John 17:20-26

08/22/10
John 17:20-26
Hudson UMC

At the end of Jesus’ longest prayer, He prays for unity; unity among the disciples and unity of the disciples with Him and the Father through the Spirit. Before we spend too much time on what Jesus says and what it implies, let’s take some time and think about the whole problem of unity.

If we look around at the world around us, it is not difficult to see the disunity that is rampant in our society. It seems that our country is becoming more and more politically polarized, with the conservative getting more conservative and the liberal getting more liberal. We talk on an international scale about how there are some countries that hate us and we hate them in return. Even within the state of Iowa there is some tension between those who were born and raised in cities as opposed to growing up on the farm. If we wanted, we could sit here and make quite a list of things that we, as human beings, are in disunity about.

When we think that Jesus places a high value on unity within the church, we might expect that when we look at Christians, we would be struck by their incredible unity in light of the disunity in the world. However, unfortunately, that is not the case. There are many Christians who perpetuate the harsh feelings between Catholics and Protestants, but that is not all. Among the first wave of Protestant churches, we have Lutherans, Presbyterian or Reformed, and Anglican or Episcopalian. There has been some effort to have some kind of unity between these bodies, but there is still much that divides them. Even the Methodist movement quickly became its own separate denomination, no longer organically connected to the Anglican church out of which it came. Outside of the mainline, it gets even less united. There are a countless number of different Baptist denominations, not to mention the overwhelming flood of non-denominational churches, who are bound in no organic way whatsoever to the larger tradition of the church.

All of this is more than just a little bit embarrassing when we remember that Jesus prays here for unity among His disciples like He does, in such strong and moving terms. And if that were not enough, think back to chapter thirteen. Right after Jesus had washed the feet of His disciples, including the one who was going to betray Him, after He had abased Himself to the dust and been willing to serve those who were far beneath Him, He told them, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” According to Jesus, and He is the one person that we ought to listen to, we are called to love one another with the very love of God, the same love that God showed us by going to the cross and suffering and dying on our behalf and in our place. We are called to have this love for no other reason than because they also belong to Christ and follow Him. It is not because we agree on every point of doctrine or practice, nor because we think they are worthy of our love, but simply because Jesus loves them.

I wonder if perhaps part of the reason that we have such a hard time being united in anything as human beings is because we think that the source of unity should be in all kinds of things except Jesus. We look to culture or ethnicity or socio-economic status or common interests to unite us and they work, to a degree. Most of us are not likely to, on our own initiative, go our of our way to associate ourselves with people who are radically different from us, or with those with whom we know we disagree. And yet, something that transcends all of our differences with one another is that we are all bound to Christ. One of the things I think is great about being a relatively small church in a relatively small town where there aren’t a huge number of other churches is that it forces people who are not all alike to be together and get to know one another. Not everyone in this church agrees on everything, but we get practice, if only a little bit, in getting along with others who are not like we are.

This last section of Jesus’ high priestly prayer is focused on unity. Who is Jesus praying for here? “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one.” Jesus is praying for everyone who is reached through the witness of the apostles, which is every Christian in the world. There is not a single Christian who was not reached by the witness of the apostles. Even if you were on a deserted island and a Bible washed up and you became a believer, it would have been through the written witness of the apostles. When we look at all the Christians in the world, we realize that we are something of a mixed bag. There are rich Christians and poor Christians, there are Christians of all different races and languages, on every continent, with a multitude of varying traditions, all of which are dedicated to the glory of God through Christ and in the Spirit.

So Jesus is praying that all the Christians in the world would be united. It might seem like an impossible goal, since the church is so splintered, but let us continue and see what else Jesus has to say. “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

Twice, Jesus speaks of the world’s understanding changing because of His disciples. He says that, just as the Father dwells in the Son and the Son dwells in the Father, if the disciples dwell in the Father and the Son, the world may know that Jesus is sent by God. He also says that, because He has given to His disciples the same glory that the Father has given to Him, they may be one as the Father and Son are one; and if this is the case, the world may know that Jesus has been sent by God and that God truly loves them.

Brothers and sisters, if this is indeed true, that being united to one another as God the Father and God the Son are united is how the world will come to know God, it has tremendous consequences. It means that the very most important thing that we need to do, aside from our own loving of God, is to be united to those other people who love God. According to Jesus, this is the key to reaching the lost, for sharing the good news. In spite of the fact that Jesus comes out so powerfully and emphasizes the evangelistic power of the unity of believers, we can look around and see that most churches don’t use this as their main focus for outreach.

As a pastor and seminary student, I have met quite a few pastors and church leaders from a variety of churches and denominations. Most of their churches seem to have one of a handful of strategies for outreach. One is to not do anything, hoping that people will just walk in off the street. We might call this the “Field of Dreams” approach, because we are hoping that, simply because we have built it, whether it is our church building or a particular program, people will come. Another major strategy is to come up with clever marketing and advertising that will help to develop a church’s branding and recognition, making their church more widely known throughout the community. This is not necessarily bad, but it tends to be focused rather narrowly on a view of the gospel as a commodity, where we show someone their need and then offer to fill it.

A third method of outreach is to get really involved in people’s lives, either on a one-on-one basis or by doing extensive volunteering with various organizations or working to establish events to help people. Again, there is nothing wrong with doing these things, but, if we take Jesus seriously at this point, we need to realize that it is secondary.

According to Jesus, here and earlier, the chief mark of being a disciple is not your written statement of faith, nor is it your list of programs in the church, nor is it even the number of things you do in order to foster justice in the world. The chief mark that you are a disciple is that you love other disciples, that you are one with them like Jesus is with His Father. Jesus says that the world will know that we are His followers if we love each other. The flip side to this, of course, is that, if we don’t love one another, if, in spite of Jesus’ express declaration that we are to be united with all other believers, we insist on doing whatever we can to not be united to Him and to each other, what will the world think?

There is a church in Israel called the church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is supposedly built on the site of the empty tomb. It is here that Jesus was buried, it was here that the resurrection took place, it was here that God worked out the salvation of the world. If there was ever a place where Christians ought to be united, it is here. And there is plenty of opportunity for the people to practice being united because there are Christians from every tradition who worship there and they take turns leading worship. However, they do not take turns because they want to; every tradition thinks that they should be in charge. There is so much conflict between the believers there, at the very site where God raised Jesus from the dead, that the key to the church had to be given to the care of a Muslim. It is a depressing thought that even the resurrection does not always reconcile Christians with one another.

However, in spite of disunity, in spite of the fact that it seems that we have so long to go before we achieve any kind of outward unity in the church, there is a sense in which we are already united. After all, as those who believe in Jesus, we are united to Him as branches on a vine, and, guess what, every other believer is also united to Christ like a branch on a vine. This means that, regardless of whether our church structure shows that we are united to every other believer or not, that is precisely what we are. In Christ, we are truly one body. Now, it is something of an unusual body. It sometimes seems like, in the body of Christ, we have arms going one way, legs going another, eyes and ears not cooperating with one another. And yet, even in the midst of our dysfunction, we are indeed still one body, whether we like it or not. We are forever bound to all other believers; not just the ones we like, but the ones who drive us up the wall. We’re stuck with each other, so we’d better get used to the idea.

I want to direct your attention to one of the very last things that Jesus says here. We need to be very sure that we understand this because it is the last thing that Jesus will say to His disciples until He has been crucified and raised from the dead. He says, “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

This is one of the very most hopeful things that Jesus ever says. He has pointed out over and over again that He has declared the name of God to the people during His ministry on earth. What He has done here is promise that He will continue to do so. This is Jesus’ solemn assurance to us that He will not ever abandon us to our own disorder and conflict. Even if we continue to fail and continue to allow our petty likes and dislikes to divide us, even in the church, where we ought to be the most unified, Jesus will not abandon us, will not leave us to our own destruction, but will continue to make the name of God known in our midst.

There have been many times throughout church history where it has seemed that the word of God had departed forever, that God had abandoned His church. There was a time when it seemed that grace was being sold for money and the church was using salvation and condemnation as weapons to ensure that the people were obedient to them. And yet, God raised up people who dared to listen to God Himself and used them to remind the world of the power of grace and the love of God for us, even when we seem unlovable. There was a time when it seemed as though the Bible was under so much attack from all sides, with people twisting the text one way or denying its authenticity in another way, and even trying to bind up authentic Christian faith with political allegiance so that to stand against the government was made to be the same thing as standing against God. However, God has stood strong throughout those times and is now making it ever more clear that He will speak, even when we do not want to listen.

The point is that God is more ready to bring unity than we are to let Him, He is more ready to speak than we are to listen, He is more ready to move in our midst and regenerate us than we are to let Him. Indeed, God is ready to heal anyone and any group of people and often works much of this healing long before they notice it. This means that God’s grace is alive and well, even when it doesn’t seem like it, even when the world seems to be getting worse and worse, even when our world is ravaged by war and our economy has gone down the tubes. Remember, even when human beings were so evil as to crucify the Son of God who had come among them to heal them and make God’s name known in their midst, God’s grace was at work; in fact, it might have been more at work there than it ever has been before or since.

Brothers and sisters, there is hope for the future, and there is hope for today. It is not a hope that is based in our programs, nor is it a hope in our own creativity and our ability to solve problems. It is not a hope in ourselves at all, but a hope in the almightiness of grace, a hope that, in spite of all the evidence against it, this world is still God’s world and He will not let it go. Jesus could pray with this kind of confidence that the relations between people like you and me, believers who are grafted into Christ would begin to resemble the relations between the Persons of the Trinity, who are absolutely united in their differentiation, right at the moment of His betrayal. In the very next passage, Jesus is going to be betrayed, He is going to be taken away to die. In the midst of the bleakness, Jesus is confident that, as Paul has said, that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Let us join in that confidence in our lives. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 17:9-19

08/15/10
John 17:9-19
Hudson UMC

Today we are in the second of three Sundays digging through Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John chapter seventeen. Once again, as I was preparing to preach on this passage, I was astonished with how much information is packed into a relatively short chapter. The problem with passages like this, that are so completely full of content, is that they are sometimes so complicated that it is hard to really get into them and piece together what we need to know for today. Sometimes, all we want is a simple, straightforward passage, where we don’t have to work very hard to understand what it says and we can apply it to our lives without much trouble and without having to think much. However, it is precisely the passages that make us think, that push us to dig further than we might want to, that force us to submit ourselves to the text rather than submitting the text to ourselves, that we really begin to be open to God speaking to us.

Last week, when we considered the first part of this prayer, I emphasized the incredible solidarity that Jesus has with the Father. It was important because it means that, when we encounter Jesus, we are not just encountering a human being, or as is often said these days, “a great human teacher” like a Ghandi or a Mother Teresa, but the very living God, who had spoken to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the prophets of the Old Testament. If this is the case, it changes the way we live. We do not just follow someone who is going to teach us a good way to live or someone who is going to teach us about God, but we follow God who has come to us as a human being. The stress last week was about the fact that it is God who has come to us as a human being.

This week, the stress is on the fact that God has come to us as a human being. If the last section of Jesus’ prayer showed us over and over again how Jesus is in absolute unity with the Father, this section shows us over and over again how He is in incredible solidarity with us. We talk about the fact that God loves us and that He came to earth, to walk with us, to teach us, and ultimately, to die and be raised for us, but is it possible that we have allowed this to become something we have heard and said so many times that we have let ourselves miss the absolutely astonishing thing that we believe?

I don’t know about you, but if I were the Lord of the universe, I don’t think I would be the same kind of God as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. I think that, because I like to spend a fair amount of time by myself, that I might have thought twice about creating the universe and people to live in it. When Adam and Eve couldn’t follow simple directions and not eat the fruit from the one tree, even when there were countless other trees to eat from, I don’t know for sure that I wouldn’t just say, “enough is enough,” and be done with it. When Cain killed his brother Abel out of jealousy, I don’t know if I would have had the compassion to protect him from avengers. If I got so mad that I would destroy the earth through a flood, I quite possibly would not go out of my way to save one particular family, especially if I realized that human nature hadn’t changed and things would probably just start all over again. In short, I could come up with a whole list of reasons why I wouldn’t do what God has done, and that is before I even begin to think about the whole history of Israel and their incredible stubbornness and sin.

When I think about the most amazing act of God, the coming to earth in and as the man Jesus, I really start to squirm. Why would God do that? Would I do that if I were God? Probably not. Why would I ever want to willingly limit myself like that? It would like a human being becoming a cockroach, only more so. Why would I intentionally endure all the hurts and trials of a human life, finally enduring some of the most savage treatment that human beings have ever committed and nailed to a cross to die? I can’t say that I would. When I think about this, I could begin to question if this is really what God has done. However, because I can no more doubt of truth of the gospel than I can doubt that I am alive, I instead am overwhelmed with the mercy, love, and patience of God and with the incredible conviction that is a very, very good thing that I am not God and that God is not like me.

So, in spite of the fact that our minds are overwhelmed at the fact that the almighty God of the universe would do what He has done, we rejoice because He has indeed done it. Even the psalmist, writing long before God made His compassion on humanity so clear and evident in Christ, wrote, “When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.”

Just as I lifted up three statements of Jesus last week that showed His unbreakable connection with the Father, I want to lift up three statements of Jesus that show His incredible solidarity with us. “All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.” Jesus has spoken all throughout the gospel of John that He has glorified the Father by His deeds and words. When we remember that Jesus is truly God, we can understand this. After all, it is not surprising that God could glorify God. However, He then goes on and says here that He is glorified in His disciples, and not just the eleven He has around the table, but everyone who follows Him.

Imagine that. Jesus, God in flesh, is glorified in us. Again, I don’t know about you, but when I look at my life, I can come up with a whole list of reasons why I could imagine that God would not, or at least should not, be glorified in me. And yet, He says that it is the case. We might try to dismiss this amazing claim by saying, “Oh, he’s actually talking to the disciples, who were such mighty pillars of faith. Maybe, if I lived like they did, I could glorify Christ, but I don’t.” However, we need to remember that it was not until Pentecost that the disciples had any kind of real faith. Jesus is saying that He has already been glorified in his followers, even when they have shown over and over again that they do not get it, even when they are going to scatter that very night, even when one of them is going to directly deny Him three times before the sun came up.

I think that it might be good to think about it like this. Instead of the weakness of the disciples being any kind of hindrance to their ability to glorify Christ, maybe it is precisely because they are weak that they glorify Him. After all, as amazing as it might seem for God to be glorified by the best of the best, how much more incredible is it that God can take even our weakness and brokenness and transform it into His glory? Any fool can be made to look good because they surround themselves with the powerful. Only God almighty can show just how good He really is by surrounding Himself with the weak, transforming them. If someone was strong before they met God and continued in strength, nobody would ever know that God made a difference. However, if weak people like you and me encounter God and we are powerfully transformed so that our weakness is left behind and we live from day to day in the strength of God, it should be clear to everyone that our transformation is not our own but came from God. And if God can take someone like me and bring some good out of him, truly He is a glorious God.

The second thing that Jesus says that ties us together with Him in a serious way is, “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” In previous sermons, I have spent a fair amount of time talking about what Jesus means when He talks about the world hating Christians and why that is, so I won’t emphasize that right now. Instead, I want to focus more on this idea of not belonging to the world.

In John, “the world” is a negative term. To speak of the world, or of things that are worldly is to already to interpret them in terms of hostility to God. Over and over again, Jesus says that the deeds of the world are evil, that the world hates Him, that He came into the world for the sake of judgment. However, there are other places where John talks about the world. He calls Jesus the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every person. John the Baptist exclaims that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, that He is indeed the savior of the world. However, these two different uses of the concept of the world are not in conflict. It is not as if saying that Jesus loves the world while the world hates Jesus and His disciples are contradictory. Indeed, Jesus loves the world in spite of the fact that the world hates Him.

The point that is being made here, though, is that Jesus is not of the world. Indeed, He has come from His Father in heaven. He is not part of the evil in the world that is in contradiction to God, but is on God’s side in everything, because He is God in our midst. What is astonishing is that He declares that we are not in the world like He is not in the world. There is part of us that wants to say that we are in the world because we live here and we can look around and see the world all around us. And yet, in spite of all the evidence against it, Jesus assures us that we are set apart like He is, that we, by faith, have come to participate in His separation from the evil of the world. It is an interesting thing to remember. Jesus is saying that, even though it is our business as the church and as individual Christians to be about the business of reaching out to the world, we are not to let the world call the shots about what we say and do. The world is hostile to God. If the world calls the shots, God will be excluded from all our dealings with them. God is calling us to be involved in His ministry.

This leads us to our last major thing that Jesus says that shows us that we are bound to Him in a profound way. In fact, this might very well be the most important part of this part of the prayer for us. “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” Throughout the entire New Testament, the idea of participating in the mission of God is addressed in many different ways. Sometimes it is spoken of in terms of building the kingdom of God, sometimes it is spoken of as being involved in the transformation of the world. In John, the primary language to speak of our being involved in mission is our being “sent.”

Jesus was sent into the world by the Father, to become a human being, a specific man, to enter into our condition, to bear it upon Himself, to take what is ours from us and to give us what belongs to Him. He came to give of Himself for our benefit, even laying His life down for us. This is what it means for Jesus to be sent by the Father. That is the content that we should keep in our mind when we read, “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” We have been sent into the world, but it is not as though we have our own mission that is somehow separable from the mission of Christ. It is indeed the mission of Christ being worked out in and through us by the power of the Holy Spirit, who grafts us into Christ like branches on a vine.

There have been those who, when they have read the incredible ethical implications of the teaching of Christ, have said, “It is a great idea in theory. However, nobody could actually live like that,” and so they effectively dismiss Christ’s ethical teaching. The teaching that gets the most attention is from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

It is indeed true that Jesus’ teaching demands more of us than we often feel prepared to give, and yet, in spite of that, the life He describes is not truly impossible. After all, Jesus Himself lived that way. And yet, when we really look to see how it plays itself out, we realize that, even if it is possible to live this way, we may not want to. After all, all of this not resisting the evildoer resulted in Jesus being crucified. He prayed for His enemies, by saying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” as they nailed him to the cross. It is possible to live like Jesus tells us to, but it just might mean that we will be mistreated and even killed.

The same is true of being sent by Christ like He was sent into the world. His mission had a lot of hardship, He was abused by many, and He did not have a whole lot of security and stability in His life. This is a very real picture of what our participation in His mission might look like. We might feel that this is above and beyond what we are capable of and we would be right. Nobody who is left to their own strength, or rather, their weakness, can do what Jesus calls them to do. And yet, Jesus has done it and has given us His Spirit so that we might join Him in His mission.

Jesus lived on earth as a particular human being, but now He has been resurrected and ascended into heaven. And yet, He is not just spiritually present in the world but is physically present in this earthly-historical reality. He is present in you and me. It is not impossible for Jesus to call people by a human voice, because He calls them through our human voice. It is not impossible for Jesus to reach the lost in this country or abroad in the midst of our humanity, because He does so every time we reach out to the lost or go to minister to people of foreign lands. We as the church are indeed the earthly-historical correlate to the act of God in Jesus Christ. What Christ has accomplished once and for all two thousand years ago, He is accomplishing continually in and through His people in the church.

We have been sent into the world, a world that is hostile to God, but we do not need to be afraid that we will fail in this mission because it is the very mission of God, it is a mission that, in the objective sense, God has already completed. We are walking on a difficult path, but is a path that Jesus Himself has walked already and so we can trust that we will not stumble or fall because it is the Lord’s path that we have been graciously allowed to walk. So, since we already have been sent into the world, let us go out and allow Christ to work out in our own life and community what He has already worked out once and for all in His life, death, resurrection and ascension. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 17:1-8

08/08/10
John 17:1-8
Hudson UMC

For the last several weeks, in fact, since right after Easter, we have been in the middle of John’s account of the Last Supper. Jesus is gathered together with His disciples, sharing the Passover meal and giving some final instruction. This one part of this one evening takes up a five full chapters. As we arrive in chapter seventeen, we might wonder if we are ever going to get past this seemingly endless stream of talking. Indeed, we will. In fact, once this prayer of Jesus is over, once this chapter is completed, the action will pick up tremendously. In fact, it almost feels as if we get caught up in the hustle and bustle of the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus. However, before all that takes place, Jesus prays. This is the longest prayer in the entire Bible and is commonly known as the “high priestly” prayer of Christ, where He speaks to God on our behalf. It is really a very exciting chapter, because it gives us a window into the relationship between the Father and the Son that we do not get anywhere else.

If you get nothing else out of this sermon and this passage, I hope that you are more and more convinced that it is impossible to completely separate Jesus from the Father. According to Jesus, He and the Father are joined with an unbreakable bond. He basically says this over and over again in this passage, but in different ways, looking at the same reality from different angles. I want to lift up three important ways that Jesus points out that He is utterly tied to the Father.

First, Jesus says, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.” Jesus is saying that, when He is glorified, God is glorified. Some people will claim with great conviction that the man Jesus who walked the earth two thousand years ago never claimed to be God and that this was something that the church read into the simple life and teaching of Christ. There are only two ways that we can come to the conclusion that Jesus did not think He was God. The first is by doing what a group of people called the Jesus Seminar have done, which is go through the gospels and decide what Jesus certainly said, what He may have said, what He probably didn’t say and what He surely didn’t say. The problem with this way of doing things is that the scholars began by presupposing a radical separation between Jesus and the faith of the church and so they eliminated everything that Jesus said that might go against that presupposition. The other way that we might miss Jesus identifying Himself with God would be if we did not understand the full implications of what He said in places like this.

You see, Jesus is saying that, if God glorifies Him, He will glorify the Father. He is not saying this like you and I might. You and I might say, “God, if you make me popular, or if you make people listen to me, or if you give me lots of influence with people, I will let people know about you.” This way of speaking is almost like saying to God, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,” as if God needed us to help Him out or else He would be in trouble. Jesus is saying that the glory of His name is absolutely tied up with the glory of God. If Jesus’ name is not glorified, it is not possible for God’s name to be glorified. More specifically, He says that it is because He has authority to give eternal life to human beings. By people like you and me coming to know God, and receiving eternal life, the world comes to know that God is not just a figment of our imagination but is real, living and powerful and has transformed our lives. But God did not do that in some way other than in and through Christ. It is not as though Jesus is simply a messenger that we listened to and met a God that we could have met some other way. In and through Christ we came face to face with God Himself. When we look deeply into the face of Christ we see the face of God. When we give praise to God, we do not give praise to some kind of abstract God, whatever that might be, but give praise to the one who has come to us as a human being, we give praise to the Father through Christ and in the Holy Spirit.

The next thing that Jesus says that binds Him to the Father is about how He understands salvation and eternal life. “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” This is really important for us to grasp. The question can be asked and has been asked, “What exactly is eternal life.” Throughout the gospel of John, Jesus has spoken about eternal life many times, but we might still walk away from the text confused, wondering if that is it. After all, Jesus has mostly spoken in such a way as to identify eternal life with believing in Him. Here we have Him saying that what eternal life is, is to know the one true God and Jesus Christ whom that one God has sent. So, we are supposed to know God, but doesn’t that seem a bit oversimplified? What about living a transformed life, what about having compassion on the poor, what about all the other things we talk about in the church and society? Doesn’t it seem that just knowing God is a little too easy, a little too simple?

It might, but we need to remember that the idea of “knowing” in the Bible is considerably more potent than it often is in modern society. When most of us talk about knowing something, we think in terms of information, knowing about something. We think about knowledge in terms of giving and receiving information that we can take or leave. When we learn about something we are not fundamentally changed. The knowledge can go into our heads and leave our hearts and lives alone.

This is not the case with knowing God. In the Old Testament, to “know” someone did not just mean that you met them, shook their hand, and made some small talk. It meant that you were united to them, that you had intimate, personal knowledge of them in such a way that you were forever bound to them. It is because of this that the Bible uses the word “know” to talk about marriage relationships. To truly know God is to be bound to Him in a deep and personal way. We need to remember what Jesus said in the very heart of this time with His disciples. He told them that, as those who followed Him, they were bound up with Him like branches on a vine. To know Christ is to be bound to Him so profoundly that you cannot be separated from Him. To know the one true God is not something that can be done in the abstract, it is not something that we can do without receiving the Holy Spirit, the very presence and being of God, into our lives and being grafted into Christ by that same Spirit.

When we understand the need to “know” God in this way, everything begins to make sense. We begin to see that all the different facets of the Christian life that we want to make sure are not ignored and left aside are caught up together in this knowing of God. Our knowing of God is not static, lifeless information, but dynamic, powerful, and personal interaction with the divine. When we receive the Holy Spirit into our very lives, the holiness of God presses up against our own unholiness and we begin to see that our lives are not all they could and should be, that we have not been as faithful as we are called to be, that we have ignored and even been a part of the oppression that reigns in so much of contemporary society. We begin to have our hearts and lives molded into the very image of the heart and life of Christ, where we begin to see through His eyes and feel with His heart. By being bound up with Christ, we do not become any less who we are, but more who we were meant to be than ever before because now our hardness of heart has been overcome by the love and mercy of God that has replaced our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh that can receive and return the love of God.

There is one more point I want to draw out in regard to what Jesus says in this passage. He said, “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world.” It is extremely important that we understand that Jesus is the one who makes the name of God known to us. Again, when the Bible speaks of us knowing the “name” of God, it does not mean simply that we know a word by which to call God, but that we actually have personal and intimate knowledge of God. Jesus is saying that it is He who has made God’s name known among the people of the world. What we need to understand is that this is an absolute claim.

It might help us to get our heads around what Jesus is saying if we take a moment and consider some of the things that He is not saying. Jesus is not saying that God is someone who lives inside of each of us simply because we are human beings and that He has simply awakened us to the potential that each of us already have and so is a savior in this way, because He has helped us to help ourselves. He is not saying that God is some immanent being that is so close to each of us that we have an intuitive knowledge of God already and that He just helped us to make sense out of the religious experience we have already had. Jesus is not the incarnation of our highest ideals of humanity, nor is He the incarnation of our moral code that we already believe. He is the incarnation of God, and, as the presence of God in our midst, turns our world upside down and teaches us what we never would have been able to teach ourselves.

A particular story from the Old Testament has been laying heavily on my heart recently. There is a moment in the life of Abraham where he is commanded by God to go to a mountain in the land of Moriah and sacrifice his son Isaac, the one that God had promised to give him and Sarah, and whose birth was an utter miracle. To the horror of many modern readers, Abraham obeys and takes Isaac on the journey. However, right before Abraham followed through, while the knife was raised, God stopped him and provided a ram to be sacrificed instead. There are many aspects to this story, several of which are fundamental to the development of the Jewish understanding of God which is so important to us as Christians, but the one that I think is the very most important in light of all that God has done, and the most important for us to understand today is the fact that Abraham did not have anything better to offer than his son. If Abraham were to think of what he could offer to God, nothing was dearer to him than his son, born to him in his old age and bearing the promise of God. And yet, when God interrupted Abraham and provided a substitute, it is as if God was saying to Abraham, “Even the best you have is not good enough. In fact, nothing that you come up with can satisfy me. However, I will not abandon you because of this, but I will provide a sacrifice of my choosing. Because it comes from me, I will accept it.”

When we encounter Jesus, we see that God is not interested in what we think is the best we can offer. It isn’t about us coming up with the great sacrifice, the great gift, the great and impressive donation. Instead, He provides for us, He spells out the terms of our relationship and, when we can’t live up to the standards that God Himself has laid out for us, which we can’t, He provides a substitute in Jesus and takes our place, offering Himself up for us and our salvation.

What does this have to do with Jesus revealing the name of God to us? It has everything to do with it, because in Jesus we see the very face of God and it is a face that we have not seen anywhere else and, indeed, can not see anywhere else. We see the face of a God who takes our ways of doing things, shows us that they are not sufficient, and then takes our place so that He would not have to be without us. We see a God whose mercy and compassion are not at all like we expect but are far greater than we would ever have dared to dream.

This is the very core of the Gospel. As Jesus Himself has said, “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” We have been given to Jesus Christ and empowered by the very power of the Holy Spirit. I don’t know how often we really allow the absolute power of this idea sink in and change our lives. Do we really live from day to day in the knowledge and joy that the God of the universe, who has created everything that we can see and everything that we can’t, has not remained apart from us but has come among us as one of us and one with us, all at tremendous cost to Himself? He didn’t have to do that, but He did. God has existed since eternity past and lived for quite a long time before He chose to create the universe and people to live in it. God could have gone on forever without ever creating human beings like you and me, but He did create us for no other reason than that He wanted to, that He did not want to be God forever by Himself, but wanted to share His eternal and joyful being with you and me.

We always need to remember the fact that we do not live in a necessary world, that things could have been quite different than they are, that they might not have been at all, and yet they do exist and God does interact with us and make us His own. Just as there is nothing about us and about this created universe in which we live that could have forced God to create it, there is nothing that could ever have forced God to become incarnate, to come among us, to live, suffer and die, just for us, people that, strictly speaking, God does not need, but that He loves. Nothing we have done or could do could ever tie God’s hands, could ever make Him do something for us. This makes the mercy and compassion of God all the more glorious and amazing. Jesus did not have to come, but He did, God did not have to take on human flesh and live in the pain and limitations of this world, but He did. Certainly God, who is immortal and can do anything He wants to do and does not have to do anything He doesn’t want to do, did not have to die, but He did. It wasn’t something God did because He had to, but because He wanted to, because He loves us that much, that He was willing to put His very self on the line for us and our salvation.

This is how much our God loves us. What greater joy could there be than the fact that we, though so little and insignificant in the comic view of things, are the beloved of God the almighty? What more can we ask than that God has entered into our suffering, taken it upon Himself, and promised that the pain of this life will be done away with someday and that we will dwell with Him in a new heaven and new earth forever, continually being amazed at the riches of the depths of God? Let us encourage one another and pray that God would impress Himself upon us so fully and so consistently that we would live day by day in the knowledge that God has loved us more than He loves Himself. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 16:25-33

08/01/10
John 16:25-33
Hudson UMC

In this passage, we have the very last conversation that Jesus has with his disciples before He is crucified and resurrected. All of chapter seventeen will be the prayer of Jesus, but as soon as that is over, Jesus will be betrayed and taken captive. The disciples will not have any more opportunities to interact with their Lord. These words are the last things we hear the disciples say to Jesus until after the resurrection. Though Jesus’ words are comforting and powerful, we might wish that the disciples had made a better showing.

“I have said these things to you in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures but will tell you plainly of the Father.” What things has Jesus been saying in figures of speech? He has been speaking of being in the Father and the Father being in Him, He has spoken of how He will not leave the disciples as orphans, He has spoken of the bond between Him and His disciples as if it were like branches on a vine. He has said many things figuratively and, because we live on the other side of the resurrection, because we live in an age where the Holy Spirit has been given, we can probe into those figures of speech and begin to make sense out of them, where the disciples were clueless at the time. Jesus is saying that there will come a time when He will speak and there will no longer be need for figures of speech. As we will see, clearness of speech is all that the disciples wanted, or at least, all they thought they wanted.

“On that day you will ask in my name. I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.” This is really a marvelous promise for us. It would be one thing to say that Jesus will ask the Father for us because He is the Son of God who must seem a whole lot more important in the eyes of God than ordinary folks like you and me. In fact, since Jesus has shown us how much He cares for us, it really wouldn’t be that bad a thing at all to have Him ask the Father for us for whatever we need. And yet, Jesus wants to make it absolutely clear to us that He is not the only one who is loved by the Father. The Father loves us, too. It is true that, when we pray to the Father, we do so in the name of Christ because, as Paul says, Christ is the one mediator between human beings and God; however, we get to pray to God and God has promised to hear our prayers. God is asking for us to pour ourselves out to Him in prayer. We do not need to worry that we are not good enough because, as we are united to Christ, we are loved by God with a love that will not let us go.

“I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and am going to the Father.” This is one of those times where Jesus explains, just a bit more clearly, who He is and why He matters. There have been several times when Jesus has made statements like this and the Jewish authorities wanted to have him killed on the spot, because He was making Himself equal to God. He had said things like, “Before Abraham was, I am,” taking the divine name from the Old Testament upon Himself. “The Father and I are one,” which made the people take up stones to kill Him, saying that they were stoning Him “for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.” If Jesus had said this in public, that He came from the Father and has come into the world and that He was leaving the world to go to the Father, the people would surely have tried to kill Him again. People just don’t say these kinds of things. For someone to say things like this is to say that they have some kind of special connection with God. This simply did not fit in with the Jewish mindset.

“His disciples said, ‘Yes, now you are speaking plainly, not in any figure of speech! Now we know that you know all things, and do not need to have anyone question you; by this we believe that you came from God.’” This sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Isn’t this a great declaration of faith, of confidence in Jesus? It sure seems to be, and it seems to be clear that the disciples thought so as well. They are so proud that they finally get it, that they finally can see clearly who Jesus is and why He has come among them. They realize now that, as the one who has come from the Father and is returning to the Father, they have no business questioning Him, making Him answer their questions, as if they held any kind of authority over Him. Now, the disciples are absolutely convinced and certain that Jesus is not just an ordinary man, but one who has come from God to them.

And yet, in spite of how good this confession seems, in spite of all the good things the disciples have to say, in spite of the overwhelming faith and piety they seem to have, Jesus is not totally convinced. “Jesus answered them, ‘Do you now believe? The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone.’” Another one of the things that Jesus has done several times throughout the gospel of John is allow people to make claims that show that they think that they or their circumstances are not really so bad and then respond in such a way that shows that Jesus knows the truth and knows it better than the others do. He does this when He asks the Samaritan woman at the well to bring her husband. She says that she does not have a husband and Jesus responds, saying, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband;’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!”

Another wonderful example of this kind is when the Jewish leaders were challenging Jesus. Jesus tells them that they should do what they have heard from the Father. They respond by saying, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus corrects them a bit, saying, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing what Abraham did.” They back and forth a bit more and finally Jesus comes out and says, “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.” Even though the leaders truly thought they were the rightful heirs of Abraham, they behaved as though they were the children of the devil. Jesus knew what the people could not.

The same is true with what He says here to His disciples. The disciples truly thought that they believed that Jesus was the one who came from God. To their credit, they probably were more convinced of this at this moment than they ever were before. To them, it seemed like a total life-changing revelation to have Jesus speak plainly for once. And yet, Jesus knows what the disciples could not. “Do you now believe? The hour is coming, indeed, it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone.” Jesus calls into question the faith that His disciples think they have. Do they really believe that Jesus is from God? Do they really? If they really believed that Jesus was from God, would they run away from Him in His darkest hour? Would they scatter, each one to their home in fear, if they really believed that Jesus was from God? If Jesus was from God, there should be no need to panic because God is greater than the schemes of human beings.

Jesus is saying that, in spite of their own diagnosis, the disciples do not really believe like they think they do. The pressure will come and, instead of standing strong in faith, truly being willing to share in Christ’s sufferings, even here and now, it will be revealed that they are weak and broken people like you and me, who are afraid of trouble, who do not want to suffer, and who do not always follow through on their promises.

It is easy for us to romanticize the apostles, who first took the word of God to the people. We read about their ministries in the book of Acts where we see them healing the sick, raising the dead, and standing boldly before mighty leaders, declaring the good news to them. They endure beatings and hardships the like of which we have never seen. It is easy to marvel at their faith, to think that there is something about who they are as human beings that makes them so faithful, so responsive to God’s call. However, the gospels tell us over and over again that the disciples who followed Jesus were nothing special. In fact, they might even have been less qualified to be leaders of God’s people than most. They had no formal training, they were not well-known for their deep spirituality, they were not particularly outstanding at anything. And yet God took people like that, people who were no better than us, and transformed them into His messengers, into people who would carry the Word of God to the nations and transform the world by their witness. When we see the apostles doing their miraculous ministry, we should be encouraged because there is nothing about you and me that would stop us from doing the very same things, because we, too, are disciples of Christ, who are filled with the Holy Spirit and bound to Christ like branches on a vine.

One of the glorious things about the gospel is that it shows us that the moments where human beings come off at their worst are the very same moments where God comes off at His best, and, because God’s grace has penetrated into the very depths of humanity and raised it up to new heights of glory, it ends up being the best thing for humanity. It sounds somewhat paradoxical to say that, when humanity is at its worst, it ends up being the best for humanity, but it is true. If the good news of Jesus Christ came to us in such a way that we were not exposed to the depths of our evil and shown to be not as good as we try to convince others that we are, we would always be in doubt as to whether or not God meant to make those promises to us. So long as we think that there are skeletons in our closet, so long as there is still a doubt as to whether or not God really knows how bad we can be, there will be doubt as to whether God’s grace really covers all our sins.

It is important to notice that this is exactly what Jesus is doing here. He is pointing out that they do not have nearly as much faith as they think they do, but He is not mocking them, He is not poking fun at them, and, perhaps most important of all, He is not disappointed in them, as if He expected them to have gotten it by now and that they are failing Him and letting Him down in that failure. Jesus does not say that they will scatter to their houses and leave Him alone and so prove to be unworthy of Him. Instead, He says that, even though His disciples, His closest friends, will leave Him alone, He will not truly be alone. “Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me.” Even though it will seem, to all observers, that Jesus will be completely and totally abandoned, it is not so. Jesus knows that, even when the best that humanity can offer fails, God is still strong, God is still faithful, and God will be with Him, even when His best friends aren’t.

Listen to the last thing that Jesus says here. “I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!” Let us take this bit-by-bit. Jesus is saying that He has told His disciples that they were going to fail, that they were not even going to be able to keep the promises they made so confidently that very night in order that, in Him, they would have peace. Even though the disciples are still convinced that they are going to be strong enough, Jesus knows better. He knows that they are going to fail and He wants to make sure they know that ahead of time so that they do not lose hope when they do fail. He says that it is in Him that they are promised peace. They are not granted to have peace in themselves, as if they could have peace in the face of their failure. Instead, they are granted peace because they are in Christ and Christ is victorious in spite of our failure.

“In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!” This must have sounded odd in the ears of the disciples, who were just told that Jesus was going away to die and that, in spite of their best efforts, they could not prevent it. I wonder if these words rang in their ears when they saw Jesus on the cross. What a paradox, to have a man who is actively dying at the hands of his enemies, assuring his friends that he has conquered the world. And yet, in spite of this foolishness, this is exactly what Jesus is saying.

I think that we need to hear the words that Jesus shared with His disciples today. We live in a culture that measures us by how well we achieve, by what we accomplish and by our reliability. If we make too many mistakes with too many people, people begin to get the idea, for right or wrong, that we cannot be trusted, that we might let them down and we become something of an outsider. We want to make sure that we are seen as reliable, strong and committed people. If we promise something, we want to make sure we can follow through with it. We get offended if anyone calls our sincerity or faithfulness into question. And yet, this is exactly what Jesus is doing here. He is calling the faith of the disciples into question. In a sense, He is actually undermining their confidence in themselves. But He does not do that to depress them or to make them feel like they are failures. Instead, He does this to make them redirect their faith and hope. It is as if Jesus is saying to the disciples, “You think that you really believe now, but you will all run away. Don’t feel bad, but take courage because I have conquered the world! Therefore, put your trust, not in yourself, not in your ability to do good or to stand strong, but in me, even when I appear crucified before you, for though I will die, I will be raised from the dead and the Advocate will continue my ministry in you.”

What a blessing and a relief to be included in a promise like this! What a relief to know that our standing in the eyes of God is not dependent on how well we get our act together, but on the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. What a joy to know that we have been united to Christ, who has already conquered the world. He was the victorious one even before He was crucified, even when it looked like He was defeated. In the midst of this world of space and time, where it so often feels like things are against us and that we have nowhere to look for hope, we can cling to the fact that our Lord has conquered the world, even when He is hanging on a cross, so that, in spite of our failures and shortcomings, in spite of our desire to do more and our constant disappointments, we trust that our victory is not in us at all, but in the one who has bound us to Himself with a love that will not let us go. Let us leave this place and live lives of praise for the one who calls us to do the impossible and then does it in and through us. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 16:16-24

07/25/10
John 16:16-24
Hudson UMC

In this passage, the main point that Jesus wants his disciples to know is that He is going away in a little while and they will not be able to see him, but, after only a little more time after that, they will see Him again. We know that it has to be the point of the passage because it is said three times in a row. First, Jesus says it to His disciples, then they respond by asking each other about it because they do not know what it means, and then Jesus repeats it again because He is aware that they do not know what He meant and is going to explain it. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of a single other passage in the entire Bible where a sentence is repeated so many times in a row. It must be really important.

First, I want to try to enter into the world of the disciples at this moment. How would they have heard and understood this statement? The first part is that, in a little while, the disciples will no longer see Him. Is Jesus going to go somewhere? They are eating supper together. Will He be taking an evening stroll? Will He be going on a journey? It is not clear. It seems that Jesus means something more serious than this, otherwise He would not make such a point of saying it in the midst of this serious conversation where He has spoken of leaving them and their need for an Advocate in His absence. The question is, why won’t they be able to see Him?

The fact that Jesus is getting at is that He was about to be executed. They will no longer see Him, not because He is going on a trip or hiding from them, but because He will no longer be living. If the apostles at that moment could have understood this point, it would have caused all kinds of problems for them. In fact, it is entirely possible that, in light of the various hints that Jesus was giving throughout this last supper of theirs, that they understood that death is exactly what Jesus was talking about and it was because they understood it that they felt like they did not understand it.

Let me explain. I have said before, but it bears repeating, that we only use the Greek word “Christ” or he Hebrew word “Messiah” in relation to Jesus, and so they have a specific meaning that is governed by who Jesus is, or at least who we perceive Him to be. Because we only ever hear Christ and Messiah used of Jesus, it is easy for us to forget that they were words that had a much broader range of meaning in the ancient world than they do today. “Messiah” and “Christ” are words that are used to refer to someone who is anointed. This might be someone who is anointed as a priest or a prophet, but it was, by far, most often used to refer to a king. More specifically, not just any king, but a king who was of the line of David who was God’s very own chosen ruler for the people of Israel. The prophets of the Old Testament had predicted that there would come a time when God’s Messiah, or Christ, would come and deliver the people. According to the way most people understood those words at the time, they could have come to no other conclusion than that God would send a king to deliver them from the oppression of the Romans and they could finally be a nation like they thought they were destined to be.

And yet, even though Jesus was of the line of David, even though He was indeed the deliverer of Israel, and not just of Israel, but the entire world, even though Jesus is indeed a king, He was not the one that the people expected or even wanted. The people wanted a king that was going to come in, rally the nation, and then overthrow the Romans. Jesus is saying that He is about to die and they will no longer see Him. How can He be the Messiah who leads the people to political victory if He is dead? He can’t be the Messiah that the people wanted if He allows Himself to be killed, but He can be the one they need if He does so.

The other reason why, if the disciples grasped that Jesus was speaking of His death, they would have been confused is because He not only says, “A little while, and you will no longer see me,” but also says, “and again a little while, and you will see me.” If, when He says that they will no longer see Him, He is speaking of His death, how in the world will they see Him again? Before Jesus actually went and died and was raised from the dead and ascended to heaven and poured out the Holy Spirit upon the Church at Pentecost, the disciples could not have made any sense out of this whatsoever. Could you make any sense out of someone who has always seemed to be quite in their right mind, telling you, quite calmly, that they are about to die, but that you will see them again in only a little while? No wonder the disciples were confused.

Most of the Gospel narratives are stories about what Jesus has done, or accounts of what Jesus has said. However, they were being written by particular people at particular times and, every once in a while, we hear the author insert a thought or two to help us understand what is going on. There is one moment in John that is incredibly important and it could only have been written after all of these events had taken place. In chapter twelve, we are told that the disciples did not understand what Jesus was saying at first, “but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written of him, and that they had done these things to him.” When Jesus was with them and the were following Him, but without having the Holy Spirit dwell inside of them, they heard all the words of Christ, the same words they wrote down for us to read and hear, but they did not understand them. After Jesus was resurrected and the Spirit was given, all of a sudden, those very same words took on a whole new meaning and they understood what was confusing before.

This is a key point where this takes place. Before Jesus was raised from the dead, any talk about His resurrection would be confusing at best, but more than likely dismissed as symbolism or crazy talk. However, once it had actually happened, all of a sudden, it became clear that all those things that made no sense before, because resurrections, according to everyday experience, simply do not happen, were actually legitimate predictions that showed that Jesus knew exactly what was going on and what He was doing.

Now that we understand what Jesus is talking about when He says that His disciples will no longer see Him and that they will see Him again after a little while, we must turn our attention to His actual description of what is going to happen. “Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”

The first part of this statement is that the disciples of Jesus will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice. Over and over again, Jesus has told us that the “world” is very much opposed to what He is doing in their midst. This can not really be in doubt because the world, even the part of the world that we might think would be excited about what Jesus was doing, reacted violently against Him and crucified Him. In fact, just a moment ago, at the beginning of chapter sixteen, when Jesus had been explaining how the disciples would share in the hatred that people had of Him, He said that “an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God.” If Jesus, this great teacher and leader, who is adored by this small group of people, is hated by so many, then if the world takes Him and crucifies Him, it would certainly be a cause for weeping and mourning for the disciples but for rejoicing for the world.

Jesus tries to put the pain of the disciples into some kind of perspective by using an image of a woman giving birth. “When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world.” Now I, myself, have never given birth, but those who have have insisted to me that Jesus’ words need a little bit of interpretation. It is not as though a woman undergoes a kind of amnesia after her child is born, it is not as though she literally does not remembers the pain, but that the child brings so much joy that the pain is seen as being worth it, that the benefit is so great that it is as if the pain is forgotten.

We need to be very careful that we do not push this image too far because, though he is connecting His disciples and the woman in labor in His metaphor, the source of joy that Jesus is speaking of is not something that the disciples will bring about on their own, as if the source of their joy is already inside of them and they just need to endure pain to bring it about. The thing that will transform their pain into joy, that will cause their hearts to rejoice, is the fact that, although Jesus is going away to die, they will indeed see Him again.

Even still, we need to pay careful attention to what Jesus means when He says that the disciples will see Him again because He says that it will make their hearts rejoice in such a way that “no one will take your joy from you.” It is true that in John’s gospel, we see the disciples rejoicing more after the resurrection than we do in other accounts, but even here it seems to be more the disciples’ reaction of awe and amazement that we see, shocked disbelief that Jesus is indeed alive again and yet being confronted with the reality of God so profoundly that they cannot help but cry out, “My Lord and my God.” We are reminded in the other Gospels that the resurrection in and of itself is not enough to bring joy that no one can take away. When the women in the gospel of Mark find the empty tomb and meet the angel, we are told that they went away frightened. We read in Matthew that, even after Jesus has been resurrected for forty days and is about to give the Great Commission, “when they saw him, they worshipped him, but some were doubtful.”

Let us look at Peter, even within this very gospel, in order to understand better that, when Jesus talks about the disciples seeing Him again and having a joy that no one can take away from them, He means more than the resurrection. Peter, this very night, as Jesus is betrayed and taken captive, will deny Him three times. He who seemed so strong and dedicated, who offered to die with Jesus, is revealed to be far more wishy-washy than he would have ever cared to admit. Even at the very end of John’s gospel, when Jesus tells Peter something about what will happen to him and how he will die, he finds himself very concerned with whether or not he will be alone in his fate, or whether another of the disciples will suffer the same. Jesus, however, refuses to answer his question, telling Peter to mind his own business.

The point is that, in spite of the fact that Peter seems so weak and hesitant, even at his best throughout the gospels, he does not remain so. Peter does indeed become the rock that Jesus told him he was, but when does that happen? When does he truly step forward to be the leader of the apostles? Not until the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the church. Within the context of our passage, this makes perfect sense and we should not be surprised. After all, Jesus has just gone to great lengths to explain that it is good for the disciples that He goes away because He will send the Advocate who will take the things of Christ and declare these things to them.

The Holy Spirit that Jesus promised is indeed the presence of Christ in the midst of the church. It was because the Holy Spirit was given to the church that Jesus fulfilled His promise that He would not leave His disciples as orphans, but would come to them. We can rephrase and interpret Jesus’ first words in this passage like this. “A little while and you will not see me, for I go to die, yet after a little while, you will see me, not only because I will be resurrected from the dead and you will be able to put your hands in my wounds, but because the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, will come upon you. This way, you will not only see me with your eyes, but will be so grafted into me that I will be closer to you than you are to yourself.”

What is absolutely amazing to me about this is that the promise of the Holy Spirit is not just given to the eleven disciples around the table with Jesus. Throughout the book of Acts, we see countless converts, indeed every convert, receiving the Spirit and being utterly transformed by it. Every single person who receives the Spirit in the Bible has a life that is changed in such an amazing and radical way that it simply cannot be explained in terms of anything but the very power of God coming and dwelling inside of them.

The good news of this gift of the Holy Spirit is that you and I are every bit as much recipients of this promise as the original disciples. We, too, have been promised the Spirit of God and that Spirit dwells inside of us. We, too, have been grafted into Christ in such a way that it is His blood that pumps through our veins. We, too, have been utterly bound up in the ministry of Christ in the world. This means that, when we gather together as the body of Christ, we should not be surprised if God moves mightily, touching our hearts and souls and empowering us to go into the world and make a difference, making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. In fact, what should surprise us is if we gather together, as the body of Christ, the ones who have received the Spirit, and we are not changed, if we are not empowered for ministry, and if we are not compelled to join in the work of Christ in the world today.

When Jesus was betrayed, every single one of His disciples scattered. Not one of them stood strong when their leader was in His darkest hour. And yet, even though there was an abundance of weakness, God did not turn away from them. In fact, because their weakness was shown for what it was, because it was more than clear that, on their own, they could not stand strong, it is an undeniable fact that, when they did indeed become strong in the blink of an eye, it was not because they got themselves all excited, but because God had fundamentally changed them. So if you are discouraged today, if you feel weak, if you are convinced that you are not up to the task of participating in God’s transformation of the world in Christ and through the Spirit, take heart that the strength you need is not your own. It is not something you can muster up, but something that God freely gives for no reason other than He loves us and wants us to be involved in what He is doing. So if the Christian life is anything less than a joy and a privilege for you, pray that God would make this same Holy Spirit that has transformed so many throughout history and so many even in this room, empower you in a new way so that you, too, can know the joy of the Lord. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 16:4b-15

07/18/10
John 16:4b-15
Hudson UMC

The previous chapter in the Gospel of John, chapter fifteen, is entirely concerned with the fact that we, as believers, are united to Christ as branches on the vine. As such, not only are we utterly bound up with the love, life and joy of Christ, but also with the persecution and suffering that He endures in this world. The question that might come to our minds is, “Why is Jesus going on about this?” We need to remember the context of these several chapters. Starting in chapter fourteen, Jesus began on an extended discourse, explaining to His disciples all the things that He needed to tell them. We are in the thick of this discussion and we will not be done with it until we finish chapter seventeen. The reason why this is so important, the reason why Jesus needs to say all these things to His disciples at this point is because He is going to be betrayed and die. Jesus and the apostles are at the Last Supper and Judas has already left to betray Christ to the authorities. This is His last chance to tell His disciples what they need to know in order to stay strong and endure through the trials to come.

In fact, Jesus even hints at this at the beginning of our passage. “I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. But now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’” The point is that Jesus is going away. The leader of this group of people is going to be gone and they are going to be leaderless. Jesus leaving His disciples alone because He is going to be executed, and yet, we don’t get the sense that He thinks that they will be able to lead in His absence. After all, He has said to Peter not all that long ago that he was going to deny Him three times before that very night was over. The disciples were sad that Jesus was going to leave. “But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts.”

“Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away.” This must have completely blindsided the disciples. How in the world could it be to their advantage that Jesus was going away? If Peter, for example, who seemed to be so strong, would collapse into cowardice the very night that Jesus goes away, how could it be to their advantage that He leaves? And yet, Jesus assures them that this is absolutely true. “For if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”

I think that we need to reflect on this statement here, because, if we really think it out, it will strike us as odd. Why can’t the Advocate come to us unless Jesus goes? Why can’t the God who can do anything send the Spirit to the disciples, even while Jesus is on earth? There seems to be some intimate connection with Jesus leaving and the Spirit being given. We need to think about that for a minute.

The thought that God could have poured out the Spirit upon the disciples before Jesus had left them presupposes without any kind of proof, that it would be a good thing for that to happen. It might be argued, I suppose, that God’s presence is always a good thing, but I am not so sure. Remember when Isaiah encountered an image of the glory of the Lord in a vision. Even though there were several layers of separation between Isaiah and God at that point (he is having a vision, and it is not truly the direct presence of God he is encountering, but an image of the glory of God), his only response is to cry out and say, “Woe is me, for I am undone!” The only thing Isaiah could do is exclaim that he was about to die. All throughout the Old Testament, when people encountered an angel or a miracle, they were amazed that they had not been consumed by God’s presence.

If this is the case, if God really is the consuming fire, it might not be a great thing to have ordinary folks like you, me, and the disciples, indwelt by God the Holy Spirit. And yet, Jesus says that it is indeed a good thing, that it is to our advantage. And yet, it will not happen until Jesus goes away. As it turns out, if we allow ourselves to let the reality of God becoming a man to really impress itself upon us, we will come to realize that throughout His life, death, resurrection and ascension, Jesus is hard at work, redeeming and re-creating our humanity. When Jesus is baptized in the Jordan, He receives the Holy Spirit into our very humanity and lives with it, without being consumed. It is as if the Spirit, that would normally overwhelm us, has learned to compose Himself within our humanity in Christ.

I also want to remind you of what happens on the cross. Each of the four Gospels tells us something of what happened on the cross. Each has Jesus saying one or two things before He died. What they tell us is incredibly important. In John, the words we hear Jesus saying right before He dies are, “It is finished.” This is truly fitting, as John has made a point of speaking of the work of Christ being the work of the Father, that it is only when Christ has been put to death, when, as He has said, He leaves His disciples, that the work is “finished.” It is only when Jesus takes the curse that has rested upon humanity since the days of Adam and sin entered into the world and nails it to the cross with Him that He can say that His mission on earth, the reclaiming of humanity for God and the reconciling of the world to Himself, is finished. Then and only then, when Christ has provided the appropriate human response, throughout His life and even more so in His death, that the Spirit can come and not consume us but empower us for the trials that Jesus has just told us about.

But what will this Advocate, this Holy Spirit, do? Jesus says that, “When he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” I must admit that for a long time, this statement confused me. I understood that the Spirit would prove the world wrong about sin because they did not believe in Him because this was indeed sin, but the other two statements baffled me. I can’t say that I understand them fully today, but I think I understand it a bit better than I used to.

The Spirit will prove the world wrong “about sin, because they do not believe in me.” Jesus is not just saying that the Spirit will prove the world wrong because they have sinned by not believing in Christ, but that the world will be proven wrong about sin. Jesus is saying that the Holy Spirit will show that the world does not even know what sin is and that God’s definition of sin is very different than ours often is. What do we say is sin? We think that murder, adultery, and violence is sin; we think that oppressing others is sinful, we think that when we work against the well-being of others or hate them, it is sin. Are those things destructive? Absolutely. Are they things that Christians are called to avoid? You bet. But Jesus is saying that our whole concept of sin needs to be redefined. The greatest sinner is not the one who has done a lot of things wrong, but the one who, in spite of the grace and love that Jesus has shown them, refuses to believe in Him.

This is an offensive idea, one that Paul says that is “foolishness” to the world, but is in fact the very wisdom of God. To give an example of how offensive this idea is, I want to reflect a bit on Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Paul had preached among the Galatians a gospel where Jesus has taken their place, where He has done what they could not do and lives in and through them, making them more who they were created to be than ever before. It is in this letter that Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.”

The Galatians had forgotten this message and had begun to listen to other teachers who told them that, once God showed them grace, they needed to work really hard and finish their salvation themselves, that, now that God had done something, it was their turn to work and bring what God had started by grace to completion by works. Paul’s message was that God will finish the work He has begun. What this means is that Christian faith is not simply an ethical lifestyle where we human beings are the judge of right and wrong. Instead, it means that, in spite of our best efforts, only the response that Christ has made on our behalf and in our place is worthy of God. Because it is Christ’s response and not our response that is pleasing to God, we must renounce ourselves, our own way of doing things, and follow Christ, pleading only the name of Christ for our acceptance by God. This is a very different way to think about sin. It is not a matter of getting your act together, but of letting Christ be your righteousness.

The next point, that the Spirit will prove the world wrong “about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer” is deeply related. When we read the book of Acts and we see the apostles taking the good news into the world, what do they do? They do the things that Jesus was doing, they say the things that Jesus was saying, and they were persecuted in the ways Jesus was persecuted. Real righteousness is not the self-discipline and dedication of human beings, but the very empowerment of God. The Holy Spirit shows that real righteousness is the righteousness of Christ, who once walked the earth and is now present in the lives of Christians through the power of the Holy Spirit. We become righteous, not because we do many good deeds, nor because we avoid evil ones, but because we are becoming ever more closely joined to Christ in every aspect of life.

Finally, the Spirit, we are told, will prove the world wrong “about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” Our way of thinking about judgment is where someone or something is declared bad and then action is taken immediately to remove that person or thing from society so they can’t hurt anyone anymore. Jesus is saying that judgment is something that is declared long before the sentence is carried out. Christians do not live with hope and joy because the world is doing well, nor because we think that the world is going to get better by human strength and creativity. Instead, we have hope and joy because we know the end of the story. We know that, in spite of the evil that we see all around us, the source of this evil, the ruler of this world, stands condemned. We do not say that Christ is Lord over sin and death because sin and death are no longer present in our world of space and time, but that they have been defeated and their days are numbered.

What I think is perhaps the most amazing thing that Jesus says here is not his radical redefinition of sin, righteousness and judgment, but what the Spirit will do for believers. “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” Earlier, in chapter fourteen, Jesus has promised that He will not leave His disciples as orphans, but will send the Holy Spirit to be with them. Here, he clarifies what He means when He promises the Spirit. It is not as though the Spirit, this Advocate that Jesus is promising is some stranger, even though they have not received Him yet.

The Spirit is not someone who can be separated from Christ as if the ministry of the Holy Spirit is separate from the ministry of Christ. What can the apostles expect when the Spirit arrives? The do not need to worry that they will miss the Spirit or that they will confuse it with their own spirit because the Spirit is not some random Spirit but the very Spirit of Christ taking up residence in themselves. The things of Christ will be imparted to them through the Spirit.

This is truly an amazing miracle. If we were not overwhelmed by the idea that the God of the universe, who created everything that exists out of nothing, who has manifested Himself throughout history in mighty miracles, signs and wonders, has entered into our brokenness and taken our limitation upon Himself in order to redeem it, this idea, that this very same God would enter into, not just the one man Jesus of Nazareth, but into absolutely every single person who comes to believe in Christ, should knock us over. Did you know that being a believer in Christ is not an agreement to live according to a list of “dos” and “don’ts,” it is not a matter of believing all the right things in just the right way, it is not even a matter of being at church every Sunday of your life and helping on all the committees, though all those things might happen. Instead, believing in Christ is a radical transformation where you are given the very Spirit of God, who is the fullness of God so that you might be made to live more like Christ day after day.

Think about what this means. It means that God has not abandoned you, even during the times when it might feel like it, but has taken up residence so that God is even closer to you than you are to yourself. It means that you have not been forgotten, but bound to Christ with the very power and presence of God. It means that you are not left to your own devices to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work really hard in order for God to love you, but rather that Christ has already offered that perfect sacrifice that you are searching for and offered it to God on your behalf and in your place.

Brothers and sisters, we have not been left as orphans; instead, we have been given a family that will never end, that will never be broken, and will never cast us out. We have been adopted into the family of God and God has given His very self as our pledge that He will not turn His back on us. Everything that belongs to the Father also belongs to Christ and the Holy Spirit takes those things and gives them to us. As those who have received the great things of God, let us go out and let Christ live His life in and through us, that the world might know the transforming power of God manifest in our lives and in the lives of others. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 15:18-16:4a

07/11/10
John 15:18-16:4a
Hudson UMC

Over the past few years, I have become something of a stickler for context. I find that, if you take a quotation out of context, you can make it mean something very different from what the author intended. We have all experienced the confusion and difficulty when our words get taken out of context. However, the danger is never greater than when we are dealing with the Biblical text. Our culture today loves sound bytes, we love brief, simple statements and we don’t always have time to listen to a whole paragraph, just to make sure we understand the context clearly. The problem with this is that, when we do not take the context of a quote from the Bible very seriously, we will separate what God has joined together; we will rip the words away from their meaning.

Today’s text is a wonderful example. If we consider only the words of Christ here, we will come to some conclusions about what Jesus is getting at. We might not like what Jesus has to say; we might even decide that He is wrong or that it doesn’t apply to us, since His words of warning that those who follow Him will be hated are somewhat uncomfortable. However, we cannot make a line down the middle of chapter fifteen and say that the first half has nothing to say to the second half. The two halves are deeply related and we need to allow them to speak to one another.

I haven’t been here for two weeks, so let me remind you of what was in the very last passage before this one. Jesus had used the powerful image of a vine and branches to explain how we are related to Him. When we think about how we are related to God, we cannot think of it as if we are over here and Jesus is over there. We are utterly united to Christ in such a way that we are bound to Him; we are, as Paul loved to say, in Christ. At the end of the day, the life of Christ has been implanted into us and we cannot be separated from Him. Our lives only make sense when considered in light of who Jesus is. This idea that we are united to Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit is not something that is a nice thing to think about once in a while, but the primary language in the New Testament for being a child of God. Our being bound to God through Christ is more basic, more fundamental, even than our being forgiven.

The reason I wanted to remind you of the first part of this chapter is because of the direction Jesus takes in this passage. His main point is that the disciples, those who were following Him, who were giving their lives to His teaching and his message, were going to suffer. The last few statements Jesus makes in this passage help us understand what is going on here. “I have said these things to you to keep you from stumbling. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me. But I have said these things to you so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you about them.”

Jesus has some uncomfortable things to say to us but we need to remember that He is not telling them to us to make us squirm, or to make us second-guess our faith, or to put us down in any way. Instead, He is telling us these things because they are true, whether we know them or not and He wants us to be well-informed about them. He wants us to know that the Christian life is not a life of peace where everyone loves us and we all just get along. No, the Christian life is marked by persecution by others, by being hated by those who hate God. We don’t like that idea, but Jesus wants to let us know, so we are not taken by surprise when the road gets hard.

But why does Jesus say that people will hate us? What is it about the followers of Christ that is so irritating to the world? Why should our following of Christ result in tensions with other people? The reason that Jesus gives is rooted in what He has just said about being united to Him like branches on a vine. By calling ourselves Christians, by calling ourselves by the name of Christ, we are proclaiming that we are indeed united to Christ like a branch on a vine. We cannot be separated from Him, whether we want to or not. We are bound up with Him in every way. If we keep this in mind, Jesus’ words make a lot of sense.

“If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you.” If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own.” These two statements from the mouth of Christ work together to tell us that how we will be treated is absolutely tied up with Him. If the world hated Christ, it will hate those who follow Him. The fact that the world hated Christ cannot really be doubted because when Christ came into the world, the world responded by putting Him on a cross and killing Him. Jesus is not threatening us, but is giving us warning. He is more or less saying, “If you are hoping that, by following me, you are going to become people of power and influence, who will live in luxury because you are my closest friends, you will be sorely disappointed. Do not be surprised that the world hates you, because it hated me first. Do not be surprised when you are treated as I am treated.”

Indeed, how could we expect to be treated differently than Christ? After all, as He has just said, we are grafted into Him like a branch on a vine; His blood pumps through our veins, we are, by grace, utterly united to Christ. Because we are in Christ, we have become participants in every part of Christ; not just the love and joy of God manifest in our lives, but also the difficulty and struggle and even pain of Christ. You can find many examples in the New Testament where the apostles’ took this warning of suffering seriously. It was not simply an academic question like it sometimes seems to be for us. We can question the universality of Christ’s statements that His followers will suffer because we find ourselves so often not suffering at the hands of others, especially those who do not love God. However, for the early church, and for many groups throughout Christian history, this hatred and mistreatment has been all too real, all too close to home. Nearly all the apostles died nasty deaths, but they were not surprised, because they heard Christ’s warning long beforehand.

Jesus goes on to explain a little more about why this persecution will come to those who follow Him. “Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world – therefore the world hates you.” Those who have been chosen by Christ live according to Christ’s commands, as Jesus Himself has said several times in the last few chapters. That means that from day to day, the life of the Christian is not governed by what they want and desire, but by what God wants and desires. This is something that the rest of the world cannot stand. The world and the dominant culture says that we need to go out and get everything we can, that we need to do our own thing, that we need to be the ones who take control of our lives and shape our own destiny. The Christian says, “No. I will not take that kind of control of my life, where I am the one who finally calls the shots. I won’t do that because I know that, left to my own devices, I don’t always make good choices. However, the God who loves me more than I love myself has given me a better way to live. A way that is centered, not on myself, but on Him and, therefore, on others. I will ruthlessly tear down any remnants of self-assertion in the face of God and allow God to shape me into the person I was made to be.”

In light of that kind of humble attitude, the world’s ways of selfishness and destructive pride are exposed for what they are. Those who do not love Christ do not hate those who do because they do terrible things, but precisely because they are being transformed into the image of Christ. Those who hate Christ do not do so because God has not chosen them as well but that, in spite of God’s choosing them and giving Himself to them in such a radical way, they have done the irrational. They have refused Him. We are not dealing with a God who chooses some and rejects others, but a God who loves us to the uttermost and a humanity that rejects Him, though to reject God’s love is the most nonsensical thing we can imagine.

“Remember the word that I said to you, ‘Servants are not greater than their master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you; if they kept my word, they will keep yours also.” Here we find ourselves back into the warnings that we will face persecution in this life. Christ is the master and we are the servants. If someone hates our master, they are going to hate us as well. Because of the intense solidarity we have with Christ and Christ with us, we cannot expect different treatment than Christ. Indeed, if we were to receive different treatment than Christ, it would mean that we do not belong to Him and that we are not in Him. I also find it interesting that Jesus says if they persecuted Him. Jesus is not asking a hypothetical question that may or may not be the case. He is not saying, “You might be persecuted,” but “you will be persecuted.”

We come now to what might be the most troubling and yet the most powerful statement in this passage. “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin.” Here we have Jesus saying that, in a sense, He has caused the sin of those who hate Him. He is saying that, if He had not come and spoken to the people, they would not have sin; but He has come and spoken to them so He has brought about their sin. When we think about the fact that it is because Jesus has come and spoken to the people that they hate Him, persecute Him and will finally execute Him and that, because He has done this, people will hate us, persecute us and execute us because we are not greater than our master, we might be tempted to ask, “Jesus, if your coming makes so many problems for you, not to mention the problems it causes for us, why did you come at all?”

We need to think about this seriously, because here we are getting to the heart of the Gospel. As we listen to Jesus and as we consider what He has said and what He means, we are probing into the very problem of humanity in relationship to God, we are entering what is at the same time the most difficult and also the most glorious part of the good news of Jesus Christ.

Jesus has pointed out to His disciples and to us that it is only because He came that those who persecute Him have sinned in this way. After all, if Jesus never came, they could not have hated Him, they could not have persecuted Him and they could not have killed Him. You cannot hate, persecute and kill someone who does not exist. Because of this, if Christ had not ever come, Christ’s followers could not be persecuted or killed because there would have been no Christ to follow. Because God has acted so decisively and has come as the man Jesus, there really is no other option, no other choice other than what has actually happened and cannot ever be undone. However, the other conceivable option was for Jesus not to come at all.

But what would be the case if Jesus had never come? What would be our situation if God had never become a man and lived among us? We would never have been pressed to kill Him, we would never have had the opportunity to place the Son of God on a cross, but it would also mean that God’s love has not really touched our very humanity and brokenness. God’s love would have stopped short of becoming one of us and one with us. We would never be able to truly know God’s love for us. We would remain broken and without hope of redemption. God would always remain “out there.”

If God had remained distant, if God had never come so very close to us and our evil, our sin would never have been exposed for what it is; but if that were the case, it isn’t as though we literally would not have sin. Our sin would remain and we would remain alienated from God; we just wouldn’t realize it. We would never know the fearful depths of evil of which humanity is capable, but that evil would remain; unredeemed, un-atoned for, and we would remain to this very day the enemies of God.

The crucifixion is at once the very most evil act of human history as it is the final rejection of God by humanity and yet the very most extravagant display of God’s goodness and mercy, as it is the event that binds us to Christ and through Christ to the Father. It is both the final rejection of God by humanity and the final claiming of humanity by God. God has loved us in spite of ourselves. Just as this is the case, our own personal and private sin is exposed by Christ; just compare yourself to Christ and you will see that your sin stands out when held next to His sinlessness, and yet this judgment, this calling sin what it is, is the bond that binds us to Christ for Christ came to save sinners. Every single sinner is implicated. By revealing our sin, God is simultaneously offering forgiveness that is so complete that, if we will believe, we are already forgiven.

When we consider all of this, it means that the persecution that was suffered by Christ, the persecution that the saints throughout the ages have endured, and the persecution in which we too participate, is the reaction of people who want to do things their own way against the God who wants to love them in spite of themselves. It is the result of human evil in the face of God’s redemptive compassion. So, when we are persecuted, in whatever form it may come, it is not something to get mad about, as if it were unexpected or if those who persecute us were people we should hate. Instead, it is something to pray about. Something that should break our hearts in such a way that we pour ourselves out in prayer on their behalf, that they might not be forever imprisoned to themselves but set free in Christ. Brothers and sisters, we have chosen a difficult road. A road marked with suffering, a road that seems like it may consume us, and yet a road that we can walk by faith, because Christ has walked it first. In spite of the rejection of God by humanity, God has not let us go, but has loved us with a love that is beyond any of us. Let us rejoice over what God has done. Let us pray.

AMEN