Romans 7:7-13

11/28/10

Romans 7:7-13

Hudson UMC

Today is the first Sunday in the season of Advent.  The word “Advent” literally means “arrival,” and the church has celebrated this season for a very long time in a twofold way.  First, we remember the fact that God has come among us in and as the man Jesus.  That is to say, Advent celebrates the arrival of God among us in human flesh, both one of us and one with us.  The second thing that we remember and celebrate during Advent is that, though Jesus, after His death and resurrection, was ascended to heaven and we can no longer see Him in a physical way, He promised His followers that He would come back some day.  It is important that, as we get ever nearer to Christmas, the end of Advent, we remember that we are not just remembering the waiting and groaning of the world before Jesus was born, but to identify with it because we find that, once again, the world is waiting and groaning, this time for Jesus to return and bring final deliverance to the world.

You may find that the theme for the sermons during this season of Advent are somewhat different than you might expect.  Traditionally, throughout the four Sunday’s of Advent, the story of the Virgin Birth is told, sometimes four different times, or else one account will be stretched over the four weeks.  As helpful as that approach can be, and as comforting as it might be to dedicate Advent to such a deliberate remembrance, I have felt led to take a different approach and focus on a particularly interesting, and particularly neglected theological theme of Advent.

I want to focus on what happens to human beings when God draws close to them.  This is important because, in Christ, we have an amazing drawing near of God to us, coming among us in a unique, powerful and personal way.  The thing is that, as Christians, as people who find ourselves in the church, whether we have spent our entire lives in the church, as I know many of you have, or if you, like me, are much more of a convert to Christianity rather than having been raised in it, can find ourselves focusing on some things to the exclusion of others.  I think that, unfortunately, we have done this when we think about God coming among us.

You see, our tendency is to say true things without always realizing the fullness of what they mean.  For example, we say, “God drawing near to us is good,” and we are right to say so.  However, it is very common to flatten that out so that we mean, “God drawing near is always and everywhere good for everyone in every sense of the word.”  When we examine the Biblical witness, we find that this is simply not true.  I believe that God drawing near is good for everyone, but it definitely has some implications that we might find are in conflict with some of our culture’s understanding of “good.”

It does not take much effort to find, throughout the Old Testament, but particularly in the first five books and the books that focus on the history of Israel, examples of people who consider a negative side to their encounter with God.  Over and over again, when people encounter God, or even an angel or a vision of God, their response is that of terror.  They walk away from the encounter rejoicing that they have seen the Lord but utterly amazed because they have not been consumed.  One time I was in a group discussion about a text where Moses goes to meet with God in the Tent of Meeting but everyone else stood at the entrances to their tents, not daring to follow.  One person said, “Why wouldn’t they want to go meet with God, too?”  The simple fact is that they did not want to die.  It is easy to take for granted the fact that Jesus has broken down the barrier between us and God, but the ancient people of God always remembered that God told Moses, “You cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live!”

The reason why people could not see God and live is not because God was more angry than compassionate.  It has to do with the fundamental difference between God and human beings.  To meet with God is an intense experience.  Even people who have been Christians for a very long time will tell you that to really meet with God is very powerful.  Even when God’s presence is gentle, it can still be draining.  And this is all for people on this side of Christ’s life, death, resurrection and ascension, not to mention Pentecost.

One of the single most formative moments in Israel’s history is the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, after God had dramatically delivered them from Egyptian oppression.  It was at this point that God more completely fulfilled the promises that He had made to Abraham, that he would be a father of great nations.  By giving the people a law, God truly defined them as a nation, by binding up the people’s national identity and ethnic identity with their religious identity, God made them more than a nation, but also made them a people, a people set apart in every way.

We could say that, in the giving of the law to Israel, God was drawing close to that particular nation in a way that He hadn’t with any other group of people.  No other nation in the Ancient Near East, or even in the entire world, was as completely defined by God as Israel was.  There are two main implications of the giving of the Law to Israel that I want to lift up here.

The first of these is what happened in the actual lawgiving.  The Israelites had just been delivered from Egypt with mighty miracles.  They owed their freedom and their lives to this God.  After only about fifty days, Moses went up Mount Saini to meet with God and, ultimately, to bring that law down to the people so they might know what God wanted them to do.  While Moses was up on the mountain, the people got very antsy, begging Aaron, Moses’ brother, to make them some gods to worship.  The result was the infamous “golden calf.”  Imagine that; less than two months after you had your entire life, both as an individual and as a community, radically transformed by the power of this one God of your ancestors whom had never allowed images to be made of him, you were to say, “Enough of this, let’s make our own gods.”  It seems astonishing.  At the very moment when Moses is receiving the law that is going to set the Israelites apart from the other nations, the people are doing exactly the opposite, insisting that they be just like the other nations, even though their God had just overcome those other nations.

The other implication of the law brings us, finally, to the text from Romans for this morning.  The Jewish law is full of commands, many of them expressed in the well-known formula, “Thou shalt not.”  Paul had just been spending a fair amount of time showing how the law was not effective at bringing about our salvation and emphasizing how God has done what the law was not able to do.  Paul pointed out that, so far from liberating us from sin, it seemed that the law actually increased the sinfulness of the people.  Paul says, “If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.  I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’  But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.  Apart from the law sin lies dead.  I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.”

It needs to be made as clear as possible that Paul is saying that, if it were not for the law, we would not be as outwardly bad as we are.  I remember reading, in high school, a book that suggested that it would have been better if the Ten Commandments were written in positive, rather than negative, language.  For example, instead of saying, “Thou shalt not commit murder,” it should have said, “Thou shalt affirm and support life.”  To put the commands in a negative way, it was argued, is to set the people up for failure because nothing makes us want to do something more than being told not to do it.  A poem by Carl Sandburg asks, “Why did the children put beans in their ears when the one thing we told the children they must not do was put beans in their ears?  Why did the children pour molasses on the cat when the one thing we told the children they must not do was pour molasses on the cat?”

However, we must also be equally clear that Paul does not pin the blame for this evil behavior on the law, but on sin.  “What then should we say?  That the law is sin?  By no means!”  “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good.  Did what is good, then, bring death to me?  By no means!  It was sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure.”  What Paul is saying here is that the law is good, but has been twisted by sin, sin that was lying dormant until the law came along and provoked it to show itself.  The law did not create sin but exposed it for what it is.

So, in response to the concerns that the law makes people more sinful, Paul would respond that people are already sinful; the law just showed us that this was so.  In fact, part of the purpose of the law in the first place was to unmask our secret sinful desires.  Maybe its true that saying, “Thou shalt not…” makes us want to do evil.  But perhaps we must think about it as a way to expose that, while the law is good, we are not always good.  After all, who will say that keeping God first in our lives, allowing ourselves to rest regularly, honoring our parents, and avoiding things like killing, adultery, stealing, lying, and jealousy, are bad things, even if we don’t always do them?  Maybe the big problem we have to deal with is not with the law, but with ourselves.

The point that I really want to make is that God drawing near to us is a good thing, the very best of all things, in fact.  If God did not draw near to us, we would remain untouched by grace, we would not know what it means to be forgiven, to have the very life of God implanted into us.  If God never drew near to us, we would be hard-pressed to really say or believe that God loves us.  After all, who loves us and yet insists on remaining far away?  God’s drawing near is the one thing that will truly transform our lives and break the power of evil in this world of ours.

However, it is also true that this drawing near to us of God is also something that can be very uncomfortable.  When God first moved to free the Israelites from Pharaoh, the immediate response was for the workload, that was already too heavy for the people to bear, was increased.  God setting His people apart and giving them a good law by which to govern their lives resulted in their continual rebellion, doing precisely what the law said they shouldn’t do.  When God drew close to the Israelites by sending His word to them through the prophets, as we will consider next week, calling the people back to the Lord, the people responded by being even more like their pagan neighbors and by treating those prophets badly, often having them killed.  When God came among us in His most personal way yet, in the Incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus of Nazareth, it had catastrophic implications; so much so that the New Testament often uses words reserved for earthquakes and other natural disasters to describe portions of the life of Christ, ultimately provoking the sinfulness of humanity to its highest pitch.

It is tempting to think of the giving of the Law to Israel, if we understand it this way, as the act of a vindictive God who wants to set people up for failure and then punish them for it.  However, the very history of Israel shows us that this is not at all the case.  Remember, the giving of the Law that provokes Israel to sin is not given at the end of the Old Testament but at the beginning.  Moses was not the last great leader of the nation of Israel but the first.  The very fact that we have hundreds of years of Jewish history, where God is continually interacting with the people, both warning and bringing comfort to them, never giving up on them, even in their sin, shows us that the failure of Israel to keep God’s law was not grounds for God abandoning them.  On the contrary, we can see that God stuck to Israel all the more ferociously, not even allowing them to abandon Him.

This is amplified for us as Christians because we can see that God was so far from rejecting sinful people that He chose to come among us personally to accomplish the forgiveness and salvation that the law could not bring.  The Law shows us many things.  It shows us that God and His commands are good, it shows us that we are not particularly good at following them, and, proving that God really isn’t like spiteful and vindictive human beings, it shows us that, though God knows everything that is wrong with us, He still refuses to let us go.

That is why the world was waiting for Christ to come, that is why our God is worth following, and that is why we are waiting for Christ to return and finish healing the world of all its brokenness.  The harshness of God is actually more tender than we can even imagine.  God is good and though His coming often brings us a certain amount of pain, it is never pain for pain’s sake, but always to bind us all the more closely to Him, to redeem and renew us and to heal us from our own self-destructive tendencies.  It is something like the work of a surgeon, who cuts into the flesh, inflicting pain, but so that healing might take place.

As we continue to gather together in anticipation of our celebrating Christ’s birth, let us trust, not in ourselves, but in the mighty power of God to transform both our lives and the world in which we live.  Our God is a God who draws near to us and makes His life our own, not just for our sake, but for the sake of our community and the sake of our world.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Luke 7:36-50 (Thanksgiving)

11/21/10

Luke 7:36-50

Thanksgiving

When I think about passages in the Bible that teach us about giving thanks, I cannot think of any that do a better job than this one.  It reminds us that our actions speak louder than our words and that it is what we do that shows whether we are truly thankful.  In this passage, Jesus shows us that we are not always the best judge of our own intentions or actions.

In our passage, we have Jesus eating dinner at the house of a Pharisee, who invited Him into their home and provided a meal for Him.  During the course of the meal, a woman, who is called in the Scripture “a sinner,” came in and, “weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing his feet and anointing them with the perfume.”  It is very likely that this woman was someone of very ill-repute, someone who was well known in the community for being a sinner and one who showed incredible boldness by even showing up to the Pharisee’s house, let alone to touch one of his guests.

To all observers, it was clear that the Pharisee knew just how sinful this woman was, probably showing revulsion in one form or another.  However, Jesus seems to be completely unaware of who this woman is.  The Pharisee began to think to himself, “If this man were a prophet he would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching him, that she is a sinner.”  The implication, of course, is that, if Jesus knew that this woman was a sinner, He would not allow her to touch Him, He would cast her away and put her back in her place, so to speak.

Jesus, knowing that the Pharisee was thinking these things, but not announcing it, decided to tell a parable.  “A moneylender had two debtors:  one owed five hundred denarii, the other fifty.  When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both.  So which of them will love him more?”  The Pharisee knew the answer, of course.  “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.”  The man knew the right answer and Jesus congratulated him on it, but there seems to be a little bit of buckshot, almost sarcasm, in Jesus’ response.

We have all just heard the rest of the story.  The Pharisee did not give Jesus any water for His feet, a common sign of hospitality in the Ancient Near East.  However, this woman, who had nothing, who was probably not even welcome in the Pharisee’s home, did not stop showing hospitality toward Jesus.  Jesus finishes up His explanation by saying, “For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.”

This is not just an interesting teaching that Jesus meant to go in one ear of His hearers and out the other.  Jesus is breaking one of the cardinal rules of politeness:  Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.  To think about it using the language of thanksgiving, we might say, “Hey Jesus, you don’t seem to be very thankful to this person who has invited you into their home and has given you dinner.  It seems that, even if this Pharisee didn’t give you water to wash your feet, he is still paying for your meal and is being kind to you, even though you don’t seem to be responding in kind.”

So, maybe Jesus wasn’t very polite at that point in time; after all, it is clear that He is saying that the Pharisee is the one who does not love very much.  He certainly broke the social rules of the day.  The people at the table are upset and begin to say, “Who is this man who even forgives sins?”  They weren’t saying it out of amazement at the power of Christ but because they were amazed that someone would be that arrogant to dare to take God’s power upon themselves.

So, what are we to make of this whole story?  Jesus explained that the one who is forgiven much loves much but the one who is forgiven little loves little.  Are we to conclude that, while the woman desperately needed to be forgiven, the Pharisee wasn’t really all that bad and so didn’t need to be forgiven?  It doesn’t seem so.  Remember the parable that Jesus told.  There were two people who had their debts forgiven.  One of them owed ten times as much as the other but the really important bit of information was that neither of them were able to pay what they owed.  It was not as if, left to their own devices, they would both have been able to clear their own debts, it just would take one longer than the other.  It is clear that, even though one owed more than the other, they were both helpless.  It doesn’t matter if you are drowning in a pond or in the ocean, you are still drowning.

Maybe, if we were able to play what I like to call “Big sin, little sin,” and make a list of all the things that this woman has done wrong and a list of all the things that the Pharisee has done wrong, we might be able to show that the Pharisee really isn’t as bad as the woman in some kind of objective sense.  Even if we could do that, what would that prove?  It would still mean that he was in a hole he could not get out of, even if his hole is a little bit shallower than the woman’s.

The real issue here seems to be that both the woman and the man were debtors to God, the woman has received forgiveness gratefully, the Pharisee, if he accepted forgiveness at all, treated it as if it were not that big of a deal.  He clearly did not think of himself as a sinner.  If Jesus’ parable here shows us nothing else, it should show us that, sometimes, what we think we believe is not what we actually believe.  If you want to know what someone really believes, don’t listen to what they say; watch what they do.

I want to illustrate this with a true story.  A friend of a professor of mine from Boston who was in seminary was in an airplane with a business man, also from Boston.  It came out early in the flight that the one was a seminary student and the businessman was a committed atheist.  Both being from Boston, they got themselves into a loud, Bostonian argument in which half the plane was listening in.  They went back and forth until they finally realized that the real issue that divided them was their view of humanity.  The businessman believed that human beings were basically good while the seminary student believed that human beings were created good but were tragically flawed and sinful.  Eventually the seminary student said, “You don’t really believe that and I can prove it.”  They went back and forth, “No you can’t.”  “Yes I can.”  “No you can’t.”  “Yes I can.”  Finally the seminary student said, “Show me your keys.”

Now, in Boston, there is rather a lot of crime, so you lock everything.  If you have decent wheels on your car, you have to lock the lugs on your wheels or else you may find that they have been stolen.  So this businessman, who claimed to believe in the inherent goodness of humanity, had a big wad of keys that he carried with him.  The seminary student responded, “If people are basically good, why do you need all those?”  In spite of the fact that the business man said that he believed that people were basically good and he even thought he believed that, his actions showed that he really believed that at least a certain portion of humanity is not to be trusted.

Now, why would the businessman convince himself that people were basically good when he clearly did not live that way?  I think it is because, if he let himself admit that people are really flawed and not as good as they ought to be, he would be forced to admit that he was flawed and not as good as he ought to be.  I think the same is true with the Pharisee in our text.  If he responded to Jesus with great love, if he really allowed himself to behave as if he had a debt that he could never pay forgiven and his whole situation radically changed, he would have to admit that, in spite of all the appearances to the contrary, he really wasn’t all that better than the woman that he called a sinner.

What was revealed in this interaction between Jesus and the Pharisee is not that the Pharisee loved less because he was forgiven less because he was less of a sinner and so better than the woman.  What was revealed was that the man loved less because he did not realize what he had received and that made him worse than the woman.  Even if we could argue that he was less of a sinner than the woman and so was really the one who owed less, the fact remains, he was still a debtor and was still unable to pay.

When I think about passages like this, I am reminded to be humble.  In his Confessions, Saint Augustine said something to the effect of, “If you have not engaged in the same sinfulness that I have, remember that the same physician prevented you from the sickness that he healed me from.”  I needed to be reminded that I, too, have been forgiven, that I, too, was a debtor with nothing to pay.  Even if I was not a drug dealer or a flagrant sinner, it does not change the fact that I, too, have sinned and I, too, need forgiveness, a forgiveness that is given freely and lovingly, not dependant on anything that I had ever done.

I am thankful for many things today, as I imagine you are, too.  I am thankful for a loving and supportive family, a warm and safe place to live, a job, a community, and many other things.  But there is no question in my mind.  The thing that I am thankful for above all else, even my family, is that God has not left us alone in our sin, has not been strict to demand that we pay our debts, debts that we could never pay, no matter how hard we tried.  I am thankful that we have a God who knows exactly what we are going through because He has not remained far off in heaven but has entered into our broken world of space and time, enduring all the brokenness that goes with it, even suffering and dying on our behalf and in our place.  I am thankful because, not only has God forgiven me, He has given the gift of the Holy Spirit so that even my tendency to sin might be healed.  I am thankful because, in spite of this marvelous gift, I still sin and God is still there to accept me and continue to transform me so that my life looks more and more like Christ’s every day.

But these are not just things that I have to be thankful for.  These are promises and gifts that are offered to you as well.  There are some who are here tonight who know exactly what I am talking about because you are thankful for them, too.  If you have not felt the thankfulness that comes from being adopted into God’s family, receive God’s gift even now.  We worship a God who invites all of us and accepts all of us, in spite of all that we may have done.

So, as we leave this place tonight, let us not be like the Pharisee, who loved little because he had no idea how much he had been forgiven.  Let us cry out to God with our thanksgiving because He has given us everything that we have and continues to provide for us day by day.  Our God is good and He loves us.  Let us give thanks and let us be glad.  Let us pray.

AMEN

John 20:30-31

11/21/10

John 20:30-31

Hudson UMC

With this short, two verse passage, we end John chapter twenty and are left with only one more chapter to go before we are finished with John altogether.  You may all breathe a sigh of relief.  You might think that it is a little silly to try to preach a sermon based on only two verses, especially two such incredibly obvious verses like these.  “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”  What’s the big deal, right?  John is telling us that there is more to say than just what he has written and that he wants us to come to believe like he did.  There is no mystery, there should be no confusion, we can just close the book and move on to new business, right?

It might seem that easy, and perhaps, as far as the text is concerned, it is that easy.  However, in light of the fact that we have had about two thousand years of church history and it seems that every single passage has been interpreted in every way possible, and even in some ways that you never would have thought were possible, it seems that this simple text actually has something to say to us.  As far as I am concerned, the point of this passage is simple and, if you walk away understanding it, I will be more than happy.  If you walk away understanding the text but not understanding why I made such a big deal about it, I can live with that, too.

Let me tip my hand so you can see where I am going with this.  What I am concerned to explore is that texts like this show us that John and the other New Testament writers make a distinction between what they tell us about and the telling of it, that is, the stories about Jesus are just that, stories about Jesus; they are not Jesus Himself.  This probably makes perfect sense.  The other thing that this text tells us is that those same stories of Jesus are not just stories, not just something to pass the time, to entertain us, or even to ask deep questions, but that they are made to communicate something to us, that there is a very real connection between the stories that they share and reality.

Now that you can see that this is where I am going, I want to say that if it were not for the long and complicated history of Western thought, a sermon like this one would be completely unnecessary; we could have just included this text with the one before it or the one after it and pass it by.  However, it is truly amazing how often people have made one of two really big mistakes.  The first of these mistakes is the collapsing our statements of the truth into the truth itself so that our statements are the truth in the fullest sense; the second is the completely separating our statements from reality.  There are probably at least a few of you who aren’t sure why people would make these two mistakes because they seem so completely counter-intuitive, and you are right, they are counter-intuitive.  And yet, these ways of thinking are not at all uncommon.

Let us start with the collapsing of the truth of our statements with the truth of reality.  Over the years, certain ways of speaking about the truths of Christian faith became more or less standard.  For example, everyone spoke of the Triunity of God by saying that God is “One Being, Three Persons.”  In particular, the Pope’s authority grew to an unbelievable height, where the Pope’s word was as authoritative as the Bible.  Before too long, the statements made by the Pope as statements began to be seen as carrying the weight of truth.  To put it in other words, the issue is not whether what the Pope says is true independently of his saying it, that is, whether it would have been true, even if the Pope never said it, but that it is true because the Pope said it.

Now, this sermon is by no means intended to bash the Catholics for two main reasons.  First, much of the Catholic Church has gotten much better around this whole issue.  The second reason is because it has been just as strong, if not stronger, within the Protestant tradition.  One of the things that set the Protestants apart in its early days was its absolute devotion to Scripture.  While the mainstream of the Protestants still affirmed the insights of the early church, there were those who questioned their use of non-biblical language.  For example, it was pointed out that the words “Trinity” and “consubstiatial” which is a Latin word that means, “Of one and the same being” do not appear in the Bible.  If they are not in the Bible, what business do we have using them?

There were many reasons put forward by the major Reformers as to why they had no problem using non-biblical terms, but my point is that there were people who said, “If the Bible doesn’t say it, it isn’t true.”  The only problem with this is that it insists on a very narrow interpretation of what the Bible says.  In this case, for the Bible to say something, it must say so clearly and directly.  The argument was that, since we do not find the phrases, “God is Triune,” or “Jesus is of one being with the Father,” in the Bible, they must not be true statements.  It must be noted that this way of thinking was opposed by Martin Luther, John Calvin and, most importantly for us Methodists, John Wesley.  At one point, Wesley was told that Christians should not read anything other than the Bible because truth can only be communicated in the words of the Bible, Wesley responded, “If we read nothing but the Bible, we should hear nothing but the Bible; and then what becomes of preaching?”

The danger here is that there becomes a strong connection between the truth and the words we use to speak of the truth.  The two things become so very close that they finally become utterly indistinguishable.  When we apply this to the gospel of John, for example, we find that we do not believe because the words on the page have directed us God, but because the text says we should believe.  A sure way to see if someone holds to this understanding of the relation of our words to reality is to ask them to explain a biblical idea in other words.  If they respond by saying that they can’t do that because only these words will do because they are the ones found in the Bible, they are probably unable to clearly tell the difference between the truth of our statements and the truth of reality.

The other mistake that we can make is if we completely separate our words from reality.  This is a harder idea to grasp because, for our entire lives, we have been told and we have experienced for ourselves that words mean things.  To think of our words as just floating in the air, not really meaning anything at all seems silly.  However, there have been many brilliant minds that have gone in this direction.

 There was a tremendously influential philosopher named Immanuel Kant who questioned whether we really ever could understand things as they are in themselves.  Instead, he suggested that we only ever know things as they appear to us and, since we can never know if things appear to other people as they appear to us, we can never know for sure if we are actually making contact with reality.  Before long, it was suggested that what we call the world outside of ourselves does not really exist at all but is merely the projection of our minds.  Things no longer have any meaning in themselves, or, if they did, we could never know it.  The only meaning that exists is meaning for us.

When it became more and more clear that our words do not have meaning in themselves but they acquire meaning in any given community (think, for example, of how slang develops), it was not a difficult thing to imagine that our words and statements do not have any real reference beyond themselves at all.  Everything we say, everything we hear, everything we read, and everything we experience, is simply an exploration of the depths of our own minds.  If we take this approach when we read something like the gospel of John, we do not believe because we are actually convinced that there is a God and that this God has actually come to meet us; instead, we believe because we feel better when we believe.  If someone were to prove that there is no God or that the Bible was completely unreliable, it wouldn’t matter because our faith is not dependent on facts, but on feelings.

So, if both these ways of thinking, while popular throughout Western history, clash with the gospel, what way of thinking would the gospel suggest to us?  What is interesting is that, when compared to all the brilliant thinkers and complicated ideas that have been shared throughout history, the gospel is amazingly simple.  I hope that, for most of you, when you hear me explain what passages like ours for this morning have to say about our words and statements, you aren’t surprised by any of it.  I am convinced that what the Bible has to teach us here is something that comes very naturally to us in our daily lives if we do not complicate it with a bunch of other stuff.

What does John tell us his purpose is in writing?  “These are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”  The goal of John’s gospel, and indeed, all of the Bible, is not that we might know a book really well, that we would get to know a lot of text, nor is it that we would be helped to explore the depths of our souls and come to self-fulfillment, but that we would come to know Jesus Christ and believe in Him, and, through believing in Him, that we would have life in Him.  John is saying that truth is something that lies beyond the text but that the text is meant to point us to that truth.

The relationship between the text of the Bible to the reality of Christ is the relationship between a sign and the thing that is signified.  Imagine that you are driving to Chicago.  At some point, you will see a sign that tells you that Chicago is fifty miles away.  If we make the first mistake we have been talking about, we would have to say that the fact that Chicago is fifty miles away is true because the sign tells us so, not because there actually is a city called Chicago that is actually fifty miles away.  If we make the second mistake, we would have to say, “There may or may not be a city called Chicago that is fifty miles away.  What I need to figure out is how this information helps me understand myself better.”

In this light, both of these ways of thinking are seen to be absurd.  When we see that sign, what do we conclude?  We conclude that, fifty miles from this sign, there is a city called Chicago.  We use the sign to confirm that we are, indeed, on the right road, but we also know that, even if that sign had not been there, Chicago would still have been fifty miles away.  The sign is good, but the city does not depend on the sign to exist.  To give two more examples, if I were to say that my Bible is burgundy or that the paper on which my sermon is printed is white, it would be true, but it would have still been the case, even if I hadn’t said so.

So, what does all of this mean to us today?  It means that, instead of thinking of the Bible as Jesus in book form, as you will find that some do, it seems that it is far more accurate to think of the Bible as John the Baptist in book form.  That is, in the Bible, we have sixty-six books, from different times and different authors, all of whom, in their own ways, are pointing away from themselves and toward God.  If you remember way back to the beginning of the gospel of John, you will recall that John the Baptist explains, referring to Christ, that “He must increase, but I must decrease.”  To insist on following John the Baptist rather than allowing him to direct us away from himself to Christ would be to pervert his message and to miss its point.  To insist on following the Bible in such a way that it keeps us from following the Triune God to whom it points would be equally foolish.

To draw on what John relates to us later in his book, in chapter fourteen, Jesus explains, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.”  If Jesus is indeed the only way to the Father, then there seem to be some ways that don’t lead to the Father that seem relevant to this topic.  If it is through Jesus that we come to the Father, it means that, though we learn about Jesus primarily through the Bible in the worshipping life of the church, it through the Jesus that the Bible bears witness to and not the Bible itself that we come to the Father.  If it is through Jesus that we come to the Father, then it is not through our own sense of self-fulfillment.  We indeed come to know ourselves more completely when we trust in Christ, but that is not an end in itself.  The life that we are directed to seek in the Bible is not a life of our own making, but a life that is in Christ’s name.

So, my encouragement to you is to not place your trust in any of the things that the world tells us are so important.  What really matters is not a text, nor our feelings, but the fact that the God of the universe, who created us and who loves us, has acted decisively to redeem us so that He might not be without us.  Not only this, but this same God has sent the Holy Spirit to dwell within us to renew us in the image of Christ so that having life in Christ’s name might not just be a nice thing to think about but would be a reality.

What will you gain if you memorize the whole Bible, but miss the God to whom it bears witness?  What good is it to feel personally fulfilled but to not know the God who is closer to you than you are to yourself?  Though we call this book we have been working our way through the gospel according to John, we need to remember that it was not signed.  The point is that, though we attribute the book to John, the son of Zebedee, the disciple of Christ, the author felt no need to acknowledge himself.  The point of this book, from beginning to end, is to direct us to Jesus.  John is successful only if we do indeed come to believe in Jesus and he has failed if we do not.  Let us respond in joy and faith because God has done so much and has loved us to the uttermost and will not let us go.  Let us pray.

AMEN

Colossians 2:13-23

11/18/10
Colossians 2:13-23
Expository Preaching

In our passage from last week, we explored the absolutely central place that Christ is to have in our faith. Any attempt to try to “get behind” Christ, to try to find a different or a presumably “better” way to God that somehow bypasses Christ, is harmful to our Christian lives. We saw that, in the Colossian church, this took a Jewish and a Gentile form, which were equally problematic. The big focus was on the fact that Jesus is the answer, completely and in every way.

The question that might have arisen in your mind is, “How does this fact, that it is Jesus, and not the other things we try to put in his place, that is the answer, impact our daily lives?” The reason why the answer to that question was not the main emphasis of the sermon last time is because it is the dominant concern in the second half of chapter two.

There seems to have been something of a revival of ancient Jewish practices in Colossae, where the people took on distinctively Jewish lifestyles, including a particular diet and observing the Jewish festivals. It is not hard to imagine that, while a portion of the Colossian Christian community was insisting on this way of life and another portion was not, tensions arose in their midst. One side would condemn the other for insisting on such distinctively Jewish practices while second group would condemn the first for not following those practices.

Paul’s advice is that they drop the whole argument. “Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or Sabbaths.” This rejection of condemnation is not directed against just one of the two factions, but against both of them. If you only eat or drink certain things and observe the Jewish festivals, do not let someone else condemn you for doing so. It is important that we notice, though, that by saying this, Paul is not aligning himself with one side or the other, because he is also saying that, if you do not keep kosher or keep the Jewish festivals, do not let someone else condemn you for it.

In our increasingly polarized culture, it may be hard for us to understand how Paul could look at these two options, which seem to be the only real alternatives and refuse to take align himself with either of them. And yet, this is precisely what he does. The reason he can do so is because he does not believe that either of them really strikes to the core of our existence as Christians. “These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.” Once again, reinforcing what he has just said, Paul insists that, at the end of the day, Jesus is what matters, so everything else must be marginalized. Scottish theologian Thomas F. Torrance put it so well. “In the great hierarchy of truths, to be absolutely related to what is of permanent and paramount importance in the center, carries with it a requirement for us to be only relatively related to everything else” (Reality and Scientific Theology, 157).

Paul continues on and spends two verses giving some more examples of ways that people need to resist the condemnation of others and persist in clinging to Christ and Christ alone. “Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.” Again, Paul’s point here is that Christ is at the center and, because that is the case, we must not allow ourselves to be disqualified by others because of peripheral things. However, let us go on and consider Paul’s pointed conclusion to this argument.

“If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? Why do you submit to regulations, ‘Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch?’ All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings. These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.”

I have to imagine that these words would probably have elicited an uproar among many people. Is it really true that regulations that restrict what we touch and eat are of no value for checking self-indulgence? Is not one of the reasons why we set restrictions on ourselves to make us constantly aware of what we do and, thus, help prevent us from engaging in self-indulging behavior? Paul asserts that these regulations are not intrinsically helpful. At best, they are “human commands and teachings” that refer to things that are passing away.

Paul will grant that these regulations have “an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body.” Indeed, it is precisely this appearance of usefulness that makes them all the more dangerous. Just like Paul said earlier in this chapter, the danger is not that we would do things that are clearly foolish, but that we would substitute something for Christ that seems good; that’s why he said that he was concerned that the Colossians would be deceived “with plausible arguments.” In spite of the fact that these kinds of regulations seem to be good, in spite of the fact that they have a tradition of being useful, independent of Christ, they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.

Are there any parallels in our contemporary world to the issues in Colossae that Paul points out here? Paul is speaking out against any tendency to substitute another set of ideas or practices for Christ. Surely we do not have to look very far to find things that people have substituted for Christ. In the conservative direction, we see that there are those who place the Bible as a text in the central place in their lives instead of Christ. The argument is, “The Bible is how we learn about Jesus, so it must be good.” In the liberal direction, we see that there are those who substitute social justice and acts of mercy for Christ. Their argument is, “Jesus showed us that we ought to care for the poor and love one another, so it must be good.”

As shocking as it may sound, I believe that these, too, are things that “have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.” How is that, you might ask. In the first case, the passion for the written form of God’s word can very easily become collapsed into the following of rules for rules’ sake. We place the Bible as our authority, not because it bears witness to the greater authority of Christ, but because we have simply decided that this ancient text that has been authoritative over so many should be authoritative over us, too. It is easy to try and reduce everything that God has done into explicit statements and lose sight of the powerful, dynamic and personal nature of God’s work among us and in us . Christ can have nothing to say about how we interpret the Bible because we only care about Christ because he is one of the things taught about in the Bible. However, we must always remember that it is with Christ that we died to the ways of the world, not with a book, even one so unique as the Bible.

In the second case, it is very easy to place our trust, not in what Christ has done independently of us, but in our ability to do the same kinds of things that Jesus did. Immediately, when our acts of justice take the central place, Christ becomes nothing more than the example of good behavior. Good deeds become virtuous in themselves and we quickly begin to wonder, “Why is Jesus special? After all, many people have done good deeds and cared for people. If it is the good deeds that count, why be dogmatic about faith in Christ?” By what standard can we decide what qualifies as social justice or good deeds? Christ can no longer be our criterion because we only care about Christ because he was so good at being good, not because he is truly the controlling center of all our thoughts and actions.

The ultimate lesson to learn from Paul’s critique is that it is very easy to trust in something, anything other than Christ; it is easy to forget that by making anything other than Christ the basis of our decisions is to make Christ not that basis, in spite of all our best intentions.

When we think about all the ways that we can go wrong and indeed, of all the ways that we have gone wrong at one point or another in our lives, it can be tempting to become depressed. After all, if the arguments that distract us are plausible and if the practices that we are tempted to engage in have the appearance of wisdom in promoting all kinds of good things, how can we be set on the right foundation? Here, once again, Paul reminds the Colossians of their history with God. They did not just subscribe to a particular set of views and values; they did not simply have an emotional experience, but they have “died with Christ to the elemental spirits of the universe.” Their life as they know it has changed, they are no longer a part of the world in the same way that they used to be.

Let us, at this point, remember the very first words of this passage. “And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.” The grace of God does not come to any of us after we have changed our lives or after we have gotten our act together, or even after we have allowed Christ to be the center of our lives. No, God’s grace always comes before; God always moves first.

So, in spite of our past failures and our tendency to take our eyes off Christ, let us trust that God is fully revealed to us in Christ and nowhere else. Just as we do not have to look behind Christ’s back to find God but see God when we see Christ, we do not need to substitute an ideology of our own making, but can trust that following Christ and Christ alone will keep us from presumption. As Paul said to the Romans, “He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?”

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, AMEN.

John 20:19-29

11/14/10
John 20:19-29
Hudson UMC

How do you spend your evening on Easter? When I think of what we have done over the past few years, it usually involves spending time with family, maybe watching a movie or playing some games as a group. It is a day that does not usually have an evening meal but is replaced by a kind of constant “grazing.” I would imagine that, for many people, Easter evening is a time to relax.

According to our text for this morning, for the disciples on that very first Easter, this was not at all the case. We read that on the evening of that day that they found Christ’s tomb empty, they were gathered in a house and the doors were locked “for fear of the Jews.” This is something less than a celebratory attitude, is it not? The longer we have been in the church, which for many people in this room has been decades and since their childhood, we may find ourselves losing sight of the fact that the world has not always celebrated the resurrection of Christ. Our customs and our traditions are actually very short when we compare them to the whole of the history of the world, or even all of Christian history.

The disciples had locked their doors because they were afraid. Why should they be afraid? They are afraid because they had thrown their lot in with Jesus. We often, in modern America, think of Jesus as a nice teacher who said some wise things and was somewhat warm and fuzzy, but that was not at all the common perception of Him at the time. Why did the authorities execute Jesus? Because they saw Him primarily as a political criminal, one who was going to rally the people against the status quo, who was going to overthrow the government. He was even called the Messiah, for goodness’ sake, which meant, for most people, that Jesus was going to follow in the footsteps of the great Davidic kings who ruled over Israel before foreign powers took over.

So, that’s what the people who hated Jesus thought, but what about His friends? After all, it is not surprising to have someone misunderstood by people who already don’t like Him. However, it still matters what the authorities thought of Jesus because, whether they were right or wrong, Jesus was considered a political revolutionary and He died a revolutionary’s death. His disciples would be guilty by association, not completely unlike the danger of being associated with a known communist when Joseph McCarthy was in power. Even if the disciples were convinced that Jesus was a gentle, compassionate, peace-loving person, it would not have mattered, because the authorities, those who had tremendous power over them, did not think so.

Even still, is it true that the disciples fundamentally disagreed with this picture of Jesus? It seems that they, too, saw Jesus primarily as a political leader. Peter, for example, was constantly ready to march off to war, even willing to take on a few hundred soldiers and guards by himself when Jesus was arrested. It might be argued that the disciples were just trying to protect themselves, innocent people being harassed by their government. However, it would not really be true. They thought of themselves, at least to a degree, as political revolutionaries, those who would become the new powerful people when Jesus took over Israel. At one point, James and John came up to Jesus and asked if they could sit on His right and His left when He came into His kingdom. They weren’t thinking about His kingdom in heaven, but His kingdom centered in Jerusalem. They were hiding behind locked doors because their dynamic leader was dead and they were at the mercy of the authorities. Even though they had heard Mary Magdalene’s story of seeing Jesus, risen from the dead, they weren’t sure that it was really true.

So anyway, here we have a bunch of disciples, not just the twelve, but likely others as well, behind locked doors for fear of the Jews. What do we read? “Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” Jesus managed to get into the house, even though the doors were locked. The implication seems to be that He did not pick the lock or break in, but that He just walked in. There is something amazing about the resurrected Jesus. He can walk through walls, but in the next chapter, we will see that He can still eat fish. He is certainly physical and physically raised, but are some clear differences from being resurrected in glory and being physical as we often think about it.

The point is that, though the disciples had barricaded themselves in this house so that nobody could get to them, it did not stop God from getting to them. It wasn’t exactly what they were expecting, but Jesus shows up anyway. While Jesus is among the disciples, He does two things, which are deeply related. First, He proclaims, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Jesus was sending His disciples into the world to be the representatives of God. Just as Jesus was sent by God, the disciples are also sent by God to be about the business of God, to proclaim the good news of God. Just as Jesus made disciples of His own, so we are to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. The mission of the disciples, and thus, our mission, is bound up with the mission of Christ.

The other thing that Jesus does is breathe on His disciples, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” This is both fascinating and frightening at the very same time. On the one hand, it is fascinating because Jesus has so completely grafted us into His ministry that He says that we have authority granted by God to forgive people of their sins or to refuse that forgiveness. This is a radical idea. Do you feel qualified to speak authoritatively into a person’s life and say either “Your sins are forgiven” or “You are still in your sins?” Left to my own devices, I must admit that this is something that seems to be far too big for me, and yet Jesus affirms it to be true.

It is frightening because I don’t think that most of us are ready to be given that kind of responsibility. We feel inadequate and indeed we are. We feel so very inferior to those original apostles who transformed the world with their witness. And yet, what have we seen throughout the whole Gospel of John? We see that the disciples haven’t always been the pillars of the faith that they become. We see that they are impulsive, they have their own ideas about what God is about that don’t necessarily have any connection to what God is actually doing and we see that, even in the presence of the resurrected Lord, they are confused and weak. All of that is just like how we often are. It is when the disciples are weak, and not when they are strong, that Jesus grafts them into His ministry. They eventually become strong, but what made them strong? The gift of the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit that you and I are given when we are made the children of God.

This means that, though we often feel weak like the disciples, there is nothing stopping us from becoming strong like they did. You might think to yourself, “I could never be a dynamic witness for Christ. I just don’t have any gifts for ministry. I can’t preach, I’m not good at praying, and I keep getting distracted by other things.” Again, that is nothing different than the disciples. If the Holy Spirit can transform someone as impulsive, selfish, and this-worldly focused as Peter into a mighty preacher and witness to Christ, why can the Spirit not do the very same thing with you? That is why the gift of the Spirit and the being united to the ministry of Christ can be so frightening, and yet it is absolutely true. God has grafted each and every one of us into the ministry of Christ and yes, that means you.

The text now turns to deal with Thomas, whom the Western church calls “Doubting Thomas,” while the Eastern church calls him “Believing Thomas,” since they say the most important thing about him is not that he doubted, but that he came to believe. Thomas was not with the rest of the disciples when Jesus came to them. In spite of the fact that many of his closest friends told him that they had met with Jesus, in spite of the fact that he was bound with them in their fate, whether good or bad, because he, too, was a follower of Christ, he would not believe their witness.

Thomas’ response was, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” His skepticism continued on for a week. Imagine what that would have looked like. Most of Jesus’ disciples had met with Him but Thomas had not. For seven days, while everyone around rejoiced that Christ had been risen, Thomas insisted on his skepticism. We find the whole group, a week later, all gathered together, again behind locked doors. Jesus came to them again. Jesus shows amazing compassion for Thomas because, even though he, too, was hiding in this house and even though he had set up additional barriers between him and Christ (after all, nobody else had put their fingers in Jesus’ wounds), Jesus comes and offers Himself to Thomas.

We do not know for sure if Thomas followed through with his need to actually put this hands in the wounds of Christ, but his response is clear, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus response is, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not yet seen and yet have come to believe.” We could talk about how, since Christ has ascended, people are no longer able to literally “see” Christ but must come to believe through witnesses, which Thomas refused to do. We could talk about the nature of faith, but, since time is short, I want to highlight something that is not always brought up about this story.

The question I want to raise is, “What changed when Jesus revealed Himself to Thomas?” We could answer and say that Thomas’ understanding changed or that his perception of the facts changed, and that would be true, but if we were to ask, “What actual facts changed?” the answer would have to be, “nothing.” The fact that Thomas came to believe and confessed Jesus to be his Lord and God did not actually change any historical facts; it was true, independently of his confession.

If we approach this whole episode from an empiricist view, that believes that nothing can be real unless we can touch it with our hands or see it with our eyes, Thomas would have been completely rational in his refusing to believe until he could verify it with his own senses. In fact, according to this way of thinking, Jesus’ statement that people are blessed if they believe without seeing, would make no sense. It might be responded, “Stupid are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” or if not stupid, then hopelessly irrational.

And yet, in light of the fact that Jesus actually was raised from the dead, that He actually was alive, and that He actually was revealed to His disciples as such, it turns out that Thomas is not the only rational one among them, but actually the only irrational one. He was rational as far as he knew, but because his behavior was inconsistent with what actually was the case, he was actually the only one who was behaving irrationally. What really matters is not what we can see or touch but what really is.

It is interesting that even natural science has moved away from this empiricist notion that, if we cannot see it and if we cannot touch it, it must not exist. In a famous discussion between the great scientists Ernst Mach and Max Planck, Planck was advocating for the atomic theory, that everything we know is made up of atoms of different elements while Mach denied it. When Planck put forward all the evidence from various experiments that all pointed to the validity of the atomic theory, Mach responded, “Show me one.” Well, of course, as we all know, we cannot directly see atoms, nor can we touch a single atom. However, in spite of that, you will hardly find physicists today who will deny that atoms are real, even though they have not seen them or touched them.

So, the challenge for today in light of the story of Thomas is to reflect and see whether our behavior is rational or irrational in light of the resurrection of Christ. This is especially appropriate as we are getting ever closer to Advent. Do we live as if the Son of God has come among us in human flesh, was executed and then raised from the dead? That is to say, do we live as if God has actually interacted profoundly with this world of space and time, not just once upon a time, but here and now; that we are utterly grafted into the ministry of Christ, that we have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit and that we have the ability to forgive and retain sins? Or, do we live as if this is not the case and that we are just human beings who are just doing the best we can and getting by one day at a time?

We have been called into a dynamic ministry, to be the presence of Christ here in our community and, through that, to the world. We are the witnesses that Christ has commissioned in our weakness and given the Holy Spirit to be our strength, we are the blessed ones who have believed even though we have not seen. So, let us go and be about the business of Christ, healing broken relationships, growing in holiness, making disciples for the transformation of the world, and united with everyone else who is also laboring for God’s kingdom, starting right here in this church. Let us go because we are sent, just as God sent Christ into the world, so are we sent into the world, into this community, among these people that God loves so very much. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 20:11-18

11/07/10
John 20:11-18
Hudson UMC

We continue, this morning, with John’s account of the resurrected Jesus, which is the longest in the New Testament. In John we get to see several instances of people coming to meet the resurrected Christ. The reactions that people have when they see Him are particularly interesting. Today, we have the encounter of Mary Magdalene with Christ. She is the first person to see Him, even before those we know as the apostles. Her story raises some interesting thoughts.

We find Mary weeping outside of the tomb. We read, “As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’” If you think about it, this really is a good question to ask. If we were to ask Mary why she was weeping at the very beginning of chapter twenty, it would be a silly question to ask. Why was she weeping? Because Jesus, her teacher and friend, had been executed.

As it stands, the question makes sense and it is her tears that seem out of place. Jesus is no longer there, He has been raised, there are two angels sitting where Jesus had been. We can understand why Mary would weep if Jesus were dead, but He is alive. Surely, if she was the kind of person who jumped to say, “It’s a miracle” at everything she did not understand, as some would have us believe, she would have gone away rejoicing. But this is indeed not the case. John portrays the whole scene as if it were obvious that Jesus was raised and not just missing because, now that he has received the Spirit and has remembered all the things Jesus said while they were together, it makes perfect sense that this is exactly what happened. These two angels are surprised at the tears because, to them, it is clear that Christ has been raised and that is something to rejoice, not weep, over.

But to Mary, this is not the case. Her conclusion when she sees that Jesus is no longer in the tomb is that His body has been stolen. She is convinced that her hope is gone; not only has Jesus been killed to the surprise of His followers, it seems that His enemies have not stopped simply at killing Him but by stealing Him from His tomb. In her mind, she has good reason to weep; there is a large hole in her life.

A man comes up to her and says “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Mary thought that this was a gardener and so she replied, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” The question that might cross our minds is, “Why would a gardener want to take the body of Christ away from the tomb?” Apparently, there were some in the early days of Christianity that claimed that this is exactly what happened. A gardener who worked in a place where someone extremely well-known was buried might be concerned about the large crowds that might come to see the tomb and destroy the plants that he has worked so hard to take care of. It could, conceivably, be in his best interest to remove the body so that people would leave him alone.

What is interesting is that Mary is so intent on finding Jesus. She is so interested in finding her Lord that she is willing to hunt down the body of Jesus and take responsibility for it, presumably taking it to another location altogether. The reason why this is interesting is that this man whom she mistakes for a gardener is actually Jesus Himself, the one she is looking for. She is so intent to see Jesus, so bent on finding Him that she actually misses Him. She was face-to-face with her Lord, and yet she is totally unaware of the fact.

To a certain extent, her confusion is understandable. After all, we have many stories in the New Testament of people not recognizing Jesus after He had been raised from the dead, even people who saw Him face to face. It is a theme that will show up again before we finish John’s account of the life of Christ. However, I can’t help but think that part of the reason that she couldn’t recognize Jesus is because she was expecting one thing and what was really the case was something altogether different.

Mary was expecting to find a Jesus in the tomb, wrapped in grave clothes, lifeless and still. Instead, Jesus was actually living and breathing, resurrected in glory, one whom not even death could defeat or contain. She wanted a Jesus who fit neatly into her preconceived notions, whom she could make sense of with her past experience and she was confronted with a Jesus who was nothing of the sort.

There are many people who do not believe in Jesus. As a Christian pastor, I cannot account for why someone would reject Christ, but it happens. People have many reasons for why they do not believe that range all over the map. However, if someone does not believe in Christ because they cannot recognize Him in spite of all their searching, might it not be possible that they are looking for a Jesus who does not exist? Is it not possible that the Jesus they have been looking for is one of their own creation, one that is shaped by their hopes and desires and not by what God has actually done? This seems to be why Mary could not recognize Christ. The Jesus she was looking for was a dead Jesus, a weak Jesus, a broken Jesus; the only Jesus there is is one who was alive, who was victorious over death; still with the wounds of crucifixion on His body and yet one who is strong in spite of them.

When I suggest that perhaps we human beings tend to look for a Jesus who will fit into our hopes and desires and that is not who Jesus is, I do not mean to imply that Jesus is somehow less than what we hope for and desire but far greater. After all, the Jesus that met with Mary was not the one she hoped to see, but was far better. She had her own understanding of what was possible and this simply didn’t fit into it. To really believe in a God who does the impossible, who heals the broken, and who overcomes despair is hard to do and, if God had not demonstrated very clearly that this is the kind of God He is, it would be hard to explain how anyone could believe. And yet, God is greater than our limited ideas, bigger than the box that we so desperately want to put Him in.

It can be a somewhat difficult thing to see such a faithful follower of Jesus being so confused that they can completely miss Jesus, even when He is right in front of her. It is difficult because we can’t help but wonder, “If Mary could miss Jesus like that, is it not possible that I could miss Him as well?” Indeed it does mean that, but let us not stop reading the text at this point, for if we do, we will miss the rest of the story.

In spite of Mary’s inability to recognize Jesus, does He abandon her? Does He say, “Well, she must not have been trying hard enough, or must not have had enough faith, or must not have wanted to see me badly enough?” No, He does nothing of the sort. He calls out her name, “Mary!” Instantly, the picture is changed, immediately, her guard goes down. Instead of speaking, presumably in Greek, the common language, to the gardener, she speaks in Hebrew, calling out to Jesus, “Rabbouni,” which means “teacher.”

Apparently, Mary runs at this point to embrace Jesus because He responds, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” It is as if Jesus is saying, “I know you are happy that I am back, that I am no longer confined in the tomb, but that does not change the fact that my mission will draw me away from this world of space and time and back to the Father.” This is nothing new, as Jesus has said it before and promised that it was actually better that He left, because then the Advocate, or Holy Spirit, could come and be with them. His saying that He could not stay but had to ascend to the Father were words of comfort and compassion. He would not abandon His followers as orphans but would empower them through the Holy Spirit so that they would do, in His own words, greater things than He did.

Brothers and sisters, this is the God we serve. We follow a God who routinely destroys our preconceptions, who constantly breaks through the limitations we consciously or unconsciously put on Him. As we gather today to remember those who have gone on before us, it is fitting that we should consider the resurrected Christ. After all, those we love have not merely passed away but have gone on to glory, the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ who blesses and keeps them. To God, they are not just nameless and faceless entities, but are loved and known by name. Each of them has heard the voice of the Lord call them, like Mary Magdalene, by name, and the same will be true for each one of us. As we acknowledge our human loss over the past year and throughout our lives, let us also give thanks that we had the chance to know them, to love them, and to be influenced by them, as well as rejoice that, though we are separated for a time, we will indeed be reunited with them one day. Our God is good, now and always. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 20:1-10

10/31/10
John 20:1-10
Hudson UMC

Normally, resurrection is something that we tend to associate with Spring. After all, that is when Easter falls in the church year. At the same time, we are reminded of the general idea of rebirth when we look around and see flowers blooming and trees getting their leaves. So it might feel just a little bit odd that we are going to talk about resurrection at this time of year, after a week that, for my money, was the first real week of late autumn or early winter. It has been cold, it has been windy, it has been not all that pleasant to be outside.

And yet, I think that it is great that our journey through John has brought us to this point at this time of year. It seems that it is precisely when everything around us seems to be going to sleep, when all of nature is in the dying part of its cycle, that we need to hear the word of hope contained in the resurrection. We need to always remember that the hope of the gospel is not just true when we look around and can see all of the world joining in resurrection, but is also true when our world is getting darker, when our world is getting colder.

The resurrection accounts in the New Testament are very interesting. None of the four gospels present the resurrection as if it were an ordinary thing. There are some who would say that believing in the resurrection would have been so much easier to those during Jesus’ time because they tended to believe that anything they couldn’t explain was the miraculous act of God. That is an interesting thought, but not one that we can take seriously on the basis of the New Testament. According to each of the four gospels, the resurrection came as a complete surprise, something that the disciples never would have expected, even though Jesus had spoken of it over and over again. They knew, just like we know, that dead is dead. Once someone has died, they don’t come back again.

And yet, the tomb is empty. Even here in John, as we will see next week, the disciples do not jump immediately to thinking that Jesus was physically raised. Mary Magdalene was convinced that someone had stolen the body. This emptiness of the tomb is extremely important because it was so baffling to the people. In each of the gospels, we are presented with the reality of the empty tomb and the confusion of the disciples. In each, the disciples are portrayed as being astonished and at least dimly aware that this is extremely important, but are totally unsure as to what it really means. Over a longer or shorter span of text, we see them trying to come to terms with what has happen, to understand what it really means that Jesus was raised from the dead. However, we also see that they do not understand in any kind of real way until they received the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.

When we look at how the disciples behave in response to this astonishing fact, that the tomb that Jesus was laid in was now empty, we can see how different it was to their normal way of responding. Let us look primarily at Peter. This is the same Peter who has been so bold throughout the whole ministry of Christ. He claimed that he was willing to die for his master and even inflicted harm on another human being to defend Him. We are used to Peter making a big show of everything. What happens here? He runs to the tomb, goes inside, sees everything, not wrapped on a dead body, but organized neatly, and then what? He goes home. It makes you want to say, “Really, Peter? Is that all you’re going to do?” It just seems so completely anticlimactic.

So, if we look just at the information presented in this particular passage, we have to say that, if we were to ask the disciples what they were thinking, they would say something like, “The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is extremely important, but we have no idea what it means.” The question that we need to ask today, though, is, “Do we have any better idea of what is going on? Do we know what significance the resurrection of Christ from the dead has for us today?” If the answer to that question is no, if we really don’t have any more clarity about the significance of the resurrection then we have to ask why we are here in church. Confusion isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if it never moves to some kind of clarity, we have to ask why we care.

So, even though the disciples at the time did not understand what difference it made that Christ was raised from the dead, as people who live on the other side of Pentecost from the people in our text for this morning, what can we say about it? The first thing that it means is that our God is a God who is indeed more powerful than anything we can imagine. This is important because, if Jesus remained in the tomb, we would have to ask whether God was not finally defeated by death. After all, to outside observers, Jesus would have seemed to be an eccentric traveling preacher who was finally defeated by the power structures of the time, whose ministry ended in death. Instead, the resurrection declares that what seemed like defeat was really nothing of the kind, that not even death, that great enemy of humanity, can stop God.

This impacts us every day. As Christians, we live our lives, as Paul says, “in Christ.” Like we saw in John, chapter fifteen, when we say we are “in Christ” we mean that we are “in Christ” as branches are in a vine. We are so connected that our very existence depends on his and, as I have said before, it is Christ’s blood that pumps through our veins and gives us life. The point is that if we are so deeply connected to Christ and death cannot defeat Christ, what does that say about us? As those who are bound to Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, we need not fear that death will be the end of us, for just as Christ was raised from the dead in glory, so will we who are bound to Him be raised.

Another major implication of the resurrection of Christ is tied to the significance of the crucifixion. One of the things we discovered was that the fact that God had to enter into our broken condition so completely and endure it even to death shows us that our human nature is not what it ought to be. When God deals with our sin and alienation, He does not just wave a magic wand or snap His fingers to take care of it, but puts His very self on the line and suffers and dies, all for us because God refuses to be without us. The resurrection shows us that God is not content just to put the sinfulness of our humanity to death, but does not stop short of resurrecting it in glory, healed and perfected by the very power of God.

The wonderful thing about this is that it gives us a glimpse into where God is leading us at the end of the day. God’s actions in our world of space and time are not random, they are not arbitrary, but instead are clearly directed toward a particular goal. We see that things will not always be as they are now. Things will be transformed; so much so that we might not have any idea at first what has happened. And yet, we can see that, in spite of the fact that God’s ultimate plans seem so different than what we know today, we can see that there is still continuity between this world and the world to come. After all, when Jesus was raised, it was not simply a spiritual resurrection (whatever that might be), but, when He was resurrected, it left the tomb empty.

But the question that some people have asked over the years, especially in our modern world of science, is, “But can we really believe that Jesus was raised from the dead?” After all, if we look around at our world, we don’t see people being raised from the dead. If we have no modern examples of the resurrection, can we really be expected to believe in it? This is a serious question because, according to the church from the very earliest days, even within the New Testament documents, if Christ has not actually been raised from the dead, our faith is based on a lie and we are, of all people, most to be pitied.

And yet, in spite of the fact that this seems so logical, it is less convincing than some might think. The fact that there is only one of something throughout all of history is not proof that it must be a misunderstanding. After all, this universe of ours has never existed before and it will never exist again. The universe of space and time as we know it is absolutely one of a kind and yet we could not deny it without being totally irrational. Natural science has actually become more compatible with Christian faith than it has ever been before.

To give an example, I want to relate an experience that Thomas F. Torrance, who is something of a theological hero of mine, as many of you know, shared in an interview. He was sharing a platform with another well-known theologian who denied that Jesus was raised physically from the dead. Torrance challenged him on this point, asking him why he denied the physical resurrection. The response was “Because you can’t talk like that in the modern scientific world.” Torrance, who was also a widely respected philosopher of science, and also just a little bit feisty, retorted, “The exact opposite is the case: only if you speak of the resurrection in terms of an empty tomb, of an event that is physical and a direct act of God can it scientifically be respectable, can you communicate about it.” At that, a physicist jumped up to support Torrance over the other theologian.

This just goes to show that God does not stand off and let our world just tumble on its own as deists have said both during the Enlightenment and today, but enters into it in a profound way. The resurrection is not just a way of talking about something that happens in our mind or something that makes us feel good, but something that has actually taken place in space and time. God presses up against our world, not only upholding it, but deeply impacting what happens in it. The resurrection was the raising of an actual human being who lived in an actual place at an actual time in history, who was buried in an actual tomb and was actually returned to life again, healed and transformed.

So, in order to understand the significance of the resurrection of Christ for our lives as individuals and as the church today, I want to try and paint the picture of what Christ has done. In the beginning, the Triune God of grace, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, created the heavens and the earth, crowning creation with human beings, both male and female. However, humanity rebelled against God, taking His authority for their own. This did not just affect humanity, but it worked itself out by making all of creation broken and not what it ought to be. Throughout the Old Testament times, God promised that He would so radically transform our world of space and time that the lion and the lamb would lie down together and that children could even play over the hole of venomous snakes without being in danger.

For years, the people of Israel yearned for this kind of transformation to take place but were disappointed. The world that God had promised seemed so far off that many have doubted whether it would ever happen at all. This is where we Christians, precisely as Christians, cling to a hope that we believe to rooted and grounded in God’s concrete act in Christ. In Christ, God came among us as a human, as one of us and one with us. God came to take our brokenness and alienation upon Himself, to truly and concretely recreate our human nature, to fully and finally undo the brokenness that human beings have inflicted on the world as we know it.

But this redemption did not come without a cost. By dealing decisively with our sin, God was not declaring that our sin really wasn’t that bad after all, but that it was so bad that it could only be dealt with at tremendous cost to God. The act of redemption is simultaneously an act of judgment. God passes judgment on our evil but endures the brunt of the punishment Himself, turning the power of the wrath of God, not against us, but against Christ, God in flesh. In the crucifixion, we have God opposed to God, in a sense, God negating God. It is a fearful thought, one that we may not want to think, but we have little choice but to take it very seriously because Jesus on the cross cried out, “Eloi eloi, lama sabachthani,” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And yet the story does not end with the crucifixion. Jesus was not just a man who taught an idealistic lifestyle and then died a tragic death. In Christ, God endured the brokenness of this world, the brokenness that you and I endure every single day, and put it to death, but then was raised in glory on the third day.

What does this mean? It means that, God has not given up on our world of space and time. Even when we might wish that we could just escape out of our troubles, out of our bodies and just leave this world behind, God does no such thing. God did not just take on human flesh for a little while, but has entered in it once and for all. The Son of God is still incarnate, even to this day. It means that God does not want to save us out of the world, but in it. It means that, even though there are some things that need to be put to death before they can be healed, healing is indeed God’s final plan for you, for me, and for this world in which we live.

And so, since God thinks that this world is worth saving, since God has given so much to heal us, since God has implicated us in this saving and healing and has invited us to join with Him in this ministry (Jesus said in His high priestly prayer that, as the Father had sent Him, He sends His followers into the world), let us go boldly and with joy. Brothers and sisters, we are people who know the end of the story. Even though we do not know all the details of what God will do, we know that He is about recreating the world and bringing healing to the broken. Since we know what God is about and since we know that God has so deeply committed Himself to it that He was willing to die for it, how can we ignore the mission of God in the world around us? We are resurrection people, the people of God, so let us be about the business of God, the business of reconciliation and transformation through the power of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray.

AMEN