought that Jesus was a ghost, or an apparition.  Jesus greeted them by saying “Peace be with you”, and to calm their fears and to prove that He was not a ghost but was indeed flesh and bones, He showed them the wounds from the crucifixion in His hands and side.  But right now, we have a small problem.  You see, the apostle Thomas wasn’t there.  After Jesus had left and Thomas had returned, the other disciples told him “We have seen the Lord!”  And Thomas, quite famously (or infamously) replied “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

            Poor Thomas!  He has been remembered for this for over 2000 years and will continue to be remembered for this for who knows how many more years.  To add insult to injury, we sometimes call skeptical people “Doubting Thomases”.  Poor Thomas!  But before we dismiss Thomas for his lack of faith, I’d like for you all to pick up the nearest pew Bible and open it to John chapter 11.  The story in John 11 tells us that it was late in the ministry of Jesus and that the Jewish authorities were already plotting how to kill Him.  When Jesus heard that His friend Lazarus was ill, He decided to go to Bethany, which is Less than 2 miles from Jerusalem, to see Lazarus and to comfort his family.  The disciples were deeply concerned for Jesus’s safety, and maybe even more so for their own, and were trying to talk Jesus out of going there.  “A short while ago the Jews there tried to stone you, and yet you are going back?” the disciples said to Jesus.  Then Thomas said (would someone please read verse 16 for me?  [Then Thomas (also known as Didymus) said to the rest of the disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”]

            So, we can see that Thomas is courageous and maybe not as clueless as we may have been led to believe, but just as we discussed last week, accepting the fact that Jesus had absolutely died, and was now absolutely alive again, is a really hard thing to accept.  It was hard for the disciples when He first appeared to them, remember, they thought that He was a ghost!  It was hard for Thomas who didn’t have the opportunity to see Him at His first appearance to the disciples, and it’s hard for us who never had the advantage of living with Jesus, seeing His miracles, and hearing His teaching first hand.  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”.

            Finally, a week later (and probably a VERY difficult week for Thomas) Jesus appears among the disciples again, this time with Thomas in attendance.  “Peace be with you” Jesus greets them again, then He turns to Thomas and says, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”  Thomas, now having seen irrefutable visual proof, replied to Jesus “My Lord and my God!”  He finally got it, but Thomas didn’t accept Jesus’s resurrection on faith, he accepted it on proof. 

            But let’s not be too hard on Thomas.  At least three times in the Synoptic Gospels, once after the feeding of the five thousand, once just after the Transfiguration, and once on the road to Jerusalem just before Palm Sunday, Jesus told the disciples plainly that He would suffer, be rejected by the Jewish authorities, be killed, and rise again.  The first time Jesus did this we are told that Peter rebuked Jesus, saying “Never, Lord!  This shall never happen to you!”  The second time He did it we are told that the disciples didn’t understand what Jesus was saying, but were afraid to ask Him to explain, and the third time they are again reported as not having understood.  In John’s Gospel we are told that Jesus alludes to His death at least four times.  So, none of this should have been news to the disciples and yet somehow, they still failed to understand what Jesus was trying to teach them.  And then they continued not to understand until they actually encountered the Risen Jesus… Thomas apparently a week after everyone else.  But it wasn’t just Thomas.  Among the disciples, none of their belief came from faith, it all came from the irrefutable proof of encountering the risen Jesus.  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”.

            So, the question that should be on our minds at this point is, if the disciples didn’t understand all of this in spite of being personal witnesses to the life and teachings of Jesus, in spite of having been told exactly what was going to happen in advance, how then are we, who never had the benefit of personal witness to these things, supposed to understand and believe?  This is a difficult question, but one that is important for us to answer.

            Where does our faith come from?  How is it that each of us has come to sit in this church this morning, or have come to log into Zoom so that we can be part of the virtual assembly?  Well, somewhere along the line, we were each introduced to Jesus.  Each of us had someone, a parent or a friend, who cared enough about us to tell us who Jesus is, why Jesus is important to them, and why Jesus should be important to us.  You see, personal witness is one of the three primary ways that we grow into the faith.  The other two ways are through the witness of the Bible and through the witness of the Holy Spirit.  But personal witness is by far the most important when it comes to our initial introduction to Jesus.  Yes, there are some who will pick up the Bible out of curiosity and find faith there, and occasionally the Holy Spirit will do something so unmistakable in someone’s life that they can’t ignore it, and they come to faith that way.  But for the most part, personal witness is the avenue through which we come to know Jesus. 

            When I lived in Boston, I worked with a gentleman named Roy.  Roy was a Christian and was the most relentlessly joyful person I have ever known.  He’s also one of the best friends I have ever had.  Roy was never the least bit shy about sharing with me what Jesus meant to him, and yet in the three years that we were friends, he was never once overbearing.  In spite of his seemingly never-ending witness, I never once felt like he was trying to convert me.  He was simply a man whose life was infused with joy, had no problem sharing that joy with others, and had no problem attributing that joy to his relationship with Jesus.  When Jesus told us to “Go and make disciples”, I have a feeling that Roy was exactly what He had in mind.

            Once Roy had inspired enough interest in me to want to know more, I began reading a Good News Bible that Jackie had given me for Christmas one year. The Good News Bible is a modern English translation that is much easier to read than that King James Bible that I had owned since childhood, and where I might have abandoned my fledgling Bible study if I had struggled over the language of the King James, I found that Good News Bible that Jackie gave me really easy to read and understand.   Now, at the time that Jackie gave me that Bible, I remember that my response (silently, mind you) was “What in the world did she give me this for??”  And yet that gift became important to me at the exact, right time.  Are we starting to see how this works?  Roy was faithful to share his gift of joyfulness and friendship with me, without ever knowing that I would someday became a Christian.  And Jackie was faithful to share that Bible with me even though I didn’t really appreciate it at the time.  She had no way of knowing whether it would ever matter to me or not, but she gave it to me anyway.  Eventually both of those gifts did matter… a lot.  And then last week I spoke of my friend Fred, who guided me and mentored me in the faith.  And so, my answer to the question of how am I, who never had the benefit of personal witness to Jesus’s teachings and example, supposed to understand and believe?  Is that Jesus was made real to me by my encounter with Him through a group of friends who were faithful to share their faith with me. 

            And so, we see that finding the answer to the question of how we are supposed to come to faith on faith alone is important for two reasons.  First, we want to answer the question for ourselves, so that we can come to a solid understanding of what the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus means to us personally.  But then, once we have a grasp on this answer for ourselves, we want to be able to use what we have learned and experienced to help others to come to an understanding of what all of this means to them. 

            But how do we do this?  How are we to be the people through whom our friends and acquaintances are able to personally experience the risen Jesus?   I have a card in my wallet that I have been carrying with me for over forty years.  Yes, it’s pretty beat by now.  But the card has printed on it a dictionary definition of the word “Coincidence”.  After spelling the word phonetically and declaring it to be a noun, just like any dictionary entry would do, it defines the word as “When God does a miracle and remains anonymous”.  I would imagine that most of us have had experiences where, even though we may not have recognized it at the time, we can look back and see how God was at work in our lives through that experience.  Maybe it was just one of those coincidences.  But as we grow in faith, we learn to recognize that these coincidences are the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  After all of the personal witnesses, and all of the Bible studies, it’s the work of the Holy Spirit that competes the task of giving us the irrefutable proof of the fact that God is alive and active in our lives.  

            Sharing our faith really shouldn’t be scary… at least not too much.  But it should be gentle.  We’re not talking about knocking on doors or accosting random strangers on the street here.  What we’re talking about is being relentlessly joyful, or relentlessly kind, or relentlessly helpful, or relentlessly whatever it is that God has given you that makes you so very special in His sight.  It’s about being ourselves, and letting the love that God has lavished on us, shine through our actions and our lives in a way that allows others to be able to see and experience that love also.  As Madeleine L’Engle so eloquently said.  It’s about “showing people a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it”. 

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”  When we allow ourselves to become the hands, and the feet, and the voice of Jesus, we become the people who make Jesus real in the lives of others.  We become the reason that they are able not to see… and yet to believe.

Why a Gardener? Easter 2024

            Our story this morning focuses on three people, Mary Magdalene, and the apostles John and Peter, all of whom are trying to make sense of the empty tomb.  It also talks about Mary being the first to encounter the risen Jesus. 

            Jesus died just before sundown on Friday, which meant that His body needed to be buried hastily because those preparing the body would not be permitted to do the work of preparing and burying His body when the Sabbath began at sundown.  Mary had to wait for a day until the Sabbath ended at sundown on Saturday to complete the burial preparations and so, early in the morning on Sunday, well before dawn, we find Mary headed to the tomb in the darkness to complete the work of anointing Jesus’s body in order to give Him a proper burial.  When she arrived, she found the stone covering the entrance to the tomb had been removed.  It was common Roman practice for criminals who had been crucified to be buried in mass graves so as not to give them the dignity of a proper burial, so it’s possible that Mary thought that the Romans had taken His body. Mary quickly went to Peter and John to tell them that someone had taken Jesus’s body.  And so the three went to the tomb with Peter and John actually entering the tomb to investigate.  And what they found must have been startling.  In ancient Israelite custom, after death the body would be washed with perfumes, ointments, and spices.  This combination of ingredients would have, in a relatively short period of time, solidified, making the grave cloths not unlike paper mache that would have adhered to the body.  And yet, there in the tomb lay the empty strips of linen, along with the towel that had been wrapped around Jesus’s head neatly folded and placed separately from the linen strips.  It appeared clear to Mary and the disciples that someone had taken the body, but she and the other disciples must have been perplexed, because no one stealing a body for any reason would have gone through the laborious process of removing those strips of linen that were stuck to the body.  It just didn’t make any sense. 

            After investigating, Peter and John returned to their hiding place, but Mary remained at the tomb, and she was crying.  Finally, as she bent over to look into the tomb she saw two angels, dressed in white, who asked her why she was crying.  She explained to them that she was distressed because the body was missing and she didn’t know where they had taken it.  Then she turned around and Jesus was standing right behind her, but somehow, she thought that He was the gardener.

            If someone tells you that they are going to do something that you know is impossible, your first response will probably be skepticism, assuming of course that you don’t just immediately dismiss this person as being off their rocker.  If someone tells you “I’m going to go take a stroll across Fletcher Lake” your response to them might be “Yeah, right.  Don’t forget to wear your swimmies”.  If a friend looks for apples on an apple tree and curses the tree for not having any apples on it, even though it’s out of season, and then turns to you and tells you “That tree will be dead by tomorrow” you might say to them “good luck with that”.  If someone tells you that they’re going over to a friend’s house because their friend just broke their arm and you are going to go and heal it, you might say “Oh, I’ve got to see this”.  We don’t know what Mary was thinking, but we really can’t blame her for not recognizing Jesus.  After all, He WAS supposed to be dead.  We can talk all we want about how many times Jesus tried to tell His disciples and friends that He was going to be arrested, killed, and then rise from the dead, but you and I both know that that would be an incredibly difficult thing for them to wrap their heads around, and even today there are plenty of people who find that equally difficult to believe.  No matter how you look at it, if someone claims that they are going to do the impossible, we all will find their claim to stretch the limits of credulity.  Maybe we would have thought that He was the gardener too.

            When I first became a follower of Jesus in my late twenties, I was fortunate to have a mentor in the faith.  Some of you know Fred Wolf.  He’s a great guy, a good friend, and a man of deep faith, and Fred put up with a lot of questions from me, with a lot of those questions revolving around the miracles of Jesus and whether they really happened or not.  But every time I asked Fred one of those questions, he responded with what seemed to be the oh so unhelpful answer “You’re asking the wrong question”.  Fred and I played this game for a really long time and truthfully, I found it a bit frustrating because I just couldn’t figure out what the question was that I was supposed to be asking.  Then one day Fred explained it to me.  Fred said “The question that you should be asking is ‘Is God who He says He is?’”  And Fred was absolutely right.  I want for us to think about this in just a moment, but first I have to tell you a joke.

            A group of scientists are speaking with God and the scientists tell Him that they now know how life began on earth.  They know that proteins developed in the primordial mud and that electrical charges sparked life into that protein, and that the scientists believe that they can now duplicate that process.  God says to the scientists, “Wow, that’s really cool.  I’d like to see you do that”.  So, the scientists begin the experiment by starting to gather some dirt, but God says to them, “Wait a minute!  That’s MY dirt, you have to use your own”. 

If God created the entire universe out of absolutely nothing, if He created stars and planets, if He created plants and life and humanity, simply by speaking it all into existence, then walking on water, or withering a tree, or healing a broken arm is nothing… it’s nothing.

            I mentioned on Maundy Thursday that my study of the scriptures for this Holy Week led me to believe that the entire passion narrative is about people misunderstanding who Jesus is, and people misunderstanding Jesus’s mission.  First came the people lining the road to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday who were expecting Jesus to proclaim Himself king, overthrow the Romans, and restore the throne of David.  Then on Maundy Thursday it was Peter, resisting the act of Jesus washing his feet because he believed that act to be beneath Jesus, and he believed that… because he misunderstood the love that Jesus had for him, and because he misunderstood the love that Jesus was calling him to show the world.  And now, it is Mary not recognizing Jesus when He is standing right in front of her.  As I said, we can’t really know what Mary was thinking or why it was that she didn’t recognize Him.  But the one thing that we do know is that she did recognize Him the instant that He called her by name.

            And with a single word, Mary realizes that Jesus is alive!  He’s alive.  For Mary, for the disciples, for us, HE IS ALIVE!  Mary, in her joy, apparently embraced Jesus, but now Jesus needed for Mary to become the very first evangelist.  Jesus asked Mary not to hold on to Him but rather to go and tell His brothers “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”.  Mary went to the disciples, told them that she had seen Jesus alive, and reported what He told her.  And as an aside, this would be a passage that those who disparage the role of women in the church would do well to study closely.  Jesus didn’t wait for a man to become available to carry His message, He entrusted the most important news the world would ever hear to a woman.

            Over the next few days, all of the disciples would get to see Jesus, and one by one, they were able to overcome their doubt and believe.  These disciples, who had personally witnessed many of the miracles of Jesus, who had seen Him turn water into wine, cast out demons, heal the sick, walk on water, calm a storm, and raise people from the dead, only after meeting the resurrected Jesus, were finally able to put all of the pieces together and come to their own personal realization that Jesus IS INDEED WHO HE SAYS HE IS! 

            So let’s take just a minute to examine exactly what Jesus had to say about who He is. In the second chapter of Mark we read the story about a paralytic being lowered through a hole in a roof so Jesus could heal him.  With the Pharisees and teachers of the Law present, Jesus healed the man, telling him “Your sins are forgiven.  Pick up your mat and walk”.  Our culture doesn’t understand the full impact of this, but the Pharisees did, and were outraged because only God can forgive sins.  So, in Jesus’s telling this man that his sins are forgiven, Jesus has declared Himself equal with God.  In John 8, Jesus told the Pharisees and teachers of the Law “Before Abraham was born, I AM”.  Again, that statement may not seem like much to us, but his Jewish audience would have immediately recognized His “I AM” as being the same exact name by which God identified Himself to Moses at the burning bush.  And finally, standing in the Temple colonnade, Jesus tells the Pharisees and teachers of the Law unequivocally that “The Father and I are one”.  Jesus did not leave room for doubt in His claims of being one with the Father.  To the disciples and followers of Jesus (including us) the resurrection is the final proof of that claim.

            I’d like to take a moment to tell you about something really interesting that John did with today’s text.  Three times, in telling the story of John and Peter at the tomb, John tells us that they saw something:  John 20 verse 5 says, “He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there”.  In 20 verse 6 he says, “He saw the strips of linen lying there”.  And in 20 verse 8 he said, “He saw and believed”.  In each of these three statements, John has chosen a different Greek word to indicate the act of seeing something.  In verse five the word is Βλέπει (Blepeye), and Βλέπει means to notice visually.  What we in English might call taking a cursory look.  In verse six the word is θεωρεῖ (Theorei) which means to discover something by seeing it.  What we in English might say to ascertain.  And in verse eight he uses the word εἶδεν (Eidain) which means to see with your mind or to understand or comprehend.  In these three verses, John is describing the progressing recognition of the importance of Jesus’s tomb being empty.  Every once in a while, people have one of those “Aha” moments where things suddenly become clear, but more often than not our understanding of things comes about gradually.  For the disciples, and especially for Peter, the miracles and teaching of Jesus had led them to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, but even then, they didn’t fully understand what that meant.  The disciples were steeped in a tradition that envisioned the Messiah as a ruler who would ascend the throne of David and rule the world according to that which is right and just.  They were correct, of course, but as we discussed on Palm Sunday, Jesus would rule not by dominance, but by consensus.  Jesus is not a conquering hero, but a gentle persuader of willing hearts.  The kingdom of God will come about because God’s beloved children (That’s us, by the way) will follow their King willingly, because they have personally experienced His love and grace, because they know that their best interests are always His concern, and they know that, because of all that, and because He gave His life for us, He fully deserves our worship, our admiration, and our obedience.

            As we think today about the resurrection, and what it means to us.  As we reflect back on Holy Week and the awful things that Jesus experienced willingly, out of His love for us.  As we try to make sense of who Jesus is, and what His life, death, and resurrection mean to us, I’d like to close with the thought that there is no more important decision that we will ever make in our lives, than the decision to believe or not to believe that Jesus is who He says He is.

            My prayer is that the dawning realization of the meaning of the resurrection will lead each of us into the truth that God loves us with an astonishing, extravagant, completely selfless love, that is beyond our capacity to understand, and that as recipients of that astonishing love, we will all seek to become the loving and gracious children of God that we each are called to be.

Sermon May 29, 2022 “Time for a Solitary Place”

I didn’t select the subject for my sermon today.  Every month or so, Rev. Widmer gives me a plan to use for selecting the music.  This plan has all of the readings and the sermon titles for the upcoming month, and as it happens, the readings and sermon title for this week were on the plan that he gave me.  He probably didn’t expect me to preach from his sermon title, but I’d already selected appropriate music so I figured that I might as well just run with it. 

The sermon title he gave for this week was “Time for a Solitary Place”. Now, I have to admit, that between working full time as a store manager, running the music program and being on the finance committee at Hope, taking the CRE classes that I’ve been taking, and still trying to find adequate time to hang out with my grandchildren, I would not consider the seeking of solitude to be one of my spiritual strengths.  And yet whenever we read the New Testament we find, time and time again, Jesus seeking moments of solitude for prayer, and today’s New Testament lesson gives us a really good opportunity to learn something about how Jesus approached solitude.

Our story today begins just after Jesus left the synagogue in Capernaum after driving a demon out of a man on the sabbath.  Oops!  According to Jewish law you are kind of not supposed to do that, but this isn’t the first time that Jesus did something like this, and I’d like to talk about that for a minute before we move into the heart of this week’s lesson.  In Matthew 5 in the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.  For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.”  So how is it then, that Jesus did something that, at least on the surface, appeared to be against the rules? 

I’ve been enjoying the classes that I’ve been taking for my CRE certification.  In my Introduction to the Old Testament class, we didn’t so much study the text of the Old Testament as we discussed different schools of thought on interpreting the text and the different types of Hebrew literature that are used in the Old Testament, how the ancient’s viewed the use of those literary genres, and how our reading of those genres differs from the way that those texts were interpreted by the ancients.  I found this to be deeply fascinating, and as we discussed how to interpret some of the more difficult Old Testament passages, the one thing to which the professor continued to cycle back, was “the rule of love”.  In Matthew 22 Jesus, answers a question that the Pharisees asked, about what is the greatest commandment.  Jesus’ reply is: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the first and greatest commandment.   And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”  The rule of love is this: any interpretation of scripture must be completely consistent with the idea of loving God and loving others.  If an interpretation isn’t consistent with loving God and loving others, then the interpretation is almost certainly in error.  More than once, Jesus made the point that to heal is an act of love, and to heal on the sabbath is therefore consistent with the rule of love.  The Pharisee’s insistence on following the law to the letter, even if the following of that law was detrimental to others, or interfered with a loving, caring act, meant that the Pharisees placed a human interpretation of God’s law in opposition to the rule of love, and as such, they were in error.  Jesus always placed love before law, and as His followers, this should be a powerful message to us as well, that love is paramount in our dealings both with God and with others.  In short, if we are truly loving, with a Godly, agape, love, we are keeping the law.  I’ve often said that the Ten Commandments are not so much a list of rules and regulations to be followed, as they are a description of what the human heart is supposed to look like.  When love has filled our hearts, we become a people who obey the law, not out of fear, or a desire for personal gain, but simply because we recognize the rightness of it.  Ultimately, Christianity is not about what we do or how we act, it’s about who we are.

And so, continuing with our story, as Jesus leaves the synagogue, he goes to the house of Simon Peter, where it turns out that Simon Peter’s mother-in-law is suffering from a high fever. (And an interesting aside from today’s reading: There are multiple places in the Bible that subtly speak to the authenticity of the text.  The story of the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is reported in all three synoptic Gospels, but where Matthew and Mark simply report that Peter’s mother-in-law has a fever, Luke, the physician, actually uses a medical term to describe her fever as being a serious one.  It’s the kind of word that only a doctor would be likely to use, and so now we have this little bit of good evidence supporting the likelihood of the Gospel of Luke actually having been written by Luke, due to the author’s choice of a word that only a doctor would have been likely to use). Anyway, Jesus heals Peter’s Mother-in-Law, and she immediately gets up and begins to serve her guests.  Now, going from a serious fever to jumping up and serving her guests would certainly lead one to believe that her healing was pretty dramatic! For those of you who have been following the TV show “The Chosen” they did a great job of telling this story.  By the way, if you are not watching “The Chosen”, talk to me or to Kelly and we’ll see if we can get you set up to watch it.  I think that you’ll be glad you did.

  That evening, Simon Peter’s house was filled with a seemingly endless stream of people coming to see Jesus and hoping to be healed, and the text tells us that He laid His hands on every one of them and healed them. 

The next morning we are told that Jesus went out to a solitary place.  Jesus seeking solitude for prayer is, rather quietly, one of the major themes of the Gospels.  In the book of Mark alone we are told 23 different times that Jesus sought a quiet place to pray.  In His solitude, Jesus spent time in intimate communication with the Father, and His prayers during this alone time preceded almost every major event in His life.  

Before Jesus began His ministry, He spent forty days and nights in the desert, preparing Himself for His ministry and for facing the temptations that He knew would come.  Interestingly, a careful reading of the Gospels reveals later events that paralleled each of the temptations but did so in a way that honored God.  When Satan suggested that Jesus make bread to feed Himself when He was hungry, Jesus declined, replying “Man shall not live by bread alone”, and yet one of Jesus’ best known miracles was feeding a multitude with five loaves of bread and two fish.  Do you think maybe Jesus made some bread that day?

When Satan offered Jesus all the glory of all the kingdoms of the world if Jesus would worship him, Jesus responded “You shall worship the Lord your God and serve Him only”.  And yet the glory of Jesus was fully revealed to the inner circle of His disciples at the transfiguration. 

When Satan suggested that Jesus throw Himself off of a cliff because angels would protect Him, Jesus said that “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test”.  And yet later, when an angry mob took Jesus to a cliff with the intent of throwing Him off, Jesus turned around and walked right through the mob. 

I believe these temptations actually run deeper than appears on the surface.  Try to imagine the temptation to miraculously end hunger; to see to it that everyone is fed and that no one goes hungry.  Indeed, feeding the hungry is important, and we, as followers of Jesus, are called to do this, but Jesus’ mission was bigger than that. 

Jesus had the power to take political control, to oust the Romans and free His people, but His mission was bigger than that too. 

Jesus could have done something showy and spectacular to quickly gain a following, but from the start, God’s plan has always been to reach His children one heart at a time. 

The time Jesus spent in communion with His Father during those forty days gave clarity to Jesus and helped Him to shape His ministry in a way that was completely consistent with His Father’s will.

Jesus spent time in private prayer before He called His disciples, often before He was to speak before large crowds, before He raised Lazarus from the dead, after He heard about the death of John the Baptist, in Gethsemane, and finally, on the cross itself. 

The Christian website Got Questions writes: “Solitude is the state of being alone and is often considered one of the traditional spiritual disciplines. Many times, it is associated with silence. The idea is to be alone with God, to pray, to meditate on His Word, and to simply enjoy His presence. Some people use solitude as a way to distance themselves from the distractions of the world, acknowledge the interior of their hearts, and hear God speak. Being alone can also be used as a time of rest and refreshment.” 

For Jesus, and for us, taking the time to listen to God, to Seek His face, is essential for establishing and maintaining that relationship with Him that we were intended to have from the very foundation of the universe.

Yes, solitude and communion with the Father were incredibly important to Jesus, but here is where today’s lesson becomes really cool.  As so often happened when Jesus sought solitude, the crowds managed to find Him anyway, and as important as that solitude was to Jesus, the needs of those seeking Him were more important to Him than was the solitude.  So many times, we see Jesus breaking with His solitude to heal someone, to teach someone, or to fill a need. The Bible tells us that, interrupted once again in His solitude, Jesus looked at those who interrupted Him and had compassion on them, because He felt that they were as sheep without a shepherd.

Prayer is essential, but prayer mustn’t take the place of acting in love when the situation presents itself.  Just as Jesus balanced the Law with the need to love, He balanced His prayers with the need to act.  We also must recognize when we are being called to act in love.  To pray for someone is a loving act.  To pray for them, and to seek to meet their needs, as God has provided us with the opportunity to do so, is Christlike. 

Yes, we absolutely should pray for others.  We learned in our series on James that “the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective”, so our prayers can and do make a difference, and for that reason we should be fervent in offering our prayers as needs arise, but when God has given us an opportunity to act, and to make a difference in loving and compassionate ways, then thoughts and prayers alone are inadequate.  Just as Jesus was quick to leave His solitude to fill a need, we must never allow prayer to become a substitute for living lives of love and grace. 

Our lesson ends with the people who have found Jesus in His solitude trying to keep Him from leaving them.  Jesus answered them, saying “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.”  Jesus kept on preaching in the synagogues of Judea, and everywhere He went, He continued to touch lives, to heal, to teach, and to show the love of the Father to those He met.  Our call is no different.  We also are called to allow God’s love to shine through us in ways that touch the hearts of others. 

Madeleine L’Engle once said “We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”  As we spend time in prayer, as we seek whatever solitude is available in our busy schedules, let us pray that God will allow us to show others that “light so lovely”.  Let us always be in prayer for others, but let us also be doers of the Word in ways that make a difference in the lives of those we meet.