12/21/11 God Trusts Us GUMC Youth
Last time we got together, two weeks ago, I said that we live in a culture that just kind of assumes that everyone is a Christian, that we live in a "Christian nation." When I say that our culture does this I don't mean to say that it is a good thing, like many other people might. I am not at all convinced that it is a good thing to think of America as a Christian nation and I will tell you why. When we say, "We live in a Christian nation," it is all too easy to get blinded and tricked into thinking that what is Christian must be American and, even more dangerously, that what is American must be Christian. If we tried, we could probably make a pretty good list of things that we do as Americans that are completely acceptable in the eyes of the culture that, when we look at it through the eyes of the gospel, maybe we shouldn't do.
My point for bringing this up over and over again is not to give America a black eye. I am glad to live here and not somewhere else. I am not anti-America in any way. I am, however, so radically and completely pro-Jesus that I refuse to take my cue of what Christianity is all about from what I see in American culture. With that in mind, I have been trying to focus on things that Christmas teaches us that are more important than what we might imagine from looking at our secular culture during December. Last time, we talked about how, because at Christmas we celebrate the coming of God into our world, the Creator becoming a creature, Christmas is actually the center of all of space and time. Tonight, I want to talk about how Christmas shows us just how much God trusts us, which is a pretty amazing thing.
Now, when we ask the question, "Does God trust us," it seems at first glance that we can only take our answer in one of two directions. The first way we can look at it is to say that, because we are such sinful people and God is so holy, it would be hard to imagine that God really trusts us. It seems that every single time God entrusts anything into human hands, things fall apart. God calls Abraham and he starts telling lies to keep himself out of trouble. He calls Moses and he makes excuse after excuse to get out of doing what God wants him to do. He takes David from a small farming town and makes him one of the greatest kings that Israel ever had, and yet he responds by committing adultery and murder. There is no end to the examples we could put forward of how human beings continually let God down because they keep doing stupid things. Not only that, we can all look into our own hearts and see that we are all capable of doing stupid things, even if we don't do them all the time.
If we want to look at things from this angle, we could say that there is probably no greater example of why God should not trust us than the crucifixion. When God, in all his love and mercy, comes to meet us where we are, what do we do? We nail him to a cross. Back in the 90's, a singer named Joan Osborne asked the question, "What if God was one of us?" That question isn't an abstract one for us Christians. In Christ, God actually did become one of us. What if God was one of us? We have shown by our actions that we would kill him. If the very coming of love into our midst could only provoke anger and hatred from us, why should God trust us?
Now, we could look at it from a completely different point of view, one that our modern culture might like pretty well. After all, we don't need to look very far to find that the view that human beings are basically good and trustworthy by nature is amazingly common. Never mind the fact that human beings consistently commit horrible crimes against each other, never mind that our world seems to be continually torn by war, human beings are basically good. Even though it is clear where I come out on the issue of the inherent goodness of humanity, let's try to take it seriously and see where it leads us in this question, "Does God trust us?"
Now, if human beings are basically good and trustworthy, then the answer to the question whether God trusts us is a resounding "Yes!" And why not? After all, I do what I can to be good and trustworthy and I am sure that many, if not all of you do what you can to be good and trustworthy people. Being "good people" is really important to our culture today. What is interesting is that, because our whole culture teaches us to be fixated on ourselves, we sometimes don't realize how much we get in our own way to be good, especially because everyone around us seems to be doing the same things. I have some friends who have committed to giving away quite a bit more of their money to their church and other causes than the average person. Once, some friends said to them, "Boy, I wish I could give more, but I just don't have enough money to do it." The fact of the matter is that these same people who wanted to give more "go out" every weekend, which is a kind of code for, "going out to eat at a nice restaurant and getting a few drinks (and alcohol can be expensive)" which costs a lot of money if you do it all the time. The fact of the matter is that these people have plenty of money to give if they wanted to, but because they have believed the lie that says they have to spend all their money on themselves and they look around and see everyone else around them doing it, too, they simply can't see it.
Even if we put those kinds of situations aside, how many of you would say that there are people in the world who are not good people? How many of you would say that there are people you go to school with who are not, to all observers, good people? How many of them, if asked if they were a good person, would say "no?" Probably not any, or very very few of them. We all know people who are not good people, and we can see that human evil is a very real problem in our world, but we really want to believe that human beings are, at their core, good. Why is that? I am more and more convinced that it is because we want to convince ourselves that we are good people. After all, if I were to ask you, "Are you a good person?" you would probably say, "yes," right? What would you have to do before you would consider it possible that maybe you weren't as good as you would like to think you are? We desperately want to say, "Yes, God trusts us," because we want to think of ourselves as people that are worthy of trust, as people who are good enough for God to rely on.
So, we have two ways of looking at things. One of them says that God trusts us because we are trustworthy people, but can only say it by pretending the Bible doesn't say what it says, or by pretending it doesn't mean what it so obviously means. The other view says that God does not trust us because we cannot be trusted. This view takes the failure of humanity very seriously, but that seems to be a pretty depressing view of our situation and our relationship with God. In fact, it actually makes God seem kind of stupid, since he can't seem to figure it out that human beings keep messing things up, that every time he tells them to do something, they seem to find new and creative ways of sinning in the middle of it.
If you have gotten to know me at all over the last six months, you can probably tell that I don't quite fit into either group. On the one hand, it is clear that I don't think that human beings are, by nature, good. Yes, God created human beings good, but if that is the last word, we have forgotten the whole story of the Fall and the countless examples of human beings not being what they ought to be that we find in the Bible. And yet, though I feel that way about human beings, I didn't title this message "God Doesn't Trust Us," but "God Trusts Us." Unless I am being sarcastic (which I'm not), I must think that God actually does trust us. If that sounds odd, hopefully it will make more sense in a minute.
This is the whole reason why I had us read the passage from Luke's gospel where the angel speaks to Mary and tells her that she is going to be the mother of Jesus, of God when he stepped into his creation. Have you ever thought about how much God must have trusted Mary? There is so much that can go wrong in a pregnancy, especially two thousand years ago. God is saying to Mary, "I trust that you are going to take care of yourself throughout this whole pregnancy, I trust that you are going to be able to stand strong when people make fun of you for getting pregnant before you got married (because you know the truth that they don't and maybe even can't understand), I trust that you will make a good mother, that I will even allow you to raise Jesus, the God who created you." There is not a single parent in the history of the world who could say with absolute confidence, "I was a perfect parent." They might say, "I did the best I could do," or "In spite of all my faults, my kids turned out alright and that's all I can hope for," but I have not met anyone who would say, "I did everything right as a parent, every single day." And yet, here we have God entrusting the raising of Jesus into the hands of this ordinary, fallible human woman. That is pretty astonishing.
Once we begin to see that God actually might trust us at Christmastime, we start seeing that trust all over the place. Think about it; God comes into our midst, lives his life, has a teaching and miracle-working ministry, but he doesn't stay forever. Jesus eventually leaves. He is killed, raised from the dead, but within two months, he ascends back to his Father and is no longer among his disciples in the personal and physical way he had been before. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew we read what has come to be known as The Great Commission. "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." And then he leaves, he ascends to heaven.
Do you see what Jesus has done? He was raised from the dead in glory, he did not have to leave, but he did. He left the ministry that he, that is God himself, started, in the hands of ordinary people like you and me. Not only that, as we talked about a few months ago, it is a pretty odd group of people that he entrusts his ministry to. The one that we usually remember is that he trusts his ministry in the hands of people like Peter who denied him three times on the night he was betrayed, but that is not all. He also trusts it in the hands of people like James and John who were hot-tempered, impulsive people, and people like Simon the Zealot and Levi the tax collector, people from two groups that hated each other so much, it is amazing they can even be in the same place at the same time without violence, and Thomas the skeptic. When we look at the people that Jesus actually trusts to carry his message into the world, we realize that they are just like us, weak and broken people who have made a lot of mistakes. It is true that he sends his Holy Spirit to strengthen those disciples, but it was in their hands nonetheless.
So, what about all the failures of humanity that we pointed out earlier and are on nearly every page of the Bible? I mentioned that there are some who might say that because we are so unfaithful, God does not or at least should not trust us, but that isn't what I believe. That is because when I look at the failures of all the people in the Bible I don't just see them but I see something else, too. I also see God's plans not hindered by it. The sin of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, the disciples and a host of others did not stop God from doing what he was trying to do.
Here is some good news. We can look at the Bible, the whole of Christian history and even people in our lives today and see that God can do mighty things when people wake up and listen to him. It comes as no surprise that God moves when people are faithful, but does God only use our successes? What about our failures? Can God use them, too? It is clear that God absolutely does use our failures, and sometimes uses them as the most powerful expressions of his grace. We all know Peter denied Christ three times on Good Friday. After he was raised, Jesus asked Peter if he loved him, but he didn't just ask it, he asked it three times. It is almost as if Jesus was undoing those denials. Jesus showed Peter that those denials from back then did not stop him from being his disciple right now.
To give another example, look at the crucifixion. Was there ever a more evil act of humanity than the betrayal and murder of the Son of God? Was there ever a greater failure of human beings to respond in faith to what God was doing? In all of history, the single greatest failure of humanity is in the crucifixion of Christ. And yet, that astonishing failure did not stop God from using that very moment as the most profound expression of his love for us. The crucifixion has been so completely transformed by God, so completely used by God for his own purpose, that many people find it very difficult to appreciate the human evil expressed in it.
The point is that God is not afraid of your evil. That doesn't make your evil good, and he is still going to work with you to get rid of that evil, but he is not afraid of it. In fact, it is very likely that he will take your biggest mistakes and transform them into the the means by which you are bound all the more tightly to him. When I look back and see all the times I have made mistakes, I realize that God's grace is bigger than all of them. That God is powerful enough to use me, even when I am weak and broken and can't seem to get my act together.
God trusts us, even if we don't think he should, because he knows something that we often forget: That we are his children, that he loves us with a love that will not let us go, that he will not abandon us, even if we might want him to. So, when you go back home and back to school, remember that God has given you a mission, a great calling that you can't get out of even if you wanted to because God trusts that you can do great things, and that he can use even your failures for his glory. So go and be bold, for through his Holy Spirit, God himself dwells in you and has made you his own. Let us pray.
AMEN
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Emmanuel, God With Us
12/18/11 1 John 1:1-10 Grace UMC
Several years ago, at a different church, when I preached my very first Christmas Eve sermon, I made a statement that the birth of Christ was a relatively unimportant event. I did not say, nor did I mean, that it was unimportant, but that it was relatively unimportant. In the message, I spelled out some of the things that Jesus did not come to do: he did not come to give us an extravagant, human-centered holiday, he did not come to brainwash us and make everyone conform to some narrow definition of "the Christian life," he did not come to make everyone happy and, perhaps most importantly, he did not come to leave us how we are. Then I raised the question, "If those are some of the things that Jesus did not come to do, what did he come to do?" I took the response from John's first letter, where he says, "The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil," which happened most fully and finally in the death and resurrection of Christ. That is to say, Jesus was born so that he could die.
While I still stand by the fact that the death of Christ is of supreme importance for us as Christians and that we cannot correctly understand the New Testament witness to what Jesus has done on our behalf and in our place if we forget about Good Friday and Easter, I will never again make the point that the birth of Christ is unimportant, relatively or otherwise. You see, it is not just important that we have a God who dies for us, as amazing as that might be, but we also have a God who lives for us, a God for whom no sacrifice is too great, even becoming a creature and entering into his creation.
The reason I said what I said my first Christmas as a pastor is because I had been misled by a well-meaning but inadequate understanding of just who Jesus is and why he came, which is quite common in our world today. If you were to ask many Christians, "Why did Jesus come?" the answer would often be something like this, "Jesus came because God needed a perfect human to die for us so we could be forgiven." If pushed, they may continue and emphasize that Jesus' teaching ministry was important as well, that we needed to learn from Jesus as well as have him die for us. The radical humanity of Christ tends to play nothing more than an instrumental role in God's plan; that is, it serves as a vehicle to get a perfect human being from the cradle to the cross, but not much more.
I don't mean to imply that the things this view emphasizes are fundamentally wrong. It is absolutely true that Jesus lived his life in utter human perfection, that if he had not lived in such perfection, it would call into question God's saving act through his death. It is true that we benefit from Jesus' teaching, which often surprises us and catapults us out of our comfort zone. My point is that the reality of what God has done in, through, and as Jesus is far more dynamic and staggering than this view leads us to believe. As true as it might be, we cannot collapse all of what God has done in Christ to simply the formula, "We had a debt, God paid it, now we are free."
When we look closely at what John tells us in our passage for this morning, we see that he, at least, understood the coming of God in our midst to be of supreme importance. "We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life." According to John, the word of life is not just a concept, not just an idea that we can learn once and then never worry about again. The word of life is something that does not stay "out there" but something that comes and meets with us, that is something that entered into our world of space and time, that was actually encountered by real human beings. Jesus of Nazareth was not just a man, but the very word and truth of God, taking up residence in the same world we live in, walking around real places that we can visit today, using real human words, eating real human food, interacting with and building relationships with real human beings not unlike you and me.
I don't know how often you think about the fact that the God who created the universe with nothing more than a word, who never needed to create the universe or people to live in it, actually stepped into it, God becoming a man, the Creator becoming a creature, but it is truly astonishing. In Jesus we have a word that we don't just hear, but that we can see and touch and enter into relationship with. In the baby in the manger we have nothing less than all the fullness of God in our midst, the God of all as a human infant, the Creator of all the vastness of the cosmos so small you could hold him in your hand, the very Word of God unable to speak but reduced to cries to communicate with his parents, those he had created. When I think about the earth-shattering idea that God himself has met with us, I am so overwhelmed, I can't hardly get over it.
Though the coming of God into our world in Christ has become a fairly common notion, something that we affirm, often without thinking about it, it was not always so. There have been many people who have found it impossible to believe that God either could or would become a human in our midst. The ancient Greek philosophers argued that God was so utterly detached from the world that we live in that God could not come among us, even if he wanted to. The Jewish thinkers of the first and second centuries who engaged in dialogue with Christians affirmed that God could become a human being, but that he never would do so, that they simply could not entertain the idea that the holy and glorious Lord and God of the universe would stoop to such a lowly position as to become a human being.
The offensiveness of this central claim of the Gospel, that in the man Jesus of Nazareth, we have to do with God himself, did not go away. Arius, a church leader in the early fourth century, said that God would not have come among us, so we must think of Jesus as a creature, a lofty messenger, but not God. A group called the docetists taught that, if Jesus really is God, then he cannot really be a a human, but only seems to be like us. Apollinaris of Laodicea argued that, in becoming a human, God refused to take on a real human mind, since it is so diseased by sin, and so Jesus is not really a human in the same sense that we are.
Even when Christianity became the dominant religion in the West, resistance to this idea that God would really meet us and make himself accessible to ordinary humans like you and me continued. Isaac Newton, the great physicist, thought of God as the great container of the whole of space and time. If that is the case, to say that God entered into his creation is like saying a box contains that contains many things, also contains itself, which would be ridiculous. Even today, we are surrounded by people, theologians, biblical scholars, and many others, who simply cannot bring themselves to really believe that when we look into the face of Jesus, we see the face of God, a face that we have never seen anywhere else and that we could never see in any other way. The reality of the incarnation, that the God of the universe has come among us, is repeatedly domesticated into the idea that Jesus was just really good at being good, that we follow him like we would follow any other human leader, that the real work of Christ is to provide us a model to follow in our lives (though even when we look at it this way, we usually stop short of suffering and dying, like he did), and in other ways as well.
Why do we do this? Why is it so hard for human beings to admit the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Jesus is who he claims to be, truly united to the Father, the Son of God in whose hands the Father has placed all things, the one who is in the Father and in whom the Father dwells, the one through whom all things were made and without whom the Father does nothing? I think it is because we are terrified to see the coming of God into our world for what it really is: an invasion. It doesn't take much to see that we live in a world that is dreadfully infected with sin. It isn't just that we commit sins, but that sin goes down to the core of who we are. We don't just make mistakes, we don't just make wrong choices because we don't know which choice is right and which is wrong. All too often, we know all too well what is the right thing to do and choose the wrong thing anyway. And it isn't just that we sin, but our neighbors sin too, and it is isn't just we as individuals who do what is wrong, we as a society sin, too.
In the midst of all this sin, it really is no surprise why we would rather find some way, any way, to keep God from meeting us here in this world of ours. So long as God remains "out there," we are like kids who have made a huge mess while our parents are out of the house. We keep telling ourselves, "We'll fix it in time, we'll get it all cleaned up before they come home." But every time we try to clean up our mess, in spite of our best efforts, we make it worse. So long as God has not actually come among us, we can still convince ourselves that there is still time to make things right on our own; we can still get our act together, we can still pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Maybe, just maybe, God won't even notice that we haven't been as good as we would like to think and we'll be let off the hook. Maybe we'll get it all cleaned up in time, maybe we'll never have to face the consequences for what we have done. As soon as we admit that, in Jesus we have to do with nothing less than the very God of the universe, we realize that we are out of time, that we were out of time even before we were born. We have made a mess and we didn't get it cleaned up. Indeed, we realize, when we are face to face with God, that we never could have cleaned it up on our own.
But when we realize that the jig is up, that we didn't, and even couldn't save ourselves, when we realize that the high and holy God has actually come near, has met with us, who has, by his Spirit, probed into the depths of our hearts, we find that all the consequences we feared do not come to pass. When we come face to face with God in Christ, we are asked to open our hands and give up everything we have. We are asked, not only to give over the mess we have made, but we are asked to give up even all our best attempts at cleaning it up, and God takes them from us and takes them to the cross. The only way we face punishment is if we stand before God and say, "I never made that mess; it was someone else; I was set up," or perhaps, "Yes, I made a mess, but I did my best to clean it up, so that should count for something."
We read in the New Testament that there will be a judgment, that we will all be judged. This can be, and has been a frightening thing for many people, but we need to ask, "When we are judged, who will be our judge?" We are told in the book of Revelation that the one who oversees the judgment is Jesus, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, the one who conquers, but when this Lion is revealed, what is it that we see? "A Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered." Our judge is not a vindictive human being like we can so often be, but one who has been sacrificed in atoning reconciliation on our behalf and in our place. The one who will judge us is not some angry pagan god who weighs up our good deeds and our evil deeds and we had better hope and pray that we've done more good than bad. Rather, the God who judges us is the God who has made our cause his own who, when he set out to redeem us from our sin and death, did not count it too great a sacrifice to become one of us, God of the universe though he was, live in our broken world and finally take our disease, sin and death on his own shoulders and take them to the cross.
As Charles Wesley wrote, "'Tis mystery all, the immortal dies, who can explore his strange design. In vain the firstborn seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. 'Tis mercy all, let earth adore, let angel minds inquire no more."
If we were in a situation where we had simply built up a debt that needed to be paid, then all we would need is a savior who would be willing to die for us. If all we needed was a savior who would die our death on our behalf and in our place, then we could say that Christmas only matters because there has to be Christmas before there can be Easter. But we are not just people who commit sins, we are sinners. The fact that, in Christ, we see God walking as one of us and one with us, we see him enduring our temptations and overcoming them, we see him confessing our sins when he is baptized in the Jordan, we see him being faithful where we are all too often faithless, shows us that we do not only need a God who dies for us, but a God who lives for us. We not only have a God who offers up his own death so that we do not need to suffer the eternal death that would separate us from God, our God also comes and lives the life that we could not live and offers that in on our behalf and in our place. To believe in Jesus is not just something we say, not just something to check off our list of things to do in this life, but a profound trust that, when God judges us, it will be the God who sacrificed himself for us and that this God will accept, not only the death of Christ in the place of our death, but the life of Christ in the place of our lives.
Because of what God has done, we are bound to Christ in every way. Listen to these words of Gregory Nazianzen, one of the most important leaders in the early church. "We needed an Incarnate God, a God put to death, that we might live. We were put to death together with him, that we might be cleansed; we rose again with him because we were put to death with Him; we were glorified with him, because we rose again with him." In everything we do, whether in life or in death, we find that it is in Christ that we live and move and have our being. Our God is a God who does not abandon us, but meets us where we are, long before we ever dreamed of turning to him. Though the coming of Christ is an invasion into this world of sin and that means even our sin is under attack, it is not an attack that destroys us, but liberates us and makes us free to love like we have never loved before. O come, O come, Emmanuel. Let us pray.
AMEN
Several years ago, at a different church, when I preached my very first Christmas Eve sermon, I made a statement that the birth of Christ was a relatively unimportant event. I did not say, nor did I mean, that it was unimportant, but that it was relatively unimportant. In the message, I spelled out some of the things that Jesus did not come to do: he did not come to give us an extravagant, human-centered holiday, he did not come to brainwash us and make everyone conform to some narrow definition of "the Christian life," he did not come to make everyone happy and, perhaps most importantly, he did not come to leave us how we are. Then I raised the question, "If those are some of the things that Jesus did not come to do, what did he come to do?" I took the response from John's first letter, where he says, "The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil," which happened most fully and finally in the death and resurrection of Christ. That is to say, Jesus was born so that he could die.
While I still stand by the fact that the death of Christ is of supreme importance for us as Christians and that we cannot correctly understand the New Testament witness to what Jesus has done on our behalf and in our place if we forget about Good Friday and Easter, I will never again make the point that the birth of Christ is unimportant, relatively or otherwise. You see, it is not just important that we have a God who dies for us, as amazing as that might be, but we also have a God who lives for us, a God for whom no sacrifice is too great, even becoming a creature and entering into his creation.
The reason I said what I said my first Christmas as a pastor is because I had been misled by a well-meaning but inadequate understanding of just who Jesus is and why he came, which is quite common in our world today. If you were to ask many Christians, "Why did Jesus come?" the answer would often be something like this, "Jesus came because God needed a perfect human to die for us so we could be forgiven." If pushed, they may continue and emphasize that Jesus' teaching ministry was important as well, that we needed to learn from Jesus as well as have him die for us. The radical humanity of Christ tends to play nothing more than an instrumental role in God's plan; that is, it serves as a vehicle to get a perfect human being from the cradle to the cross, but not much more.
I don't mean to imply that the things this view emphasizes are fundamentally wrong. It is absolutely true that Jesus lived his life in utter human perfection, that if he had not lived in such perfection, it would call into question God's saving act through his death. It is true that we benefit from Jesus' teaching, which often surprises us and catapults us out of our comfort zone. My point is that the reality of what God has done in, through, and as Jesus is far more dynamic and staggering than this view leads us to believe. As true as it might be, we cannot collapse all of what God has done in Christ to simply the formula, "We had a debt, God paid it, now we are free."
When we look closely at what John tells us in our passage for this morning, we see that he, at least, understood the coming of God in our midst to be of supreme importance. "We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life." According to John, the word of life is not just a concept, not just an idea that we can learn once and then never worry about again. The word of life is something that does not stay "out there" but something that comes and meets with us, that is something that entered into our world of space and time, that was actually encountered by real human beings. Jesus of Nazareth was not just a man, but the very word and truth of God, taking up residence in the same world we live in, walking around real places that we can visit today, using real human words, eating real human food, interacting with and building relationships with real human beings not unlike you and me.
I don't know how often you think about the fact that the God who created the universe with nothing more than a word, who never needed to create the universe or people to live in it, actually stepped into it, God becoming a man, the Creator becoming a creature, but it is truly astonishing. In Jesus we have a word that we don't just hear, but that we can see and touch and enter into relationship with. In the baby in the manger we have nothing less than all the fullness of God in our midst, the God of all as a human infant, the Creator of all the vastness of the cosmos so small you could hold him in your hand, the very Word of God unable to speak but reduced to cries to communicate with his parents, those he had created. When I think about the earth-shattering idea that God himself has met with us, I am so overwhelmed, I can't hardly get over it.
Though the coming of God into our world in Christ has become a fairly common notion, something that we affirm, often without thinking about it, it was not always so. There have been many people who have found it impossible to believe that God either could or would become a human in our midst. The ancient Greek philosophers argued that God was so utterly detached from the world that we live in that God could not come among us, even if he wanted to. The Jewish thinkers of the first and second centuries who engaged in dialogue with Christians affirmed that God could become a human being, but that he never would do so, that they simply could not entertain the idea that the holy and glorious Lord and God of the universe would stoop to such a lowly position as to become a human being.
The offensiveness of this central claim of the Gospel, that in the man Jesus of Nazareth, we have to do with God himself, did not go away. Arius, a church leader in the early fourth century, said that God would not have come among us, so we must think of Jesus as a creature, a lofty messenger, but not God. A group called the docetists taught that, if Jesus really is God, then he cannot really be a a human, but only seems to be like us. Apollinaris of Laodicea argued that, in becoming a human, God refused to take on a real human mind, since it is so diseased by sin, and so Jesus is not really a human in the same sense that we are.
Even when Christianity became the dominant religion in the West, resistance to this idea that God would really meet us and make himself accessible to ordinary humans like you and me continued. Isaac Newton, the great physicist, thought of God as the great container of the whole of space and time. If that is the case, to say that God entered into his creation is like saying a box contains that contains many things, also contains itself, which would be ridiculous. Even today, we are surrounded by people, theologians, biblical scholars, and many others, who simply cannot bring themselves to really believe that when we look into the face of Jesus, we see the face of God, a face that we have never seen anywhere else and that we could never see in any other way. The reality of the incarnation, that the God of the universe has come among us, is repeatedly domesticated into the idea that Jesus was just really good at being good, that we follow him like we would follow any other human leader, that the real work of Christ is to provide us a model to follow in our lives (though even when we look at it this way, we usually stop short of suffering and dying, like he did), and in other ways as well.
Why do we do this? Why is it so hard for human beings to admit the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Jesus is who he claims to be, truly united to the Father, the Son of God in whose hands the Father has placed all things, the one who is in the Father and in whom the Father dwells, the one through whom all things were made and without whom the Father does nothing? I think it is because we are terrified to see the coming of God into our world for what it really is: an invasion. It doesn't take much to see that we live in a world that is dreadfully infected with sin. It isn't just that we commit sins, but that sin goes down to the core of who we are. We don't just make mistakes, we don't just make wrong choices because we don't know which choice is right and which is wrong. All too often, we know all too well what is the right thing to do and choose the wrong thing anyway. And it isn't just that we sin, but our neighbors sin too, and it is isn't just we as individuals who do what is wrong, we as a society sin, too.
In the midst of all this sin, it really is no surprise why we would rather find some way, any way, to keep God from meeting us here in this world of ours. So long as God remains "out there," we are like kids who have made a huge mess while our parents are out of the house. We keep telling ourselves, "We'll fix it in time, we'll get it all cleaned up before they come home." But every time we try to clean up our mess, in spite of our best efforts, we make it worse. So long as God has not actually come among us, we can still convince ourselves that there is still time to make things right on our own; we can still get our act together, we can still pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Maybe, just maybe, God won't even notice that we haven't been as good as we would like to think and we'll be let off the hook. Maybe we'll get it all cleaned up in time, maybe we'll never have to face the consequences for what we have done. As soon as we admit that, in Jesus we have to do with nothing less than the very God of the universe, we realize that we are out of time, that we were out of time even before we were born. We have made a mess and we didn't get it cleaned up. Indeed, we realize, when we are face to face with God, that we never could have cleaned it up on our own.
But when we realize that the jig is up, that we didn't, and even couldn't save ourselves, when we realize that the high and holy God has actually come near, has met with us, who has, by his Spirit, probed into the depths of our hearts, we find that all the consequences we feared do not come to pass. When we come face to face with God in Christ, we are asked to open our hands and give up everything we have. We are asked, not only to give over the mess we have made, but we are asked to give up even all our best attempts at cleaning it up, and God takes them from us and takes them to the cross. The only way we face punishment is if we stand before God and say, "I never made that mess; it was someone else; I was set up," or perhaps, "Yes, I made a mess, but I did my best to clean it up, so that should count for something."
We read in the New Testament that there will be a judgment, that we will all be judged. This can be, and has been a frightening thing for many people, but we need to ask, "When we are judged, who will be our judge?" We are told in the book of Revelation that the one who oversees the judgment is Jesus, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, the one who conquers, but when this Lion is revealed, what is it that we see? "A Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered." Our judge is not a vindictive human being like we can so often be, but one who has been sacrificed in atoning reconciliation on our behalf and in our place. The one who will judge us is not some angry pagan god who weighs up our good deeds and our evil deeds and we had better hope and pray that we've done more good than bad. Rather, the God who judges us is the God who has made our cause his own who, when he set out to redeem us from our sin and death, did not count it too great a sacrifice to become one of us, God of the universe though he was, live in our broken world and finally take our disease, sin and death on his own shoulders and take them to the cross.
As Charles Wesley wrote, "'Tis mystery all, the immortal dies, who can explore his strange design. In vain the firstborn seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. 'Tis mercy all, let earth adore, let angel minds inquire no more."
If we were in a situation where we had simply built up a debt that needed to be paid, then all we would need is a savior who would be willing to die for us. If all we needed was a savior who would die our death on our behalf and in our place, then we could say that Christmas only matters because there has to be Christmas before there can be Easter. But we are not just people who commit sins, we are sinners. The fact that, in Christ, we see God walking as one of us and one with us, we see him enduring our temptations and overcoming them, we see him confessing our sins when he is baptized in the Jordan, we see him being faithful where we are all too often faithless, shows us that we do not only need a God who dies for us, but a God who lives for us. We not only have a God who offers up his own death so that we do not need to suffer the eternal death that would separate us from God, our God also comes and lives the life that we could not live and offers that in on our behalf and in our place. To believe in Jesus is not just something we say, not just something to check off our list of things to do in this life, but a profound trust that, when God judges us, it will be the God who sacrificed himself for us and that this God will accept, not only the death of Christ in the place of our death, but the life of Christ in the place of our lives.
Because of what God has done, we are bound to Christ in every way. Listen to these words of Gregory Nazianzen, one of the most important leaders in the early church. "We needed an Incarnate God, a God put to death, that we might live. We were put to death together with him, that we might be cleansed; we rose again with him because we were put to death with Him; we were glorified with him, because we rose again with him." In everything we do, whether in life or in death, we find that it is in Christ that we live and move and have our being. Our God is a God who does not abandon us, but meets us where we are, long before we ever dreamed of turning to him. Though the coming of Christ is an invasion into this world of sin and that means even our sin is under attack, it is not an attack that destroys us, but liberates us and makes us free to love like we have never loved before. O come, O come, Emmanuel. Let us pray.
AMEN
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Jesus Christ and Time
12/07/11 Jesus Christ and Time GUMC Youth
We live in a country that has been historically shaped by the Christian message. This shaping has been so strong that there are many who would argue that America is, at its roots, a Christian nation, a nation that does not just have a bunch of Christians who live there, but one that fundamentally is Christian. This, perhaps, goes even farther when we look at our culture here in Northwest Iowa. You have all told me about people who go to school with you who are atheists or otherwise hostile to Christian faith, but if you look around at much of the adult population, you will find that most adults presuppose that Spencer is a Christian town, one that is made up mostly of Christians, who believe in Jesus, who believe in God, and who go to church, or at least, used to go to church.
What I think we find is that, when we are in this kind of culture, we end up with a whole bunch of people who simply assume that everyone is a Christian, that being a good Christian is one and the same thing with being a good American, that right and wrong as understood by out culture must be the same as right and wrong as understood by the gospel of Jesus Christ. When this happens, we tend to lose sight pretty quickly of the things that really matter, the things that make Christian faith what it is. So as we get closer and closer to Christmas, I want to spend a bit of time looking at one of the most important things we are celebrating during Advent and Christmas.
How much thought do you give to time? I don't mean, how often are you late or early to places you need to be, nor am I talking about how you like to spend your time. I am asking, how often do you think about time itself, what it really is, how it functions, what to expect from it. The fact of the matter is that not many people really spend all that much time thinking about time. They don't see how it can matter to their lives and, in a lot of ways, they are right to do so. I have no interest in standing up here and going into a huge analysis of time, but there are some things about time, that have to do with Christmas, that I want to talk about because they actually are important; more important than most people realize.
Many, if not most, cultures throughout the ages have had a conception of time that it is kind of like a big circle. There is a certain way in which this makes perfect sense. After all, days go in a kind of circle. We have a day today, we had a day yesterday, and we will have a day tomorrow. Even our clocks reinforce this idea. Just like the hands of a clock keep spinning round and round, marking the passing of time that never really runs out, just keeps repeating itself over and over, we could say that the day and night cycle is like a circle. Never ending. You can just keep going around and it will never end, only repeat.
In a larger sense, our years follow a cycle. Right now we are in winter, but we don't imagine that the sun is going out, or that the world is just getting colder and colder. Instead, we realize that winter is not the end, but we will eventually get to Spring and Spring will give way to Summer and Summer will give way to Fall, until we get back to Winter again. There are some little differences from year to year, some winters are worse than others, for example, but the yearly cycle is basically the same. You can always count on the fact that the seasons are not just going to stop suddenly, but will keep going, like going around a circle.
What if we thought of time the same way? What if time never really began and never really ended, but just kept going on a loop, like a CD or a playlist left on repeat? There are many, but not all, scientists who say that the universe began with the Big Bang and that it will end with some kind of Big Crunch, where it could explode again in a new Big Bang. What if those big moments weren't just big moments, but the bookends of time itself, that the universe, after it collapsed, would explode again and everything would happen just as it has happened before? What if even this youth group, this message, had been given who knows how many times before and it will be given who knows how many times again, over the course of trillions upon trillions of years? What if the whole universe as we know it is just going to repeat itself over and over again, never ending, never changing, always just going along, like going around a circle?
This was, generally speaking, the view of many cultures throughout the years. It is kind of like the idea of reincarnation, where you never really die, you just become a new person over and over again. There is a certain comfort in this way of thinking. It takes a lot of pressure off, because nothing ever really changes. There really isn't anything you can do to make a truly lasting impact, since things will just repeat, regardless of what you do. For some, it might seem like life is just pointless, but for others, it can be liberating. Things have already happened before and they will happen again. I can just float along and let things happen.
What is interesting is that this is not the view of the ancient Jewish people and it was not the view of the first Christians. If we could say that this first view of time is that time is a big circle that repeats over and over again, we could say that the Jewish and Christian conception of time is like a big line that has a very definite starting point and a very definite ending point. I mentioned earlier that some scientists think that the universe will collapse one day. Not everyone thinks that. There are plenty of scientists who are convinced that the universe will just keep expanding. If that is the case, then the universe can never repeat. It can never get back to its starting point.
How many of you have heard that the Big Bang Theory is very much an anti-Christian idea? Usually, this is because there are many who think that this raises questions about the first chapter of Genesis, where we read that God created the universe in six days. What is interesting is that, when the Big Bang Theory was first put forward, it was suggested by a priest who was also a scientist. When he published his ideas, the mainstream of scientists were offended and said that he was trying to bring religion into science. What is interesting is that, even though the Big Bang Theory is not, I want to stress that not, the same thing as the Christian doctrine of Creation, it is actually closer to it than the idea of an eternal universe. At least the Big Bang allows for God to have created the matter and caused it to explode, where the other views do not. The Big Bang Theory is science agreeing with Christian faith that the universe had a concrete beginning. The universe hasn't always existed. There was a time before it came into being and, many scientists say, there is only this universe; there will never be another one. If something happens to this universe, thats the end of the story.
The point is that the single most important reason why Christians cannot really believe in a repeating universe or an eternal universe is, believe it or not, Christmas. That might sound like a weird thing to say, but Christmas actually has profound implications for the nature of time and how we understand it. First, I want to show you what it means for time and then I want to point out why this actually matters in our understanding of God.
What do we celebrate on Christmas? We celebrate the birth of Jesus, right? But what is the significance of the birth of Jesus? Its significance is that the God of the universe, who created all there is with a word from his mouth, who has interacted with people since the beginning of the human race, has actually stepped into his creation. Think about it, we are talking about God, the one and only God, the God who is all powerful, all knowing, and all-everything-you-care-to-mention coming here. Not here as in Spencer, Iowa, but here as in Earth! This is the Creator of the universe stepping into his creation, this is the maker of humanity becoming a human. This is the almighty God of all, whom the highest heavens cannot contain coming among us, not just as a human being, but as a baby, so small you could hold him in your hands.
What is amazing about Christmas is not only that God actually did this but that he did this for the very first time. It isn't that we had God come among us in our human flesh over and over again, just in different forms throughout the years. It isn't that, in Jesus, we are dealing with just one more human teacher. In Jesus, we are brought face to face with God in all of his majesty in a way that we never experienced before and we could not have experienced in any other way. Jesus is not just one more example of God coming to earth, but the only one there is. God came among us in a very specific place and time, lived in specific towns, met and spoke with specific people, ate specific pieces of food, and spoke specific human words in a specific human language. And not only that but he did this for the first time in all the eternal life of God and he has never done it before and will never do it again.
God coming into our midst is an absolutely singular and unrepeatable event that never happened before and will never happen again. It is because of this incredibly singular event that we cannot really believe that time is just a loop that keeps getting played on repeat. If that is really how time worked, it would mean that Jesus had come over and over again; it would mean that God is just as bound by space and time as we are, which would mean he was not the Creator of the universe, by the way.
So, what does all of this mean to us? Well, there are lots of people who emphasize the fact that Earth is not the only planet out there, that the universe is incredibly large. And yet, out of all those places that God has created, out of all the vastness of our universe, when God enters into it, he doesn't do it just anywhere, but here, on this planet where we live. Not only did God meet us here, but he met us now. I know its been a long time since Jesus came, but especially if we listen to the scientists who tell us the universe is about fourteen billion years old, we realize just how close to Jesus' time we really are.
The point is that God came here. Out of all the places he could have gone, he came here. He didn't go to Mars, he didn't go to the outer reaches of the universe, but came here. When he came, he did not come as just any creature, but came as one of us. By coming precisely when he did and precisely where he did, God in Christ has set that time and place aside and said to us, "Here I am, come meet with me here." And through the power of the Holy Spirit and the testimony of the Bible, we can actually stand with the original witness of God's self-revelation, the disciples, and actually meet him there and then in the here and now.
There are so many people in the world who talk about God as if he were someone who is far off, who does not actually meet with us, about whom there is not much that we can say. And yet, that is not what we read in the Bible and it is not what we believe as Christians. We believe that, in Christ, God actually came here to meet us and to transform us.
So how does this tie in with how we understand time? Well, remember that, because God actually came among us at a particular time, what the scriptures call "the fullness of time," we can't really believe in time as a circle. Instead, we need to think of time as being a line, with certain very precise points on it. The line starts at a specific point, with the creation of space and time by God and then, at another precise point, God came into this world in Jesus of Nazareth. But that wasn't the end of the line. The line continues on, doesn't it? It has continued to this day, where you and I are living and it may well continue on for a while. The point is that it does not continue on forever. There will come a time when time as we know it will be done away with. There will come a time when Christ will return and change the whole game. When will that happen? We don't know; nobody does. And if anyone tells you otherwise, they are mistaken.
The point is, as we celebrate this Christmas season, we should remember every day that Christmas, in many ways, is the center of all space and time. It is where God the Creator stepped into his creation and made it his own in a powerful way that was new, even for God. Christmas is a really, really big deal. It is such a big deal that it impacts all of time and space. So let us celebrate, not any less, but all the more, because our God has come to meet with us. Let us pray.
AMEN
We live in a country that has been historically shaped by the Christian message. This shaping has been so strong that there are many who would argue that America is, at its roots, a Christian nation, a nation that does not just have a bunch of Christians who live there, but one that fundamentally is Christian. This, perhaps, goes even farther when we look at our culture here in Northwest Iowa. You have all told me about people who go to school with you who are atheists or otherwise hostile to Christian faith, but if you look around at much of the adult population, you will find that most adults presuppose that Spencer is a Christian town, one that is made up mostly of Christians, who believe in Jesus, who believe in God, and who go to church, or at least, used to go to church.
What I think we find is that, when we are in this kind of culture, we end up with a whole bunch of people who simply assume that everyone is a Christian, that being a good Christian is one and the same thing with being a good American, that right and wrong as understood by out culture must be the same as right and wrong as understood by the gospel of Jesus Christ. When this happens, we tend to lose sight pretty quickly of the things that really matter, the things that make Christian faith what it is. So as we get closer and closer to Christmas, I want to spend a bit of time looking at one of the most important things we are celebrating during Advent and Christmas.
How much thought do you give to time? I don't mean, how often are you late or early to places you need to be, nor am I talking about how you like to spend your time. I am asking, how often do you think about time itself, what it really is, how it functions, what to expect from it. The fact of the matter is that not many people really spend all that much time thinking about time. They don't see how it can matter to their lives and, in a lot of ways, they are right to do so. I have no interest in standing up here and going into a huge analysis of time, but there are some things about time, that have to do with Christmas, that I want to talk about because they actually are important; more important than most people realize.
Many, if not most, cultures throughout the ages have had a conception of time that it is kind of like a big circle. There is a certain way in which this makes perfect sense. After all, days go in a kind of circle. We have a day today, we had a day yesterday, and we will have a day tomorrow. Even our clocks reinforce this idea. Just like the hands of a clock keep spinning round and round, marking the passing of time that never really runs out, just keeps repeating itself over and over, we could say that the day and night cycle is like a circle. Never ending. You can just keep going around and it will never end, only repeat.
In a larger sense, our years follow a cycle. Right now we are in winter, but we don't imagine that the sun is going out, or that the world is just getting colder and colder. Instead, we realize that winter is not the end, but we will eventually get to Spring and Spring will give way to Summer and Summer will give way to Fall, until we get back to Winter again. There are some little differences from year to year, some winters are worse than others, for example, but the yearly cycle is basically the same. You can always count on the fact that the seasons are not just going to stop suddenly, but will keep going, like going around a circle.
What if we thought of time the same way? What if time never really began and never really ended, but just kept going on a loop, like a CD or a playlist left on repeat? There are many, but not all, scientists who say that the universe began with the Big Bang and that it will end with some kind of Big Crunch, where it could explode again in a new Big Bang. What if those big moments weren't just big moments, but the bookends of time itself, that the universe, after it collapsed, would explode again and everything would happen just as it has happened before? What if even this youth group, this message, had been given who knows how many times before and it will be given who knows how many times again, over the course of trillions upon trillions of years? What if the whole universe as we know it is just going to repeat itself over and over again, never ending, never changing, always just going along, like going around a circle?
This was, generally speaking, the view of many cultures throughout the years. It is kind of like the idea of reincarnation, where you never really die, you just become a new person over and over again. There is a certain comfort in this way of thinking. It takes a lot of pressure off, because nothing ever really changes. There really isn't anything you can do to make a truly lasting impact, since things will just repeat, regardless of what you do. For some, it might seem like life is just pointless, but for others, it can be liberating. Things have already happened before and they will happen again. I can just float along and let things happen.
What is interesting is that this is not the view of the ancient Jewish people and it was not the view of the first Christians. If we could say that this first view of time is that time is a big circle that repeats over and over again, we could say that the Jewish and Christian conception of time is like a big line that has a very definite starting point and a very definite ending point. I mentioned earlier that some scientists think that the universe will collapse one day. Not everyone thinks that. There are plenty of scientists who are convinced that the universe will just keep expanding. If that is the case, then the universe can never repeat. It can never get back to its starting point.
How many of you have heard that the Big Bang Theory is very much an anti-Christian idea? Usually, this is because there are many who think that this raises questions about the first chapter of Genesis, where we read that God created the universe in six days. What is interesting is that, when the Big Bang Theory was first put forward, it was suggested by a priest who was also a scientist. When he published his ideas, the mainstream of scientists were offended and said that he was trying to bring religion into science. What is interesting is that, even though the Big Bang Theory is not, I want to stress that not, the same thing as the Christian doctrine of Creation, it is actually closer to it than the idea of an eternal universe. At least the Big Bang allows for God to have created the matter and caused it to explode, where the other views do not. The Big Bang Theory is science agreeing with Christian faith that the universe had a concrete beginning. The universe hasn't always existed. There was a time before it came into being and, many scientists say, there is only this universe; there will never be another one. If something happens to this universe, thats the end of the story.
The point is that the single most important reason why Christians cannot really believe in a repeating universe or an eternal universe is, believe it or not, Christmas. That might sound like a weird thing to say, but Christmas actually has profound implications for the nature of time and how we understand it. First, I want to show you what it means for time and then I want to point out why this actually matters in our understanding of God.
What do we celebrate on Christmas? We celebrate the birth of Jesus, right? But what is the significance of the birth of Jesus? Its significance is that the God of the universe, who created all there is with a word from his mouth, who has interacted with people since the beginning of the human race, has actually stepped into his creation. Think about it, we are talking about God, the one and only God, the God who is all powerful, all knowing, and all-everything-you-care-to-mention coming here. Not here as in Spencer, Iowa, but here as in Earth! This is the Creator of the universe stepping into his creation, this is the maker of humanity becoming a human. This is the almighty God of all, whom the highest heavens cannot contain coming among us, not just as a human being, but as a baby, so small you could hold him in your hands.
What is amazing about Christmas is not only that God actually did this but that he did this for the very first time. It isn't that we had God come among us in our human flesh over and over again, just in different forms throughout the years. It isn't that, in Jesus, we are dealing with just one more human teacher. In Jesus, we are brought face to face with God in all of his majesty in a way that we never experienced before and we could not have experienced in any other way. Jesus is not just one more example of God coming to earth, but the only one there is. God came among us in a very specific place and time, lived in specific towns, met and spoke with specific people, ate specific pieces of food, and spoke specific human words in a specific human language. And not only that but he did this for the first time in all the eternal life of God and he has never done it before and will never do it again.
God coming into our midst is an absolutely singular and unrepeatable event that never happened before and will never happen again. It is because of this incredibly singular event that we cannot really believe that time is just a loop that keeps getting played on repeat. If that is really how time worked, it would mean that Jesus had come over and over again; it would mean that God is just as bound by space and time as we are, which would mean he was not the Creator of the universe, by the way.
So, what does all of this mean to us? Well, there are lots of people who emphasize the fact that Earth is not the only planet out there, that the universe is incredibly large. And yet, out of all those places that God has created, out of all the vastness of our universe, when God enters into it, he doesn't do it just anywhere, but here, on this planet where we live. Not only did God meet us here, but he met us now. I know its been a long time since Jesus came, but especially if we listen to the scientists who tell us the universe is about fourteen billion years old, we realize just how close to Jesus' time we really are.
The point is that God came here. Out of all the places he could have gone, he came here. He didn't go to Mars, he didn't go to the outer reaches of the universe, but came here. When he came, he did not come as just any creature, but came as one of us. By coming precisely when he did and precisely where he did, God in Christ has set that time and place aside and said to us, "Here I am, come meet with me here." And through the power of the Holy Spirit and the testimony of the Bible, we can actually stand with the original witness of God's self-revelation, the disciples, and actually meet him there and then in the here and now.
There are so many people in the world who talk about God as if he were someone who is far off, who does not actually meet with us, about whom there is not much that we can say. And yet, that is not what we read in the Bible and it is not what we believe as Christians. We believe that, in Christ, God actually came here to meet us and to transform us.
So how does this tie in with how we understand time? Well, remember that, because God actually came among us at a particular time, what the scriptures call "the fullness of time," we can't really believe in time as a circle. Instead, we need to think of time as being a line, with certain very precise points on it. The line starts at a specific point, with the creation of space and time by God and then, at another precise point, God came into this world in Jesus of Nazareth. But that wasn't the end of the line. The line continues on, doesn't it? It has continued to this day, where you and I are living and it may well continue on for a while. The point is that it does not continue on forever. There will come a time when time as we know it will be done away with. There will come a time when Christ will return and change the whole game. When will that happen? We don't know; nobody does. And if anyone tells you otherwise, they are mistaken.
The point is, as we celebrate this Christmas season, we should remember every day that Christmas, in many ways, is the center of all space and time. It is where God the Creator stepped into his creation and made it his own in a powerful way that was new, even for God. Christmas is a really, really big deal. It is such a big deal that it impacts all of time and space. So let us celebrate, not any less, but all the more, because our God has come to meet with us. Let us pray.
AMEN
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Mark 4:35-41
11/30/11 Mark 4:35-41 GUMC Youth
Tonight, we look at the last passage the fourth chapter of the gospel according to Mark, which means that, as of tonight, we are already a quarter of the way through Mark's gospel. It has already moved pretty fast and it will only move faster as move closer and closer to the end of Christ's life on earth. We look tonight at Mark's account of Jesus calming the storm. But before we do that, we need to look at something that has come up a few times so far.
Our passage begins by having Jesus say, "Let us go to the other side," by which he means, the other side of the sea of Galilee. Jesus is leaving the West side of the sea of Galilee and going to the East side. Now, to us today, this might not seem like such a big deal; he's just going on a trip. From another point of view, it might seem at least a little bit interesting, since he is leaving a crowd on the one side and going to a place where basically nobody knows who he is. The big point that I want to make is to remind you that Mark uses geography to make some of his points about Jesus. We always need to remember which side of the sea he is on when he does things. When he is on the Western side, he is doing miracles for and giving teaching to the Jewish people, those who have been historically identified with God's interaction in our world of space and time. They are God's people and see themselves as belonging to God in a special way. When he is on the East side, he is doing miracles for and giving teaching to Gentiles, the people who have, historically, been a corrupting influence on the Jewish people. These are the people that "Good Jews" don't talk to. For Jesus to deliberately go and minister among the Gentiles is a huge deal.
All of this is to remind you that it isn't just important what Jesus does, it is also important where he does it. So far, everything that Jesus has done has been on the West side of the sea of Galilee, that is, he has been among the Jewish people. Now, for the first time, he is traveling to the Gentile side. So, when this storm comes up, it isn't just a storm on a lake, but a storm that arises as Jesus is on his way to minister to the Gentiles. So far we have seen that every encounter that Jesus has with unclean spirits, or demons if you like, has them freaking out and being overcome. The idea that we are left with is that Jesus is actually invading the territory of these unclean spirits. Here is Jesus marching into a region that has traditionally been hostile to God. This storm is not merely a natural event, but we could easily see it as a resistance to Jesus in the spiritual realm.
So, let us look at the concrete situation in our passage. Jesus and his disciples get into a boat and set off across the sea of Galilee. While they are on their way, a storm came up quickly, which is not an uncommon occurrence on that particular body of water. The storm was significant enough that the disciples, many of whom were experienced sailors, were very worried that they were going to sink. What is amazing is what Jesus is doing during this time. He is in the back of the boat, asleep on a cushion! Now, I don't have a huge amount of experience traveling by boat, but it seems to me that to sleep through a storm is a pretty significant thing. It is one thing to fall asleep while the sea is calm. After all, the rocking of the boat could be soothing. It is another thing altogether to be asleep while the boat is being tossed to and fro. And yet, there he is, sound asleep.
One of the things I hope you have gotten from me by now, or will get from me is that we are not only interested in what Jesus says. We are just as interested in what Jesus does and who Jesus is. Sometimes we learn more about Jesus, which is to say, sometimes we learn more about God, by looking at what Jesus does or does not do than by always looking at what he says. In this case, we see that, while the storm rages around the boat of disciples, Jesus is fast asleep. Here we have Jesus, that is, God, sleeping the night away while all around there are people who are panicking for their very lives. What are we to make of this?
I think that we learn something very important here. Jesus is not concerned with the things that we are concerned about, which means that God is not concerned with the things that we are concerned about. Now, this unconcern of God could be interpreted in two ways. First, we could interpret the fact that God is not concerned with the things that we are concerned about in a sense that God is simply unconcerned with human struggles and suffering. We could assume that Jesus is sound asleep in the midst of a crisis because he is heartless and doesn't care what happens to the disciples. This is precisely what the disciples think is going on. They wake Jesus up and say, or probably shout, to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" They are basically saying, "Jesus, don't you care about us? The whole world is crashing down around us and you're sleeping! Don't you care at all?"
But that is not the only way to look at this unconcern. The other way to look at it is that maybe, just maybe, Jesus knows something that we don't and is living in light of it. Maybe Jesus knows that the things that we get worked up over aren't really worth getting all excited about. Think about it. Let's say that someone you know stubs their toe and are in pain. To them, in that moment, they are in a crisis. Their world is so tiny that they can't hardly think of anything outside of the pain in their toe. The worst thing you, as someone who knows just how small this pain is in the grand scheme of things, could possibly do is to freak out with them. You might show some signs of sympathy, but you wouldn't react as if the world was coming down because you know better and you know that, in spite of the momentary pain that they might be experiencing, it is not a big deal. And it isn't that you just know it in your mind, but you know it so deeply that you can actually live that way.
Perhaps that is what Jesus is doing. Jesus can be relaxed, not because he doesn't know how powerful and dangerous the storm is, but because he knows precisely how powerful and dangerous the storm is and that it isn't that big a deal. After all, in a moment he will stand up and, with a word, calm the storm. However powerful the storm is, it is not nearly as powerful as Jesus. The disciples are worried, but Jesus isn't, because he knows that the storm is no match for himself and that, at the end of the day, it won't matter all that much. Now, just because Jesus knows that doesn't mean that his disciples do. In fact, the opposite would be the case. They are worried because, even though they have seen all kinds of miracles, they are still not certain that Jesus can do anything to stop the storm (though they must have hoped he could do something, or they wouldn't have bothered to wake him up and plead for help).
Now, this is actually really hard for us today, because though we might know that Jesus is more powerful than our troubles in our heads, we haven't really internalized it, we don't know it so deeply in the core of who we are that we are willing to trust everything into his hands. When we as Christians say things like, "Everything will be alright," we don't mean, "Nothing bad will happen, or if it does, it won't be all that bad." Sometimes, things that are really bad happen to Christians as well as to non-Christians. When we say, "Everything will be alright," what we really mean is, "Everything will be alright, even if it kills us," because, at the end of the day, we as Christians believe that death is not the end, that Jesus is more powerful even than death and that we will one day be rescued even from death. And if even death is not a deal-breaker, then what do we have to fear? The trick is getting that truth so deeply into our very being that we actually live every day knowing and trusting that we are secure in Christ, regardless of what happens.
I want to make a connection between this story and one from the Old Testament. Are you familiar with the story of Jonah and the Whale? Jonah, while running from the calling that God had given him, got on board a boat with a bunch of other people. Not long into the voyage, a storm came up, so strong that the boat was in danger of sinking. The people on board were panicking, but Jonah was asleep. Sound familiar? The other people wake Jonah up and ask him to do something. This is where the difference comes in. Jonah says, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become calm for you, for I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you."
Jonah said, "Alright, because we have this storm, I will throw myself on God's mercy." By having himself thrown out of the boat, Jonah was hoping that God would move, especially since it was his fault that the storm came in the first place. But where Jonah hoped that God would intervene, Jesus just stands up and stops the storm. Jonah basically said, "Nobody but God can stop this storm," Jesus stands up and stops his storm. Do you get the connection? Jesus is doing what has been shown in the Old Testament as something that only God can do.
Now, we in our day have had two thousand years of church history, of people working hard to make sense out of who Jesus is, so when we read that the disciples were filled with great awe and said to one another "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" we want to say, "Duh, he's the Son of God, God in flesh, God with us." But the people at the time didn't really know what to make of him at that point. To them, Jesus was a man; yes he was a miracle worker, he was an exorcist, he was a great healer, but he was just a man. After all, just about everything that Jesus did, miracle-wise, had been done at least once in history by other prophets in the history of Israel. The fact that this man who had authority over the unclean spirits had just as much authority over the wind and waves was astonishing.
But given the fact that, in Jesus of Nazareth, God himself came among us, we shouldn't really be all that surprised that Jesus could calm a storm. After all, we read all over the New Testament that the whole universe was created through Jesus. We read "All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being," and "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers - all things have been created through him and for him," and "Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds." If this is who Jesus is, it should come as no surprise that he can calm a storm. After all, he was the one who created the world in which the storm happened. Jesus is Lord, even over nature.
I do want to draw attention to the word that is used when Jesus calms the storm. The word in the Greek that is used is επιτιμαω and it means "to rebuke," which means to sharply correct or to scold. The reason why I bring this up is because it shows up every once in a while in Mark. For example, it is the word that is used to describe how Jesus deals with the unclean spirits we read about earlier, he "rebuked" them. At one point, it is even used when Jesus rebukes one of his disciples. The point here is that Jesus rebukes a storm, an inanimate thing. The sense we get is that Jesus is telling the storm to get in line, to behave itself, to do what it knows it's supposed to do. I have read that the idea is that Jesus is treating the storm like "an unruly heckler," behaving toward it as if it were someone who was interrupting his teaching. This is hard for us to understand because it doesn't make much sense for us to rebuke something that is not alive, but that just means that we need to understand that God approaches the storms of this life differently than we do.
I want to leave you tonight with the question that the people asked. "Who then is this?" There are lots of people in the world who say, "Jesus was a great teacher," or "Jesus is a nice guy, but I don't like his followers," or a bunch of other stuff that makes it seem like they want to honor Jesus but we need to remember that Jesus is not merely another teacher but is the one who can stop a storm that threatened to kill his disciples with a word from his mouth. Jesus is the one who sees the big picture, who has an understanding of context that is far beyond what any of us can imagine. We have a God who is not worried about the things that we are worried about, not because he doesn't care about us, but because he cares about us so much that he will not allow every little crisis, every little difficulty to shake him from his plans. Remember, even though Jesus did not prevent the storm and seemed to be unconcerned about it, nobody died that day. Nobody's boat sank and nobody drowned. In the end, it wasn't the panic of the disciples but the calm of the Savior that made the most sense. So let's go day by day and trust that, even though our troubles might be strong, and even if they kill us, our God is still in heaven and still cares for us. Let us pray.
AMEN
Tonight, we look at the last passage the fourth chapter of the gospel according to Mark, which means that, as of tonight, we are already a quarter of the way through Mark's gospel. It has already moved pretty fast and it will only move faster as move closer and closer to the end of Christ's life on earth. We look tonight at Mark's account of Jesus calming the storm. But before we do that, we need to look at something that has come up a few times so far.
Our passage begins by having Jesus say, "Let us go to the other side," by which he means, the other side of the sea of Galilee. Jesus is leaving the West side of the sea of Galilee and going to the East side. Now, to us today, this might not seem like such a big deal; he's just going on a trip. From another point of view, it might seem at least a little bit interesting, since he is leaving a crowd on the one side and going to a place where basically nobody knows who he is. The big point that I want to make is to remind you that Mark uses geography to make some of his points about Jesus. We always need to remember which side of the sea he is on when he does things. When he is on the Western side, he is doing miracles for and giving teaching to the Jewish people, those who have been historically identified with God's interaction in our world of space and time. They are God's people and see themselves as belonging to God in a special way. When he is on the East side, he is doing miracles for and giving teaching to Gentiles, the people who have, historically, been a corrupting influence on the Jewish people. These are the people that "Good Jews" don't talk to. For Jesus to deliberately go and minister among the Gentiles is a huge deal.
All of this is to remind you that it isn't just important what Jesus does, it is also important where he does it. So far, everything that Jesus has done has been on the West side of the sea of Galilee, that is, he has been among the Jewish people. Now, for the first time, he is traveling to the Gentile side. So, when this storm comes up, it isn't just a storm on a lake, but a storm that arises as Jesus is on his way to minister to the Gentiles. So far we have seen that every encounter that Jesus has with unclean spirits, or demons if you like, has them freaking out and being overcome. The idea that we are left with is that Jesus is actually invading the territory of these unclean spirits. Here is Jesus marching into a region that has traditionally been hostile to God. This storm is not merely a natural event, but we could easily see it as a resistance to Jesus in the spiritual realm.
So, let us look at the concrete situation in our passage. Jesus and his disciples get into a boat and set off across the sea of Galilee. While they are on their way, a storm came up quickly, which is not an uncommon occurrence on that particular body of water. The storm was significant enough that the disciples, many of whom were experienced sailors, were very worried that they were going to sink. What is amazing is what Jesus is doing during this time. He is in the back of the boat, asleep on a cushion! Now, I don't have a huge amount of experience traveling by boat, but it seems to me that to sleep through a storm is a pretty significant thing. It is one thing to fall asleep while the sea is calm. After all, the rocking of the boat could be soothing. It is another thing altogether to be asleep while the boat is being tossed to and fro. And yet, there he is, sound asleep.
One of the things I hope you have gotten from me by now, or will get from me is that we are not only interested in what Jesus says. We are just as interested in what Jesus does and who Jesus is. Sometimes we learn more about Jesus, which is to say, sometimes we learn more about God, by looking at what Jesus does or does not do than by always looking at what he says. In this case, we see that, while the storm rages around the boat of disciples, Jesus is fast asleep. Here we have Jesus, that is, God, sleeping the night away while all around there are people who are panicking for their very lives. What are we to make of this?
I think that we learn something very important here. Jesus is not concerned with the things that we are concerned about, which means that God is not concerned with the things that we are concerned about. Now, this unconcern of God could be interpreted in two ways. First, we could interpret the fact that God is not concerned with the things that we are concerned about in a sense that God is simply unconcerned with human struggles and suffering. We could assume that Jesus is sound asleep in the midst of a crisis because he is heartless and doesn't care what happens to the disciples. This is precisely what the disciples think is going on. They wake Jesus up and say, or probably shout, to him, "Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?" They are basically saying, "Jesus, don't you care about us? The whole world is crashing down around us and you're sleeping! Don't you care at all?"
But that is not the only way to look at this unconcern. The other way to look at it is that maybe, just maybe, Jesus knows something that we don't and is living in light of it. Maybe Jesus knows that the things that we get worked up over aren't really worth getting all excited about. Think about it. Let's say that someone you know stubs their toe and are in pain. To them, in that moment, they are in a crisis. Their world is so tiny that they can't hardly think of anything outside of the pain in their toe. The worst thing you, as someone who knows just how small this pain is in the grand scheme of things, could possibly do is to freak out with them. You might show some signs of sympathy, but you wouldn't react as if the world was coming down because you know better and you know that, in spite of the momentary pain that they might be experiencing, it is not a big deal. And it isn't that you just know it in your mind, but you know it so deeply that you can actually live that way.
Perhaps that is what Jesus is doing. Jesus can be relaxed, not because he doesn't know how powerful and dangerous the storm is, but because he knows precisely how powerful and dangerous the storm is and that it isn't that big a deal. After all, in a moment he will stand up and, with a word, calm the storm. However powerful the storm is, it is not nearly as powerful as Jesus. The disciples are worried, but Jesus isn't, because he knows that the storm is no match for himself and that, at the end of the day, it won't matter all that much. Now, just because Jesus knows that doesn't mean that his disciples do. In fact, the opposite would be the case. They are worried because, even though they have seen all kinds of miracles, they are still not certain that Jesus can do anything to stop the storm (though they must have hoped he could do something, or they wouldn't have bothered to wake him up and plead for help).
Now, this is actually really hard for us today, because though we might know that Jesus is more powerful than our troubles in our heads, we haven't really internalized it, we don't know it so deeply in the core of who we are that we are willing to trust everything into his hands. When we as Christians say things like, "Everything will be alright," we don't mean, "Nothing bad will happen, or if it does, it won't be all that bad." Sometimes, things that are really bad happen to Christians as well as to non-Christians. When we say, "Everything will be alright," what we really mean is, "Everything will be alright, even if it kills us," because, at the end of the day, we as Christians believe that death is not the end, that Jesus is more powerful even than death and that we will one day be rescued even from death. And if even death is not a deal-breaker, then what do we have to fear? The trick is getting that truth so deeply into our very being that we actually live every day knowing and trusting that we are secure in Christ, regardless of what happens.
I want to make a connection between this story and one from the Old Testament. Are you familiar with the story of Jonah and the Whale? Jonah, while running from the calling that God had given him, got on board a boat with a bunch of other people. Not long into the voyage, a storm came up, so strong that the boat was in danger of sinking. The people on board were panicking, but Jonah was asleep. Sound familiar? The other people wake Jonah up and ask him to do something. This is where the difference comes in. Jonah says, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become calm for you, for I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you."
Jonah said, "Alright, because we have this storm, I will throw myself on God's mercy." By having himself thrown out of the boat, Jonah was hoping that God would move, especially since it was his fault that the storm came in the first place. But where Jonah hoped that God would intervene, Jesus just stands up and stops the storm. Jonah basically said, "Nobody but God can stop this storm," Jesus stands up and stops his storm. Do you get the connection? Jesus is doing what has been shown in the Old Testament as something that only God can do.
Now, we in our day have had two thousand years of church history, of people working hard to make sense out of who Jesus is, so when we read that the disciples were filled with great awe and said to one another "Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" we want to say, "Duh, he's the Son of God, God in flesh, God with us." But the people at the time didn't really know what to make of him at that point. To them, Jesus was a man; yes he was a miracle worker, he was an exorcist, he was a great healer, but he was just a man. After all, just about everything that Jesus did, miracle-wise, had been done at least once in history by other prophets in the history of Israel. The fact that this man who had authority over the unclean spirits had just as much authority over the wind and waves was astonishing.
But given the fact that, in Jesus of Nazareth, God himself came among us, we shouldn't really be all that surprised that Jesus could calm a storm. After all, we read all over the New Testament that the whole universe was created through Jesus. We read "All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being," and "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers - all things have been created through him and for him," and "Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds." If this is who Jesus is, it should come as no surprise that he can calm a storm. After all, he was the one who created the world in which the storm happened. Jesus is Lord, even over nature.
I do want to draw attention to the word that is used when Jesus calms the storm. The word in the Greek that is used is επιτιμαω and it means "to rebuke," which means to sharply correct or to scold. The reason why I bring this up is because it shows up every once in a while in Mark. For example, it is the word that is used to describe how Jesus deals with the unclean spirits we read about earlier, he "rebuked" them. At one point, it is even used when Jesus rebukes one of his disciples. The point here is that Jesus rebukes a storm, an inanimate thing. The sense we get is that Jesus is telling the storm to get in line, to behave itself, to do what it knows it's supposed to do. I have read that the idea is that Jesus is treating the storm like "an unruly heckler," behaving toward it as if it were someone who was interrupting his teaching. This is hard for us to understand because it doesn't make much sense for us to rebuke something that is not alive, but that just means that we need to understand that God approaches the storms of this life differently than we do.
I want to leave you tonight with the question that the people asked. "Who then is this?" There are lots of people in the world who say, "Jesus was a great teacher," or "Jesus is a nice guy, but I don't like his followers," or a bunch of other stuff that makes it seem like they want to honor Jesus but we need to remember that Jesus is not merely another teacher but is the one who can stop a storm that threatened to kill his disciples with a word from his mouth. Jesus is the one who sees the big picture, who has an understanding of context that is far beyond what any of us can imagine. We have a God who is not worried about the things that we are worried about, not because he doesn't care about us, but because he cares about us so much that he will not allow every little crisis, every little difficulty to shake him from his plans. Remember, even though Jesus did not prevent the storm and seemed to be unconcerned about it, nobody died that day. Nobody's boat sank and nobody drowned. In the end, it wasn't the panic of the disciples but the calm of the Savior that made the most sense. So let's go day by day and trust that, even though our troubles might be strong, and even if they kill us, our God is still in heaven and still cares for us. Let us pray.
AMEN
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