Matthew 21:28-32

Disclaimer:

This sermon is stylistically different than most that I preach. It was for a special play at our church to celebrate 150 years since the church was founded. I played the Rev. H. H. Maynard who led revivals in Hudson in the late 19th century. The attempt was to be more or less stylistically authentic. However, even though the style is somewhat harsher than I usually preach, the main ideas are fully in line with what I would attempt to get across if I were preaching on the same text throughout the normal course of events. I hope you enjoy this somewhat altered offering. (P.S. The scripture version read before the sermon and cited throughout is the King James Version)

04/25/10
Matthew 21:28-32
Hudson UMC

My brothers and sisters, God’s holy word lays before our very eyes today two very different people. Jesus told a parable of two sons of the same father; both were hypocrites in their own way. Their father told both of his sons, “Son, go work to day in my vineyard.” One of them refused his father to his face, rejecting even his own family, but then thought better of it and went and did what he was asked. The other agreed to his father’s face, but rejected him by his actions.

In ancient times, when our Lord ministered in Galilee, the people who encountered Him could be put into two groups. There was the poor, the weak, the despised, who never went to the Temple, who were continually being rebuked by the religious authorities because they did not keep the law. They had spit in God’s face over and over and over again, rejecting the promises that He made to their fathers. But when Jesus came among them, they changed their minds. They left their sins by the side of the road and followed Jesus, going and sinning no more and spending the rest of their lives laboring in God’s vineyard, being filled with joy by serving such a loving master. These people were like the first son, who said, “Lord, I will not serve you,” but later changed their minds and worked for God. And, though they had lived lives of sin before, because they changed their minds, they will be blessed forever in the kingdom of God.

There was, however, another group that encountered Our Lord during his time on earth. The Scribes and Pharisees, the teachers of the law and the prophets, were people who, when God called them to give their lives to him, said with a bold and confident “Yes, Lord, I will serve you!” They spent their lives studying the words of God in the Old Testament, even teaching this law to others, and yet they found themselves to be strangers to true religion, to the religion of the heart, by which alone we can be joined to God and have eternal life. In spite of their weighty professions, in spite of the great show they made of their religion, they were hypocrites. As Jesus said, “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”

As Jesus preached to these “holy” men, he saw that they were just like the second son, who said, “I go, sir” and did not go to work for his father. They saw themselves as holy men and they were even able to convince the people that they were holier than they were, but nothing, not even the craftiest wiles of man can trick the Lord God. Jesus looked into their hearts and saw that they were full of hypocrisy and had no life in them.

It was to these people that Jesus told the story of the two sons. After He finished, He asked them, “Whether of them twain did the will of his father?” The self-righteous leaders answered, “The first.” Brothers and sisters, even these sinful men answered rightly. Even drowning in their sea of sin, they were not able to deny the truth of God’s parable. They saw, even in their hypocrisy, that true religion is not in thinking but in doing. And so, even though they could see the truth of Jesus’ words, they did not live by them. “Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom before you.”

Brothers and sisters, give your ears. Our Lord does not just say that the publicans and harlots go into the kingdom at all, but that they go into the kingdom ahead of all those who say they work for God but instead serve themselves. Indeed, those who will not serve the God they profess to love will not enter the kingdom at all, neither before nor after the publicans and harlots, no matter how holy they may think they are.

There is a word for us here today, fellow sinners. Are there any among us like the second son, like the Pharisees, who profess with the mouth, but whose heart is far from God? Do you not hear the words of Our Lord and fear lest you, too, might end up, not as a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, but rather cast out into the outer darkness, where the fire is not quenched and the worm dieth not? Do you not feel the weight of eternity resting on your shoulders? Can you endure the wrath of God that will be poured out on all unrepentant sinners on the last day? Jesus warned those who spoke a fine religion but did not live it that God would say to them, “Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels!” The Bible teaches of a lake of fire which those who are condemned must endure for ever and ever. “For ever and ever! Why, if we were only to be chained down one day, yea, one hour, in a lake of fire, how amazingly long would one day or one hour appear! I know not if it would not seem as a thousand years. But (astonishing thought!) after thousands of thousands, he has but just tasted of his bitter cup! After millions, it will be no nearer the end than it was the moment it began!”

Those who would put on a show for men, to impress those who are easily fooled, would do well to take the warning of Christ here. For all your show, even the harlots and prostitutes will enter the kingdom before you. The religion of the heart must change the way you live, must make itself known in holiness of thought and life, and love for God and neighbor. Without holiness, the Bible tells us, we will never see the Lord. I urge you, be reconciled to God. No longer trust in your fine words to deliver you while your life is still rancid and steeped in sin.

But the Gospel is just as clear in this text as the warning. There are many who associate with faithful people in order to make it seem that they, too, are truly the people of God even though their hearts are strangers to true religion. However, there may also be those here today who have rejected God their whole lives, who, like the first son, have had second thoughts, who would like to stop living in rebellion of your heavenly Father and go labor in His vineyards. You may have thought to yourself, “Surely, there can be no hope for me. I have rejected God, spit in His face, refused His offer of love. Surely nothing but sadness and despair await me.”

Sinner, know that, no matter what it might look like to the outsider, remember that it was the first son, who, in spite of his words of rejection, actually went and labored for his father, that was the son who did his father’s will. The one who said he would work but did not go is the one who was the rebel in heart. Both the sons were hypocrites, but while the second son was a hypocrite to God, making promises he did not keep, the first was only a hypocrite to Satan, breaking only his promises to sin.

In Christ, those who are enemies of God become His friends; those who are children of Satan become the children of our heavenly Father; sinners become saints. If you are the first son today, who has rejected God in the past, do so no more and you will be accepted with no questions asked, but with open arms of love. If you are the second, who, even by your presence here this morning, are trying to hide that your profession is no deeper than your skin and has not reached your heart, make good on your promises. No longer be almost a Christian, but one in truth. For with God all things are possible.

Amen and Amen.

John 13:21-30

04/18/10
John 13:21-30
Hudson UMC

I love how human Jesus is in the Gospel of John. It is possible to make two very serious mistakes in our consideration of Jesus, and people have made both of them throughout the years. The first is to forget that Jesus is really, really, God. If we do that, we can make all kinds of statements about Jesus and Christian faith, but at some point, we have to ask, “Why Jesus.” If Jesus is not really God, we can finally have no compelling reason why we emphasize Jesus and not some other leader.

The other major mistake we can make is to forget that Jesus is really, really, human. Jesus can be a revelation of the divine, but if He is not also fully human, if He has not taken our humanity upon Himself and brought God’s action right into the heart of what makes us who we are, then God always remains at arm’s length. When we see that Jesus is a man, we see that not even the weakness that we see in ourselves can stop God from working in our lives and in the lives of others.

Jesus has just washed the feet of His disciples and Judas is about to leave to betray Him to death. The connection between these two scenes is John telling us that “Jesus was troubled in spirit and declared, ‘Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.’” Here is the God of the universe, clothed in our flesh and living among us, with a troubled spirit. Have you ever been troubled in spirit? I’ll bet you have. Between all the stresses that we have in our world today, with work, family, health issues, death of ourselves or our loved ones, even the stresses of high school, we all know what it means to have our spirit troubled in one way or another.

The question we have when we hear texts like this is, “What would trouble Jesus’ spirit?” It is one thing for people like you and me to have a troubled spirit; it seems like something else altogether for the Son of God to have a troubled Spirit. If we look at it from one point of view, Jesus having a troubled spirit can be depressing. If we wanted to, we could look at this as being evidence that the trials of life are just too much for human beings to deal with. If even God in flesh could not live His life without being troubled in spirit, what hope is there for us? We could look at it this way, but I think we had better consider some other options before we decide that this is the way to look at it.

I can think of three major things that might cause Jesus’ heart to be troubled. The first is that the time was coming when His betrayer was going to be revealed. Now, it isn’t like Jesus didn’t know who was going to betray Him. He knew since the very beginning that Judas was going to turn Him over to the authorities for a paltry thirty pieces of silver. The issue is not that Jesus was going to find out who the betrayer is because He already knew. The issue is that everyone else was going to find out who the betrayer was.

We might think that this is something odd, that Jesus would be troubled because other people would find out who was going to betray Him. If you or I were being betrayed, we might want everyone else to know who would do it. If other people knew what was going on, they might be able to stop it. If the betrayer knew that a bunch of people knew what he was planning to do, he very well might not do it. Those sound like just the kind of thing we would like to have happen, but Jesus has good reason to not want those things to happen.

First, Jesus knows that, if He does not go to the cross, if He does not expose human sinfulness in all of its depths by provoking the mob to cry out “Crucify Him” and murdering the Son of God, He could not truly overturn our sin. Even if He could, we would never know the depths of God’s love like we do. If Jesus had not provoked humanity to its highest pitch of sin, evil and rebellion, we would always have been in doubt as to whether or not we could out-sin God’s grace. By doing what He did, we can trust that, even when we are at our worst, we have not sinned more than God can forgive.

The other major reason that Jesus might be troubled that Judas would be exposed as His betrayer is because Jesus would no longer be able to cover up his treachery. That might sound odd to us, too, especially as people who live in a society that wants to prosecute people who commit crimes in secret. We want people to be exposed because, until they are exposed, they can continue to commit those crimes. But we need to always remember that this Jesus is the same Jesus who cries out on the cross, after He has been condemned to death by the political and religious leaders of Jerusalem, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” This is a Jesus who has come to pour out grace and forgiveness to the whole world. He desperately wants to deliver Judas from his sin, but He knows all the same that, in spite of the good news He has proclaimed to His disciples, Judas would do the most irrational thing imaginable: refuse it. Until Judas is exposed, only Jesus knew the depths of his evil. Soon, everyone will know how bad he is and be shamed for the rest of time as the betrayer of Christ.

A second reason that Jesus might have had a troubled spirit is, quite simply, because He did not want to die. I think that sometimes we get the idea that Jesus, convinced of His mission would just march, glassy-eyed and unfeeling, to the cross, as if knowing the purpose it would serve would somehow make such a painful death easier to bear. Remember what I said earlier about it being a major mistake to forget that Jesus was really human. We have evidence from the New Testament that, while Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane, which is so beautifully depicted in our new stained glass window, He actually prayed that He would not have to be crucified. Luke’s Gospel tells us, Jesus went off to pray and said, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” Now, He continues and says, “yet not my will, but yours be done,” but we are also told that, “being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.” He never wavered from His faithfulness, but He was in agony over His death, and no wonder, crucifixion is one of the most painful ways to die that humanity has ever devised.

Another way we can think about Jesus being troubled in spirit is to think about it according to what we know He did in living and dying for us. Jesus took our weakness from us to overcome it. He took our limitations and worshipped God in spite of those limitations. He endured the temptations that you and I succumb to and met them with the very power of God, enduring them from within our humanity. We see in the Gospels that Jesus took everything that is ours and made it His own and took everything that was His own and gave it to us. Jesus having a troubled spirit because He is about to die is just one more example of this amazing exchange. He has taken even our fear of death and taken it upon Himself in order to confront it in our weakness with the very power of God and overcome it. Jesus does not entirely eliminate the feeling of fear when we face death, but He does assure us, first that He understands exactly what it feels like, because He has endured it Himself. He also assures us that, if that is what we are facing, if we are staring death in the face, that we are not alone, that our elder brother has gone even through that trial for us, on our behalf and in our place and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, will unite you to His triumph over death and, eventually, that you will join in His resurrection.

As true as those two ideas may be, that Jesus’ spirit was troubled because He was grieved that Judas’ sin was going to be exposed and that He did not particularly want to die, and I think they are true, I think there is one more reason, perhaps even stronger than the others, that Jesus has a troubled spirit. Jesus’ spirit was troubled as He faced betrayal and death precisely because the disciples’ spirits were not troubled. Jesus announces that the hour has arrived that He was going to be betrayed, and, as if that weren’t bad enough, the betrayal was going to come at the hands of one of His own disciples, by someone who was gathered together with them at the table.

When the disciples heard Jesus say that, their spirits were troubled. However, they were not troubled because their Lord and Master was going to be betrayed but because they were terrified that it might be them that betray Him. In Matthew’s Gospel, we hear every one of the disciples, including Judas, saying, “Surely not I, Lord?” Even in the text we have before us this morning, we have the disciples, represented by Peter, making gestures to one another trying to find out whom Jesus is talking about. It’s just like human beings, right? We tend all too often to be more concerned as to whose fault something is than the problem at hand and fixing it. We desperately want to place blame somewhere, as if it would be better to keep the problem but know who to blame than work together to fix the problem regardless of who is responsible.

So, the disciples were far more concerned with who would betray Jesus than they were that He was going to be betrayed. To be perfectly fair, the disciples probably didn’t really think that Jesus would really be betrayed and thought even less that, even if He was betrayed, that He would end up actually being killed. But even still, their spirits were troubled because they were afraid that, in the end, it might actually be them who betray Jesus, even if they had not already been plotting to do so. Even though only Judas actually went through with the betrayal, each of the disciples looked deeply into their hearts and souls and saw there a capacity to betray their Lord. They knew that each of them was capable of it, even if they never actually did it.

Even though we can point out the shortcoming of the disciples and see our shortcomings mirrored in theirs, the point that I am trying to make is not to emphasize our weakness, but to emphasize the incredible thing that God has done here in Christ. God knows, just like we do, that our spirits get troubled about all kinds of things that shouldn’t excite us. Even though Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow because today’s trouble is enough for today, the concerns of the future continually creep into our lives. So, when everyone around Him is getting agitated about the future, Jesus calmly leads on, following His own teaching and being calm when we can’t. Jesus takes the things that trouble us that shouldn’t and promises us that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we, too, can be joined to that calm and not be moved by the daily troubles that we all face.

Perhaps even more importantly, God knows that there are all kinds of things that should trouble our spirits but don’t. We are told that the single most important thing in our lives is our relationship to God, and yet far too often, even for pastors, we allow it to slip by the wayside and worry about everything but our relationship with God. We know that how we treat the least of society is incredibly important, but we let it sink to the back of our mind so it doesn’t trouble us. We could take time and make a good list of things that should trouble our spirits but just don’t. Jesus takes those things and allows them to trouble His spirit, even when they don’t trouble ours. On the one hand, this emphasizes to us that the things we worry about and stress out about are not really worth the time and energy we put into them and that there are things that are worth that time and energy that we ignore. Looking at Jesus, we see how far short we are from where we should be, but that is not all. We also see that, even our worries are so important in the eyes of God that He took them upon Himself and redeemed them.

Brothers and sisters, you and I live in a hectic world that isn’t slowing down a bit. We feel that we are surrendering our lives to our calendars and obligations. We live in a world that wears even retired people to a frazzle and distracts us from the things that really matter. We go along our merry way, with a soul that is troubled or untroubled depending on what is going on in our lives at that particular moment and we wonder if this is how life is supposed to be. We question whether the things we spend our time and energy on are really important or if we could and should be doing something more worthwhile with our lives.

When God poured out the Holy Spirit on the church at Pentecost, we Christians got the single most calming and also troubling gift we have ever received. It is calming because, if we allow the Holy Spirit to live Christ’s life of obedience to the Father through us, we will find that there is a whole multitude of things that we used to give ourselves ulcers over that just aren’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. We can have the freedom to not live our lives worried about every little thing and it can be a wonderfully liberating experience. However, it is also a troubling thing as well. If we are open to the Spirit’s call, we will find that there are things that we never even noticed before that, all of a sudden, become matters of great importance to us. All at once, we find that we are concerned about whether or not we are reading our Bibles, if we are putting ourselves in the position for God to speak to us. We begin to consider whether we are setting time aside for God in order to pray. We begin to look at the community around us and notice that there are people who are needy and we try to figure out ways that we can help them. In short, if we allow God to make us more and more like Christ, we will find a whole world that we never knew before, and that we finally realize is more important and even more real than the world we used to know.

So let your hearts be troubled, but don’t let them be troubled by trivial things. Let your hearts be troubled by things that are worth being troubled over, like your relationship to God, the spreading of the Good News throughout Hudson, and how you are treating your neighbor. But God wants you to be free from the troubles of things that are here today and gone tomorrow, that are passing into nothingness. God has sent His very life into your heart and wants to renew you in joy. He wants so desperately to give you His life that He has gone, even to His death, for you. The God who became flesh died so that you might live. Go live the life that God has given you to live and live it to the fullest. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 13:1-20

04/11/10
John 13:1-20
Hudson UMC

Today is the first Sunday in the season after Easter. As we celebrate the newness of life that is given to us because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, we enter into an extended reflection on the events of Holy Week. In John, chapters thirteen through twenty-one all take place in about a week. Everything else that John has to tell us is about Holy Week, the crucifixion, resurrection, and the time that the resurrected Christ spends with His disciples. You might think it is odd to focus so intensely on Holy Week right when we have just celebrated Easter, but nothing could be more natural, especially in John. Throughout the Gospel according to John, we hear Jesus and the narrator explain that nobody understood the significance of these events until after the resurrection. It is only when we look at these stories on this side of the resurrection that we can make heads or tails of them. There is no better time to think about John’s account of Holy Week than right after Easter.

Our passage for this week is the beginning of five chapters that are nearly entirely Jesus teaching His disciples. If you have a red-letter edition of the Bible, you will see that almost everything is in red for a while. It is significant that, right before Jesus takes on the role of teacher more fully than ever before, He serves His disciples. Jesus, knowing that He was about to be arrested and killed, knowing that the one who was going to betray Him was sitting at the table with Him, and knowing that, though He was the fullness of God in the midst of humanity and His disciples would be so unfaithful that they would turn and run when the going got tough, washed their feet.

It is extremely important that we understand how serious this is because it has drastic implications for the way you and I live our lives. Jesus, the leader, the teacher, the powerful one, washed the feet of His disciples. In order to understand this, we need to understand the culture at the time. At that time and place, people walked a lot on dirt roads wearing sandals. By the end of the day, their feet would have been caked with dust and anything else they managed to step in. It was common practice for a person to provide water for people to wash their own feet. Under the Israelite system, nobody could be forced to wash someone else’s feet. Not even slaves were required to wash the feet of their masters. Sometimes, a disciple would wash the feet of their teacher or Rabbi as a sign of humble love and admiration, but, according to the custom at the time, the greater person never served the lesser.

This is what makes the actions of Jesus so incredibly important. Jesus takes off His outer garment, that is, basically stripping down to His underwear with all the humiliation that goes along with it, ties a towel around Himself as an apron and went to His disciples, ordinary men, many of whom were lowly fishermen before they met Him, and began to wash their feet.

I can imagine the intense awkwardness that must have consumed the disciples at that moment. Here is their lord, their teacher, their master, washing their feet. What are they to make of that? What should they do when Jesus does this? What is the appropriate response to this blatant disregard for “the way things are done?”

This tension comes out into the open when Jesus approaches Peter. Peter says, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” He can’t believe that his master would actually do that. He wanted to make absolutely sure that this is what Jesus was doing. For all he knew, He might have another plan in mind and it just looks like He is going to wash his feet, but if that is actually his plan, Peter would want to put a stop to it. “Jesus answered, ‘You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Listen to what Peter says here. “Peter said to him, ‘You will never wash my feet.’” Peter is saying, “No, Jesus, I simply will not allow you to humiliate yourself like this. I will not allow you to so flagrantly overturn our social customs. I know myself far too well to allow you to wash my feet. By washing my feet, you are taking on the role of my servant and I can not allow that.”

What does Jesus do in response? Does He come to His senses, as it were, and say, “You’re right. What was I thinking? I’ll let you wash your own feet.” No, He does not. He says, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” This is incredible. If Peter did not allow Jesus to wash him, he could not be a disciple. What kind of situation is this to put someone in? “If you want to be my disciple and my follower, you need to allow me to debase myself, get on my knees, and be your servant.” If you want to follow Jesus and serve Him, you have to let Him serve you. As awkward and paradoxical as it might seem, this is the beauty of the Gospel. If we want to be a part of what Jesus is doing, if we want to follow Jesus, we have to allow Him to do the work. We can’t stand up and say, “No thank you, Jesus, I can take care of this.” Even if it is something like washing your feet. If Jesus wants to wash your feet, you cannot do the washing and still be His follower. To follow Jesus requires total commitment. Jesus is either everything, or else we have nothing to do with Him.

So, when Peter finds out that his status as a disciple is at stake here, he completely turns around. He says, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” He says, “If I’ve got to be washed by you, then wash all of me!” This seems great, but Jesus does not do it. He says, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” This is extremely important. Jesus does not allow Peter to call the shots. Even when Peter’s exclamation seems to make perfect sense to us, Jesus remains in control and the one who decides what needs to be done. Over and over again, throughout the entire Bible, we see God saying to humanity, “You have your ideas of what needs to be done. However, you are stuck in your limited context with misperceptions and confusion. I know what you need and I will give it to you, even if you think you need something different.

At the end of this event, after washing the feet of His disciples, Jesus begins to explain the full extent of how radical what He has just done is. We read, “After he had washed their feet, had put in his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, ‘Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord – and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” Now Jesus starts meddling. He is not satisfied with the fact that He has decisively demonstrated service to His disciples; He has taken His example and turned it into a command for all who follow Him to observe. He doesn’t leave us any alternative but to follow in His footsteps.

In fact, He goes so far as to say, “For I have set you as an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them.” Jesus is saying something here that everyone in the ancient world would agree with. The disciples saw themselves as Jesus’ servants. They also would be sent out into the world, so they are the messengers of Jesus. They would agree with the statement that they are not greater than their master and the one who sends them. But what does Jesus mean in this context? What does He mean by saying this right after He washed the feet of His disciples? He means, quite simply, that if their master takes the lowliest place, the place of a servant, and waits on others, making Himself low, even washing feet in His undergarments and a towel, we, that is, you and I, should be willing to do the same.

This radically overturns the way that we normally look at service. We think of Christian service to be something that is completely voluntary, but Jesus tells us that it is mandatory, that we cannot be His followers if we refuse to serve like He has done. We see that, if we hope to live our lives without serving others, or even having others serve us, we are trying to be greater than our master, which Jesus says cannot be. If the God of the universe was willing to humble Himself to the dust and wash the dirt and dust off of ordinary people’s feet, surely we must be even more willing to take the degrading jobs and give of ourselves.

Perhaps the single most radical thing that Jesus is saying here has to do with the reward that we should expect for service: there isn’t one. The service that Jesus models is one that does not count the cost, that does not consider if it is a good investment, but one that gives selflessly and does not expect any thanks, any compensation, or any reward. I want you to think about a mighty king, sitting on his throne, the mightiest man in the country. This mighty king calls to have one of his servants come and wash his feet. The servant comes and does just that, washing the dirt and nastiness off of his master’s feet. Does the king say “thank you” to the servant? Does he offer to return the favor? Of course not! In the world, masters do not thank their servants; they simply command them. Servants serve their masters, but do not serve in order to get thanks or to enjoy the deep personal satisfaction they get from washing the king’s feet, but because they are ordered to.

Jesus puts it this way. He tells a story about a servant working all day in the fields, laboring away for his master. When the day is over and the servant comes in from the fields, what happens? Does the master say, “Boy, you’ve sure been working hard. Here, sit down, make yourself comfortable. I’ll make you some supper. You’ve had such a long day, just relax. You’ve earned it.” No, the master doesn’t say that at all. Instead, the master says, “Now that you are done in the fields, make me some supper and change into some nice clothes so you can wait on me while I eat and drink and only when I am done can you go and get something to eat.” He finishes up His story by saying, “So you too, when you do all the things which are commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have done only that which we ought to have done.’”

If we were slaves and we had to wash the feet of the king, we would not expect any thanks or anything else like that, because we are a slave and he is the king. If we were a servant or a follower of a leader and we did what we were told, we would not expect any thanks or generous response because we are the servant or follower and they are the leader. If we are working at a job, we don’t expect our bosses to say “thank you” every time we fulfill our job description, all we expect is the paycheck that is coming to us. In fact, any time we serve someone or something that we think is more important than we are, we have no problem serving just because it is what we are supposed to do. The difficulty comes when we engage in serving someone or something that we think is not worthy of us, that we somehow believe is beneath us. The more I think about it and reflect on the nature of service, the more I am convinced that the only way we can expect to get thanks for our work and service is if we think that, somehow, we are better than the one we are serving. All of our selfishness that we usually keep hidden away so that nobody can see it comes rushing out, all of a sudden, and is exposed. We want people to recognize our work because we think that we are pretty special and, by golly, the people should be grateful that I took time out of my busy schedule and made room for them.

So long as we are working for someone or something that we think is greater than ourselves, we have no problems working and serving and giving of ourselves without any thanks. We see the job as intrinsically important and we feel honored just to be allowed to serve. However, if we are serving someone or something that we think is beneath us, we want to make sure that the person or cause knows just how lucky it is to have someone like us serving them. We expect them to marvel at our dedication, at our willingness to serve. However, we do not see this in Jesus when He served.

In fact, we see the opposite. We do not see a Jesus who expected His disciples to return the favor and wash His feet. We do not see a Jesus who waited for His disciples to thank Him for His service and then become upset when it never came. We do not see a Jesus who, while on the cross, lamented that He had shown so much kindness to people who didn’t appreciate it. Instead, we see a Jesus who says, “I know that you are fickle and unreliable people. I know that, within a matter of hours, you are going to scatter all over the place, that you are going to join the crowd of mockers, that you are going to pretend that you don’t even know me. I know that you are going to run and hide when the going gets tough. In short, I know that you are completely unworthy of me, but I serve you anyway, without reserve, without hesitation, and without expecting anything in return.” When Christ is on the cross, we hear Him cry out, not that we have been ungrateful and undeserving, but rather we hear, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Now, this does not mean that we should not honor people who serve the church, who give sacrificially of themselves to help others. When we lift up such service, we can encourage them to keep going because their work makes a difference and is appreciated. However, it is a caution and even a warning to us that we must not approach service as if we are doing people favors. Like Jesus said, after we have done everything in our power to do, we should say, “We are unworthy slaves and we only did what we ought to have done.” We follow a Lord who gave of Himself, washing the feet of His disciples, even washing the feet of the one who was about to betray Him to death. If Jesus is willing to wash and even die for the one who is directly responsible for His arrest, and we have been given the Spirit of Christ, surely we can give and not count the cost, we can rejoice in service, we can be overwhelmed in the midst of our service that we are joined in the servant ministry of Jesus and the job is intrinsically worth doing because it is God’s work.

So we all are called to serve, and to serve without thanks, even though thanks may be given from time to time. We do not serve human beings but God, who sees whatever we do in secret and rewards us. Jesus is our model, Jesus is our example, Jesus is the one we serve, even when it looks like we are serving our brothers and sisters in Christ. To follow Jesus is to be a servant, to be reduced to nothing in ourselves and raised up to unthinkable heights in Christ. We are called to serve the servant Lord. Let us do so with joy and amazement, that we might be allowed the privilege to serve the least of society. Let us pray.

AMEN

Luke 24:1-12

04/04/10
Luke 24:1-12
Hudson UMC

What a glorious day to gather together as the people of God, who have been purchased with the blood of the Lamb, Jesus Christ the Son of God. Today we celebrate one of the most amazing things in all of history. God, who had taken on human flesh, was nailed to a cross, bearing and bearing away our sins with the very power of God. Three days later, He rose from the dead, taking our humanity and overcoming death in it, demonstrating that, in the end, not even death can stop God’s will.

Before I make some general comments about the resurrection as one of the central parts of the Christian faith, I want to spend at least a few minutes on the actual text that we have this morning. Particularly, I want to focus on the words of the two men, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” The women had brought spices with them to the tomb, which were meant to care for Jesus’ dead body. This question must have absolutely blown them over. Why were they looking for Jesus among the dead? The answer was simply this, they thought He was dead. The last time they saw Him, He was dead. How could they possibly imagine that Jesus was alive? They looked for Him among the dead because that was where they expected to find Him.

Now, we in the church might think this is somewhat odd. We know that Jesus was raised on the third day, we know that Jesus told them over and over again that this was going to happen, but we have to remember that we live on the other side of the resurrection from the disciples. We already know how the story ends; they didn’t.

I think that this might reflect on how we often live our lives. Jesus promises us extravagant things, eternal life, abundant life even here and now, joy, peace, love, and more, and yet we often live our lives as if the status quo is all there is. We have the very presence of God among us in the Holy Spirit, and all too often, we allow ourselves to be satisfied simply with the way things have always been. God tells us that by faith we can move mountains, but we say to Him, “No thank you. I take great pride in doing things myself. If I can’t move that mountain on my own, then I don’t want it moved.” Lives get changed and we are amazed, because, in spite of the repeated promises of the gospel, we sometimes just don’t really believe that God actually does these things.

And yet, if there is one thing that the resurrection of Christ from the dead proves to us, it is that God keeps His promises. We can see that, even when it takes nothing less than the second Person of the Trinity taking on human flesh, and dying the most painful death imaginable, God does not waver, but does everything He promises us, and does so in more amazing ways than we ever thought possible. God endured the pains of death, not because He did anything to deserve it, but because you and I deserve it and He did it on our behalf and in our place in a total act of self-giving love. If He will do that, we can trust with everything we are that He will fulfill all His other promises to us. Our trust in the love of God is rooted in the resurrection. It is of absolutely pivotal importance but the world we live in makes it difficult to keep it in the forefront.

Between the trend that our culture has towards secularism and the commercialization of the Christian holidays, I think that we as a society have tended to forget how incredible this event really is. Not only is it incredible, but, if we look at the facts through our modern lenses, it is incredibly hard to believe. Last year, I found myself explaining the idea of Pentecost to a young person who had absolutely no background in the church. I found myself reflecting on the fact that, in spite of the fact that the amazing work of God seems completely normal to me because I have been so deeply shaped by the Gospel, it probably sounds like the most ridiculous thing in the world to someone who has been raised in a skeptical modern society.

We celebrate today what is perhaps the very central event in the life of the church. We celebrate the fact that a human being, who was at the very same time the God of the universe, was dead and yet was raised. When we say He was dead, we mean that He was dead; His life functions had completely ceased, His heart had stopped beating, His brain was no longer responsive. His eyes were dilated and fixed. When Jesus was on the cross and they wanted to make sure He was dead, they pierced His side and we read that blood and water came out. The reason for this is because, once the heart stops circulating fluids, they begin to pool. We Christians proclaim without flinching and without hesitation that this man who was very dead was raised from the dead. His heart began beating, His brain resumed function, He was able to stand up and walk. Despite the fact that, in our every day experience, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen, we declare in no uncertain terms that this is exactly what happened to Jesus.

We have a story at the end of every single Gospel that tells us about people coming to the place where Jesus was buried and finding the tomb empty. Even though the disciples had been told over and over again that He was going to be raised, they still didn’t believe it, couldn’t imagine that it would actually happen; and yet it did. We could look through the whole New Testament and find a whole pile of texts that either explicitly talk about the resurrection of Christ or strongly imply it. But that is not all. It has been argued that the entire New Testament is written from the point of view of the resurrection and, if we deny that the man Jesus of Nazareth was physically raised from the dead, the entire Gospel message collapses to the ground as irrelevant and groundless. Truly the resurrection is extremely important.

What is amazing is that even committed atheists see the resurrection as central to Christian faith. Christopher Hitchens, who wrote the book God is Not Great, who has no reason to defend any claim by Christianity, in a recent interview with a Unitarian minister said, “I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.” Even those who don’t believe see this as supremely important to the integrity of Christian faith.

So I could stand up here all day and tell you that the resurrection is important for the Christian life, but you might be wondering how it matters to you in practical, every day life. The first thing I want to remind you of is that the resurrection of Christ is the guarantee that this life that we are living is not the only one we have. There will come a time when we too will be raised from the dead, joined in Christ’s resurrection, and we will be joined in fellowship to God for all eternity. If we say that Jesus was not raised from the dead because the dead are simply not raised, all our hopes to see our loved ones again, to have a life beyond this one, go out the window. Paul makes exactly this point in First Corinthians. He says, “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” We can trust that we will be raised because Christ was raised.

The resurrection is also the final root for Christian ethics. God entered into our humanity, giving it worth beyond what it had on its own. But the resurrection proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that what happens to our physical bodies matters to God. Ancient Greek philosophies often said that the soul is good but the body is evil. In that case, we should strive to get rid of the body as fast as possible so we can be free from it. Not so in Christian faith. God not only took our humanity upon Himself, not only allowed it to die, but raised it from the dead and ascended it to heaven where the physical body of Christ dwells forever. The body never finally goes away. Because God places such a high value on our bodies, we must take care of them and not abuse the bodies of others.

Finally, as people who follow Christ, who have been promised the incredible future of being resurrected in glory like Christ was, we can live our lives knowing that our God has overcome our weakness, has taken our sin and nailed it to the cross. We can go into the world with the confidence of the children of God who know that their sins have been forgiven, their guilt and shame have been taken away and they have been made children of God.

This freedom and joy is not dependent on how much we have done to deserve it because, as the Gospel tells us, we know the depths of God’s love for us because Christ died for us, not when we were righteous, but while we were still sinners. We don’t have to worry that we haven’t been faithful in the past because God does not hold our past against us, no matter what we may have done, but offers us a new start, where we do not need to be chained by our weakness or what other people might think about us, but can live in the liberty and glory of the Spirit of God. Paul reminded the Roman church, “the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives inside of you.” Imagine that! The Spirit of God has taken up residence in you and in me; all because Jesus took everything that stands against God in our hearts and lives upon Himself and allowed it to be crucified with Him, never to return. You and I, brothers and sisters, are resurrection people, with a freedom that those who are strangers to the promise of eternal life cannot even imagine. Let us go forth into the world as those who have been raised from the death of our pasts, who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God. Our God is good and has already won the victory over the powers of sin and death. Let us go forth in that victory and allow God to transform the world through us. Let us pray.

AMEN

Mark 11:1-11

03/28/10
Mark 11:1-11
Hudson UMC

Just five weeks ago, we heard John’s account of the Triumphal entry into Jerusalem. That reading came up in the normal course of our plowing our way through the Gospel of John. Here we are, five weeks later, considering the same story, only now, we come across it, not as pure chance on our way through a particular book, but because we find ourselves in a very specific time of year. Today we consider this event, not just as the next thing in the story of Jesus’ ministry, but because today we are entering into Holy Week, where we remember the last few days before Jesus was executed. We will have several worship services this week to commemorate these significant days and to help us to sustain our thinking and thanksgiving about what God has done for us.

I mentioned that we are thinking about the same story that we thought about a few weeks ago, so there might be some people who wonder why we are going over the same ground again. You might raise the question, “Why didn’t you just skip that passage in John and use it today instead of preaching on the same story twice.” Well, that had crossed my mind, but, in a way, it isn’t quite the same story. When we thought about John’s telling of the story, I emphasized the ways that the radically different context of John actually highlights different things in the story.

Because what I have to say depends so strongly on the context of this passage in Mark, I want to remind you of two major things. The first is that none of the Gospel writers make any kind of claim to be telling the story of Jesus in absolutely chronological order. We read the same stories in different orders depending on what Gospel we are reading, but that should not bother us. After all, we will often tell people stories where we don’t make any point to set it at a particular time and place, and yet the stories are still absolutely true. Most of the time, whether the story you are telling happened last Wednesday or a year ago last Wednesday doesn’t really matter. The story is not dependent on that particular detail in order to be true.

The other major thing I want to remind you of is that the entire ministry of Jesus is not and indeed can not be exhausted by any individual gospel or even all of them together. John tells us at the end of his version of the events that, if we wrote down everything Jesus did and said, the world not be able to even contain the books that would be written. This is important because it means that, whenever anyone tells the story of Jesus, they select some stories and teaching and pass by others. This is not meant to hide anything or to falsify the facts, but simply out of necessity. You can’t relate everything, so you have to choose what you do relate and how you arrange it will speak as loudly as the words themselves do. Think about it this way. If you were to go through the four gospels that we have and put together a new Gospel to help people who live in Hudson learn about Jesus, what would you pick and how would you arrange it? Whether you mean to or not, those choices will reflect this time and place and the points that you want to make sure you get across.

All of this is to say that, even though this event is something that actually happened in Jesus’ life and each of the gospels includes this scene, Mark is trying to bring out different ideas than John was. This doesn’t make it any less true, but it means that we shouldn’t be surprised if we see it with different eyes. However, it means that we are going to have to take a few minutes and understand some of the major themes in Mark and where this story falls in his account.

Mark emphasizes more than any other Gospel writer that, in the ministry of Jesus we have the clashing of two forces, the force of God and the forces of evil. Just the presence of Jesus causes evil spirits to cry out for mercy. When Jesus is among people, their evil thoughts are known to Him and He points them out, bringing the evil that nobody would ever have known about because it was so carefully hidden out into the open and confronting it with the very presence of God. When Jesus is accused of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons, He rejects the claim and says, “If a house is divided against itself, that house will not stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.” Throughout the whole Gospel, Jesus is portrayed as the one who is stronger than the strong man, the one who has the strength and authority to overturn the kingdom of evil.

The other major theme that is important to talk about is the way that Mark uses geography in his Gospel. For Mark, where he has a particular story taking place is extremely important. For example, Mark tells of Jesus feeding five thousand people on the West side of the sea of Galilee, where the Jews lived and four thousand people on the East side where the Gentiles lived. He didn’t forget he had already told basically the same story; he was making a very distinct point, that God’s work in, through, and as Jesus Christ breaks down the barriers that stand between people, even those so serious as the one that divided Jews and Gentiles. You get a little bit of theological use of geography in other gospels, but nobody uses it as much as Mark does.

The reason that I bring this is up is because almost exactly halfway through Mark, Jesus gets as far away from Jerusalem as He ever does. He is way in the north in the villages of Caesarea Philippi. What is significant is that, from that moment on, Jesus makes a steady journey south, straight to Jerusalem. On the way, He explains to His disciples three times that He is going to die and be raised from the dead. There are two points that I want to make about this. First, that Jesus is on His death march. He knows exactly what is happening and what He will suffer once He gets to Jerusalem. He is on the brink of suffering a painful and terrible death for you and for me and He did so willingly and with open eyes. The other thing is that it almost seems as if Jesus is making a final charge on Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is a very important city in the Bible. It is called the City of David, but even he did not found the city. He took it over from the Jebusite people but built it up and made it his capital. Under Solomon, it became a center for culture, wealth, and the location of the Temple. During Jesus’ time and in the early church, because it was where the Temple was and, for the church, because it was where Jesus was put to death and resurrected, it was referred to as the City of God. Indeed, the location of the city is so important that, even today, people are fighting over it. It was called the City of God, but nothing could be further from the truth. In Mark, Jesus does not come to Jerusalem until this last minute. What does it say about a city if, when God takes on human flesh, He avoids it? What is more important is that we see that the leaders from Jerusalem are the ones who set themselves most fully against Jesus. Jesus is marching into the heart of human evil, to the one place where, more than anywhere else, human beings have usurped the authority of God for themselves and used it to rule over the people, and the very presence of Jesus is going to cause the whole situation to erupt into an explosion of conflict between the ways of human beings and the ways of God.

This invasion of God into our life and situation is exactly what we are celebrating during Holy Week. This entry into the heart of human rebellion shows us that God is not afraid of our evil, is not afraid of our stubbornness, is not afraid of our shortcomings. God never leaves the work undone, but sees it through, even when it costs more than we could possibly imagine. This is one of the most decisive moments in all of history. The first and greatest use of geography to tell us something about God is when Jesus was born and, for the first time ever, God stepped into our world of space and time. We read that Jesus is called Immanuel, “God with us.” Truly, God was with is in a way that He never was before. He was not only with us in spiritual ways, but with us in our every day lives of flesh and blood. When Jesus came to Jerusalem, He was intensifying His presence, but it was nothing new; He was just bringing to a climax what He had already started thirty some years before.

Here, in the story of Palm Sunday, we have a brief glimpse of God’s kingdom breaking in. Before this time, to most people, Jesus was just an itinerant preacher, wandering around the region of Galilee. The peasants liked Him and the religious leaders hated Him, but He was just a preacher, carrying on the long tradition of prophets in Israel. Here was have an impromptu parade. Jesus riding an animal rather than walking for the first time. In fact, since people who were coming to Jerusalem for Passover were expected to walk in if they were physically able to, that Jesus choice of this moment to ride a colt is extremely significant. He is riding, not because He is tired, but because He is making a point, that He is Israel’s king, even if He doesn’t live in a palace and never will. He is the ruler of the people of God, even though Pilate, Herod, and others are the ones who have stolen that right from Him. Nobody planned the event, but a crowd of people all of a sudden get a tiny bit of understanding of who Jesus is and they cannot contain themselves but feel compelled to celebrate.

In Mark, even more than in the other Gospels, it is emphasized over and over again that the people who seem to be on the inside really don’t understand and those who seem to be on the outside, and them only, are the ones that really do get it, who can see with eyes of faith. It is because of this running theme that Mark is perhaps the most dangerous Gospel to read in the church, because it calls us to reflect on ways that we might not be understanding Jesus while those outside of our walls, who seem to be living in darkness and shame, who are our modern equivalents of the tax collectors and prostitutes, might see a Jesus that we have learned not to see in our world of comfort and security. Where we often look for a Jesus who is going to provide us with a stamp of approval on our status quo, those who have not grown up in the church are often met with a Jesus who radically challenges their lives and, in doing so, transforms them into new people whose faith is often greater than we can imagine.

But regardless of those who we think are on the inside or outside, we have Jesus overturning all of our preconceived notions about everything. The God of the universe becomes a man, not a man who spends all His time being catered to, but living among the poorest of the poor, sleeping on the ground, being misunderstood and attacked by the leaders of the day. His riding on the colt in this one instance highlights the fact that, for the rest of His ministry, He refused special treatment, but showed compassion on those the world had thrown out. Here comes God into the city that is supposed to be dedicated to Him and, just for a moment, receives a joyful welcome. Yes, that welcome soon fades; yes, God quickly finds Himself unwelcome in His own city, but for one moment, people throw their dignity to the wind and welcome Jesus.

Jesus came to invade our world, to launch an attack on the ways of human beings that have strayed entirely too far from their Creator. God does not sit idly by and hope things work out for the best; He does something about it, He gives of Himself to right the wrongs. Everything that human glory stood for was about be turned upside down and Jesus’ attack on the corruption of Jerusalem in Mark’s Gospel begins with His storming the Temple and exposing the sin that was entrenched in the place set aside for worship. And yet, in spite of the fact that all the leaders of the people, and especially the religious leaders, thought that what Jesus was doing was the worst thing ever, He did not stop but pressed on until He had finished what He came to do.

This matters to you and to me because, if we give our lives to God, it will only be a matter of time before we see God standing against something in our lives. Perhaps it is how we use our time; maybe God convicts us of a tendency to gossip and show one face to some people and another to others; often, He challenges us in how we spend our money. No matter how God’s judgment manifests itself in our lives, no matter how uncomfortable it might feel, no matter how much we might think that God’s ways are not the best for us because they go against our way of thinking and our plans for our future, we have the divine promise that, as we are changed, we are changed for the better. As God attacks the sin in our lives, it may hurt for a time, but God died for us to live, and we can trust the God who does that to do nothing but the best. The ancient church liked to use the image of a surgeon inflicting pain in order to remove a dangerous infection or other problem. That image must have been even more potent in those days before anesthesia.

So, as we have gathered to celebrate the welcome that the least of society gave to Jesus as He entered into Jerusalem, to greet Him as He joined them in their celebration of the work of God, let us welcome Jesus into our lives; again, or for the first time. Words cannot express how important it is that we are ever welcoming God to do His will in our hearts and lives. And yet, we must not stop there. We are in the climax of the season where we remember and celebrate the incredible self-giving of God for each of us that we might have life and not death. Let us be joined in Christ’s mission by giving of our selves to others so that they too might have the life of Christ dwelling inside of them. Let us pray.
AMEN

John 12:44-50

03/21/10
John 12:44-50
Hudson UMC

This morning, we finish many things. First, we finish chapter twelve in the Gospel of John. In doing this, we finish the first half of the book, where Jesus is engaged in public ministry; teaching and doing miracles for everyone He meets. The second half of the book is geared much more at the private teaching that Jesus gave His disciples, those who were better prepared to understand the mysteries of God. For those of you who are wondering if we will ever finish John, the answer is “yes.” The second half will go much faster than the first half. Finally, we are finishing the last of the Sundays of Lent before Palm Sunday and Easter. Once Easter is over, a whole different tone will come over our Scripture reading.

Our passage for this morning is the last statement that Jesus makes in public. From this point on, we will only be reading about Jesus’ final teaching in the Upper Room on Maundy Thursday, the crucifixion, the resurrection and what happens after that point. Since this is the last thing Jesus has to say to the general public until the apostles are sent out, we might expect it to be something of a summary of what He has already said. This is indeed what it is. We do not hear anything different here than we have heard already in John’s Gospel.

“Then Jesus cried aloud: ‘Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me.” This is not a new statement, but it is a stronger way of saying what He has said before. Earlier in the Gospel, we have heard Jesus explain that He is a manifestation of God’s love for the whole world. We have heard Him explain that the one that “God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands.” In a discussion with the Jewish leaders, Jesus explained that He does not do His own works but only the works of the Father who sent Him.

However, this statement claims that whoever believes in the man Jesus does not really believe in a human, but believes in the God who sent Him, that is, the God that Jesus calls Father. This is very important for us to understand. Many times, people put God over here and Jesus over there, as if you could have Jesus and not have God or have God and not have Jesus. Jesus is saying that faith in Him and faith in God are completely bound up together. If you believe in Jesus, you believe in God. In fact, you have a deeper understanding of God than you could ever have if you didn’t believe in Jesus. There is no God other than the God that has come among us as the man Jesus. If we try to find God somehow outside of Jesus, we are looking for a God that, quite simply, does not exist. Our statements about the character of God are only true inasmuch as they are true statements about the character of Jesus.

The great Christian thinkers of the early church wanted to make sure that their congregations understood how significant it is that Jesus says what He says here. They point out that the apostles, for example, would never say about themselves what Jesus says about Himself here. None of the apostles would ever say, “The one who believes in me believes not in me but in He who sent me.” They would never say that because they would not tell people to believe in them at all. When we say that we believe in Jesus, we don’t mean it in the same way that we might if we are trying to encourage someone and we say, “I believe in you.” When we are talking to someone else, what we mean is, “I have confidence that you can handle your situation, even if you don’t.” When we say we believe in Jesus we are saying, “We believe that you are God, that you have the authority to forgive sins and to heal our brokenness.”

The next thing Jesus says is, “I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness.” This is good news for us in our modern situation. In a world where sin is more available to us than ever before, where we can maintain our anonymity on the internet and get involved in all kinds of sin with no accountability whatsoever, it is extremely easy to slide into darkness. We even have elected officials who, while they are about the business of leading our nation, find themselves caught up in all kinds of scandals. It all goes to show us how prone we are as human beings to live in darkness. I can’t speak for everyone who has had a scandal, but I would imagine that, if they were able to get the right kind of support and if they learned to lean on God in the aftermath of the painful exposure of their misdeeds, they might begin to live a life that is more free than it has ever been.

Jesus came as a light into the world. The famous Greek Philosopher, Plato, told an allegory of people who lived in a cave who could only see shadows and, because it was all they knew, were convinced that the shadows were all that was real in the world. He said that, if one of these people was released from the chains and was brought out of the cave and made to encounter the light of the sun for the first time, they would be frightened and angry, and want to go back to the shadows that they knew and thought they could understand. Though I don’t hold Plato to be anywhere near the authority of Jesus, he had some very useful insights about humanity. If we live all our lives thinking that the world is all that is real, that all we can enjoy and look forward to is the fleeting joys of this life, if we come face to face through the Holy Spirit with God in Christ, the light of the world, it can be a painful, frightening and profoundly disturbing experience. Once we have met face to face with God, we can either live in the light and experience the joy of eternal life, even here and now, or we can run back to the shadows, to what we know, to what is comfortable.

What Plato didn’t understand is that the light and the world of the real is not simply frightening and disturbing, but loving, personal, and transformative. When we first encounter God, the one who, more than anything else, is really real, we hear good news, that our sins are forgiven, that we no longer need to live in darkness, that God has taken the initiative and joined us in our brokenness so that we might join Him in His fullness. We are given promises to encourage us backed up by the very being of God, so that God cannot go back on them without ceasing to be God. C. S. Lewis once reflected on how we often react to God. “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are too easily pleased.”

“I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.” This sounds odd to us, because Jesus has said, earlier in the Gospel, that the Father has entrusted all judgment into His hands. It might seem to us that, if Jesus was the one in whose hands lies all judgment and He says here that He does not judge the world, we might have a hard time reconciling this with all the passages that clearly claim that there is a judgment to come. In fact, Jesus explains right here that there is indeed still a judgment.

“The one who rejects me and does not receive my word has a judge; on the last day the word that I have spoken will serve as judge, for I have not spoken on my own, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I speak, therefore, I speak just as the Father has told me.” This is an amazing statement, because it reminds us of the extreme grace of God.

What does it mean for the word that Jesus has spoken to serve as judge on the last day? This sounds somewhat odd. I might go on and on, as many throughout history, especially revivalist American history, have done and remind you that Jesus has lots of harsh things to say, that He makes it very clear that there is a coming judgment and that, at some point, those who have accepted the good news of Jesus Christ and those who have not will be separated. I could explain that the Bible teaches us that such a separation is absolute and final, that it will be sudden, and even that it will surprise everyone, both those who finally go to heaven and those who finally do not. I could frame the whole discussion about Jesus’ words as judge within the context of all the frightening images of hell that abound in Jesus’ parables and teachings. I could do that, but I am not going to.

I am not going to do that, not because I don’t think that those passages have important things to tell us, especially because Jesus talked about the coming judgment more than everything else except money, but because I think there is another side to it, one that we don’t hear all that much about, that is just as important, if not even more so. In the end, when Jesus is saying that His words will judge us, I don’t think He is primarily talking about His warnings against evil behavior or His harsh rebukes of the Pharisees. I think that the words that will stand in judgment over us if we reject Christ and don’t receive His word will be of a decidedly different kind. I think that those words will be along the lines of “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Other words like this in the Gospel of John might include, “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgment, but has passed from death to life,” and “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.” “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” “The Father and I are one.” And, even from this very text, “Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness.”

I think that those are the words that will act as our judge if we reject Christ and do not believe His word. It is like the author of Hebrews says at one point, “How will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?” What more could God have said to convince us that He was about our best interests? God has come into our midst, taking our brokenness upon Himself, to shoulder our burdens in order to overcome them from the inside out, has pledged His very being as God for us, and has made promise after promise that, if we simply place our trust in Him, we will not walk in darkness, we will saved from the forces of evil, that we will never be finally conquered by death, that God Himself will abide in us and we will abide in Him. What more do we want from Him? What more could we possibly demand from the God of the universe that He has not already done? If, in spite of God’s willingness to live for us and to die for us, we still reject Christ and His words, it is not the words of warning that will judge us, but the words of hope and promise. God says to us, “Here is hope beyond what you could ever imagine.” If we say, “We want hope, but not that hope,” what hope is there for us? If we say we want happiness and life and all that is good but yet reject the one who brings it to us and fulfills His promises, what good can we possibly receive? The promises of God cannot be separated from God Himself. We either get both the one and the other, or we get neither. We cannot have the good news of Jesus Christ without Christ Himself.

But why would we ever do that? Why would we ever reject those promises? Can there be any rational reason why we would refuse to receive what God has offered? Maybe because we want things our own way, that we want salvation on our own terms, that we want to think that we have contributed something, or that maybe we want to think that we are good enough that we don’t really need to be saved because there is no real danger. All of those things are wild fantasies. We have the assurance of God that those ways of thinking, in spite of being attractive, are completely incompatible with how things really are. This is the reality, the only one there is, that we are helpless but that the Lord God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, loves us more than we love ourselves, indeed, as we see in His willingness to die for us, loves us more than He loves Himself, and will stop at nothing to save us from disaster.

So, we might rephrase what Jesus has said here. It is as if He has said, “The love that I show you is the very love of God. When you look into my face, you see the face of God. I have come to free you, not just from the bondage that you know you are in, but from the bondage you are not yet aware of but is all too real. I plead with you not to reject me and my words because I and my words are a source of hope and there is no hope outside of me. Do not throw away the only hope there is, a hope that has given everything for you. Listen, for my words are eternal life.” This is the final proclamation that Jesus makes in the public and it is an outburst of love. May the Holy Spirit soften our hearts that we might know more fully than ever before that God’s love is real, powerful, and able to transform even us. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 12:36b-43

03/14/10
John 12:36b-43
Hudson UMC

When I was deciding on whether or not I really wanted to preach the entire way through the Gospel according to John, I was thinking about what it would involve. The single greatest advantage is that it gives us as a body an opportunity to consider the ministry of Jesus from beginning to end and see how it influences our lives and to then be able to say at the end of it, “We have really considered an entire Gospel.” In a world that loves sound bytes, surrounded by Christians who, in spite of all their good intentions, can do nothing more than grab a few verses out of context to think about, we have a chance as an entire church to thoughtfully consider large sections of Scripture and how different passages relate to one another. It used to be extremely common practice to do what we are doing, but it has fallen out of popularity.

I can remember thinking to myself, “You know, Travis, if you set out to preach on every passage of John, you are going to run into some texts that you’d rather not preach on.” I don’t know if you have had the same experience that I have, but there are some things in the Gospel that are not easy to hear. God is always challenging us and our preconceived notions, but there are some places where God stands firm and we have nothing to do but wrestle with what He has said and try to make sense of it.

There is a passage from the book of Isaiah that is referenced by each of the four Gospel-writers, though they each word it slightly differently. It appears in John right here, where John is lamenting the lack of faith in spite of all the miracles Jesus had performed. He puts it this way, “And so they could not believe, because Isaiah also said, He (that is, God) has blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart, so that they might not look with their eyes, and understand with their heart and turn-and I would heal them.” This statement has tended to get people all riled up and with good reason. It seems to paint a picture of God that we don’t really like all that well.

Every other time I have read this passage, I have done so as a private Christian, one who is not bound by any kind of authority to have to make a decision about every single text. The moment someone enters into Christian leadership, however, all of that changes. All of a sudden, the passages that I used to put off making a decision about or really wrestling with take on a new urgency. As a Christian who is not bound by an obligation to teach the Scriptures, I can look at this text and say, “God is a great mystery. I don’t understand this; I may not even like what I think I understand, but I trust that God is bigger.” Now that I have to stand up in front of all of you and tell you what this difficult statement means, I don’t have a choice. I can’t just brush it aside, I can’t just say to you, “I don’t really know what to make of this.” I am no longer free to pretend that I’ve really dealt with it in my own life, because I haven’t. So, in spite of the fact that I could list a whole bunch of passages that I would rather preach to you about this morning and only a few that I would look forward to with more anxiety than this one, I am glad to be doing it. First, because it gives me an opportunity to make it very clear that I don’t have it all together, that parts of the Bible still deeply trouble me, that you are not alone in your struggle with the Bible. The other reason I am glad to have to preach on it is because it has helped me understand it a little better and come to some kind of peace, even if there is some of it that still escapes me.

The problem with the statement is that it really seems to make God the cause of people’s unbelief. In this text, we are not dealing with the sad fact that some people don’t believe, but we are dealing with a passage that seems to root the reason that those people don’t believe in God. If it was just God lamenting that the people’s eyes were blind and their hearts were hardened so they didn’t look to God and be healed, it would be no problem, because it is their own fault for being so stubborn and resisting God. But that isn’t what we read here. We read that they could not believe because God had done the blinding and hardening so that they would not turn and be healed. It is the “so that” and the fact that God is the source that makes it problematic.

Traditionally, there have been a few ways to look at this passage. One way, which tends to believe in a high doctrine of predestination, states that, before God created the universe, He already had decided that some people would come to believe in Him and the rest of humanity would not. If we already have this kind of belief, this text poses no problem to us. If we really believe that God sovereignly causes some to believe and causes others not to, then it makes perfect sense. The people who were there were simply predestined not to believe. Sure, it is easier to believe that if you are convinced that you are not in the same boat, but if it finally rests in God’s arbitrary choice, who are we to say that God is unjust?

Now, the Methodist tradition, of which we are a part, has not traditionally supported such a high doctrine of predestination, so it would be irresponsible for me as a United Methodist pastor to promote such a view. It would be even more irresponsible because I don’t believe it. And yet, if we reject predestination as classically explained, what in the world are we supposed to make of this? What choice do we have but to say that God’s unilateral and impersonal choice is the only difference between life and death? We might try to think about it by raising the question, “Do events happen because God said they would or does God say ahead of time what was going to happen anyway?” We could get into a long debate about this question, and I have done so with several people, but it doesn’t really solve the problem. We still have God blinding eyes and hardening hearts.

Another question that we might ask is, “Does God’s hardening and blinding people once imply that they will not always be hardened and blind or is it a once and for all event?” Various people have held various points of view and where you come down on this issue will shape how you understand a whole list of difficult texts in the Bible. And yet, there is a temptation to think that this doesn’t solve the problem of human responsibility. If God hardens people for a period of time and that’s why they don’t believe, how can we ever be sure that people who are not acting as God would have them are not doing so simply because God has hardened them for a time? We need to try to find some larger, overarching understanding that will help us to put this specific event in context.

I think that we can begin to find that context by looking at how John frames the quotation. John is a master story-teller, and he almost never places two ideas together without them having something to say about each other. Right before he tells us the difficult words from Isaiah, he says, “Although he had performed so many signs in their presence, they did not believe in him.” This tells us a few things. It shows us that, if the primary purpose of the miracles was to convince those who, until that point, had no faith in Jesus, they failed miserably. So we must either think that God failed miserably or that the miracles have a different purpose. In many ways, the miracles are evidence that Jesus is Immanuel, God with us, but not necessarily evidence that will convince us on their own.

This is really no surprise, because, though once upon a time, people claimed that the miracles in the New Testament were sufficient to convince anyone that Jesus is God, we find that this just isn’t so. There are all kinds of people who read the Gospels, who even teach them in universities, who simply do not believe that Jesus is who the church proclaims He is. What is more, people like you and me aren’t convinced simply because Jesus is said to have done a bunch of miracles. We are convinced because God speaks to our hearts through the Holy Spirit and takes the life that is in Christ and makes it real in our lives. There really is no way to get to God except in Christ and through the Spirit. Now, you very well may have first become aware of this activity of God while thinking about the miracles of Jesus, but your coming to know God is a decidedly supernatural event. We cannot break Christian faith as portrayed in the New Testament and attested to in two thousand years of Christian history down into simply rational and intellectual categories. We are talking about a life that is, as Paul says to the Colossians, “Hidden with Christ in God.” Once we believe in Christ, the miracles are convincing, but until God has begun the process of transformation and moved decisively in the heart and life of a person, the miracles are just stories.

After the Isaiah quotation, we are told the following. “Nevertheless many, even of the authorities, believed in him.” So far, so good. It sounds really good, like, even in spite of what seemed to be a complete lack of faith, there are still some who believe. And these people aren’t just ordinary folks, but are the authorities. What great allies for the future! Ah, but what else do we read? “But because of the Pharisees they did not confess it, for fear that they would be put out of the synagogue; for they loved human glory more than the glory that comes from God.”

This is not a compliment. In John, belief in Jesus and committed, whole-hearted discipleship are utterly inseparable. There is never a single instance of the word “faith” as a noun in the entire Gospel. John always talks about people believing, but never that they “have faith,” as if faith was something you could possess and do whatever you wanted with. John consistently prefers to talk about faith, not as nouns but as verbs. Throughout this entire Gospel, faith is not what you “have” but what you “do.” It is active and dynamic. The faith of these authorities, which is so afraid of being mistreated by other human beings is far short of the faith that Jesus has been telling us about.

To really understand the faith that these authorities had, let us consider what they do with it. These very authorities would, within a week, be deciding what they were going to do with Jesus. This faith that they are said to have did not seem to make much of a difference. We hear John tell us explicitly here that their faith was not strong enough to risk loss of power or position. Within a short period of time, we will see that they are not willing to stand up to the authorities who don’t believe when they want to put Jesus to death and they go along with it, allowing the one that they say they believe in to be killed. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that, when John tells us about the faith of the authorities, he is being very sarcastic, that this faith isn’t worth much and they certainly don’t have the kind of faith that Jesus has been speaking of.

So, this conclusion to the first half of John seems to be somewhat pessimistic, but it is what we should have expected from the opening passage of John where we are told, “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” The Isaiah passage is not really any more depressing than this statement at the very beginning of the book. In fact, I think that we might even get some insight into what is really going on if we think that somehow, the fact that God entered into our situation so completely has something to do with God’s hardening and blinding of the people.

By entering completely into our broken condition, God met us face to face. This is more than we can handle. By confronting us in the depths of our sin, that sin is exposed for all that it is. By forcing humanity to come to terms with God, we are forced to realize that, because we are all broken by sin, we, if left to our own devices, would choose, as the authorities in the passage, human glory instead of the glory that comes from God. God did what He did, knowing full well that, even the little sight and softness of heart that we thought we had is not really there at all, simply on the basis of nature.

This is not, in the end, a depressing thing, but one that is absolutely joyous. If God had not exposed our weakness, we would have still thought that we were strong, but we would still have been weak and in need of help. If God had not explained to us that faith without the supernatural interaction of God by the power of the Holy Spirit, is something that is completely beyond our reach, we would think that, since we believe in Jesus, we are somehow more noble than the ones who don’t. We would think that, somehow, we were good enough to make the decision based on our own willpower, when in reality, even that decision, even our free, human response to God, is preceded by God’s grace, what John Wesley called God’s prevenient grace, or the grace that always goes before us. Even Wesley, who fought against predestination continually throughout his ministry, claimed that our freedom to choose or reject God is not intrinsic to our humanity but a freely given gift of God that flows from the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

So, finally we can ask the question, what is the passage saying to us today? The passage is reminding us that, without God sustaining our faith, it isn’t worth a hill of beans; but, as the entire Gospel reminds us, God does sustain our faith. The passage is warning us against putting our trust in things that are not God, even the good things that come from God. The miracles of God are not God and so we cannot put our trust in them. We can only trust in God, the source of those miracles. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is warning us against having a faith like that of the authorities. Are we fair-weather Christians, who say we believe but whose faith has no real and substantial impact on our lives? This doesn’t mean we should all like exactly the same way, but God should be involved in all of our everyday activities.

We are getting ever nearer to Good Friday and Easter, the time of year when we go out of our way to remember what Jesus has done for us. This passage, among others, calls us to answer the question, “What kind of faith did Jesus die for me to have?” Everyone has to wrestle with that question and everyone needs to find a solution that they can have peace with God about, but it must not be ignored. Our faith and our salvation has cost God more than we can ever imagine and He did it only out of His sheer love for you and for me.

The really amazing thing is not that some people don’t believe in God, but, in light of how hard it is to believe, how many people misunderstood Jesus throughout His life, that anyone believes. And yet, here we are, not just one or two faithful people, but a whole community of people bound together by a common faith. Even if we have nothing else in common, we are united in the love of Christ. Let us give praise and thanksgiving to the God who transforms us, sometimes, even in spite of ourselves. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 12:27-36a

03/07/10
John 12:27-36a
Hudson UMC

Any good parent will tell you that they do not give their children everything they want. Sometimes, children want things that they can’t have for one reason or another. What is often the case is that they want something that they simply shouldn’t have. Even at his young age, Peter has desires that I absolutely refuse to fulfill, not because I don’t care deeply about him, but precisely because I do. For example, there are times that he feels very strongly that he needs to leap out of my arms. He may have any number of reasons for this. Maybe he is tired of being held, maybe he wants a different perspective on life, or maybe he has absolutely no idea what he is doing. What I know, that he does not seem to understand, or maybe even can’t understand, is that, if I allow him to have what he wants at that particular moment, it will go very badly for him.

Over and over again, throughout the Gospel of John, we have seen Jesus radically overturning our concepts. We think God is one way and Jesus shows us that He is indeed different than we ever imagined. We think that the life following Christ looks one way when, in reality, we find that it is completely different. There is a sense that this passage shows Jesus overturning the people’s understanding in a more deep way than ever before. I think we will find that it challenges us as well, but if we allow the majesty of God, revealed to us in Christ, to impress itself upon our hearts, we will find that, though we sometimes don’t get the God we want, we have the God that we so desperately need.

Jesus has just been told that some Greeks want to visit Him. He had declared that His hour had come, that is, the time has come for Him to die. Now he has this to say. “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” This is a heavy statement and, if we are not paying careful attention, going through it slowly and, perhaps even reading it over and over again, we will miss the huge weight of what is being said here.

First, we have Jesus saying that His soul is troubled. Now, you know what it is like to have your soul troubled; I know what it is like to have my soul troubled, but what does it mean for Jesus’ soul to be troubled? What do we make of the soul of this man, who is at the same time the fullness of God, being troubled? Now, this topic has come up before, and not all that long ago, so I am not going to rehash all the details of that again just now, but let us remember that statements like these remind us beyond all doubt that God has loved us so much that He has entered completely into our brokenness. Jesus has taken the very things that trouble our souls and brought them into His own life. Perhaps even more significantly, He takes the things that should trouble our souls, but don’t, and allows them to trouble Him deeply. Jesus stands in solidarity with us, with a soul troubled like ours is, and, in taking that troubling upon Himself, overcomes it.

The next thing we see is something that takes a whole chapter to show in Matthew and Luke. We see Jesus’ triumph over temptation. “What should I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour?’” Though we do not have the figure of Satan in this passage, we see that temptation has come upon Jesus. It is as if the thought entered His head, “Wait a minute, you are the Son of God. You are the fullness of God living on earth. You don’t have to die. You could snap your fingers and stop everyone who wanted to kill you. You could overcome all of this with a word from your mouth.” And yet, Jesus resists the temptation to do what we might want to do if we were in the same place. “No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” Jesus would not allow Himself to be distracted from His mission.

The third thing that we see is the astonishing thing that Jesus was about to do. He says, “Father, glorify your name.” Jesus doesn’t lay it all out here, but, if we look at what Jesus actually does, we can see that the Father glorifying His name was not a pleasant process, least of all for Jesus. We see in the crucifixion that, in order for the Father to glorify His name, the Son had to be given up. This is serious enough if we just think about how we would feel if we had to give up our children. And yet, it is even more serious than that. In order to give up the Son, the Father had to turn His back on His Son, the one who had been with Him since eternity past. The Son was just as much a part of the Father as the Father Himself. The relationship between the Father and the Son was part of who they were. The Father and the Son are two distinct persons, but they share a being. There is a sense in which God, in order to glorify His name, has to give Himself up.

Throughout the history of the church, there has been a lot of discussion about who killed Jesus. Many times, unfortunately, Christians have said that it was the Jewish people who put Jesus to death and this has fueled all kinds of terrible fires throughout the years. More recently, it has become more common for people to realize that the only reason that we did not put Jesus to death was because we did not live two thousand years ago in Jerusalem. It might have been us who had Jesus killed. Other people may have actually put the nails in His hands and feet, but we could make the argument that, since He died because of our sins, too, that we killed Christ. That brings it a little closer to home, but I think that, even though there is a grain of truth in this, we need to always remember who really put Jesus to death. God Himself. It was the Father who sentenced the Son to death. He died because of and for our sins, but it was the Father who passed the sentence, and it was the Father who carried out the judgment. In Jesus, we see God identifying with our sin so completely that the intense judgment of God against sin is brought to its fulfillment without being reduced in any way and it results in Jesus, God in flesh, dying.

We read that a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” God the Father is confirming that, indeed, Christ will die and that, in spite of the fact that it will expose the evil of humanity in a way that we have never seen before, it will result in God’s glory because the death of Christ will proclaim salvation and liberty to all who will come. Some of the people said that the voice was actually just thunder. Some others said that it was an angel who spoke. I always find statements like this interesting. I have heard people explain that they yearn to hear the audible voice of the Lord telling them what they need to know. Here we have just that happening and the people miss it. Some people realize that it is speech, but think it is an angel. Others hear the very voice of God and imagine that the weather is changing. If we do not have ears to hear, God Himself can speak to us and we will miss it. God, give us eyes to see and ears to hear.

“Jesus answered, ‘This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’” Jesus explains to us that what is about to take place is the judgment of the world. His going to His death is the ultimate act of judgment. In the cross, we see God passing judgment in all its severity on the sin of the world. Jesus has taken our sins upon Himself and nailed them to the cross. Our sins have already been exposed as evil, have already been condemned by God, and yet, we have not been consumed, we continue to live and we have the joy that comes with being reconciled to God. The ruler of this world has been cast out. We no longer need to live in slavery to sin and death, but have been purchased with the very blood of Christ.

The statement, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself,” is interesting. Earlier, Jesus compared Himself to the bronze serpent that Moses made that was lifted up on a pole so that the people of Israel could be saved, but He seems to be getting at something more here and the people know it. When Jesus says that He will be lifted up from the earth, He is pointing out that He is going to be crucified; that is nailed to a cross and lifted up from the earth. It is an odd expression for us today, but it was clearly understood at the time. “The crowd answered him, ‘We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?”

This is a key moment. Here we have Jesus surrounded by a crowd of people, all of whom presumably think He is a really big deal, who is going to change their lives, but they have a big problem with what Jesus has just said. They are under the impression that He was not ever going to die because the Messiah is said to remain forever. Here is Jesus saying in no uncertain terms that He is not only going to die, but that He is going to die soon. The people do not like this and they begin to doubt Him. Before, they were ready to call Him Messiah and Son of Man; now they are asking, “Who is this Son of Man?” Jesus doesn’t fit in with what they want, so they have turned on Him, at least a little bit.

The people want a Messiah who will never die, who will march into Jerusalem, take over and kick the Romans out and make sure they never come back. They want a leader who will put them back on the political map. They had not been a sovereign nation for over fifty years and they wanted to be free from foreign rule. As a side note, not only did they not get this from Jesus, but Israel was not a self-governing country until 1947. More than anything else, the people did not want a hero who was going to allow Himself to be captured and killed. The one Messiah the people refused to have was a suffering Messiah. The only problem with this is that the only Messiah there is had come to suffer and die.

How important is this for us today? All too often we live our lives as if Jesus was the kind of leader who comes in and takes over, who takes out evil by a display of brute force and makes good win and evil lose. We often confuse Christ’s kingdom with our kingdoms, whether national or local. What is more, many people live their lives truly believing that their faith is meant to make their life easy and to make everyone like them. We hope against hope that, when everything becomes clear, we will find that doing whatever it takes to make ourselves happy will somehow be revealed to be in line with God’s plans for us and our community. Wesley’s covenant renewal service that we have used for the last three years puts it well. “Commit yourselves to Christ as his servants. Give yourselves to him, that you may belong to him. Christ has many services to be done. Some are more easy and honorable, others are more difficult and disgraceful. Some are suitable to our inclinations and interests, others are contrary to both. In some we may please Christ and please ourselves. But then there are other works where we cannot please Christ except by denying ourselves.”

We follow a Lord who was put to death, not because He did anything wrong, nor because He treated people badly, but simply because He was the very presence of God in the midst of the people. The only Son of God there is came to suffer and die and we are called to follow in His footsteps. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we will be executed by a mob in Jerusalem, but it means that following God is not always easy. In fact, it will always challenge us and urge us to put our own likes and dislikes aside and seek what God wants.

“Jesus said to them, ‘The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.” God has shone His light on you and on me. He has overcome the darkness of the world and invites us to live as though we have been redeemed because redeemed we are. We are so completely and utterly redeemed that we can endure hardships and face the world unafraid. We have the very Spirit of God dwelling inside of us who unites us to the courage, the love, and the passion of Christ. Because we have been united to Christ, we join in His ministry to all the world.

In a few moments, we will celebrate Holy Communion. We remember that Christ has indeed been lifted up from the earth. His body has been broken and His blood has been spilled, all so that we might be transformed. The price has been paid; the bonds of sin have been broken. God has done the work and calls us to join Him. We cannot say, “But God, I am far to unworthy. I know all too well that I have sinned.” He knows it, and it is precisely because you have sinned that Jesus died for you. We cannot claim any insufficiency because God has taken every shortcoming, every failure, every mistake upon His own shoulders and defeated the curse once and for all. We cannot say that we are unable to participate in the sacrament because we are not good enough, because, by God’s grace you are forever bound to Christ who is good enough. Christ has been lifted up from the earth and now He is drawing all people, that is, you and me, to Himself. Let us rejoice as we celebrate this holy meal together for, as people who have been redeemed, we join Christ in His victory feast. Let us pray.

AMEN