The following is a response to a friend who has strong ties with pagan thought. He is particularly critical of the tendency of Christians to say, "We need to believe that Jesus is God because the Bible says so. We need to believe the Bible because it is inspired. You need to believe the Bible is inspired because we say so." He specifically asked for Christians to respond. Here was my response.
For right or for wrong, whether you find this convincing or not, here is my response.
I have thought about this issue and ones closely related to it for quite a while and I often find myself in self-conscious disagreement with how many American Christians approach this issue. But first, some history is necessary.
The predominant movement that we know today as "Biblical Innerancy" (with which I disagree, for the record) arose in the second half of the nineteenth century (it existed, in a different form, before that time, but we only get the radically militant form of it that we know today at about that time). It was developed as a response to what was seen as the attack of the "higher criticisms" of the Bible, which argued that we must not treat the Bible as somehow fundamentally different than other books, that is to say, we must be willing to examine the books of the Bible in their historical and cultural contexts, just like we do to other books, and try to understand them at that level as well. For people like me, such a move has only helped me to understand the texts better and to fully take into account the fact that God has moved through human beings, not by bypassing their humanity, history, or culture, but working in and through it (though it does yield some degree of transformation as well).
However, others felt that to do so was to "desacralize" the text and undermine faith as a whole. In order to combat this, conservatives/fundamentalists (they were effectively the same in those days. Fundamentalism was a much less militant movement in its early days) ratcheted up their doctrine of inspiration so that history and context no longer played a role in interpretation. The Bible became nothing more than free-floating oracles, independent of context, that all bear equal weight in interpretation.
Once this move takes place, the Bible becomes the ultimate authority and Jesus becomes a doctrine taught about by the Bible, on the same level as any other thing taught in it. This is precisely where I disagree with such an interpretation. I do not think that a text as a text (that is, as words on a page) can be the ultimate authority, nor do I think it was ever meant to be such. I think that ultimately, the text needs to be a witness to God (to use an idea of Karl Barth) or spectacles through which we look to discern what lies behind them (to use an idea of John Calvin). What matters is not the text as such, but at what the text directs us to.
I don't know how much confidence you have in natural science, but that is precisely the same kind of attitude that has been developing in natural science over the last hundred years or so. There is a tremendous conservative bias in science, when ultimate paradigms are concerned. There was so much support for Newtonian mechanics, both among scientists and laypeople, that Einstein's theories of Relativity had almost no chance of being heard or taken seriously. It was only the fact that, after long and careful scrutiny, it seemed to be a closer and more adequate representation of what really is the case (given concrete expression by its prediction of the change in the perihelion of Mercury) that made it win the day. It was not merely political power (for it certainly did not have that), but fidelity to the truth. If you doubt the hesitancy of scientists to adjust to new ideas, you should read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn, and "Against Method" by Paul Feyerabend.
My point is that, at the end of the day, Christian convictions do not, ultimately, rest on what a particular text says. The ultimate conviction is that God stepped into our world of space and time (which is only incomprehensible if we begin by presupposing a dualistic outlook) as an actual human being. Not that God took human "form" and only "seemed" to be human, nor that it was something less than God who came to earth as Jesus of Nazareth, not that Jesus was just one more prophet, but that the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, was very God of very God. This is a conviction that is proclaimed as truth. I would argue that authentic conversion takes place only when a person becomes convinced of this truth, which I do not think happens by intellectual argument (or the authority of a text), but by a personal encounter with this Jesus who has been raised from the dead and lives even now. Because of this, authentic Christian experience is inherently Trinitarian.
Now, one might argue, "How do you know that someone had a genuine encounter with the risen Christ? How can we be certain that it was not simply an illusion, or wishful thinking, or anything of the kind?" If one means "certainty" as, "absolutely impossible to be doubted," like the kind of truth Descartes was searching for, then we cannot be. But, by that same token, the same can be said of anything, as Foundationalism is widely believed to have completely failed. Absolute certainty of that kind is an unattainable, and thus false, goal. There is always room for doubt.
However, if a person claims to have such an encounter and becomes liberated from destructive habits and lifestyles and their life is utterly transformed by it (which does happen), there is reason to believe that something has happened, call it what you will.
My ultimate answer is that real Christian conviction is reached by personal experience, not by argument from a text. The text of the Bible becomes the source and norm of Christian theology, as there is no other text that can not only present Jesus Christ in his time and place, but also present the whole historico-cultural context that led up to it, as well as the impact that he had on his first followers. That experience is always open to doubt, as every other claim to truth and knowledge is, but the Christian believes that their experience is not merely subjective, that it connects, in some way, to a deeper reality that is true, regardless of whether they believe it and acknowledge it or not. This reality might be only imperfectly understood and need to be revised in some way or another (as Newtonian physics had to be refined by Einsteinian thought), but the reality with which they have made contact is fundamentally reliable.
When done well, it is my conviction that Christian theology bears a much stronger resemblance to science than it does to many forms of philosophy.
To return, in closing, to your example of "Why Jesus and not Thor?" I must say that, on one level, there is no reason. After all, from the point of view of historical evidence, we can only learn about them from sources written by human beings, which might very well be wrong. However, my conviction is that Jesus is indeed alive and meets people, myself included (though that does not mean that I equate my theology with the truth, though I hope it bears some resemblance to the truth), whereas I do not believe the same is true for Thor. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. Is it possible that Thor has encountered me and I have just not noticed it? Certainly. I just do not believe it to be so. It can be doubted, but so can any other position, so dubitability as such is not condemning.
Those are just some thoughts. I do not imagine that you will be convinced, but you specifically asked for Christians to respond, so here is my response.
In Christ,
Travis Stevick
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Mark 3:31-35
10/12/11 Mark 3:31-35 GUMC Youth
Tonight, we are going to look at Jesus in relation to his family and we are going to pay attention to how he reinterprets what it means to be family. What Jesus does here might be a bit surprising, it might even be shocking, depending on your own relationship to your own family, but like everything else that Jesus says, it certainly provokes some thought.
But before we get on to our text as it stands, we need to remember back to last week when Jesus got into a discussion with the scribes from Jerusalem. At the beginning of the passage, we read that Jesus was surrounded by a crowd, such a big crowd that he and his disciples were not able to sit down and eat a meal. There were so many people that there were people who couldn't get in to see Jesus. Some of the people who were kept out at that time were Jesus' family. We read, "When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, 'He has gone out of his mind.'"
Now, I suppose we have to ask the question, did Jesus' family also think that he had gone out of his mind or were they just concerned about his public image, and thus, their public image? Either way, we have to think that they might just be misunderstanding exactly who Jesus is and why he had come. We need to remember that we are dealing with the Son of God, who has always existed with the Father and the Holy Spirit, but had come among us human beings. This is the same God who told his people through the prophet Isaiah, "Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
You see, we are talking about a God whose ways and thoughts are so much higher than our own, that we have a hard time really understanding it. To give an example from natural science, when Einstein developed his theory of relativity and he and other scientists were making breakthroughs in subatomic physics, the rest of the world looked on and said, "That's ridiculous. All of your findings are irrational." Now that we have taken more time to really understand it, we realize that the problem wasn't that physics was becoming irrational, but because we just didn't have the tools to understand it. Relativity and Quantum physics isn't irrational, it is so completely and fully rational that our weak rationality needs to be transformed and improved before we can make sense out of it. It is not something altogether different with Jesus here. We are talking about God in our midst. Let me give you another example.
I have here a topographical map. Do you know what all the lines on this map mean? They are lines that represent how high something is above sea level. Every line represents a certain distance. The closer together they are, the more the land slopes, and the further apart they are, the flatter the land is. That is easy enough to understand, but do you see what we have done? We have taken a hilly landscape and squashed it down from three dimensions to two. It is entirely possible to represent three dimensions in two in as much detail as you would like, and it is entirely possible to become so good at reading maps like this at a glance that you could know almost exactly what the hills or mountains would look like without actually going there. But the point is that if you've never seen a map like this, you need to learn how to interpret it. There is much more there than meets the eye, but we can't see it at first. We need to be guided out of our ordinary habits and learn to see what is really there.
Again, this is not altogether different than what we have in Jesus Christ. Here we have God meeting us in our world of space and time. Jesus is a completely faithful representation of God among us, but that doesn't mean that we can understand him at first glance. He is the fullness of God in human flesh just like we have. To imagine that we human beings, even Jesus' own family, can understand him without some serious restructuring of our thoughts and lives is to misunderstand that Jesus is really God. The point is that, even though it takes some hard work and even though we have to be transformed in our knowing of God in Christ, we really can do it. God has actually revealed himself to us and has done so in a way that we actually can know God. Even though God declares that his ways and thoughts are above our ways and thoughts, the whole point was that we should turn to God and be forgiven, even if we can't fit everything into our preconceived notions.
Our passage, though, makes us ask the question, "Who is Jesus' family?" which is another way of asking the question, "Who is on the inside and who is on the outside?" At first, we want to respond, "It should be clear who Jesus' family is. After all, they are the ones he grew up with." And yet, Jesus turns this whole idea upside down. We read, "And he replied, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking at those who sat around him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.'"
We need to make sure we understand this, because it is a big deal. In this moment, Jesus is saying that these people that raised him, that he grew up with, are not his real family, but that these other people, who he basically just met, are his real family. How many of you would do what Jesus did? How many of you would basically turn your back on your family in order to be with other people like this? Now, if you've got a pretty close relationship with your parents and siblings, the idea of cutting ties with them for any reason sounds ridiculous. Family is more important to you than anything else. Even if the whole world were to turn against you, you would still have your family who would love you and help you out. At one point, the whole world does indeed turn against Jesus, so the rubber really does meet the road for him.
In Jesus' day, we need to understand the incredible expectation that people had to respect and take care of their families. You probably remember that one of the Ten Commandments is, "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother." If you wanted to, you could make an argument that Jesus is not upholding that commandment here, and it is likely that someone probably made it at the time, even though we don't read about it here. Jesus' response to his family would not only have been personally offensive, but socially unacceptable. I had a class in seminary where we were looking at this passage and there was a student from Brazil, which has family values that are more similar to those of Jesus' culture than ours are here today. He was asked how his family and friends would have responded if he behaved like Jesus did here. He was clear that it would not have gone over well.
But we need to understand what Jesus is really getting at here. The main point is not, repeat not, to simply talk back to your parents and use Jesus as your reason. What Jesus is pointing out to us is that there are certain relationships that are closer even than family. There was a time when I was the only Christian in my family. Now my parents are back involved with the church but my brother still isn't. There have been many times in my life that, when I need to talk to someone about an issue in my life, I don't turn first to my family, but to my close Christian friends.
The fact of the matter is that the question, "Do I choose God or my family," will not probably arise for many of you. As far as I know, none of you are coming to youth group in defiance of your parents' wishes. Some of you might be here more because your parents want you to than because you want to be here yourself, but I am not aware if any of you are here even though your parents wished you didn't come. But that doesn't change the fact that, for many people throughout history, and even in the world today, this is a real choice they have had to make. Even in the Bible, look at the apostle Paul. He was a Pharisee, one of the people who set themselves firmly against Jesus during his ministry. During his pre-Christian life, Paul spent his time persecuting Christians, locking them up in prison, and supervising their execution. When he encountered Christ on the road to Damascus, he had to choose between his friends and family and the God who had called him by name.
But it isn't just throughout history. I played music for the wedding of a friend in college who was from India. He came to America as a radical skeptic of the claims of Christian faith. He was culturally Hindu, but was not particularly religious in any meaningful sense of the term. He had a radical conversion, married a Christian, and became a full-time missionary around the world. If I recall, there was not even one member of his family at his wedding. This is partly because his family all lived in India and the wedding was in Cedar Falls, Iowa, but it was just as much due to the fact that, by becoming a Christian, he had chosen to be disowned by his family. This didn't happen in some far-off land in the distant past. This was like six years ago in Iowa!
Listen to the words of Paul in his letter to the Romans. "So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh, for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, 'Abba! Father!' it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ - if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him."
What I want to lift up for you is the fact that we learn in the Bible that, when we are in Christ, we are made heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ. We are told that we are made children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ, knit together into a new family, a family that is so close, that the New Testament also talks about it as "the Body of Christ."
This is great, as long as we are talking about people that we like, but we don't always like everyone, do we? I want to make a connection that you may not have noticed. Last week, we talked about Jesus having conflict with the scribes who came from Jerusalem and now we have Jesus looking around and saying "Here are my mother and my brothers!" What you need to realize is that the scene hasn't changed. They are still in the same house, at the same time. We had read in the last passage that Jesus' family tried to get in earlier, but couldn't do it. Nobody has left and nobody has come in. It is the same group of people who were around last week and this week. That means that the people who came because they were interested in what Jesus had to say were there to hear Jesus say this, but it also meant that the scribes from Jerusalem were there, too.
Think about that, even though there were scribes from Jerusalem there, who had come for no other reason than to harass Jesus, he still said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." This doesn't mean that, magically, everyone present was a follower of Christ, but that Jesus didn't say to anyone, "You can't be part of my family." He didn't even say it to the people who were seeking to kill him. Jesus even called a Pharisee, one of the people who hated him the most, to be one of the most important Christian leaders in all of history. I had a professor who had a professor who said, "Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, but he didn't tell us that our neighbors are disgusting." Jesus calls us to love and to welcome, as family, even the people that we hate, that we would rather not be around. If Jesus can welcome and forgive the people who nailed him to the cross, surely we can welcome the people who annoy us.
The fact of the matter is that we are, in Christ, already bound to one another. You see, if I am in Christ, and if you are in Christ, then it doesn't really matter how different we are, we have one, incredibly important thing, in common, we are both in Christ. You and I are already family, you are all already family, not just with me and with each other, but with everyone who is in the other youth group, with everyone else in the church, with everyone in the youth groups around town, and with everyone in all the other churches. We don't always get along, but we are bound together by the blood of Christ, which is bigger than all of us. So, as we go into the world, and as we interact with one another, remember, day by day, that you are surrounded by family, because the people in this room as well as the people who go to other youth groups in town are all around you. But that isn't all. You are also surrounded by everyone else. But those people are not necessarily "not family." Rather, they are like the scribes in the audience; people who are simply not yet family. They are your long-lost cousins. Share with them the love and joy you have.
Let us pray.
AMEN
Tonight, we are going to look at Jesus in relation to his family and we are going to pay attention to how he reinterprets what it means to be family. What Jesus does here might be a bit surprising, it might even be shocking, depending on your own relationship to your own family, but like everything else that Jesus says, it certainly provokes some thought.
But before we get on to our text as it stands, we need to remember back to last week when Jesus got into a discussion with the scribes from Jerusalem. At the beginning of the passage, we read that Jesus was surrounded by a crowd, such a big crowd that he and his disciples were not able to sit down and eat a meal. There were so many people that there were people who couldn't get in to see Jesus. Some of the people who were kept out at that time were Jesus' family. We read, "When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, 'He has gone out of his mind.'"
Now, I suppose we have to ask the question, did Jesus' family also think that he had gone out of his mind or were they just concerned about his public image, and thus, their public image? Either way, we have to think that they might just be misunderstanding exactly who Jesus is and why he had come. We need to remember that we are dealing with the Son of God, who has always existed with the Father and the Holy Spirit, but had come among us human beings. This is the same God who told his people through the prophet Isaiah, "Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."
You see, we are talking about a God whose ways and thoughts are so much higher than our own, that we have a hard time really understanding it. To give an example from natural science, when Einstein developed his theory of relativity and he and other scientists were making breakthroughs in subatomic physics, the rest of the world looked on and said, "That's ridiculous. All of your findings are irrational." Now that we have taken more time to really understand it, we realize that the problem wasn't that physics was becoming irrational, but because we just didn't have the tools to understand it. Relativity and Quantum physics isn't irrational, it is so completely and fully rational that our weak rationality needs to be transformed and improved before we can make sense out of it. It is not something altogether different with Jesus here. We are talking about God in our midst. Let me give you another example.
I have here a topographical map. Do you know what all the lines on this map mean? They are lines that represent how high something is above sea level. Every line represents a certain distance. The closer together they are, the more the land slopes, and the further apart they are, the flatter the land is. That is easy enough to understand, but do you see what we have done? We have taken a hilly landscape and squashed it down from three dimensions to two. It is entirely possible to represent three dimensions in two in as much detail as you would like, and it is entirely possible to become so good at reading maps like this at a glance that you could know almost exactly what the hills or mountains would look like without actually going there. But the point is that if you've never seen a map like this, you need to learn how to interpret it. There is much more there than meets the eye, but we can't see it at first. We need to be guided out of our ordinary habits and learn to see what is really there.
Again, this is not altogether different than what we have in Jesus Christ. Here we have God meeting us in our world of space and time. Jesus is a completely faithful representation of God among us, but that doesn't mean that we can understand him at first glance. He is the fullness of God in human flesh just like we have. To imagine that we human beings, even Jesus' own family, can understand him without some serious restructuring of our thoughts and lives is to misunderstand that Jesus is really God. The point is that, even though it takes some hard work and even though we have to be transformed in our knowing of God in Christ, we really can do it. God has actually revealed himself to us and has done so in a way that we actually can know God. Even though God declares that his ways and thoughts are above our ways and thoughts, the whole point was that we should turn to God and be forgiven, even if we can't fit everything into our preconceived notions.
Our passage, though, makes us ask the question, "Who is Jesus' family?" which is another way of asking the question, "Who is on the inside and who is on the outside?" At first, we want to respond, "It should be clear who Jesus' family is. After all, they are the ones he grew up with." And yet, Jesus turns this whole idea upside down. We read, "And he replied, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking at those who sat around him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.'"
We need to make sure we understand this, because it is a big deal. In this moment, Jesus is saying that these people that raised him, that he grew up with, are not his real family, but that these other people, who he basically just met, are his real family. How many of you would do what Jesus did? How many of you would basically turn your back on your family in order to be with other people like this? Now, if you've got a pretty close relationship with your parents and siblings, the idea of cutting ties with them for any reason sounds ridiculous. Family is more important to you than anything else. Even if the whole world were to turn against you, you would still have your family who would love you and help you out. At one point, the whole world does indeed turn against Jesus, so the rubber really does meet the road for him.
In Jesus' day, we need to understand the incredible expectation that people had to respect and take care of their families. You probably remember that one of the Ten Commandments is, "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother." If you wanted to, you could make an argument that Jesus is not upholding that commandment here, and it is likely that someone probably made it at the time, even though we don't read about it here. Jesus' response to his family would not only have been personally offensive, but socially unacceptable. I had a class in seminary where we were looking at this passage and there was a student from Brazil, which has family values that are more similar to those of Jesus' culture than ours are here today. He was asked how his family and friends would have responded if he behaved like Jesus did here. He was clear that it would not have gone over well.
But we need to understand what Jesus is really getting at here. The main point is not, repeat not, to simply talk back to your parents and use Jesus as your reason. What Jesus is pointing out to us is that there are certain relationships that are closer even than family. There was a time when I was the only Christian in my family. Now my parents are back involved with the church but my brother still isn't. There have been many times in my life that, when I need to talk to someone about an issue in my life, I don't turn first to my family, but to my close Christian friends.
The fact of the matter is that the question, "Do I choose God or my family," will not probably arise for many of you. As far as I know, none of you are coming to youth group in defiance of your parents' wishes. Some of you might be here more because your parents want you to than because you want to be here yourself, but I am not aware if any of you are here even though your parents wished you didn't come. But that doesn't change the fact that, for many people throughout history, and even in the world today, this is a real choice they have had to make. Even in the Bible, look at the apostle Paul. He was a Pharisee, one of the people who set themselves firmly against Jesus during his ministry. During his pre-Christian life, Paul spent his time persecuting Christians, locking them up in prison, and supervising their execution. When he encountered Christ on the road to Damascus, he had to choose between his friends and family and the God who had called him by name.
But it isn't just throughout history. I played music for the wedding of a friend in college who was from India. He came to America as a radical skeptic of the claims of Christian faith. He was culturally Hindu, but was not particularly religious in any meaningful sense of the term. He had a radical conversion, married a Christian, and became a full-time missionary around the world. If I recall, there was not even one member of his family at his wedding. This is partly because his family all lived in India and the wedding was in Cedar Falls, Iowa, but it was just as much due to the fact that, by becoming a Christian, he had chosen to be disowned by his family. This didn't happen in some far-off land in the distant past. This was like six years ago in Iowa!
Listen to the words of Paul in his letter to the Romans. "So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh, for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, 'Abba! Father!' it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ - if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him."
What I want to lift up for you is the fact that we learn in the Bible that, when we are in Christ, we are made heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ. We are told that we are made children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ, knit together into a new family, a family that is so close, that the New Testament also talks about it as "the Body of Christ."
This is great, as long as we are talking about people that we like, but we don't always like everyone, do we? I want to make a connection that you may not have noticed. Last week, we talked about Jesus having conflict with the scribes who came from Jerusalem and now we have Jesus looking around and saying "Here are my mother and my brothers!" What you need to realize is that the scene hasn't changed. They are still in the same house, at the same time. We had read in the last passage that Jesus' family tried to get in earlier, but couldn't do it. Nobody has left and nobody has come in. It is the same group of people who were around last week and this week. That means that the people who came because they were interested in what Jesus had to say were there to hear Jesus say this, but it also meant that the scribes from Jerusalem were there, too.
Think about that, even though there were scribes from Jerusalem there, who had come for no other reason than to harass Jesus, he still said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother." This doesn't mean that, magically, everyone present was a follower of Christ, but that Jesus didn't say to anyone, "You can't be part of my family." He didn't even say it to the people who were seeking to kill him. Jesus even called a Pharisee, one of the people who hated him the most, to be one of the most important Christian leaders in all of history. I had a professor who had a professor who said, "Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, but he didn't tell us that our neighbors are disgusting." Jesus calls us to love and to welcome, as family, even the people that we hate, that we would rather not be around. If Jesus can welcome and forgive the people who nailed him to the cross, surely we can welcome the people who annoy us.
The fact of the matter is that we are, in Christ, already bound to one another. You see, if I am in Christ, and if you are in Christ, then it doesn't really matter how different we are, we have one, incredibly important thing, in common, we are both in Christ. You and I are already family, you are all already family, not just with me and with each other, but with everyone who is in the other youth group, with everyone else in the church, with everyone in the youth groups around town, and with everyone in all the other churches. We don't always get along, but we are bound together by the blood of Christ, which is bigger than all of us. So, as we go into the world, and as we interact with one another, remember, day by day, that you are surrounded by family, because the people in this room as well as the people who go to other youth groups in town are all around you. But that isn't all. You are also surrounded by everyone else. But those people are not necessarily "not family." Rather, they are like the scribes in the audience; people who are simply not yet family. They are your long-lost cousins. Share with them the love and joy you have.
Let us pray.
AMEN
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Luke 16:19-31, The Rich Man and Lazarus
10/09/11 Luke 16:19-31 Grace UMC
It would be very possible to preach a sermon on any number of topics using the story of the rich man and Lazarus. One could prepare a sermon on the reward for the righteous and the punishment of the wicked, or about what happens to us once we die, or perhaps the give and take between receiving blessings during this life and those that we receive in the life to come. There are many ways we could look at this, but I want to draw attention to the last interchange between the rich man and Abraham.
"He said, 'Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father's house - for I have five brothers - that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.' Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.' He said, 'No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"
The rich man's reaction is something that has found a prominent place throughout Christian history in the writings of various people. How often have we heard of people who lived their whole lives, pushing God off until tomorrow, until finally there came a time that there were no more tomorrows? Immediately, such people, we read, are overwhelmed by remorse. What they would not give for just one more day, to go and do what they ought to have done before but had, tragically, left undone.
What is more, we see this day by day in our own lives, even if in a somewhat less extreme form. How many of us can remember what we used to do when we were teenagers and wish we could go back and tell the teenage version of ourselves that we should live differently, that we should make better choices? How many of us look at the state of the world today and realize that people today are making the same mistakes we did yesterday and haven't learned from them? How many of us wish we could just sit people down and talk some sense into them, to teach them what we have learned over so many years and with so much pain?
The fact of the matter is that, when I look back on my life, just about every bad decision I ever made was preceded, at some point, by someone who was older and wiser than I was, who warned me about the temptations and trials that I would go through, and they knew what they were talking about because they had gone through them already and had watched their friends and everyone they knew, in addition to total strangers, go through them. They could see with the clear vision of hindsight what seemed far less clear to me at the time. I ought to have trusted them. The fact of the matter, however, is that I not only didn't listen to the voice of experience, I don't know for sure if I could have done so. I am repeatedly amazed at our ability, as human beings, to simply brush aside anything that we don't want to deal with.
This is precisely what Jesus is getting at with this story. The realities of reward and punishment are as clear as can be to the rich man. He is experiencing one for himself and he can see the other one before his very eyes. Surely, if someone who had this kind of first-hand experience could come and bear witness to what was coming, everyone would listen, it would be indisputable proof of what the future held in store, and nobody would have to endure what this rich man had to suffer.
It is an argument that makes a lot of sense to us. If someone who was dead could come back to us and share their experiences, wouldn't that seem to be the ultimate proof? And yet, I think that, when we think this way, we tend to overvalue the role of miracles in the act of convincing human beings of the truth of God. Take, for example, the story of the Exodus from Egypt that you all probably learned in Sunday School or, if you are like me and didn't grow up in the church at all, probably learned it from various movies that are made every so often about it. Imagine the scene in your head. Ten plagues are unleashed on the Egyptian people who had gone from hosting the Israelites, to dominating them and making them their slaves. The land is plagued with the turning of water into blood, overrun with frogs, gnats, and flies. Livestock was struck with disease, boils broke out on all the people and animals, terrible thunder and hail storms ravaged the countryside, locusts came and devoured the produce of the land, unnatural darkness covered the whole country, and finally the firstborn sons were killed. But that is really only the beginning. The Israelites were then led across the sea, which was parted to let them pass. Even after these astonishing miracles took place, that was not the end. Every day, the people were given Manna from heaven to eat and were led, day in and day out, by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
These were people who had seen more miracles in a matter of weeks than most of us have ever seen or will ever see over the course of our whole lives. If miracles could convince people beyond a shadow of a doubt of who God was, surely the Israelites would have been convinced. After all, it had profound consequences. Without God, they were slaves, now they were free. They owed everything, not just in a spiritual sense, but in a very literal sense, to the God who redeemed and saved them. And yet, when Moses goes up Mount Sinai to speak with God, what do we read? We read that the people lost patience, that they pressured Aaron, their priest, to make a golden calf for them to worship because, after all, whatever might have been the case before, they haven't seen God move lately. For goodness' sake, it had been a whole month without a dramatic miracle, never mind the fact that they were still eating bread from heaven and always lived in the sight of the pillar of cloud and of fire.
I still remember when I first noticed this as I read the Bible. I remember longing for God to move with power in the community in which I found myself, that he would perform undeniable miracles, signs and wonders, so that true revival would break out. When I saw the Israelites in this light, for the first time, the thought crossed my mind, "If God did everything I asked him to do, and did all kinds of miracles, it might not really convince anyone, at least not for long." It started to make sense to me why God would give such a serious law to his people. They, just like we, are easily distracted, and need not just a miracle, but a whole way of life that is devoted to God. It wasn't that God wasn't able to do miracles, or held back from doing them; after all, he did them all the time, but it seemed that God knew all too well that, at the end of the day, miracles only go so far in transforming hearts and lives.
But that isn't all. Let us look at the New Testament, at the life of Jesus. Everywhere Jesus went, he healed the sick, he restored sight to the blind, he made the lame to walk again, he did amazing things. However, we read, in Mark's gospel, to speak of nowhere else, that, one morning, when a crowd of people had gathered to be healed, Jesus left town, saying, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." Jesus seemed to be more interested in proclaiming his message than healing the sick, although he certainly did that, too.
You know, it is interesting that Luke's gospel records a story where a man begs that a man named Lazarus be sent back from the dead in order to tell people about the life that is to come. The reason it is so interesting is because in John's gospel, we read an account of Jesus raising a man named Lazarus to do precisely that. The fact that Jesus had an advocate who everyone knew had been dead, in fact, had been dead for several days, but had come back, did not convince people who had already made up their minds not to believe. Instead of being convinced, they simply included Lazarus in their plans to kill Jesus.
But one of the most astonishing things that I ever read in the Bible about this is something that I never noticed until someone pointed it out to me one day. It is such a famous passage that I must have read it over and over again, but had just never noticed it. At the very end of the Gospel according to Matthew, when Jesus is about to give what has come to be known as "The Great Commission," we read this. "Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted." Some doubted! Can you imagine that? There they were, face-to-face with the Lord, resurrected in glory, Jesus Christ, who was clearly dead just the day before, and some doubted! Not only was it, apparently, not convincing to people who hated Jesus that he raised Lazarus from the dead, it wasn't even convincing to the disciples that Jesus was resurrected.
It was not until Pentecost that people really began to understand what Jesus had said and done; it was not until the Holy Spirit came upon the church that everything began to make sense. Before Jesus was crucified, Peter denied him and ran away, after he was raised, he decided to go back to fishing; it was only when he received the Spirit that Peter became the mighty leader of the church that we remember.
When we look at the issue in this way, we can really see that Jesus' story of the rich man and Lazarus is not merely a warning not to trust in miracles as the primary convincing force, but is truly a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. What does Abraham say? "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." On the one hand, it tells us, as we have been discussing so far, that we have a tendency, like the rich man, to overvalue miracles as a means of conviction, but it also tells us that we have a tendency, like the rich man, to undervalue the convincing power of the word of God, especially as made manifest in human beings.
You see, lots of people went to see Jesus as a miracle worker, but it was only when the disciples, empowered by the Spirit, began to go out and preach that people began to respond. Once again, they performed miracles, and miracles never dropped out of God's interaction with humanity, but it wasn't the miracles that had the impact on the people, it was the word of God, backed up by the power of the Spirit. Peter and John heal a crippled man on the steps of the Temple and are met with nothing but anger and skepticism from the authorities. But when Peter stands up and preaches, when he shares what God has done, the impact he has made, three thousand people were added to the number of believers.
I have emphasized that, in spite of the fact that miracles do not seem to play the real backbone of the plan of God to minister to humanity and transform lives, that is not to say that God doesn't do the miraculous. Far from it. Though I have been here for only a short time, I know that this congregation has been touched by genuine miracles. Many of you have been touched, either directly or indirectly, by the fact that God has and does still move mightily in ways that bear a striking resemblance to the healing and transformational miracles of the Old and New Testaments. And even though I don't know all of you so I can't say for sure, but if you are anything like the rest of humanity, there are still days where you feel weak, that you have your doubts, that, even if your faith seems strong, you don't always live in the full, unbridled confidence of the truth of the Gospel, in spite of the undeniable miracles you have seen and even experienced. In fact, I have a feeling that many days can go by with not a thought about those miracles, until you are reminded by someone else or you deliberately remind yourself of the power of God in your life.
The point is not to say that miracles don't happen, because they clearly do, and it is not to say that they do not have a profound impact on those they touch, because they clearly do, but it is to remind us that the power of God is most manifest, not in what the world would call clearly miraculous, but in the word of the Lord, spoken by ordinary people like you and me, who are empowered by the very Spirit of God. This is precisely why I will say now and you will hear me say again, that Pentecost is without a doubt the single most frightening day of the Christian year. It is the day that we are forced to come to terms with the fact that the disciples with whom we identify so strongly in the gospels, because they are weak and broken people, just like you and me, are utterly transformed into mighty heroes of faith, who speak the word with boldness, who go into the world and make a difference beyond what they would otherwise be capable of because they are united to the ministry of Jesus Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
You see, brothers and sisters, that Spirit of God that made Peter preach with boldness, that gave the force to his words that transformed the hearts and lives of three thousand people in a single morning, is promised to you and me as well. The only difference between the Peter who denied Christ and the Peter who laid his life down to be killed for his faith is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that, the scriptures teach us, takes up residence in our lives as those who belong to Christ.
What I am saying is that we, as human beings, have a tendency to say things like, "If only this miracle would happen, if only we had this kind of program at our church, if only we had these kinds of people to lead and participate in the ministries of our church, if only things were different than they are now, if only they were the way things used to be." And you know what? None of those things we long for are bad things, and, to be honest, they already exist in various ways. The point is that God is not calling us to something that is too hard for us, not because we are capable in ourselves to follow God's call, but because we, too, have been indwelled by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus' story told us to consider the words of Moses and the prophets. So let us consider what Moses tells the people in Deuteronomy, chapter thirty. "Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe." The command to go and make disciples is not something that is far off, not something that we need to go and find a miracle-worker before we can do it; it is not something that requires a special insight above and beyond what we have in Moses, the prophets, and Jesus Christ, but requires only that faithful people listen to what God has said and is saying, and do it, knowing that the word of faithful people, undergirded by the Spirit, is more powerful than the mightiest miracles. So, let us go and trust that God will take even our words and transform lives. Let us pray.
AMEN
It would be very possible to preach a sermon on any number of topics using the story of the rich man and Lazarus. One could prepare a sermon on the reward for the righteous and the punishment of the wicked, or about what happens to us once we die, or perhaps the give and take between receiving blessings during this life and those that we receive in the life to come. There are many ways we could look at this, but I want to draw attention to the last interchange between the rich man and Abraham.
"He said, 'Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father's house - for I have five brothers - that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.' Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.' He said, 'No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'"
The rich man's reaction is something that has found a prominent place throughout Christian history in the writings of various people. How often have we heard of people who lived their whole lives, pushing God off until tomorrow, until finally there came a time that there were no more tomorrows? Immediately, such people, we read, are overwhelmed by remorse. What they would not give for just one more day, to go and do what they ought to have done before but had, tragically, left undone.
What is more, we see this day by day in our own lives, even if in a somewhat less extreme form. How many of us can remember what we used to do when we were teenagers and wish we could go back and tell the teenage version of ourselves that we should live differently, that we should make better choices? How many of us look at the state of the world today and realize that people today are making the same mistakes we did yesterday and haven't learned from them? How many of us wish we could just sit people down and talk some sense into them, to teach them what we have learned over so many years and with so much pain?
The fact of the matter is that, when I look back on my life, just about every bad decision I ever made was preceded, at some point, by someone who was older and wiser than I was, who warned me about the temptations and trials that I would go through, and they knew what they were talking about because they had gone through them already and had watched their friends and everyone they knew, in addition to total strangers, go through them. They could see with the clear vision of hindsight what seemed far less clear to me at the time. I ought to have trusted them. The fact of the matter, however, is that I not only didn't listen to the voice of experience, I don't know for sure if I could have done so. I am repeatedly amazed at our ability, as human beings, to simply brush aside anything that we don't want to deal with.
This is precisely what Jesus is getting at with this story. The realities of reward and punishment are as clear as can be to the rich man. He is experiencing one for himself and he can see the other one before his very eyes. Surely, if someone who had this kind of first-hand experience could come and bear witness to what was coming, everyone would listen, it would be indisputable proof of what the future held in store, and nobody would have to endure what this rich man had to suffer.
It is an argument that makes a lot of sense to us. If someone who was dead could come back to us and share their experiences, wouldn't that seem to be the ultimate proof? And yet, I think that, when we think this way, we tend to overvalue the role of miracles in the act of convincing human beings of the truth of God. Take, for example, the story of the Exodus from Egypt that you all probably learned in Sunday School or, if you are like me and didn't grow up in the church at all, probably learned it from various movies that are made every so often about it. Imagine the scene in your head. Ten plagues are unleashed on the Egyptian people who had gone from hosting the Israelites, to dominating them and making them their slaves. The land is plagued with the turning of water into blood, overrun with frogs, gnats, and flies. Livestock was struck with disease, boils broke out on all the people and animals, terrible thunder and hail storms ravaged the countryside, locusts came and devoured the produce of the land, unnatural darkness covered the whole country, and finally the firstborn sons were killed. But that is really only the beginning. The Israelites were then led across the sea, which was parted to let them pass. Even after these astonishing miracles took place, that was not the end. Every day, the people were given Manna from heaven to eat and were led, day in and day out, by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
These were people who had seen more miracles in a matter of weeks than most of us have ever seen or will ever see over the course of our whole lives. If miracles could convince people beyond a shadow of a doubt of who God was, surely the Israelites would have been convinced. After all, it had profound consequences. Without God, they were slaves, now they were free. They owed everything, not just in a spiritual sense, but in a very literal sense, to the God who redeemed and saved them. And yet, when Moses goes up Mount Sinai to speak with God, what do we read? We read that the people lost patience, that they pressured Aaron, their priest, to make a golden calf for them to worship because, after all, whatever might have been the case before, they haven't seen God move lately. For goodness' sake, it had been a whole month without a dramatic miracle, never mind the fact that they were still eating bread from heaven and always lived in the sight of the pillar of cloud and of fire.
I still remember when I first noticed this as I read the Bible. I remember longing for God to move with power in the community in which I found myself, that he would perform undeniable miracles, signs and wonders, so that true revival would break out. When I saw the Israelites in this light, for the first time, the thought crossed my mind, "If God did everything I asked him to do, and did all kinds of miracles, it might not really convince anyone, at least not for long." It started to make sense to me why God would give such a serious law to his people. They, just like we, are easily distracted, and need not just a miracle, but a whole way of life that is devoted to God. It wasn't that God wasn't able to do miracles, or held back from doing them; after all, he did them all the time, but it seemed that God knew all too well that, at the end of the day, miracles only go so far in transforming hearts and lives.
But that isn't all. Let us look at the New Testament, at the life of Jesus. Everywhere Jesus went, he healed the sick, he restored sight to the blind, he made the lame to walk again, he did amazing things. However, we read, in Mark's gospel, to speak of nowhere else, that, one morning, when a crowd of people had gathered to be healed, Jesus left town, saying, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." Jesus seemed to be more interested in proclaiming his message than healing the sick, although he certainly did that, too.
You know, it is interesting that Luke's gospel records a story where a man begs that a man named Lazarus be sent back from the dead in order to tell people about the life that is to come. The reason it is so interesting is because in John's gospel, we read an account of Jesus raising a man named Lazarus to do precisely that. The fact that Jesus had an advocate who everyone knew had been dead, in fact, had been dead for several days, but had come back, did not convince people who had already made up their minds not to believe. Instead of being convinced, they simply included Lazarus in their plans to kill Jesus.
But one of the most astonishing things that I ever read in the Bible about this is something that I never noticed until someone pointed it out to me one day. It is such a famous passage that I must have read it over and over again, but had just never noticed it. At the very end of the Gospel according to Matthew, when Jesus is about to give what has come to be known as "The Great Commission," we read this. "Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted." Some doubted! Can you imagine that? There they were, face-to-face with the Lord, resurrected in glory, Jesus Christ, who was clearly dead just the day before, and some doubted! Not only was it, apparently, not convincing to people who hated Jesus that he raised Lazarus from the dead, it wasn't even convincing to the disciples that Jesus was resurrected.
It was not until Pentecost that people really began to understand what Jesus had said and done; it was not until the Holy Spirit came upon the church that everything began to make sense. Before Jesus was crucified, Peter denied him and ran away, after he was raised, he decided to go back to fishing; it was only when he received the Spirit that Peter became the mighty leader of the church that we remember.
When we look at the issue in this way, we can really see that Jesus' story of the rich man and Lazarus is not merely a warning not to trust in miracles as the primary convincing force, but is truly a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. What does Abraham say? "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead." On the one hand, it tells us, as we have been discussing so far, that we have a tendency, like the rich man, to overvalue miracles as a means of conviction, but it also tells us that we have a tendency, like the rich man, to undervalue the convincing power of the word of God, especially as made manifest in human beings.
You see, lots of people went to see Jesus as a miracle worker, but it was only when the disciples, empowered by the Spirit, began to go out and preach that people began to respond. Once again, they performed miracles, and miracles never dropped out of God's interaction with humanity, but it wasn't the miracles that had the impact on the people, it was the word of God, backed up by the power of the Spirit. Peter and John heal a crippled man on the steps of the Temple and are met with nothing but anger and skepticism from the authorities. But when Peter stands up and preaches, when he shares what God has done, the impact he has made, three thousand people were added to the number of believers.
I have emphasized that, in spite of the fact that miracles do not seem to play the real backbone of the plan of God to minister to humanity and transform lives, that is not to say that God doesn't do the miraculous. Far from it. Though I have been here for only a short time, I know that this congregation has been touched by genuine miracles. Many of you have been touched, either directly or indirectly, by the fact that God has and does still move mightily in ways that bear a striking resemblance to the healing and transformational miracles of the Old and New Testaments. And even though I don't know all of you so I can't say for sure, but if you are anything like the rest of humanity, there are still days where you feel weak, that you have your doubts, that, even if your faith seems strong, you don't always live in the full, unbridled confidence of the truth of the Gospel, in spite of the undeniable miracles you have seen and even experienced. In fact, I have a feeling that many days can go by with not a thought about those miracles, until you are reminded by someone else or you deliberately remind yourself of the power of God in your life.
The point is not to say that miracles don't happen, because they clearly do, and it is not to say that they do not have a profound impact on those they touch, because they clearly do, but it is to remind us that the power of God is most manifest, not in what the world would call clearly miraculous, but in the word of the Lord, spoken by ordinary people like you and me, who are empowered by the very Spirit of God. This is precisely why I will say now and you will hear me say again, that Pentecost is without a doubt the single most frightening day of the Christian year. It is the day that we are forced to come to terms with the fact that the disciples with whom we identify so strongly in the gospels, because they are weak and broken people, just like you and me, are utterly transformed into mighty heroes of faith, who speak the word with boldness, who go into the world and make a difference beyond what they would otherwise be capable of because they are united to the ministry of Jesus Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
You see, brothers and sisters, that Spirit of God that made Peter preach with boldness, that gave the force to his words that transformed the hearts and lives of three thousand people in a single morning, is promised to you and me as well. The only difference between the Peter who denied Christ and the Peter who laid his life down to be killed for his faith is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that, the scriptures teach us, takes up residence in our lives as those who belong to Christ.
What I am saying is that we, as human beings, have a tendency to say things like, "If only this miracle would happen, if only we had this kind of program at our church, if only we had these kinds of people to lead and participate in the ministries of our church, if only things were different than they are now, if only they were the way things used to be." And you know what? None of those things we long for are bad things, and, to be honest, they already exist in various ways. The point is that God is not calling us to something that is too hard for us, not because we are capable in ourselves to follow God's call, but because we, too, have been indwelled by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus' story told us to consider the words of Moses and the prophets. So let us consider what Moses tells the people in Deuteronomy, chapter thirty. "Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?' No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe." The command to go and make disciples is not something that is far off, not something that we need to go and find a miracle-worker before we can do it; it is not something that requires a special insight above and beyond what we have in Moses, the prophets, and Jesus Christ, but requires only that faithful people listen to what God has said and is saying, and do it, knowing that the word of faithful people, undergirded by the Spirit, is more powerful than the mightiest miracles. So, let us go and trust that God will take even our words and transform lives. Let us pray.
AMEN
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Mark 3:7-19a
08/31/11 Mark 3:7-19a GUMC Youth
This passage in Mark's gospel is interesting because we start to see the difference between what it means to be part of the crowd that is following Jesus around and what it means to be one that Jesus has specifically called to join him in a deeper way. We are going to see this interplay between the crowd of followers and the twelve disciples over and over again, but this is where Jesus first separates the twelve out from everyone else.
We need to understand just how popular Jesus was. He really had a crowd of people following him wherever he went. Remember, he is ministering primarily in Galilee at this time, which isn't much to write home about. Galilee is the kind of place where you only really go to because you need to go through it to get where you actually want to go. It is kind of the backwater place that has nothing about it that really draws people to it other than the fact that Jesus is there. We get people from all over the place coming to see Jesus; we read about people coming from Judea, Jerusalem, and Idumea in the South and Tyre and Sidon in the North. It seems that everyone in the world wants to come to see Jesus. Somehow, the mere presence of Christ makes Galilee the most important place in the universe, the center of the world.
However, it is at this moment, where Jesus is more popular than he has ever been before, that he calls out twelve people to be his close disciples. So, at every point after now, we have this idea that there are some people who are in the inside and some who are on the outside. In general, we will see that the disciples are on the "inside" and the crowd is on the "outside." But before we get too rooted in that way of thinking, I want to give you a head's up, that the question of who is on the inside and who is on the outside is going to get taken up over and over again. Even though Jesus makes this distinction between the crowd and the disciples, we are going to continually be asking the question, "Who really is on the inside or outside?" and the answer to that question might surprise you as we explore it.
However, be that as it may, I want to take tonight and look at the people that Jesus called. The fact of the matter is that history has tended to venerate the disciples and put them up on a pedestal, but it was a bizarre bunch of people. I want to talk about several of them. You might find that one of them reminds you of yourself in one way or another. You might even find that some of them resemble people you know, which should encourage you to remember that God is calling them, too.
Let's start with people we talked about a few weeks ago, Levi the tax-collector and Simon the Cananean, also called the zealot. The Cananeans were a group of radically nationalistic Jews, who hated the Romans more than anyone else. There had been armed uprisings over the years, for which they were at least partially responsible. They were not the folks who were just mad at the fact that they were ruled by a foreign power, they were prepared to put their money where their mouth is and to even attack the Romans, even though they were far more powerful.
On the other hand, Levi is a tax-collector, a person who is employed by the Roman government in order to collect the high taxes from their neighbors, who even were known to take more than they were supposed to and just pocket the rest. If there were two kinds of people in the world that would have hated each other, it would be the tax-collectors and the Cananeans. And yet Jesus calls them both. The call of Christ commands them, and us, to set aside our differences, even our deep differences, because few of us can have deeper differences than Levi and Simon did, and join together in following Jesus. We could name all kinds of opinions that divide us Americans today, but when Jesus calls us, and he does call us, we must lay them down, not because they are unimportant, and not because we do not have strong feelings about them, but because, compared to Christ, everything else is unimportant by comparison. To use modern language, Jesus calls both the most conservative Republican and the most liberal democrat and, even though they will probably continue to disagree, they must not allow their serious differences to tear the body of Christ. In fact, Jesus is the only one who can actually make that work. Certainly, nothing else seems to.
The next disciples I want to mention are James and John, the ones that Jesus calls the "Sons of Thunder." These are people who are extremely fiery and dominating. There is a moment, when Jesus and his disciples go and preach in a town, and nobody seems to listen. When faced with this frustration, James and John ask Jesus if they can pray that God would send down fire from heaven and consume the people. Jesus just rebukes them and moves on to the next town. There is another moment, that we will see later, when James and John go up to Jesus and ask if, when he comes into his kingdom (which, by the way, they thought was an earthly kingdom, not a heavenly one), they can sit at his right and left hand, that is, they wanted to be the most powerful people in the kingdom, after Jesus. As you can imagine, that kind of annoyed the other disciples. We will talk about what Jesus said to them when we get there, but these are the kinds of people that James and John were.
And yet, both of them become people who laid down their lives for others. James is ultimately killed for his faith, as an early Christian leader. John is not killed, and he is either the only one who wasn't killed or one of only two who weren't. The point is that, when we look at the writings of John, we find him to have become one of the most deeply loving leaders in Christian history. The story goes that, when John was too old to be able to actually deliver sermons, and had to be helped around by others, he just came into the church and said, "Children, love each other," and left it at that. This man who had been so completely obsessed with power had been transformed into one of the most humble people in history.
Next, I want to talk about someone who does not appear in the lists of Jesus' disciples. His name was Nathanael, and he was a bigot. When his friends, Simon Peter and Andrew, told him they had found the Messiah who had been promised, Nathanael's response was, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" He didn't think that those people could do anything good. He certainly didn't think that God would save humanity through someone who grew up in Nazareth, of all places. When he actually met with Christ, Nathanael was so overwhelmed by him, that he cried out, saying, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Christ, being who he is, challenged and overcame, even some deep prejudices.
Jesus had a disciple named Thomas, called "The Twin," who, it seems to me, is something of the disciple of our modern age. Church history has called him "Doubting Thomas," because of a famous scene in the gospel of John. After Jesus had been resurrected from the dead, he met with the disciples, but Thomas wasn't with them at that time. Everyone was making a big deal about the fact that they had met with Jesus, but Thomas wouldn't believe it. He said, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." Thomas said, in so many words, "Seeing is believing." Even though Jesus did indeed show up and allow him to satisfy his curiosity, people can't do that in the same way today. He shows us that the disciples were not only a bunch of people who would simply believe everything they heard, regardless of how far-fetched it might be. Instead, we have an example of someone who refused to believe until God proved it to him.
But, though Thomas was a skeptic, he did not remain one forever. There are people who say they need proof, when in fact, they have already made up their minds that nothing can ever really be proof. They say, basically, "You will not convince me, even if you convince me," and they can always find a way out of believing if they find themselves in a corner. That was not the case with Thomas. The Eastern Orthodox Church actually calls him, not "Doubting Thomas," but "Believing Thomas," because he finally believed Christ, crying out, "My Lord and my God!"
There are just two more disciples that I want to lift up for your consideration, and these last two are the most interesting for us today. The first one is Peter, who I like to call "The Bold Bumbler." Peter very quickly became something of a spokesman for the disciples, so we hear him speak up as the one who tells us what the disciples were thinking. He was probably the oldest of the disciples, since he was married and most of the others, as far as we can tell, were not. He has something of a strong personality and is really excited about being involved with following Jesus. It is Peter who, when Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is, responds with, "You are the Christ." It is Peter who actually gets out of the boat and walks on the water when Jesus calls to him. It was Peter who made it clear that he was going to follow Jesus to the very end; even if everyone else abandoned him, Peter would not, he would stay and he would fight for his master.
But Peter isn't exactly always, in fact, the great and mighty leader that he wanted to be. We read about Jesus asking his disciples who they say he is and Peter gives what certainly seems to be the right answer; but right after that, when Jesus is explaining that he was going to be handed over and killed, Peter takes him aside and begins to rebuke him. Jesus' response is to turn around and return the rebuke, saying, "Get behind me, Satan." In one moment, Peter went from seeming like he understood Jesus better than anyone else did to being called Satan. Later on, he promises that he would die rather than abandon Jesus. Unfortunately, before that night is over, within just a few hours, he not only abandons Jesus, but denies him three times. Peter might be one of the most famous Christian leaders in history, but he wasn't always that great. He messed up an awful lot.
The last disciple I want to mention by name is Judas. He is different from the others because he is not a name that shows up again at all after the Gospels. He completely drops out of the narrative because he does not live until the church really began at Pentecost. In fact, he even died before Jesus did, and did not even get to see the resurrection. You see, Judas was the one who betrayed Jesus, who handed him over to be killed by those who hated him. His death was either, depending on who you are talking to, the result of suicide or divine judgment. There are many people who use Judas as the greatest example of someone who has been rejected by God. Dante, the famous poet, in his Inferno, speaks of a special place in hell for people like Judas.
And yet, Judas was one of the twelve, one of those who was hand-picked by Jesus to follow him, to be part of the community set up by God himself to spread the good news to everyone. Jesus called Judas, walked along side of him, entrusted him with the money bag, included him in his last supper; Jesus even washed Judas' feet. Can you imagine that? Jesus, God in flesh, God with us, bent down and washed the feet of the one who was going to leave any moment to hand him over to death. Even though Judas would be responsible for his death, Jesus was not ashamed to be associated with him. He had called him and made him one of his own.
The reason why I bring this up is that Jesus calls all kinds of people. When we first heard about Levi and Simon being called a few weeks ago, I mentioned that Jesus not only calls us, but he calls our enemies. We are called, and so are the people that we hate, regardless of who those people might be. The thing that we need to deal with is that we are not the ones who get to choose who Jesus calls and who he does not call. We have to be able to live with the fact that, just as Jesus calls us when we didn't deserve it, he calls other people when they do not deserve it. That doesn't seem so bad until we realize that, because Jesus calls us and because Jesus calls them, we have to deal with them, too! In fact, if we let them, it is actually the other Christians who drive us crazy who are able to help us the most, because it is when we realize how deeply we disagree with other people who love Jesus that we realize just how strong the blood of Christ really is and how far mercy and grace really extend.
The fact of the matter is that it shouldn't take too much effort to see yourself in the disciples. In many ways, we are just like they are. I can see my own impulsiveness in Peter, my own skepticism in Thomas, my own fear of the unknown in Nathanael, my own pride in James and John, my own zeal for my own tradition in Simon and my own desire to just blend in with the culture in Levi. Perhaps you see yourself in more than one of the disciples. I want to encourage you to identify as deeply as possible with the disciples and I want you to do this for two reasons. First, the more we identify ourselves with the disciples, the more we will be humble. Even these people who we hold up as great examples of faithful Christians were real human beings, just like we are. When we make mistakes, we can be reminded that Jesus didn't call perfect people, in fact, not that it is a contest, we might even say that Jesus called people who were even more imperfect than we are, regardless of how imperfect we might seem to be. The second reason we should identify with the disciples is because they did not always remain weak and broken, but did become mighty heroes of the faith.
The Jesus that we worship and cling to is a Jesus who invites everyone to come to him, who extends his arms to the weak, to the broken, to the sinner, to the fallen, to the awkward, to the people who have problems. It wasn't the people who had it all together who followed Jesus. In fact, those people didn't like him, because he told them that, unless they followed him and came to know the Father through him, they didn't actually have it all together. Jesus consistently calls the people the world doesn't think all that much about. For goodness sake, he even called Judas and washed his feet. He put up with Peter's bull-headedness and was patient when he stuck his foot in his mouth over and over again; he dealt with the sharp conflict between Levi's connection with the Roman government and Simon's hatred of the Romans; he overcome bigotry, he knew how to put arrogant people back into their place while still loving them.
Wherever you are tonight, whoever you think you are, know that Jesus loves you and calls you, even as you are, and we know this because of the people he called when he was physically present on earth. However, we also need to remember that, though he called all kinds of people, regardless of how messed up they were, he did not leave them that way, but sent his Holy Spirit into them, and transformed them from the inside out. They were joined to Christ's own ministry and empowered by the Spirit to do it. Just as we are broken like those first disciples, the only thing we need to be great heroes of the faith like they became is the same Spirit they received, and that Spirit is promised to us in abundance. Let us pray.
AMEN
This passage in Mark's gospel is interesting because we start to see the difference between what it means to be part of the crowd that is following Jesus around and what it means to be one that Jesus has specifically called to join him in a deeper way. We are going to see this interplay between the crowd of followers and the twelve disciples over and over again, but this is where Jesus first separates the twelve out from everyone else.
We need to understand just how popular Jesus was. He really had a crowd of people following him wherever he went. Remember, he is ministering primarily in Galilee at this time, which isn't much to write home about. Galilee is the kind of place where you only really go to because you need to go through it to get where you actually want to go. It is kind of the backwater place that has nothing about it that really draws people to it other than the fact that Jesus is there. We get people from all over the place coming to see Jesus; we read about people coming from Judea, Jerusalem, and Idumea in the South and Tyre and Sidon in the North. It seems that everyone in the world wants to come to see Jesus. Somehow, the mere presence of Christ makes Galilee the most important place in the universe, the center of the world.
However, it is at this moment, where Jesus is more popular than he has ever been before, that he calls out twelve people to be his close disciples. So, at every point after now, we have this idea that there are some people who are in the inside and some who are on the outside. In general, we will see that the disciples are on the "inside" and the crowd is on the "outside." But before we get too rooted in that way of thinking, I want to give you a head's up, that the question of who is on the inside and who is on the outside is going to get taken up over and over again. Even though Jesus makes this distinction between the crowd and the disciples, we are going to continually be asking the question, "Who really is on the inside or outside?" and the answer to that question might surprise you as we explore it.
However, be that as it may, I want to take tonight and look at the people that Jesus called. The fact of the matter is that history has tended to venerate the disciples and put them up on a pedestal, but it was a bizarre bunch of people. I want to talk about several of them. You might find that one of them reminds you of yourself in one way or another. You might even find that some of them resemble people you know, which should encourage you to remember that God is calling them, too.
Let's start with people we talked about a few weeks ago, Levi the tax-collector and Simon the Cananean, also called the zealot. The Cananeans were a group of radically nationalistic Jews, who hated the Romans more than anyone else. There had been armed uprisings over the years, for which they were at least partially responsible. They were not the folks who were just mad at the fact that they were ruled by a foreign power, they were prepared to put their money where their mouth is and to even attack the Romans, even though they were far more powerful.
On the other hand, Levi is a tax-collector, a person who is employed by the Roman government in order to collect the high taxes from their neighbors, who even were known to take more than they were supposed to and just pocket the rest. If there were two kinds of people in the world that would have hated each other, it would be the tax-collectors and the Cananeans. And yet Jesus calls them both. The call of Christ commands them, and us, to set aside our differences, even our deep differences, because few of us can have deeper differences than Levi and Simon did, and join together in following Jesus. We could name all kinds of opinions that divide us Americans today, but when Jesus calls us, and he does call us, we must lay them down, not because they are unimportant, and not because we do not have strong feelings about them, but because, compared to Christ, everything else is unimportant by comparison. To use modern language, Jesus calls both the most conservative Republican and the most liberal democrat and, even though they will probably continue to disagree, they must not allow their serious differences to tear the body of Christ. In fact, Jesus is the only one who can actually make that work. Certainly, nothing else seems to.
The next disciples I want to mention are James and John, the ones that Jesus calls the "Sons of Thunder." These are people who are extremely fiery and dominating. There is a moment, when Jesus and his disciples go and preach in a town, and nobody seems to listen. When faced with this frustration, James and John ask Jesus if they can pray that God would send down fire from heaven and consume the people. Jesus just rebukes them and moves on to the next town. There is another moment, that we will see later, when James and John go up to Jesus and ask if, when he comes into his kingdom (which, by the way, they thought was an earthly kingdom, not a heavenly one), they can sit at his right and left hand, that is, they wanted to be the most powerful people in the kingdom, after Jesus. As you can imagine, that kind of annoyed the other disciples. We will talk about what Jesus said to them when we get there, but these are the kinds of people that James and John were.
And yet, both of them become people who laid down their lives for others. James is ultimately killed for his faith, as an early Christian leader. John is not killed, and he is either the only one who wasn't killed or one of only two who weren't. The point is that, when we look at the writings of John, we find him to have become one of the most deeply loving leaders in Christian history. The story goes that, when John was too old to be able to actually deliver sermons, and had to be helped around by others, he just came into the church and said, "Children, love each other," and left it at that. This man who had been so completely obsessed with power had been transformed into one of the most humble people in history.
Next, I want to talk about someone who does not appear in the lists of Jesus' disciples. His name was Nathanael, and he was a bigot. When his friends, Simon Peter and Andrew, told him they had found the Messiah who had been promised, Nathanael's response was, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" He didn't think that those people could do anything good. He certainly didn't think that God would save humanity through someone who grew up in Nazareth, of all places. When he actually met with Christ, Nathanael was so overwhelmed by him, that he cried out, saying, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Christ, being who he is, challenged and overcame, even some deep prejudices.
Jesus had a disciple named Thomas, called "The Twin," who, it seems to me, is something of the disciple of our modern age. Church history has called him "Doubting Thomas," because of a famous scene in the gospel of John. After Jesus had been resurrected from the dead, he met with the disciples, but Thomas wasn't with them at that time. Everyone was making a big deal about the fact that they had met with Jesus, but Thomas wouldn't believe it. He said, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe." Thomas said, in so many words, "Seeing is believing." Even though Jesus did indeed show up and allow him to satisfy his curiosity, people can't do that in the same way today. He shows us that the disciples were not only a bunch of people who would simply believe everything they heard, regardless of how far-fetched it might be. Instead, we have an example of someone who refused to believe until God proved it to him.
But, though Thomas was a skeptic, he did not remain one forever. There are people who say they need proof, when in fact, they have already made up their minds that nothing can ever really be proof. They say, basically, "You will not convince me, even if you convince me," and they can always find a way out of believing if they find themselves in a corner. That was not the case with Thomas. The Eastern Orthodox Church actually calls him, not "Doubting Thomas," but "Believing Thomas," because he finally believed Christ, crying out, "My Lord and my God!"
There are just two more disciples that I want to lift up for your consideration, and these last two are the most interesting for us today. The first one is Peter, who I like to call "The Bold Bumbler." Peter very quickly became something of a spokesman for the disciples, so we hear him speak up as the one who tells us what the disciples were thinking. He was probably the oldest of the disciples, since he was married and most of the others, as far as we can tell, were not. He has something of a strong personality and is really excited about being involved with following Jesus. It is Peter who, when Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is, responds with, "You are the Christ." It is Peter who actually gets out of the boat and walks on the water when Jesus calls to him. It was Peter who made it clear that he was going to follow Jesus to the very end; even if everyone else abandoned him, Peter would not, he would stay and he would fight for his master.
But Peter isn't exactly always, in fact, the great and mighty leader that he wanted to be. We read about Jesus asking his disciples who they say he is and Peter gives what certainly seems to be the right answer; but right after that, when Jesus is explaining that he was going to be handed over and killed, Peter takes him aside and begins to rebuke him. Jesus' response is to turn around and return the rebuke, saying, "Get behind me, Satan." In one moment, Peter went from seeming like he understood Jesus better than anyone else did to being called Satan. Later on, he promises that he would die rather than abandon Jesus. Unfortunately, before that night is over, within just a few hours, he not only abandons Jesus, but denies him three times. Peter might be one of the most famous Christian leaders in history, but he wasn't always that great. He messed up an awful lot.
The last disciple I want to mention by name is Judas. He is different from the others because he is not a name that shows up again at all after the Gospels. He completely drops out of the narrative because he does not live until the church really began at Pentecost. In fact, he even died before Jesus did, and did not even get to see the resurrection. You see, Judas was the one who betrayed Jesus, who handed him over to be killed by those who hated him. His death was either, depending on who you are talking to, the result of suicide or divine judgment. There are many people who use Judas as the greatest example of someone who has been rejected by God. Dante, the famous poet, in his Inferno, speaks of a special place in hell for people like Judas.
And yet, Judas was one of the twelve, one of those who was hand-picked by Jesus to follow him, to be part of the community set up by God himself to spread the good news to everyone. Jesus called Judas, walked along side of him, entrusted him with the money bag, included him in his last supper; Jesus even washed Judas' feet. Can you imagine that? Jesus, God in flesh, God with us, bent down and washed the feet of the one who was going to leave any moment to hand him over to death. Even though Judas would be responsible for his death, Jesus was not ashamed to be associated with him. He had called him and made him one of his own.
The reason why I bring this up is that Jesus calls all kinds of people. When we first heard about Levi and Simon being called a few weeks ago, I mentioned that Jesus not only calls us, but he calls our enemies. We are called, and so are the people that we hate, regardless of who those people might be. The thing that we need to deal with is that we are not the ones who get to choose who Jesus calls and who he does not call. We have to be able to live with the fact that, just as Jesus calls us when we didn't deserve it, he calls other people when they do not deserve it. That doesn't seem so bad until we realize that, because Jesus calls us and because Jesus calls them, we have to deal with them, too! In fact, if we let them, it is actually the other Christians who drive us crazy who are able to help us the most, because it is when we realize how deeply we disagree with other people who love Jesus that we realize just how strong the blood of Christ really is and how far mercy and grace really extend.
The fact of the matter is that it shouldn't take too much effort to see yourself in the disciples. In many ways, we are just like they are. I can see my own impulsiveness in Peter, my own skepticism in Thomas, my own fear of the unknown in Nathanael, my own pride in James and John, my own zeal for my own tradition in Simon and my own desire to just blend in with the culture in Levi. Perhaps you see yourself in more than one of the disciples. I want to encourage you to identify as deeply as possible with the disciples and I want you to do this for two reasons. First, the more we identify ourselves with the disciples, the more we will be humble. Even these people who we hold up as great examples of faithful Christians were real human beings, just like we are. When we make mistakes, we can be reminded that Jesus didn't call perfect people, in fact, not that it is a contest, we might even say that Jesus called people who were even more imperfect than we are, regardless of how imperfect we might seem to be. The second reason we should identify with the disciples is because they did not always remain weak and broken, but did become mighty heroes of the faith.
The Jesus that we worship and cling to is a Jesus who invites everyone to come to him, who extends his arms to the weak, to the broken, to the sinner, to the fallen, to the awkward, to the people who have problems. It wasn't the people who had it all together who followed Jesus. In fact, those people didn't like him, because he told them that, unless they followed him and came to know the Father through him, they didn't actually have it all together. Jesus consistently calls the people the world doesn't think all that much about. For goodness sake, he even called Judas and washed his feet. He put up with Peter's bull-headedness and was patient when he stuck his foot in his mouth over and over again; he dealt with the sharp conflict between Levi's connection with the Roman government and Simon's hatred of the Romans; he overcome bigotry, he knew how to put arrogant people back into their place while still loving them.
Wherever you are tonight, whoever you think you are, know that Jesus loves you and calls you, even as you are, and we know this because of the people he called when he was physically present on earth. However, we also need to remember that, though he called all kinds of people, regardless of how messed up they were, he did not leave them that way, but sent his Holy Spirit into them, and transformed them from the inside out. They were joined to Christ's own ministry and empowered by the Spirit to do it. Just as we are broken like those first disciples, the only thing we need to be great heroes of the faith like they became is the same Spirit they received, and that Spirit is promised to us in abundance. Let us pray.
AMEN
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