Sunday, June 20, 2010

John 15:1-17

06/20/10
John 15:1-17
Hudson UMC

If you were to ask just about any Christian what is the main benefit from being a Christian, or, in other words, what do we gain by being a Christian, the answer would most likely be, “Your sins are forgiven.” This is indeed a marvelous thing, that our sins are forgiven and that we are reconciled in the eyes of God. It is an amazing thing because, if we look at ourselves with truly honest eyes, comparing ourselves with the standards that are set up, not by our society or government, but by our God, we realize that we do have sins, that we commit them day after day, that we are totally powerless to atone for even one of them because, if we were to live every day from now on in perfect obedience, it would still leave all the sins of the past untouched. We can’t go back and undo the sins we have done, so they remain. However, because of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, God has actually undone the sins we have committed and we are freed from the bondage that goes along with them.

However, in spite of the fact that most Christians will speak about their relationship with God in terms of, “I had a debt, God paid it, and now I am free,” this is only part of the picture. It is indeed a major theme of the New Testament, primarily championed by Paul in his letters to the Galatians and Romans. However, not only is this idea of “God paying our debt” not the only way the New Testament speaks about the Christian life, it is not even the primary way it does so. There are other ways to speak of the life of a Christian that emphasize other aspects. One of them is being “in Christ.” Paul uses the phrase well over a hundred times in his letters; far more than he speaks of being forgiven.

The question that we might ask when we see Paul saying that believers are “in Christ” is “what in the world does it mean to be ‘in Christ?’” Jesus here tells us what it means in such beautiful language. “I am the true vine…Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” When Jesus speaks about how His followers are related to Him, He uses a gardening image. He doesn’t first and foremost say, “Hey, you know all that sin you’ve got? I’ll take care of that.” Instead, He says, “You are engrafted into me, you abide in me and I abide in you. We are every bit as connected as if you were branches on a vine.”

The reason why I began this sermon with a comment about most people jumping to the forgiveness aspect of salvation is because, though the idea of justification by faith is something that was reclaimed in a powerful way in the Reformation, none of the major reformers thought that this way of thinking could exhaust the incredible depths of the reality that God has brought about in Christ. Luther spoke of a “blessed exchange,” where God takes the things that are ours, our sin, our brokenness, and our shortcomings, and gives us the things that are His, His life, His righteousness, His joy, and all kinds of other things.

It might be that the one who spoke most wonderfully about this in the years after the Reformation was John Calvin. I don’t always agree with what Calvin has to say about everything, but I absolutely love his grasp on this idea and how clearly he points out its centrality. I want to give you several quotations to help understand the significance of our being united to Christ by being engrafted to Him like a branch to the vine. “We must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us. Therefore, to share with us what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and to dwell within us…For, as I have said, all that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him. It is true that we obtain this by faith.” “Christ, when he illumines us into faith by the power of his Spirit, at the same time so engrafts us into his body that we become partakers of every good.” “We do not, therefore, contemplate him outside ourselves from afar in order that his righteousness may be imputed to us but because we put on Christ and are engrafted into his body – in short, because he desires to make us one with him. For this reason, we glory that we have fellowship of righteousness with him.” “For we await salvation from him not because he appears to us afar off, but because he makes us, ingrafted into his body, participants not only in all his benefits but also in himself.” “Thus ingrafted into him we are already, in a manner, partakers of eternal life, having entered in the Kingdom of God through hope.”

Now, you might be saying, “Who cares? We aren’t Presbyterians, we’re Methodists. Who cares what John Calvin has to say? He isn’t part of our tradition.” Actually, we Methodists owe far more to Calvin than we often admit. Even still, John Wesley, who actually started the Methodist movement, does not ignore this important idea. He said, “Christ does not give life to the soul separate from, but in and with, himself.” When he was trying to articulate his understanding of Christian Perfection, that it does not release us from relying on Christ, Wesley gave the following clarification. “In every state, we need Christ in the following respects: 1. Whatever grace we receive, it is a free gift from him. 2. We receive it as his purchase merely in consideration of the price he paid. 3. We have this grace not from Christ but in him. For our perfection is not like that of a tree, which flourishes by the sap derived from its own root, but like that of a branch, which, united to the vine, bears fruit, but severed from it, is ‘dried up and withered.’”

So, we can see that it is in the New Testament, we can see that it is strong in the Protestant reformers, we can even see that it is in our own Methodist tradition. So, what does it mean for us today? It means that God is not a God that is far away, but one that has come so very close that He has taken up residence inside of us and we inside of Him. It means that God has penetrated deeply into the very core of who we are and has brought the transforming power of God into the depths of our being, to transform us from the inside out.

As believers, our sins are not just wiped away, we are not just forgiven, but this salvation has penetrated deeply into our heart. Our lives are no longer our own, we do not stand over here while Christ is over there. Now that we have believed in the incredible love of God, that we have received the Holy Spirit who binds us to Christ like a branch on the vine, it is the blood of Christ that pumps through our veins. We cannot separate ourselves from Christ without completely renouncing everything God has done for us. We are not just in relationship with God like business partners are in relationship with each other. We are in a relationship with Christ like we are to those who are closest to us; even closer, in fact. The relationship we have with Christ is not just something that we do because it is to our advantage to do so. Instead, this relationship goes to the depths of who we are and transforms who we are.

When we are transformed by the Gospel, when we live in this deep relationship with Christ, we do not get depersonalized or dehumanized, as if being in intense relationship with God through Christ and in the Spirit somehow makes us less who we are. Instead, as people who were made for this kind of relationship, we are actually made more who we really are, who we were meant to be, when Christ abides in us and we abide in Him. Think back in your life to the time when you were most profoundly aware of the presence of Christ. It might have been during a time of prayer, or listening to a sermon when the Spirit kindled a fire in your soul through the words that were spoken, or in a time of radical transition. Was not faith in Christ and a life that is shaped by the life of God the most natural thing in the world? Did you not feel more alive, more vibrant, and more who you are than at any other time? This finding our identity in Christ is not the destruction of who we are, but the final recognition of what we were created to be.

I have been attempting to proclaim this kind of deep, penetrating relationship with Jesus, being engrafted into the life of God, not just as one other way to think about your Christian life and faith that you can take or leave, depending on how satisfied you are with the idea of justification by faith. I mean that this is the primary language used in the New Testament to speak of followers of Christ to which forgiveness is secondary. Debates have raged over what happens after we are forgiven. How hard do we have to work, how holy do we have to be, do we need to do anything at all after we have been forgiven? Those who want to preserve the fact that it is God who is doing the real work will say that forgiveness is the culmination of grace in our lives. Those who realize that the Christian life is far more dynamic and active than just forgiveness now and heaven later want to stress that we do need to keep working.

But when we actually listen to what Jesus says here, how can this question even arise? How can we even begin to say, “What do we need to do after we are forgiven?” Brothers and sisters, we have been engrafted into Christ like a branch into the vine. We can no longer live for ourselves because God has died for us. We are so connected to Christ that, if we were to be separated from Him, we would wither and fall into sin and destruction. If we are so connected to God that Christ is living His life in and through us by the power of the Spirit, we realize that it is because of this union with Christ that we are forgiven and not the other way around. We realize that, in Christ, not only are our sins implicated, but our entire lives are transformed.

So, why have we as modern Christians tended to ignore this powerful theme of the implanting of the life of God into us and living as those who are united to Christ? The theme of forgiveness rose to prominence in the Middle Ages, when people lived under a system of feudalism. There was a strict hierarchy in place and everyone had power over those under them and owed a debt of honor to those above. It was helpful to think of God as the great Lord to whom we owed a great debt of honor because of our sin. It was strongly developed during that time, but what happened later? After all, if all the Reformers emphasized our participation in and union with Christ, if they reclaimed this important belief, how have we forgotten it again?

I think that we have forgotten it because in our modern, Western culture, we like the idea of having our sins forgiven from a distance and we don’t like a God who penetrates into the depths of our humanity. So long as God remains out there, we can claim the forgiveness of our sins and God can go and do His thing and we can go and do our thing. We like to hold on to our own way of living, a way of living that is shaped by our priorities, that responds to our likes and dislikes. In short, we like being able to live the American dream, to look out into the world, see what we want, and work hard to get it. So long as God is kept at a comfortable distance, we can still do that. If God gets too close, if He takes up residence inside of us and we take up residence inside of Him, we don’t get to do whatever we want to do anymore. God wants us to live with the very life of God in us. We desperately want to be forgiven, because we realize that we need it, but what we don’t want is a God who is going to meddle with us; and meddle He does.

But what kind of meddling does God do when we get engrafted into Christ? God begins to live in and through us. No longer are we a branch that is out on its own, but grafted into the source of life. The meddling that God does is insist that we don’t live like people who are dead and cut off from real life, but to live like those who are truly alive and passionate about the world and the God who created it, who care deeply about people and the God who loves them. The meddling of God is not something that sucks the life out of us, but injects it into us. God’s life reveals the life that the world offers for what it is: shallow, joyless and never quite delivering what it promises.

Though God, when we are engrafted into Christ by the power of the Spirit and we abide in Him and He abides in us, challenges the way we live and begins to mould us and shape us, this is indeed the Gospel! For God to forgive us and then leave us as we are would be a tragedy. It would mean that God doesn’t really care about us and that, for all He cares, we can continue on in our destructive and self-destructive ways, doing our own thing, failing when we try to live the right way. God becomes nothing more than a genie, who snaps his fingers and forgives us only for us to go back out into the world and sin more and more because our nature remains fundamentally untouched.

But thanks be to God that this is not the case. God has loved us so much that He was not willing that we should continue on the path to death and destruction, that things should continue as they have always been, but instead chose to move decisively, to step in, to stand against our evil and to rescue us from our sin, not just the sin that is what we do, but the sin that is lodged deep in who we are. God has declared that things are indeed not as they should be, but that they need to be redeemed and that, if He did not bring that redemption about, we would be lost. It is like a life preserver thrown to someone who is drowning. The only way out of danger is to cling to the flotation device that connects you to the ship. Without God, we wither away and die, but when we are engrafted into Christ as a branch on a vine, we are filled with the life of God.

So, as we leave this place and go into a world that increasingly chooses rather to reject the gift of God and remain in their brokenness, let us go out and be witnesses that the life of God is better than what the world has to offer us, that God is the source of our life and it is a life that does not leave us to our own devices but transforms us so that we might know the peace that passes knowledge, that gives us strength in the midst of tribulation, and that saves us from our sin. Let us pray.

AMEN

Sunday, June 13, 2010

John 14:15-31

06/13/10
John 14:15-31
Hudson UMC

A while back, I made the decision that I needed to keep pressing through the Gospel of John and get through it just a bit faster. What that really meant was that I would not, in general, spend more than one week on a particular passage. This meant that, even if a single sermon would have to leave many important ideas unsaid and even completely untouched, that would just have to be the case. So far, it has worked out pretty well, but when I came up with this text, my heart broke because there is so much good stuff in it and I would only have a chance to speak generally and briefly on it, boiling it down to just a few main ideas. Now, you all might be thrilled that I am just boiling it down, but I want to remind you as your pastor who loves you and longs for you to explore the Scriptures and live by them every moment of every day that it would be well worth it if you spent some time and energy pondering the words of Christ here. It is a mine full of the very riches of God and you would never run out of things to learn from them.

However, given that we simply don’t have time to spend weeks on end on this particular passage, I have just a few main points to make about the incredible words of Christ. For centuries, and especially since the rise of Protestantism, there has been a heated debate over two major things in the Christian life. These two things are faith and works. First, I want to put before you the argument on behalf of faith. God has promised to make us His children, to adopt us into His very family on one condition and one condition only, that we believe in Jesus. This insistence on only faith is extremely offensive to humanity, because we desperately want to do something, anything, to contribute to our salvation. Salvation by faith, the key to understanding Christianity, absolutely destroys our self-sufficient American attitude that makes us think that asking for help is weakness and that we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Salvation by faith says to this attitude, “There is no salvation except that which comes from God without any help from humanity at all. The only faith that will save us is the faith whose hands are empty and brings nothing to the table at all.” Real Christian faith is not a faith in our own ability, but an utter conviction that we simply aren’t good enough on our own and that God must be all of our hope, all of our confidence, and all of our joy. Any hope in our own works is a denial of God’s grace.

Against this is the argument for works in the Christian life. It doesn’t take much for us to look around and see that there are people who say that they have faith in Jesus but constantly act as if Jesus means nothing to them. To be a Christian means to work, not less than the non-Christian, but more. To hope for a Christianity that does not place moral demands on us is to hope for a Christianity without Jesus. Nobody spoke more about doing good to our neighbors, of helping the poor, about going out of our way to show the mercy of God to others than Jesus did. Jesus does not even acknowledge a possibility of following Him without taking up our cross, that is being willing even to die, and following Him. There are countless moral obligations pointed out, not just in the Old Testament, not just in the epistles, but in the Gospels themselves. To say that we should not place a high priority on what we do but only focus on what we believe is a wholesale denial of the Gospel and an abandonment of the Jesus that we claim to love.

Both of these two strands of argument have raged throughout much of Christian history. Both sides are absolutely convinced of the fact that they are right and that the other is wrong. In fact, many times, you will get people who were once on one side and then on the other and argue for their new position with all the passion a convert. Those on the side of faith point to the arguments of Paul and his absolute insistence on faith as the core of the Christian faith and his unwillingness to allow works to have a place. Those on the side of works will point to the Gospels, especially the Gospel of Matthew and the letter of James to point out that the Gospel does not ignore how we live but that good works are part of our daily lives.

Now, if you are anything like me, you listen to both of those arguments and you nod your head, saying to both of them, “Yeah, you’re right. All of that makes good sense.” The problem is that so much of the tradition has taught us that we can only have one or the other, that they stand over and against one another, as natural enemies and as enemies to the true Gospel. Our deepest experience as Christians does not want to believe that we have to choose between faith and works, but since we are surrounded by so many who think that they can’t go together, we sometimes feel pressured to do just that.

But if we look in this passage, with Jesus’ words to His disciples, do we see this kind of fighting over whether faith or works are more important? No. We see Jesus saying things like, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” and “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me,” and “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words,” and, interwoven with this emphasis on obedience in our lives, we hear Him say that the Holy Spirit will come and abide in us, that Jesus will not leave us as orphans but will come to us, that we do not need to be worried because the Spirit will continue to teach us day by day, that, because He lives, we will live as well, and that all of the things He is telling us is so that we may believe. We do not even get the smallest hint that these two strands should be in conflict in any way.

In fact, if the way Jesus speaks of our radical obedience and the absolute priority of grace in this passage tells us anything at all, it should tell us that the ideas cannot be separated at all, that they are utterly interrelated and that we cannot argue as if they are opposing views without destroying the relationship with God that He has established. Real faith, according to Jesus, cannot exist without corresponding action. However, this action is, at every moment, enabled and bolstered by faith and cannot exist without it. We will go more in depth about this continuous, dynamic and personal way to think about the Christian life when we consider Jesus’ image of the vine and branches next week, but it is enough for us today to be reminded that real Christian action simply cannot exist except where it is generated, encouraged, and empowered by Christian faith by the Holy Spirit.

So, in spite of the ocean of ink that has been spilled on behalf of promoting faith apart from works or promoting works apart from faith, we see that the choice between faith and works is a false one. I think that the reason we want to choose between them is because it is so much easier to live if we just reject one of them out of court. After all, it is hard enough to emphasize either one or the other. It is next to impossible to do both. Did I say, “next to impossible?” That is silly. There’s nothing “next to” about it. Living our lives emphasizing both faith and works is something that is utterly beyond all of us. And yet, this is indeed our call. Perhaps this is why Jesus made such a big point about assuring us that He was not leaving us as orphans, that the coming of the Spirit will strengthen us from day to day. We have the promise of God that assures us that, because of our participation in the life of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, we can indeed do this impossible thing called the Christian life.

Again, it is critically important that we understand that faith and works are not different things that we can play off, one against the other, but two sides of the same reality. We can see it here, where Jesus speaks so pointedly about the utter need to obey and keep His commandments if we hope to be His followers and yet treats us with incredible kindness, taking the burden off our shoulders and fulfilling it from within us. But, if we actually read the Bible without allowing the debates of others to force us to read it in a certain way, we see that faith and works are interwoven throughout all of the New Testament. Indeed, even in the Old Testament, the life of faith was accompanied by a corresponding way of life. But, when we look at James’ insistence on the need for works, how does he speak of it, as works that are independent of and against faith? No, but as a way to show whether the faith we think we have is dead or not. Whatever else we might have if we do not do good works, it certainly isn’t living and active faith.

Even Paul, the mighty defender of salvation by faith does not ever imply a faith that is utterly without works flowing from it. In his letter to the Romans, where he explores the idea of faith and the Christian life most carefully, Paul spends a full five chapters at the end, explaining how everything he has said before has concrete consequences in the Christian life and that, to live with the faith of Romans 1-11 without a life that answers to Romans 12-16, is something that never even entered into his mind. Even in his letter to the Galatians, where Paul is more prepared to warn against any works of our own contributing to God’s grace, he does not entertain a possibility of a Christian who does not have a life flowing with the fruit of the Spirit. A Christian whose life is not thoroughly marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control is a contradiction in terms.

The New Testament is of a single voice in saying that there is no Christian faith that does not manifest itself in works and that there are no genuinely Christian works that do not spring from an actual participation in Christ by faith. Brothers and sisters, that should be enough. It should be enough for us to listen to the apostles, who gave their lives to proclaiming the word of God, who are the foundation upon which our Lord has built His church, who are the leaders who do not point to themselves and their own authority, but to the very authority of God, to which they are subject. It should be enough to say that the entire New Testament cries out with a unified voice that we are to be people of faith and action and that those two things must never take away from each other.

It should be enough, but just in case it isn’t, it is not just the New Testament that has affirmed both sides of this tension. Methodism under John Wesley did the same thing. Though Wesley wrote thousands and thousands of pages, sermons, treatises, letters, and his lengthy journal, chronicling the Methodist Revival of the eighteenth century, there might be no better way to understand this twofold emphasis on faith and works than by what it meant to be a Methodist at that time.

If you wanted to join with the Methodists, you were only asked one question, “Do you desire to flee the wrath to come,” that is, are you a sinner who wants to be forgiven. However, if you wanted to stay a Methodist, you had to agree to do three things: Avoid evil, do good, and use the means of grace. You couldn’t be a Methodist and still engage in a life of sin or avoid doing the good that you are able to do, or to not be at church, worshipping with the larger body and participating in the sacraments, as we are about to do. And if you did those things and refused to hold true to your commitment, they would simply not renew your “ticket” for the next quarter, which was your pass to come to the Methodist gatherings.

Surely Methodism under Wesley emphasized works. If you wanted to be a Christian without works, whatever you were, you certainly weren’t a Methodist. However, in spite of the major emphasis Wesley put on obedience to God, he always warned the Methodists of degenerating into what he called the “dead, empty shell of religion.” And what was this but avoiding evil, doing good, and using the means of grace. Wait a minute. Weren’t those the very same things that he said you had to do to be a Methodist? They are indeed, but if they are being done, even with fervor and passion, but without real living and vibrant Christian faith, they are as useless as an empty shell.

In a moment, we are going to celebrate the sacrament of Holy Communion. The sacraments of the church also add their voices to the utter inseparability of faith and works. When we are baptized, especially if we are baptized as infants, we are not baptized because we have already been transformed, but because God has claimed us long before we ever knew He existed. And yet, though the initiative in baptism is all God’s, we are forever stamped with an indelible mark, a never-ending commission to live the rest of our lives as those who are set apart for God. Communion is no different. What have we done to deserve to come to the very table of God? We can look back over even just the last week and see example after example where we were not the people of faith that we ought to be, where we did not respond as Christ would, but as the world would. If our participation in the Lord’s Supper was limited to our earning it, it would be an empty table, a meal that would have to remain uneaten and unshared.

But thanks be to God that this is not the case. We are not invited because we have given God what is required to participate but precisely because we have nothing to contribute. And yet, after we share this holy meal, we do not remain at the table, but go out the doors and back into the world. The spiritual food of which we partake, the body and blood of Christ, nourishes our souls and prepares us for our obedience in the week to come. We come with nothing to give, but are sent out with a story to share, with good news for the world.

So let us come to the table together, as people who hear the voice of Jesus, of Paul, of James and all the apostles, and even the voice of John Wesley and the early Methodists, and participate in the good news of God, knowing that we have not been left as orphans, and that the very Spirit of God will remind us of the words of Christ and strengthen us to do the works of the kingdom. Let us pray.

AMEN

Friday, June 11, 2010

How We Know God: The Incarnation

06/10/10
How We Know God: The Incarnation
BASIC

Over the last few weeks here at BASIC, we have been considering and discussing the question, “How do we know God?” in order to be able to begin to answer the question, “How should we live in response?” So we have been considering ways in which we might come to know God. This whole project really gets down to one of the very most central ideas in all of Christian faith; the idea of revelation. Now, as Christians, we are not just interested in revelation in the abstract. We aren’t interested in revelation of any old thing, but the revelation of God. Now, ever since the very beginning, the people of God, right on back to the ancient Israelites, were intensely aware that only God can reveal God. Not only did God tell them this, they were able to look around at all the nations around them and see what happened when God did not reveal himself to human beings. They made up bizarre rituals, they sacrificed their children, they had drunken orgies, and all the rest. Every time the Jews began to do the kinds of things their pagan neighbors were doing, God sent prophets to remind them of who they were and what they were about. They worshipped a God who told them who he was. They had a God who revealed himself to them in a unique way.

What is really important for us to understand is that, since it is only God that can reveal God, it means that, under absolutely no circumstances at all, can we reveal God. This means that, no matter how much sense an idea about God makes, no matter how much we might want to believe something about God, no matter how good a speaker might be at convincing people that it is true, if it is not rooted and grounded in God’s actual revelation, we must not take it as truth. This means that we are utterly bound to what God has actually revealed about himself to us in our actual world of time and space and we cannot ever bypass this actual self-revelation and invent a god of our own. By the way, there is a word for this kind of behavior. It’s called idolatry.

God has never left humanity utterly without any revelation, but this revelation has always been fundamentally veiled. I want to consider a few ways in which God has revealed himself to us and see in what ways we can come to know God. As the one who created the universe out of nothing, God has left something of an imprint of himself on creation and we encounter creation. However, in spite of this interaction, creation is something other than God so, at the end of the day, we are encountering something that is consistent with God, but not God himself. As the one who inspired the writers of the text of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, God has revealed himself in a way that is much more full. However, we cannot forget that, though God has imprinted himself more clearly in the text of the Bible, the Bible as a text, as a book, is not God (for example, we do not worship the book of the Bible). So, when we encounter the Bible, we are encountering something that is not only consistent with God, but something that is an active witness to that God, but it is still something that is not God.

Now I want you to consider the fact of the Incarnation. When God became a human being in Jesus Christ, he revealed himself to us in a staggering way where the fullness of the divine majesty took up residence within our broken and weak humanity. He died two thousand years ago, but he was also raised from the dead and ascended into heaven and lives even today as a person that we can meet. And when we do meet Jesus, when we encounter him in a personal way, we do so by the power of the Holy Spirit. However, unlike creation which is not God and the Bible which is not God, Jesus is indeed God and the Holy Spirit is indeed God so, when we encounter Jesus in the Spirit, we are encountering God through God.

This is not meant in any way to make it seem that the Scripture is unimportant. After all, how is it that you and I learn anything about Jesus in the first place? It is because we have heard the stories of Jesus as told by his first followers, the ones who knew him and lived with him and were transformed by him. Unless you know of a reliable way to access Christ rooted in what God has actually revealed to the apostles that doesn’t involve the Bible, you are stuck with it. If we try to know Jesus by ignoring what he actually did and said, we are once again trying to make an idol.

The real point of everything I have to say is that Jesus is absolutely the answer to both of the questions “How can we know God?” and “Who is God?” Point me, if you can, to another decisive self-revelation of God along side of Jesus or some source of revelation that tells us something that is true of the reality of God that is utterly new and outside of the revelation of God in Christ and not really an unpacking of what God has actually revealed in Christ and everything that I have to say tonight is absolutely useless. However, be careful about what you say, because if you think you have such a source, then one of the things you are actually saying is that Jesus is not really the fullness of God, but that something has been left out and we can only really know God by trying to peek behind the back of Christ, and if we do that, we set him aside as something less than God in doing so.

Let’s turn to what I think is a particularly amusing passage in the Bible to try to understand this. John 14:7-10 says, “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; from now on you know him and have seen him.” Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’ Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” The real point that Jesus is trying to make here is that there is no need, and actually, no possibility of finding another source of revelation to see God. There is no outside way of thinking, no abstract speculation, no philosophy, nothing else whatsoever that is going to get us closer to God than we are in Jesus Christ.

When we look at Jesus’ response to Philip, we see him saying that a request to see the Father from those who know Him is silly. If you know God, how can you ask to be shown God, as if you did not know Him? He is saying to them. “God is in your midst, living as one of you. God is right in front of you if you have eyes to see it.” The same God that the Father is has come among us as the man Jesus. When we look deeply into the face of Christ, we do not simply look into the face of a man, but into the very face of God. Just earlier in chapter fourteen, Jesus told his disciples that he was going away and that they knew where he was going. Thomas responded, saying that they did not know where he was going. “How do we know the way?” The response is very famous. “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.” What this means is that Jesus is the way to God and there is no other. If we try to think about God without thinking about Christ, if we try to generate an understanding of God that is not fundamentally rooted in the reality of Christ, we are trying to find a way to God outside of Christ. We would be trying to get to God by avoiding God, which would be incredibly stupid, to say the least.

So, if we need to look first and foremost at Jesus to understand God instead of trying to think up God outside of Christ, what do we find when we look there? Let’s try to think out God’s love in light of Christ. We don’t have to look very far if we want to find out how people think about the love of God apart from Christ. I don’t know about you, but I have heard all kinds of different things about God’s love. The real problem seems to be the word itself. What do we mean when we say that God loves us? After all, when we use the word “love,” we mean all kinds of things. Sometimes, we say we love our family. Sometimes, we say we love pizza. Sometimes, we say we love a particular sports team. If you happen to be married, you sometimes (hopefully often) say that you love your spouse. In the last year, I became a father and so I often say that I love my son. If we look out into broader society, we see that love takes on any of a number of meanings. Sometimes love means “a deep, committed decision for a lifetime of relationship.” However, sometimes love means “I enjoy your company at least a little bit.” It also sometimes takes on the meaning, “lust.”

If we have all these different meanings of “love,” which of them, if any, do we mean when we say that God loves us? When God says he loves us, is it like the love we have for our family or is it nothing more than saying he loves us like we love a band or a movie? As if this were not complicated enough, a person’s experiences can radically shape the way they hear the statement, “God loves you.” Even saying that God loves you like a father doesn’t always help because some people have had some terrible fathers, who mistreat them, who maybe have abused them, either physically or mentally. To say that God loves them like a father might (though this is not always the case) make them say, “Forget that! One father is bad enough. Why would I want another one?” Imagine someone who has never received real love before. Perhaps it is a young woman who, every time she ever heard someone say, “I love you,” it was only a way to manipulate her to sleep with them. What might be her reaction if we said to her, “God loves you?”

We have so many ways of understanding the word “love,” and they are not all equally helpful. In fact, some are actually destructive. If you look around, among people who want to talk about the love of God, there are groups who will lobby for one or another meaning for the word love. How are we to decide what God’s love is like, especially since the human expressions of love that we can see are not always very good at all?

In order to sort through all the garbage and actually come to know and be transformed by the love of God, we can’t start with our own experience, with what we imagined one day the love of God is like, or even what someone has told us that God’s love is like. We need to look at Christ, and, when we do so, we see a love that not only helps us to sort through some of the bad ways of thinking of love, but absolutely transcends anything that we would ever have imagined on our own.

Sometimes, we will talk about the coming of Christ into the world, and we will say that the whole world was just waiting for a savior, grieving over their sins, and then God came and took care of it. Now, it is indeed true that God has dealt with sin, but the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of people in the world, even among the people of God, were quite content to stay in their sins, and may not have even been aware of them. Humanity was so utterly steeped in sin that they didn’t even notice it anymore. It was so much a part of their daily lives that it seemed truly natural and therefore, the way things ought to be. In coming into our midst, Jesus exposed our sin for what it is, evil rebellion against God that is not just manifest in what we do, but in who we are.

It is against that backdrop that I want to raise up two particular statements in the Bible about the love of God for us. In Romans 5:6-8, Paul says, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for a good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” When we were so steeped in sin that we couldn’t even see it anymore, God entered into our weak humanity, making our brokenness his own and standing as one of us and one with us. Can you even begin to understand what it cost the second Person of the Trinity to enter into the life of a newborn child, a weeping and wailing baby? For the God of the universe to have to eat food and drink water to survive? To have to go to the bathroom? Can we even begin to fathom the agony on the cross where Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” because he had identified with our sin so completely and suffered the unbridled wrath of God on our behalf and in our place?

The other passage of scripture I want to lift up is 1 John 3:1. “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are.” We have been adopted into the very family of God and made children and, as Paul says, “if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ.” God has not just forgiven us, has not just invited us to be with him for all eternity, but has adopted us into the divine family where the Spirit of God takes the things that belong to Christ and makes them ours. When we look at the actual reality of Christ, we realize that God’s love for us isn’t like the love of our family and it certainly isn’t like we love pizza. We see that the God of the universe, who never needed anything and never had to do anything he didn’t want to do, freely chose to die for us, just because he would rather die and suffer the incredible wrath that our sin deserves than be without us. It means that the love of God is far greater than we ever would have imagined on our own. It means that, at least in a sense, God loves us more than God loves God’s self.

I wanted to talk about how the reality of Christ challenges our understanding of the love of God as one example to help demonstrate how important it is to begin and end all of our thinking about God in the actual, concrete reality of God’s self-revelation in Christ. If we tried to think about God’s love outside of Christ, we would end up starting with our experience or some other made up standard of love and applying it to God. Don’t be afraid to really let Jesus be God. Don’t be afraid that letting Jesus be your standard will somehow cheapen God. As we have seen with just one example, looking at what God has actually done in Christ does not show us that our concept of God is too big, but far too small. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is far greater than any idol we could make for ourselves, so let us abandon our idols and let God be the God he really is and not the false god we human beings want him to be. Let us pray.

AMEN