Colossians 2:1-12

This is a sermon that I preached for my class in "Expository Preaching," rather than at the church I serve. The second sermon for that class (which is on the rest of Colossians 2) will be coming up a little before Thanksgiving.

10/21/10
Colossians 2:1-12
Expository Preaching

Jesus is the answer. It might sound cheesy, it might remind you, like it does me, of bumper stickers you may have seen, but I assure you, that Jesus is indeed the answer. At least, that is what Paul is proclaiming to the Colossian church, which seems to be being torn apart over the best way to discover “the mystery of God.” It seems that the Colossian Christians are not all that different from you and me. Some of them think that the mystery of God is to be found one way, some think that it is to be found in another, very different way. Conflicts arise because of differences of opinions and it seems the only thing that everyone can agree on is that the other group is wrong.

It is in the midst of this kind of situation that Paul speaks a word. “For I want you to know how much I am struggling for you, and for those in Laodicea, and for all who have not seen me face to face. I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Paul is not the one who has planted this church, but his heart yearns for them, and everyone else, to know that it is Christ himself who is the mystery of God and that, if they can just grasp this, they will have all the riches of assured understanding.

“I am saying this so that no one may deceive you with plausible arguments.” This fact, that Jesus is the mystery of God, is not just one among a series of facts that Paul thinks that he and the Colossian Christians can take or leave as they wish. Paul is not writing to give a helpful way of thinking that may or may not have any bearing on reality at all. No, Paul is asserting with all of his strength, that this is a crucial point, something not to be ignored or brushed aside but accepted and confirmed in the depths of every believer. To treat Christ as anything but utterly central is to be deceived, led astray by arguments that have been thought up by human beings; clever human beings, but human beings nonetheless.

After encouraging the people, Paul continues. “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.” It seems that the error that Paul wants to correct has a Jewish form and a Gentile form. The Jewish form is somewhat more clear because Paul speaks more directly about it, as we will see next week. There seems to be a revival of ancient Jewish practices in Colossae. Some of the people are observing distinctively Jewish dietary restrictions and taking care not to touch certain things because they will make them unclean.

The Gentile form of this Colossian error is spoken of as being taken captive “according to the elemental spirits of the universe.” In ancient Greece, there was an obsession with what the world was made out of. It was more or less universally accepted that everything was made up of four elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire. The question that remained was, “How do these four things make up everything else?” And perhaps the more pressing question was, “Which of these four things is the very most basic?” For example, if fire is the simplest of the elements, then Earth, Water and Air could be said to be made up of fire. This whole way of thinking intended to cut behind what we can see and touch and penetrate into the mysteries of the world, or, perhaps, the mysteries of God.

A related but somewhat later use of the term “elementary spirits of the universe,” but still in pre-Christian Greece, was in scientific works. Euclid’s geometry was praised for it simplicity and its beauty. It started with five postulates, that were thought to be self-evident, and then the rest of geometry was simply deduced logically from them. It was simple, it was beautiful, and it was the most rigorous discipline anyone knew. The goal in science was to find out the small number of “first principles” upon which everything else depended, like Euclid’s postulates. Then, it would be possible to use our deductive skills and understand the universe in a way we couldn’t before.

Paul, of course, is not saying that observing human tradition, like that of the ancient Jews, or studying the universe is intrinsically evil. However, there is a problem in both of these ways of thinking. Paul’s real problem is that people are doing these things and being taken captive by them and not thinking “according to Christ.” If we remember this, we can understand why Paul is concerned. The problem is not that the people are being careful about what they eat or what they touch; the problem is that they are saying by their actions that those things are more important than Jesus. The problem is not that the people are interested in what makes the world work; the problem is that, by doing so in this way, they hope to get a glimpse into how things really are that somehow goes deeper and further than Jesus does.

There is good reason that Paul thinks that this is a problem. To him, we need to always be thinking according to Christ. The reason is because “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” But this is not just an interesting fact about Jesus, but should resonate with the people because Paul goes on to say, “And you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.” Here is the simple truth for Paul. In Christ, we do not just meet with a human being, but with the very being of God. It is in Christ that God has met with us in a definitive and decisive way. If we by our actions say, “I want to know God, but I don’t want to do it in and through Christ and Christ alone,” Paul would say that we are trying to find God by going behind God’s back, that we have been taken captive through philosophy and empty deceit.

In finishing out this passage, Paul reminds the people that, because of what Christ has done, they are no longer pagans, they are no longer under the ancient Jewish law, but are renewed in Christ. “In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.” He is reminding the people of their very most basic Christian experience. In their conversion and baptism they died with Christ to everything but Christ. To do all these other things to seek the mystery of God is to say that Christ, for all that he has done, is simply not good enough.

This is really not all that different from our situation today. The temptation to behave as though Christ were not good enough is everywhere. We are pressured by some to find our status as Christians in the moral acts that we do, staying as separated as possible from the world that is so corrupt. At the same time, we are pressured by others to appeal to some kind of standard other than Christ and, presumably, better than Christ. One side says, “Jesus taught us to live lives devoted to God, so what really matters is that we are holy and not like the sinners of the world.” The other side says, “Jesus taught us to love and have mercy and so it is really love and mercy that matters.” Is a holy life important? Certainly. Ought we to love one another and show mercy? Absolutely. However, when we allow them to take Christ’s central place, we ought to hear Paul’s words. “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit…and not according to Christ.”

Someone might say, “But pastor, it just makes sense that we should live lives of holiness or that we should love one another.” Of course it does. If the things that we are tempted to put in Christ’s place didn’t make sense, there would be no danger. After all, Paul was concerned that people would be deceived, not by what seemed to be foolish, but by “plausible arguments.” Paul, an apostle who had lived long in the Word of God, who had encountered the risen Christ, and was dedicated, as one from a Jewish background, to help Gentiles live for God through Christ and in the Spirit, knows that, at the end of the day, it is Christ who is the mystery of God, it is Christ in whom God meets us face to face, it is Christ who gives us all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and it is Christ in whom you and I come to fullness. Let us rejoice in the fact that we do not need to look for God behind Christ’s back, for, in Christ, the fullness of deity dwells bodily. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 19:31-42

10/10/10
John 19:31-42
Hudson UMC

Our passage for this morning is absolutely unique in the Gospel according to John, and there are only a few texts like it in the other Gospels. In this text, we have Jesus in the action, clearly involved, but He doesn’t do anything. In the passage before this, He is still alive, but actively dying on the cross; in the next passage He is raised from the dead, but that is getting ahead of ourselves. The reason why Jesus does absolutely nothing, not a word, not a miracle, not any action at all, is because He is dead. It is the deadness of Christ that I want to focus on this morning.

The preaching professors at the Seminary I attend feel strongly that modern Mainline preachers tend to avoid the passion narrative, where Jesus faces betrayal and death. I told the professor for the preaching class I am in right now that we were going all the way through John and he commended us, not only for sticking with this passage by passage approach, but for actually spending time in the passion narrative. There are many modern Christian leaders who seem to want to transform the Christian message into nothing more than a way to find meaning in life. The primary purpose for attending church, for reading the Bible, for prayer, is so that we can feel that our lives have meaning, that we think that our lives are full.

However, the cross shows us that the new life that God promises us is not, and cannot be reduced to the power of positive thinking. There are realities born witness to in the Bible that challenge us, that overturn our ways of thinking, that shoot the legs out of “the ways we’ve always done things.” Jesus not only makes promises about having abundant life, loving God and neighbor, and even doing greater things than He did, but also suffers and dies and assures us that we, as His disciples are so far from being exempt from similar treatment, that He says, “The servant is not greater than the master.”

All of this is to say that here, where we have Jesus, God in flesh, who is dead, we are firmly outside of our normal comfort zone. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, do we come face-to-face with the absolute seriousness of our calling as Christian believers. Churches across the country are worried about finances, declining membership, a lack of passion for outreach. All of these things are serious, but I sometimes wonder if we allow those things to get us worked up because we have forgotten the astonishing seriousness of the fact that, for us and our salvation, Jesus died!

First, it seems important to look at what our passage tells us about Jesus and see that, according to the New Testament, Jesus really died. We read that, because a festival day was coming up, the Jews did not want the people to stay hanging on the crosses. This is because there is a command in Deuteronomy that says that it is a curse for someone to hang on a tree overnight. The problem is that crucifixion is not exactly a quick way to die. There were times that people would take up to a day to die. So, the Roman government was not in the business of letting people down who were meant to be executed, so they had to speed up the deaths of those on the cross. When someone is crucified, they die by asphyxiation, that is, they are not longer able to breathe. They are nailed in such a way that it makes it extremely difficult to breathe and needed to push themselves up on the cross with their legs, all with tremendous pain. In fact, the word “excruciating” literally means “from the cross,” and was invented to express the uniquely painful experience of crucifixion.

This is why the soldiers came up and broke the legs of those who were crucified with Jesus. If your legs are broken, you cannot push yourself up on your cross, which means you cannot breathe and so you die in a matter of minutes, instead of hours. It sounds somewhat cruel, but it was probably seen as a tremendous mercy to those on the cross, because it meant that their pain was ended quickly and relatively painlessly. The point is that, when they came to Jesus, they did not break His legs. The reason they did not break His legs is because they did not need to; He was already dead. Just to be sure, they poked Him with a spear. If Jesus was still alive, He would have moved when poked, but, instead of that, water and blood poured out. All the liquid in Jesus’ body had begun to pool, a sign of death.

Then, they take Jesus down from the cross and put Him in a tomb. There have been some who have said that the resurrection was just a very natural phenomenon. They argue that Jesus was not really dead when He came down and, after given a chance to rest, came to and freed Himself from the tomb. The problem is that it claims that Jesus, who had lost most of His blood by being flogged, had been crucified, and had lost even more of His blood, was able to, after just a little bit of rest, free Himself from a tomb. It also presupposes that the people of the day would not have been able to identify a dead body. This is simply not the case. Death was very much a common occurrence in the ancient world. Everyone could recognize a dead body. There was absolutely no question in the minds of the people involved. Jesus was truly and utterly dead.

It is this sheer deadness of Christ that causes some serious problems for our thinking, because it challenges some of our most basic preconceptions about God and it forces us to think very carefully about the very nature of Christian faith. How do we interpret the fact that this man, Jesus, died? Is it no more significant than when any other human dies, or is there more to it?

The Nicene Creed, first written in 325 AD, then expanded in 381 and reaffirmed at every major gathering of Christian leaders ever since, is the single most ecumenically affirmed statement of faith in the history of the church. There have been many who have said that the contents of the Nicene Creed can be seen to frame the very most basic definition of Christian faith. This incredibly important document begins with these words. “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us and our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried.” It goes on from there, speaking of the resurrection, but I want to stop here so we can take the death of Christ seriously.

The basic conviction that is given formal expression in the Nicene Creed, that goes back to the very beginning, is that the human being Jesus of Nazareth, is not only a real human being, but is also of the same being of God the Father, absolutely fully human and absolutely fully God. This is the truly central conviction of all Christian faith; with it, everything hangs together, without it everything falls apart. If there is not a real bond of being between Jesus and God, then the whole Gospel falls apart. If Jesus is not truly God, His words of forgiveness, love and compassion are merely human words without true divine authority. He can make us feel better with His kindness, but if He is not God, all He is doing is a powerful form of guidance for us to help ourselves, not actually doing anything that has real meaning.

This helps us make sense out of the words and actions of Christ. When Jesus speaks, it is God who speaks; when Jesus acts, it is God who acts; when Jesus shows us love and compassion, it is God who shows us love and compassion. It is only if Jesus really is God that we can say anything with any kind of confidence about the nature of God. However, texts like ours for this morning point to something that might very well make us squirm. Jesus died. Does that mean that God died?

I have found that there is a tremendous resistance to this idea, even by Christian leaders, but I want us to spend some time with it so we can really see what is at stake. What would it mean if God were to die? This is the same God who, when He spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, said that His name was “I am who I am and I will be who I will be.” God’s very essence as He has revealed it to us is that He exists, that He lives. If we even begin to contemplate the thought that, in Christ, God could die, does that mean that we deny the godness of God?

It is something of a dilemma. What if we were to say, as many thinkers, and even some very great ones, have done, that on the cross, the human nature of Jesus died, but His divine nature remained untouched? That seems to solve the problem, right? We can do justice to the obvious fact that Jesus died and yet can still affirm our conviction that God cannot suffer and die. But if that is so, then we have Jesus doing something that does not bear in any way on the being of God. In spite of the fact that, if the Gospel is not to fall apart, we have to affirm that, as Jesus told His disciples, to see Him is to see the Father, that the Father and the incarnate Son are one, we would be saying that, when Jesus died, it has no real impact on God at all, but is merely a human act.

What has happened? We have driven a deep wedge between Jesus and God. If Jesus cannot really show us God in death, what good is everything else He has said and done? If here, at the crucial moment, we say that Jesus tells us nothing about God, then on what grounds can we assure people that, in Christ we see the love of God for us and our salvation; after all, it seems that God and Jesus don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. If the death of Christ does not have some real impact on the life of God, what is the crucifixion but the suffering of an innocent man, a tragedy, far less than the powerful act of an almighty God?

Martin Luther, the man most commonly associated with the Protestant Reformation, was not willing to give up the conviction that, in Jesus, from cradle to grave, we have a true revelation of God in human flesh. He unflinchingly made the argument, Jesus is God, Jesus died, therefore, God died, and rejoiced that God would even enter death rather than give us up to death and destruction. I won’t presume to say that I have any idea whatsoever about what it means for God to die in this sense, but I think we have to take it seriously. We like to think about God as this aloof, emotionless being who watches over us and is just as unaffected by what happens in this world of space and time as a human being is by what happens in an ant farm. And yet, in Christ, we simply cannot come to that conclusion. It must be torn up by the roots.

The concern that gets raised whenever we speak of the possibility of God dying, regardless of exactly what that might mean, is that it seems to limit God and make Him rather less powerful. I disagree; in fact, I think the opposite is the case. I think that, by entering fully and willingly into death, taking our sin and death upon Himself and truly facing the threat of non-being that so frightens us shows us that God is revealed to be far more amazing, far more powerful, and far more loving than we ever would have imagined. It forces us to break out of the difficult way of thinking where we imagine that our redemption is accomplished merely by a wave of the divine hand, a snap of God’s fingers and shows us that, when we say that God loves us and we can see that most completely in the cross, we mean that God was willing to endure real pain and suffering and pay a real price that is real even to God for our salvation.

I think that Charles Wesley, the great hymnist of early Methodism and brother of John Wesley, had a profound grasp on this. Listen to the words of the second verse to his hymn, “And Can It Be That I Should Gain.” “’Tis Mystery all, the immortal dies. Who can understand his strange design? In vain the firstborn Seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. ‘Tis mercy all, let earth adore. Let angel minds inquire no more.”

It will be two weeks before I have the privilege of bringing the word of God to you again, so it will be two weeks before we really get a chance to resolve this issue. Think about it as something like the time that Jesus spent in the tomb, His disciples wondering if and how the work of God in their midst would be completed. What I want to leave you with today is not only the tension that is set up when we take the death of Christ very seriously without immediately resolving it into the resurrection. I want to impress upon you as strongly as I can the real point of focusing on the astonishing nature of the death of Christ and that is that whether or not you and I always understand why, whether or not we always agree with God, God felt that we were worth really suffering and dying for. We cannot begin to understand all of what that means, but it does mean that God loves us so much, that He loves us more even than He loves Himself. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 19:16-30

10/03/10
John 19:16-30
Hudson UMC

“It is finished” is not a phrase that we think about too often. When we are talking about a work of art or even just an ordinary task around the house, we often will say, “It is finished,” to let everyone know that there is nothing more to do. However, when a man actively dying on a cross in extreme pain says “It is finished” it seems a little different. There are some who have said that Jesus was nothing more than an apocalyptic Jewish preacher who expected to bring in the golden age of God through their ministry. Dying on the cross would have put an end to all of that. Instead of saying, “It is finished,” it would seem that it would be more appropriate to say, “I am finished,” or “My ministry is finished,” in the sense that it is done away with. But this does not seem to be what Jesus is saying, and if we remember the entirety of Jesus’ ministry, we can see for sure that Jesus means something else.

If we really allow the intense significance of these simple words from the mouth of Christ, “It is finished” to penetrate into our hearts, minds and lives, we would realize that they are incredibly important. They do not only tell us something about God, but something very important about ourselves. It is mainly this aspect that I want to focus on this morning.

There are people in the world, even in the Western world like in Europe and America who would say that human beings do not need to be forgiven and redeemed, that humanity does not have any problems that we cannot solve. However, if we can agree for a moment that humanity needs some help to make it what it ought to be, how would we go about doing that, or rather, how would we think that we should go about doing it? Well, modern human history has shown us that, if we were to set ourselves to redeeming human nature, we would try to do it through improving the information that people have; that is, we would tend to try to solve the problem through education; teaching people what is right and what is wrong, showing people how to make good choices. And, if that does not work for everyone, we would imprison them.

Now, if we wanted to be distinctly religious in our thinking about this problem, we might even go so far as to say that God needs to help us out. After all, we are finite, but God is infinite. We do not have the understanding of context or the wisdom to choose the very best option that God does. However, what would we think God should do in order to redeem us? Again, we in the Western world tend to think in terms of information. God should send a great teacher or a prophet, someone who can tell us what we need to do to fix our situation. We need people who will tell us that, at the end of the day, love is a better option than hate, that working together is more effective than destroying others.

Now, if this is the case, we can understand, at least to a certain extent, why Jesus came among us. We needed to be taught the ways of God, we needed to see examples of love, we needed to hear the word of forgiveness from the mouth of a great man. In Jesus, we hear the word of the Lord and, in our own lives, we realize that we are not self-sufficient, that we need God, the one who is greater than we are, to rest on. Without Jesus we would still not know the wisdom of His teaching, we would still be ignorant of what we needed to know.

However, in my opinion, there are two major problems with understanding God’s redemption primarily in terms of information. First of all, it doesn’t seem to work all that well. We have a history of people in the church who continually act as if the teachings of Jesus have no impact on them whatsoever. How many holy wars, how many crusades, how many inquisitions, how many persecutions, have been launched in the name of the one who said, “love your enemies?” How many people have heard the call of Christ to care for the widows, orphans and the poor in the land and then go their merry way as if they had not heard anything? How many people use their religious convictions, supposedly rooted in Jesus, as a stick with which to beat those who disagree with them? We can’t get out of this problem by saying that the people probably just didn’t know the teaching of Jesus because that isn’t true, either. We can see that the religious leaders since the beginning have known the text of the Bible very well indeed. The people have always known the basic teaching of Christ and yet have behaved terribly in spite of it.

The other issue with understanding redemption primarily as receiving information is that, if we think about faith mainly as knowledge, or, more exactly, “knowing the right thing to do,” we can make absolutely no sense of the crucifixion. If Jesus was primarily meant to be a teacher, who could show us right from wrong, who could give us the information we need to live the right kind of life, why did He need to die? What purpose could that possibly have served? After all, by dying in His early thirties, Jesus’ teaching ministry was radically cut short. If He had not died, He could have spent so much more time teaching. The fact that Jesus was crucified and that both He and the disciples make such a big point out of the fact that He had to be crucified should show us that there is something more to Jesus than just His teaching. Some people like to call Jesus a great human teacher like a Ghandi or a Mother Theresa or a Mohammed, or a Martin Luther King Jr., but neither Jesus nor the apostles will let us rest here. There is much more.

In many ways, the significance of this is shown so well in Jesus’ last words on the cross in the Gospel of John, “It is finished.” Over and over again, Jesus has been saying that He is not doing His own work, but is doing the work of His Father and that He will not be done until that work is finished. Here, Jesus says that the work He had come to do, the work for us and our salvation, is finally finished. After several years, after difficult times, after a tiring ministry, and now, finally, in death, the work of God is completed.

The point that I want to raise is that Jesus says, “It is finished” here and not before. This is extremely important. It is not as though Jesus had actually completed His Father’s work earlier and just forgot about it, nor is it the case that Jesus had not realized that He had done so and it was only now, hanging on the cross, that He could see that His work really had been done. Jesus did not declare that His work was finished earlier simply because it wasn’t finished earlier. Only in death, an innocent death at the hands of the religious leaders who hated Him, the very act and being of God in their midst, that His work was completed. There is something deeply important about His death in the plan of God.

What does it mean that Jesus only says that “it is finished” here on the cross? It means that our problem as human beings is not simply informational; it cannot be solved merely by education, regardless of how well we are educated. After all, the ones who orchestrate the world’s greatest disasters are not usually the ones who have had no education, but those who, because of their education, are able to coordinate evil on a large scale. If our problem could be overcome simply by hearing the wise words of God, Jesus’ work would have been finished after Jesus spent time teaching the multitudes, but this is not the case. Jesus does not say His work is finished until He is all but dead.

This outcry shows us that there is something much deeper and much more profound that needs to be overcome by the power of God. It shows us that, at the end of the day, we are not always the best judges of what is wrong with us, if indeed we ever are. We think that we need to be taught, to be guided in a better way. In Christ, God shows us that the entirety of our humanity needs to be dealt with and dealt with in such a way that does not stop short of death.

Think about what this means. It means that our condition outside of God is somewhat more dire than we often like to think. We almost always think about sin according to what it is that we do. We commit sin. When we say that we are sinners, we almost always mean primarily that we do sin, that we do not go even a day without committing sin in one form or another. This is, of course, reinforced by the way our legal system works where you get punished more or less depending on what you do and, if you don’t do anything wrong, you do not get punished at all. In fact, even many preachers who emphasize our need for grace will point out the sin that we do in order to show us that we need God. We look first at the things we have done, then we compare them to the laws, then we realize that we have done wrong and so we feel guilty.

The point is, though, that this does not go nearly deep enough. When Jesus says, “It is finished” while He is on the cross and not beforehand, we begin to understand that His death was not just an accident, it was not merely a tragedy. The putting to death of the innocent man Jesus shows us that He did not just come to teach us and to be an example of the godly life; indeed, we see that Jesus came to die for us, on our behalf and, perhaps more importantly, in our place. We see that sin is not only lodged in what we do but in who we are. At one point, Jesus says that all the sins that we commit flow from the heart, from our inner selves. Sin is not just not knowing what is right and what is wrong and so we accidentally choose the wrong, but knowing full well between right and wrong and choosing wrong anyway because we like doing wrong. We like calling the shots, we like being in charge and we like to do things our own way.

This fact, that our sin is rooted deep in our very being and not just in our acts, is very important. If sin was only what we do and not also who we are, we might say that, when we die, our death could pay the penalty for everything we have done wrong. After all, what more can we pay? In places where capital punishment is still legal, the death of the criminal marks the end of what the law can demand. However, what good is our death at atoning for our sin if sin is not just what we do put part of who we are? How can the death of someone who is a sinner atone for their sins? By the fact that God thought it was necessary to die on our behalf and in our place, we see that sin is a much bigger problem than we often like to admit.

But there is another sense of the phrase, “It is finished” that I want to emphasize because it is equally important, if not even more so, for our Christian lives. We always need to remember that the redemption that God has worked for us in Christ did not stop short of death. We do not sacrifice animals in our worship service, but Christianity does not have a bloodless forgiveness. Our redemption has cost God dearly and was bought at the price of His own innocent blood given up for us out of sheer love. However, as important as that is to remember, we also need to remember that our redemption is indeed finished, it is absolutely completed.

Our redemption is finished, the work of God is completed in the sense that nothing else needs to be added to the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ to make it “good enough.” All our love and obedience, all our faith and praise, does not add the smallest bit to the work that Christ has done for us and in us. We cannot make God love us any more by what we do. The burden has been lifted off of our shoulders and placed onto Christ’s, the only one who can bear it. The work of God is so complete that any attempt that we make to try and improve upon it, or earn our standing in God’s eyes, is actually a denial of Christ. Jesus’ life and death of obedience were not just on our behalf but also in our place. Jesus provided the one response that is acceptable to God and so it would be utter foolishness to say, “Pardon me, God, but I don’t feel like I was consulted about how you would rescue me. I want to help out because, in fact, I think I can do it better.”

Some might worry that for me to say that Christ has so completely finished the work of God for us and our salvation is to say that there is no need to live a godly life. That doesn’t bother me. People said that about Paul, they said it about Luther, and they said it about Wesley. However, nothing could be further from the truth. If it is Christ’s response that is pleasing to God, our lives cannot fall into irresponsibility or laziness. The only rational response is to join in Christ’s human response to God. When we see that only Christ has lived a life of complete faith and obedience, we don’t respond by living a life in contradiction to God, but by living like Christ lived. To use the language of the gospel, we renounce ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Christ in every way.

In a moment, we are going to celebrate Holy Communion, we will feast at the table of our God. It is a wonderful morning to do so for a few reasons. First, it is always good to celebrate the Lord’s Supper as it is one of the main ways that we remember and join in with the work of Christ. Second, Communion is not just a nice ritual that we do, but one that was instituted by Christ to remember His death on a cross, which is the subject of our text today. There can be nothing greater than remembering the death of Christ, not just by words and preaching, but by an act of communion as a body with Christ. Finally, because it reminds us that, when Jesus said, “It is finished,” He really meant it. The work has been done. We do not ask you to be worthy before you come forward to receive; if we did, nobody would ever partake. We do not ask you to be good enough, because only Christ is good enough. We ask only that you come forward, willing to receive whatever Christ will give you, knowing that He never gives us gifts apart from, but only in and with, himself.

“It is finished.” It was finished two thousand years ago, long before you were born. Christ died before you ever committed sin, and long before you ever knew Him. When we gather around this table, we are reminded that Christ did not die for us after we proved ourselves to Him but, as the New Testament says, while we were yet sinners. The issue of worthiness is indeed an issue at communion, but it is not our worthiness, but Christ’s worthiness and He is indeed worthy. Our faith is not good or bad depending on how much faith we think we have, but depending on the object of that faith. We do not trust in faith because we are faithful, but because God is faithful. Let us always remember, but especially today, that God’s love is not something that we earn or somehow twist God into giving, but something that is freely and selflessly given, with nothing asked in return. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 18:38b-19:16a

09/19/10
John 18:38b-19:16a
Hudson UMC

Here, in this passage, we have both Pilate, the Roman authority in Jerusalem, refusing to stand on the side of justice, preferring rather to avoid the political consequences of standing against the angry mob, and also the crowd of people, especially those who led them, insisting so strongly that Jesus needed to die that they insisted that a violent revolutionary be released instead of the innocent man they had betrayed. None of the people, whether religious or secular, Jew or Gentile, come out looking very good at the end of this passage.

One of the things I have noticed about much of the history of interpretation of texts like this, especially in the Protestant tradition, is that it tends to demonize those people in the gospels who stand against Jesus. For example, we hear all the time about how evil the Pharisees were. Now, I don’t want to say that they were not evil because Jesus claims that they are, and it is probably because Jesus claims that the Pharisees were evil that so many Christians have really played up this theme in their sermons and commentaries. However, it tends to paint a one-sided picture of them.

We do not only see this with passages that deal with the Pharisees, though. There is a tendency to demonize people like Pilate, the rich young ruler, and anyone who does not behave according to the highest standards of the Christian life. Part of the problem is that this way of thinking does not do justice to the fact that, while we live on this side of the resurrection, ascension and the giving of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the people we are reading about in the gospels didn’t. How could we expect the people to understand who Jesus was before the resurrection? Perhaps faith has come easily to us, but many of us grew up in communities full of believers and we inherited a way of life and thought that not only did not consider Jesus to be an enemy, but lifted him up as the greatest of all humans, if not the fullness of God in our midst, as traditional Christian faith has proclaimed.

However, in spite of all that, I think that there may be a hidden motive in our tendency to treat these people harshly. If we demonize the people who so clearly do not believe in the gospels, we distance ourselves from them. The problem with that is that, if we do that, we prevent ourselves from seeing that we are more similar to them than we might like to admit. If we do not come face to face with our own problems as revealed in people like Pilate and the Pharisees, we can never let God truly reconcile that area of our lives.

It is easy for us to condemn the Jewish leaders for trying so hard to secure Christ’s conviction, because we clearly know in this time and place that they were wrong. However, I don’t think it does justice to the actual people involved if we assume that they were doing evil with the express intention of doing evil. We need to understand that they believed, deep in their heart of hearts, that they were doing right, that they were opposing some solitary religious quack who had some bizarre cult following who was teaching some deeply destructive ideas about God. Just to be clear, I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way as some do today, as if they were saying, “That Jesus tells us to love one another; isn’t that terrible?” Instead, I mean what were seen as really destructive ideas about God, like attacking the unity of God, overthrowing the traditions that had stood for centuries, and seriously disrupting the social order. I don’t mean to soften this in any way. The people were genuinely convinced that Jesus had destructive religious ideas.

I want to put forward two very contemporary examples in hopes to show that, perhaps, we as human beings and even we as Americans, are not as far away from this kind of reactionary behavior as we might wish to think. A word of caution is required here, though, before I go on as it is possible that I might be misunderstood. Someone could say to me, “Pastor Travis, do you really think that those are parallel to the mob demanding the crucifixion of Christ?” My only point is to demonstrate the power that religious convictions, and they violation of those convictions, still has, even in a culture that is, by and large, secular and pluralistic.

There is a religious group who makes their religious convictions concrete and public by going from place to place, protesting one thing or another. I first came to be aware of them when they were protesting the funerals of American soldiers who had died fighting for a country that, in their mind, is fighting for sin in all its forms. Very recently, they were planning on coming to UNI’s campus to protest an upcoming theatrical production, although I understand that they never actually showed up. The point is that, they have become so well-known and so incredibly disliked, that their protests tend to mobilize the people in the areas to which they are traveling to organize counter-protests. Even though these counter-protests are intended to fight against hatred and intolerance, many times, the content of the signs that are made are no less hateful and intolerant than the ones they are protesting against.

Thinking just a little bit further back, just over a week ago, there was a man who said that he was going to publicly burn the sacred book of another religion. America got up in arms, posting this thing and that on the internet, getting upset over it and even threatening to physically harm this man who was deemed as insufficiently concerned with the cares of others. In the end, he decided not to do it, but not before there were riots in parts of the world over what this pastor of a relatively small church might do.

Now, I hope you all know me well enough by now to know that I am in no way affirming, defending or glorifying the actions of these people, nor am I saying that everyone in America is either like them or like the ones who violently and dramatically stand against them. My point is much more general than that. My point is that human beings have a tendency, even if they are calm and laid back about most things, to get very excited and angry when other people flagrantly violate their deepest religious convictions.

We can all see how Jesus violated the religious convictions of the ancient Jewish people gathered in Jerusalem for Passover. He claimed to be the Son of God, that He and the Father are one, that His actions are the very acts of God. He pointed out, both by His words and by His actions that the way things have always been done were not God’s ways and that the tradition was so far from honoring God that it was hindering people from knowing and loving God like they should. By looking at these contemporary examples, we can see that people still get excited when people claim that our ways of understanding God and the godly life are wrong, but by looking at Jesus, we can see that this reaction is not reduced but rather increased when that challenge is right.

It might be argued that the reactions against these fringe groups, who do not represent the mainstream of American culture, is not religious in nature, but social or perhaps even political. It is those things, but it is really and truly religious as well. Perhaps it is because I am a pastor and am attracted to religious responses to events like these that I have seen a large number of reactions pointing out a misunderstanding of who God is. However, there have been many people, who claim not to believe in a god at all, who have insisted on putting a religious spin on their commentary. They might claim that they are responding with religious convictions, not because they have deeply held belief in God, but because those who are inciting this reaction are making religious claims, but I think there is more to it than that.

Let’s say that I were to do something like misrepresent the Cub’s World Series record, saying that, since nobody can actually remember a World Series in which the Chicago Cubs won, they must not ever have won, there are probably many of you who wouldn’t care. The most I would get out of many people is, “Oh, well, that’s wrong, but who cares?” There are some, however, who would get very upset about such a misrepresentation. Why? Because they love the Cubs and they know in their hearts that I am wrong and that, by misrepresenting the Cub’s history, I am doing real violence to something they love.

I say all this because people would not make a point to complain about how other people misrepresent God if they did not have deep-seated feelings about who God is and what He is like. Sometimes, this objection is made on the basis of who Christ is, other times, an appeal is made to God as an idea, God in the abstract (which, as a Christian, I can make no sense out of. So far as I am concerned, there is no God in the abstract, but only the God that actually exists). The point is that the religious claims of fringe groups deeply offend people who do not think they have religious convictions because these other people have violated the convictions that they do not even believe they hold.

The people in Jerusalem at that time were having their religious convictions trampled upon. Their actions showed that they believed very concrete things about God and that Jesus violated them in a serious way. By their actions, they proclaimed that they did not believe that God would come among them, that God would meet them where they were at, that God would be more concerned with their hearts and souls and minds and lives than with their political independence. They did not believe that God would come so close as to become one of us and one with us, to shoulder our burdens, to share in our shame that we might share in His glory. They did not believe that God would stand against all the clever religious activity that they had thought up. If those are some of the things that their actions showed they didn’t believe about God, what did they believe?

They believed that, at the end of the day, the one thing that God really wanted for them was to be free of the Romans. God wanted them to be free of a political oppressor and the only way they could imagine that He would do that is by raising up a political leader, someone who was willing and ready to overthrow the government, to take lives in their following of God’s call. This is why, when Pilate offered to release Jesus, the one who had done no wrong, the people refused, choosing instead to have a man named Barabbas released. Our text just says here that Barabbas was a bandit. What this means, however, was that Barabbas was a participant in a political insurrection against Roman rule. Barabbas had shed blood in the fight for political freedom. He was a military hero, one like the great Judas Maccabeus, who would lead them to victory over the overwhelming force of the Roman army. What the people wanted was a God who would give them military glory like He had done in the past. What they wanted more than anything, though, was a God who thought just like they did.

When we consider the fact that it was the religious leaders who were so violently opposed to Jesus, we as the church cannot dare to walk away from texts like this with nothing more than a warm and fuzzy feeling. Texts like this humble us and remind us to hope in grace, not only because grace is promised to us, but because without grace, there would be no hope for us. As a preacher I both love and hate texts like this. I hate them because they expose all my sin and shortcoming; after all, as a pastor, I am a religious leader and yet, in spite of my status as a leader, in spite of my training, both formal and informal, in spite of all my best efforts to be faithful, I see in this text, among others, the sober fact that the religious leaders of the time were so far from supporting and defending the work of God that they set themselves against it and the same could very well happen in our time and place.

However, I love this text and those like it because it reminds me of the incredible nature of grace. In spite of all the faithlessness of the Jewish leaders and their shocking thirst for the blood of the Son of God, where human beings do not come off looking very good at all, the grace and love of God has not abandoned us, but binds us to Himself. After all, when Jesus is hanging from the cross, innocently enduring indescribable pain at the hands of people who hate Him without cause, He cried out, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

But what we need to reflect on is whether there are any deep convictions that we have about God that Jesus, by His words, actions and being, challenges. I mentioned at the very beginning of the sermon that, so long as we tend to demonize the angry mob that wanted to put Jesus to death, we would never be able to come to terms with the similar passions that exist within each of us. If we come at this question from the start by presupposing that our view of God is not challenged by Jesus, we will never take it seriously.

Perhaps most importantly of all, we must not assume that we are immune from this critique by the Word of God because we go to church or perhaps even are greatly involved in the church. After all, the people who wanted Jesus to be executed were not the evil people, they were not the Gentiles, the “other nations.” Instead, it was the Jews, the very people of God, and their leaders more than the rest. It was those who seemed like the most faithful, the greatest religious leaders, those who seemed to know the way of God better than anyone else, that were the most likely to reject Jesus. This is not a warning to the violent or to those who have nothing to do with God; it is a warning to us, for whom it is so easy to rest secure in our relationship with God.

Again, there is no sugar coating of this passage, no way to twist it around and make it warm and fuzzy, no way to avoid the searching questions it directs toward us. And yet, there are few passages more hopeful and joyful than this one. The reason it is a source of such hope and joy is because we know that Jesus was not taken by surprise by all this; He had seen it coming a mile away, and yet He had no problem coming to be one of us and take our burdens upon Himself, bearing and bearing away our sin so that we might be restored to relationship with the God who loves us. So, as we reflect on the ways that we are challenged by this text in the weeks to come, let us also live knowing the grace that God has extended, even to us. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 18:28-38a

09/12/10
John 18:28-38a
Hudson UMC

There are some very interesting statements made in this passage. For instance, it is very interesting that the Jewish authorities take Jesus to Pilate, the Gentile authority to be condemned but Pilate, at this point, does not do so. This is an amazing instance of the people who we would think should understand and support Jesus don’t and those that we wouldn’t think should do so, do exactly that. It is also very interesting that the various gospel writers, John included, consider it necessary in order to fulfill prophecy, that Jesus be executed by the Romans instead of the Jews because the Romans would crucify Him as a political criminal while the Jews would stone him to death. It is also interesting that Pilate calls Jesus the king of the Jews and that Jesus responds in such a way as to make it clear that, although he was about to die the death of a political rebel, He was, in reality, instituting a kingdom of a far different nature.

In spite of the fact that all these things are very interesting and we could spend some time talking about them, there is one moment, at the very end of the passage, that I think is so incredibly contemporary and relevant to our culture and lives today that I would be failing my responsibility to connect the Scripture to our modern world if I did not spend the majority of my sermon this morning speaking about it. Jesus finished up his statement to Pilate by saying, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate’s response is made up of three simple words. “What is truth?”

The quest for truth, which has been so popular, both in modern thinking and in the post-modern thinking that is so very common in our culture today, is nothing new. As far back as we have records, it is clear that people have been obsessed with finding and knowing the truth, at least in the Western world. What is amazing to me is that, in spite of the many ways that people have tended to look for truth, it has almost always been looking where truth cannot be found. I want to give something of an overview of the history of the search for truth.

First, let us consider the thought of the very most ancient philosophers in Greece. These early thinkers looked to the universe for truth and argued with one another where truth was most fully to be found. They spoke of four basic elements from which everything else was composed, but they argued back and forth about which element was the very most basic, hoping that they could reduce the world into different manifestations of fire, or earth, or water, or air.

Equally ancient were the Pythagoreans, who formed a secret society, that was almost like a secret religion, where they explored mathematical and geometrical relationships as the purest example of truth. To them, these relationships seemed to be so necessary that they were almost divine.

Moving forward just a little bit, we find Socrates, who said that the truth that people were seeking in nature could not be found there but resides inside the human person. He is famous for saying, “Know yourself.” He did not just mean that we need to be in touch with who we are, or that we need to have clarity in our knowing of ourselves before we can really know anything else, but that we should know ourselves because, at the end of the day, that is where truth is to be found and where alone truth really can be said to exist. This inward turning of thinking has marked the search for truth ever since.

Plato, who was a student of Socrates, held that what we can see, hear and touch is not really real and so not really true, because things are always changing and passing away. In order to maintain some sense of reality, he spoke of an ideal plane, where forms, ideas and images existed eternally, never changing and never passing away, which are impressed in some inexpressible way, on the human mind. When this was given a religious spin, this eternal plane ended up being seen as generated from the mind of God. In our daily life, we see things that are shadows and dim reflections of what is really real, but we ourselves live only in a transient world. What we must do is transcend this world of space and time, get out of our bodies, as it were, and begin to commune with the real that is independent of everything we know and have seen.

Plato had a famous student, Aristotle, who agreed that what is real is not what we can see or touch, but thought that we cannot have any kind of knowledge of those things except by abstracting from what we experience. Aristotle coined the influential phrase, “There is nothing in the mind which is not first in the senses.” Truth was not what you could see, hear and touch, but what you could deduce from those things.

If we leave the ancient world behind and step into the high middle ages, we find a completely different way of knowing truth. In the middle ages, the institutional church gained tremendous power over the lives of people. Truth was not something that was lodged in anything as reliable as the natural world or mathematics, or even in some ideal plane, but truth was what the church told you was the truth. Now, it needs to be said that this is not the same thing as saying that truth is what the Bible says, because the church believed that, left to our own devices, we could never really understand what the Bible says and so we need to be told what the Bible says.

Eventually, this whole way of thinking so upset educated people that, in the aftermath of the Renaissance, people began to question whether God had a role in our knowing of the truth at all. More and more, people turned to science as a way to know the truth. At first, this was done by people of faith, because of their faith in the one God of Christian faith, who, as the one Creator of heaven and earth, imparted to it a distinct order of its own that shows up everywhere. Again, this emphasis on science was first pursued by people of Christian faith, but quickly, it became a form of Deism which said that God created the world but left it to itself, like a watchmaker creates the watch and, after winding it up, leaves it alone. Eventually, scientists began to feel that including God in their considerations was a hindrance to their knowing the truth, so they abandoned Him.

At the same time this was happening, there was a quest in Europe to find foundations on which absolutely certain knowledge could be built. This was the goal of Rene Descartes in his famous experiment where he climbed into his oven and systematically doubted everything he could doubt. Finally, he got to the point where he realized that, in order for him to doubt, he must exist, for it was he who was doubting, so he found he could not doubt his own existence. “I think (or doubt), therefore I am.”

This trend continued on, trying to build this foundation. Every time someone thought they had found a basis for real knowledge, someone else would come along and point out that it is wasn’t as good as they thought it was. A thinker named Immanuel Kant came along and suggested that, instead of trying to try to find truth in the world, and make our thoughts and lives conform to what exists in the universe, perhaps we should try to approach nature as if it has to conform to our thinking. Hopefully, by building on our experience, we could find some foundation for our knowledge.

You could almost predict it, but it didn’t work. Thinker after thinker came along, only to find that they were not able to find the foundations they were looking for. It became overwhelmingly clear that there are no foundations on which we can build our absolutely certain knowledge, and that whole project collapsed to the ground. No longer could people claim to have any kind of knowledge that did not depend on their upbringing, their gender, their race, their socio-economic status, and their community. What can we do if that is the case? The conclusion of the mainstream of philosophers was that we can no longer know anything for sure and we can only do what seems best to us. A whole school of thought called “deconstructionism” arose, where the goal was not to put forward any clear and authoritative position, but to show how other people, who did claim that, really were nothing more than the product of their environment.

What happened in the church during this time? Well, starting in the eighteenth century, the concept of history went through a major transformation. For the first time, people began to operate with what we could now call a “tape recorder” view of history, where, if it could not have been videotaped or audio recorded, it cannot be “historical.” This had not ever been the view of history throughout the history of the world. However, once you do that, all kinds of tensions start to show up in the Bible. What were people of faith to do?

Those who came to be known as “liberals” took the challenges seriously; so seriously, in fact, that they tended to run away from history into their own world of religious experience. After all, if I have encountered God, nobody else can change that, even if the Bible ends up being historically unreliable. Those who came to be known as “conservatives” tended to respond by ramping up their understanding of Biblical inspiration. Now, the Bible was understood to be inspired in such a way as to claim that it cannot be untrue in any sense of the word, regardless of whether the topic at hand is theological, scientific, historical, or anything else. What is ironic is that, just like the liberals, the conservatives tended to run away from history. It does not matter what archaeologists and historians discover; everything in tension with the Bible is wiped away as if it did not exist.

When I think about this whole history, I am amazed, not so much with what people have tried to do to find truth, but by what people, in general, haven’t tried to do. Throughout history, people have said that truth is finally in the natural world around us, in the purity of mathematics, in an ideal plane that is cut off from us, except in shadows and images, in the human ability to think abstractly and deduce from experience, in a rigidly hierarchical institution, in scientific exploration, in firm foundations of knowledge, in our own experience, in an inspired text as a text, and finally in our own will to power. Notably absent is the answer that John’s Gospel presents for us.

Pilate asks, “What is truth,” but John does not tell us his answer here. The reason he does not provide an answer at this point is because he has already told us the answer a few chapters before, or rather, Jesus has told us the answer. Back in chapter fourteen, when Jesus was comforting His disciples, he told them to believe in God and also to believe in Him. He was going away to prepare a place for them, but He would come back. They shouldn’t lose hope because they knew where He was going. Thomas responds, saying, “Lord, we do not know where you are going, how do we know the way?” Jesus’ response is incredibly important, and we so seldom take it with all the seriousness it deserves. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.” Most of the time, when we hear this verse in our modern context, it is made to cut down other religions, but that is not primarily what Jesus is saying here.

One of the important things to understand about this statement, I have said many times in the last few months. That is that, if we are searching for truth as a what, that is, as something, we have missed it and have started on the wrong foot altogether. Truth is not a thing that we can possess or exercise any kind of authority over. Truth is a person, it is a who. Truth is not something that can be collapsed into a series of statements. We can’t reduce anything to nothing more than statements, how much less can we do so to the very Truth of God?

The other thing I want to emphasize is that God has given Himself to us. The gift that we have received from God is not just something about God, but it is God Himself. This means that God has actually moved and decisively revealed Himself among us as the man Jesus. Since this is what God has actually done, we are not free to live as if He has not done it. If we are searching for a truth that somehow bypasses God’s actual self-revelation in Jesus Christ, we are searching for the truth by avoiding the Truth.

In a society where both the modern idea of absolutely certain knowledge and the post-modern idea of no absolutely certain knowledge live side by side and pull our world in a game of tug-of-war, this bold assertion by the Gospel is something we need to hear. The Gospel reveals that any way to search for Truth that does not lean on Jesus as the self-revelation of God, is confused and completely mistaken. This says to those who want to find foundations for truth that you can’t treat truth as if it were something you could control and assert dominance over. There are no foundations of truth outside of Christ. The one on whom all our understanding of truth relies is not a logical foundation but a living and active person.

The response that the Gospel makes to post-modern relativism is just as pointed. It says, “In spite of the fact that we cannot bring to explicit articulation how we come to know the Truth, there is indeed Truth and we do indeed come to know it. This knowing is not something that we can reduce to words, but something that transcends us and comes to bear upon us in power and glory in Christ and through the Holy Spirit.”

Pilate is unwilling to ruffle feathers. He stands at the meeting of two significant and very different cultures. He wants to let them both go their own way, but is forced to decide between the Jews who are convinced that Jesus is a criminal and his own government that can find nothing wrong with Him. If he makes a stand one way or another, he could be criticized, removed from his office, or even rebelled against. It is convenient to stand back from truth, because truth causes too many problems. Truth demands that we live in a way appropriate to the truth, that we cannot be the lords of our own lives. Pilate wants nothing to do with that; he just wants to keep doing his own thing and it just seems easier to let the Jewish leaders have their way.

Brothers and sisters, this does not have to be our conclusion! We do not, we ought not, we must not, fall into either error, either thinking that truth can be found outside of Christ or that there is no truth. The very Truth of God has become incarnate in our midst, breaking into our human condition and transforming our lives. The truth has come, the truth is alive, and the truth has invited us to renounce ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow him. Let us do so with joy, because to suffer for the Truth is far better than to live in ease in opposition to the Truth. Let us pray. AMEN

John 18:15-27

09/05/10
John 18:15-27
Hudson UMC

There is a technique that the gospel writers sometimes used where they would take one story, split it in half, and stick another story in between the two halves. When they did this, they were tying the two stories together in a powerful way. The two stories have to be seen as shedding light on each other and helping us to understand what is going on. To give an example, Mark tells us a story of a hungry Jesus coming upon a fig tree that had no fruit on it. In response, He curses the tree and says that it will never bear fruit anymore. Jesus and the disciples then go into Jerusalem. On the way out of town, they see the tree again, only now it has completely withered. The disciples are amazed, but we are confused, because we cannot see why a story of a withered tree would be included in the story of Jesus.

However, when we look to see what happens while Jesus and the disciples are in Jerusalem, things begin to make more sense. Right after Jesus curses the fig tree for having no fruit, He goes into Jerusalem, to the Temple, and turns over the tables, harshly criticizing the religious leadership that had abandoned God and were not providing real spiritual leadership, that is, they were not bearing fruit. The cursing of the fig tree turns out to have next to nothing to do with agriculture, but everything to do with the Temple that Jesus was standing against and replacing with His own self. However, that depth of meaning only arises in our minds if we look at both stories at the exact same time.

You probably would like to know that I am not just bringing that up just for the sake of sneaking some helpful hints for Bible study into the beginning of my sermon. We actually care about that particular bit of information this morning because John has done precisely this with his telling of Peter’s denial of Christ and Christ’s interrogation by the high priest. John has split the story of Peter’s denial into two parts and placed the story of Jesus being questioned in the middle. The point that he is making is that these two things are deeply related and that we cannot really understand them unless we think them through at the same time. There is meaning to these two stories that we will miss if we focus on them just one at a time and do not allow their interplay to impress itself upon us.

It is this interplay that we are going to focus on this morning. There are all kinds of interesting details in this passage that we could spend a lot of time on, but aren’t going to. For example, who is this “other disciple” who both follows Jesus and is known to the high priest. How is it that this other disciple is not questioned by anyone about whether he follows Jesus or not while Peter is asked by everyone? To be honest, many of the greatest minds in the church have had no answer to some of those questions, so we will focus on what seems to be the larger issue, the comparison and contrast between Jesus and Peter and what it tells us about God, about humanity, and about the Gospel.

Let us start by looking at Jesus in this passage, because it is in light of what we see in Jesus that we understand the seriousness of what we see in Peter. Jesus is standing before the high priest, without doubt one of the very most powerful leaders in Jerusalem at the time, short of Herod and Pilate. People were not called directly before the high priest unless they were in serious trouble. History shows us that, when most people were brought face to face with the high priest, their reaction was of humility, pleading for mercy and safety, hoping against hope that they would be set free, or at least that their sentence would be mild.

This is not what we see Jesus doing. Here is Jesus in the same situation, and He is not afraid that they might put Him to death; He is quite certain that this is exactly what they are going to do. And yet, He does not cower before the merely human ruler, but stands confident. First, He exposes the hypocrisy and illegality of His arrest. In ancient Israel, like in modern America, a person who is on trial is not to be forced to bring forward information that could condemn them. Witnesses are supposed to be brought forward, and trials were supposed to be public. None of these things were the case here. Jesus reminds them that they were not even staying true to their own law by saying, “I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in the synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret. Why do you ask me? Ask those who heard what I said to them; they know what I said.”

By saying this, Jesus is basically saying, “First of all, you already know what I have been teaching, you just want me to bow before you and renounce it. Secondly, you are asking me to condemn myself in a private, rigged trial with no witnesses. You are questioning me as if I were a criminal, but it is you who seem to be intent on breaking the law.” When we understand that Jesus was blowing the whistle on these leaders, it is much less of a surprise to read what happens next. “When he had said this, one of the police standing nearby struck Jesus on the face, saying, ‘Is that how you answer the high priest?’” The response is not one of humility, apology, or even recognition that wrong has been done, but violence. The one who slapped Jesus was hoping that, even if He were not intimidated by the presence of the high priest, He would be frightened by the prospect of physical harm.

But this is not what happened. Jesus responded to this attack by saying, “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” In spite of the long tradition of human beings that “might makes right,” where the ones who can wield the most force determine what is right and wrong based on their likes and dislikes, Jesus says that this is not so. Truth stands on its own; it does not need the support of human strength. Not only that, but the Truth of God will stand, even if every human being were to resist it. In Psalm 2, the Psalmist speaks of all the nations of the world conspiring together against the Lord and His anointed. The response is that God laughs at them, showing that even the combined strength of every human being cannot overcome Him. Jesus is standing on the strength of His integrity. His integrity is not just that He is remaining true to Himself, but that He is the Truth and nothing the leaders can do, even if it means nailing Him to a cross, can undo that fact.

Let us turn our attention now to the two parts of the story of Peter. It is something of a different story. Jesus is interrogated by Annas, the father-in-law of the current high priest and, quite likely, one who had been the high priest before, and yet He stands strong, unintimidated by the power of this mighty man. Peter is questioned, perhaps even casually, by a servant girl who stands at the gate about whether he followed Jesus. It was not totally clear as to whether Peter’s life was in danger for following Jesus. It seems that it probably wasn’t because the leaders were interested in having Jesus die as the one man who would die for the nation. The stakes are considerably different. Even though Peter’s trial is much less than that of his master, he crumbles, denying that he is a disciple of Christ.

After this first denial, he goes to warm himself by a charcoal fire, along with the slaves of the household and the police. Those who were gathered around asked him again if he was a follower of Jesus, and he denies it again. Other gospels have the people asking him, specifying that he must be one of Jesus’ disciples because his accent gave him away as one from Galilee, the same place as Jesus was from. It is as if someone born and raised in the deep south, or Boston, or even from far northern Minnesota or Wisconsin came to Iowa, trying to deny that they were from out of town. The evidence is stacked against Peter, and yet he refuses to tell the truth.

Here, after that second denial, Peter is put to the question in an extremely pointed way. Remember how Peter is gathered around a fire with the police? These were the same police who had just come to arrest Jesus in the garden in the very last passage. In the heat of the moment, Peter tried to defend Jesus by pulling out a sword and cutting off the ear of one of the police, named Malchus. As it turns out, we do not only have the colleagues of Malchus warming themselves around the same fire that Peter is, but we have one of his relatives there. That person asks Peter, “Did I not see you in the garden with him?” This is not the same thing as someone thinking they saw him with Jesus once upon a time, or someone who associates Peter with Jesus because they have the same accent, but someone who, just a moment ago, watched Peter cut off the ear of their cousin. It is as if he is saying, “Now see here, you; I saw you with Jesus just now, this very night, with Jesus, and you were so devoted to Him and that you were willing to take on a whole cohort of soldiers. In fact, you even attacked someone who is related to me. Are you sure that you are not one of His followers?” Peter, caught red-handed, unable to squirm his way out of the situation, continues in his masquerade and denies it once again.

“At that moment the cock crowed.” I imagine that, when the rooster crowed, the words of Jesus rang loudly in Peter’s ears. Peter was so strong, so determined, so willing to die for Jesus, and yet here it has been demonstrated with incredible clarify that this was not the case, but that he crumbled under even under the least pressure. He, the strongest and most headstrong of the disciples, had failed.

Paul, in his letter to the Romans, wrote something that is helpful to keep in mind when we see Peter’s failure to stand strong for Jesus, especially when we realize that it is symbolic of all humanity’s failure to serve God like we should. Paul had been explaining that the Jews, who had received the law of Moses, were not following it and so they were no better off than the Gentiles who were stuck in idolatry. The question is raised, “Then what advantage do the Jews have?” Paul’s response is “Much in every way! For in the first place the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. What if some were unfaithful? Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Although everyone is a liar, let God be proved true.”

What Paul has said is that God is faithful, even when we aren’t. It is not as though God is able or unable to be faithful to His promises based on how well we fulfill His commands to us, but rather God is faithful and is true, even if every human being was a liar. Indeed, we find that, even when we are at our best, even when we think we are firmly rooted in the truth of the gospel, when we compare that to the very Truth of God, we find that, compared to God, we are liars, we do suffer from untruth. We say one thing and do another, either out of malice, or even just out of forgetfulness. With God, on the other hand, to say and to do is one and the same thing.

This applies to the story of Peter here in a powerful way. He must have been utterly overwhelmed with shame, his faithlessness exposed with such clarity. And yet, Jesus had predicted it earlier that night. Jesus knew just how wishy-washy Peter would be at this moment. Back in chapter thirteen, after Peter so boldly asserted his loyalty, Jesus says, “Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly, I tell you, before the cock crows you will have denied me three times.” Sometimes, we get the sense that Jesus is shaming Peter here, but I don’t think this is the case. I think that it is much more of a caution against idolatry. Peter is trusting on his own strength to defend his master, but Jesus knows better. He knows that if His plans were built on human strength, they would fall like so many empires. Instead, He wanted to correct Peter and show him that the work He had come to do did not depend on his ability to resist temptation.

It is marvelous that this passage falls on a Sunday where we are celebrating Holy Communion because it so captures the essence of the sacraments. Let us begin with baptism. As we are a church that, like the great tradition of the church, practices infant baptism, I would guess that most people in this room were baptized as infants. You were set apart by the grace of God, not only before you could choose to follow God for yourself, but before you were even able to speak or walk on your own. This basic idea is even true in my own case, who was not baptized as an infant. I was baptized on December 31, 2000 when I was sixteen years old. However, when I look back on my life, I realize that I only really came to know Jesus in a personal way in March of 2001, when I was on a Chrysalis weekend, much like the weekend that Austin Watts is on at this very moment. Even in my own case, when I was able to make a “decision” for Jesus, hindsight has taught me that God found me long before I found Him.

Today we will be celebrating Holy Communion. This ritual did not get invented one day by some great pastor or theologian as a great way to spend some time in a worship service. It was instituted by Christ Himself, where He interpreted His death as a sacrifice for the disciples and for all the world. We need to always remember who was at that table. Jesus shared that His blood was being poured out for Judas, among the others, the one who would betray Him. Even the terrible betrayal of Judas did not keep Jesus from celebrating that first Communion with him. However, more significant for our passage today, Peter was there, too. Peter, who, right after sharing in Communion, would make such extravagant promises that he was not able to keep and of whom it was predicted that he would deny Christ three times before that very night was over, was not excluded from the table.

What a joy it is that we can gather together and share a common meal where none are excluded. Even those who would deny and betray Jesus were welcomed to the table, how much more so can we come forward with confidence. None of us have betrayed the Son of God to His death. Regardless of who you are or what you may have done, even if it is denying Jesus over and over again, you are one of those for whom Christ died. You, too, are welcome to the table, even if you have worked to undermine the ministry of Christ in the world. It is at the table of the Lord that all of our petty differences are wiped away. We all partake, we all are welcomed, we all are offered Christ’s strength in the place of our weakness. Let us partake of this holy feast with joy and great expectation. Let us pray.

AMEN

John 18:1-14

08/29/10
John 18:1-14
Hudson UMC

The time for talk is over. The beginning of the end has come. There is no more time for Jesus to teach His disciples. Up until this moment, there has always been more time, but now the time is gone. It is hard for us to grasp the idea that there would come a time where there is no more time. It is part of the reason that many of us fear death; we are brought face to face with the reality that, in spite of the fact that we have always had possibilities for the future, all of our possibilities will eventually come to an end. If the disciples believed, as it seems they did, that Jesus was going to be their political savior and overturn the Romans in order to establish a new, independent state of Israel, they very well would not have even begun to understand that their time with their master was coming to an end, but this is precisely what was happening.

It is believed that the earthly ministry of Christ, from His baptism to His crucifixion was approximately three years. These twelve men, including Judas, not to mention the women we are told were also with them, had followed Jesus for three full years, hearing the incredible teaching and witnessing the mighty acts of healing on all manner of people. And yet, the one that they were following was going to be taken away and executed. If nothing else, it would surely seem as though the one who seemed to be in control all those times that the people tried to capture Him and failed is finally no longer in control.

However, this is not the case. If there is one thing that we should gather from John’s account of the betrayal of Jesus, it is that Jesus is always in control. Things do not ever simply happen to Him, but He is able to stop them, even when He chooses not to. Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus told the people that nobody takes His life from Him but that He has the power to lay it down and the power to take it up again. It is in this chapter that we get to see that He really means it. It is true that Jesus is taken away, questioned by the leaders, and then put to death, but at no point is Jesus ever out of control, but knows exactly what is happening and allowing it to happen.

This kind of control amazes us and makes us feel uncomfortable because it is so very much unlike control as we and others use control. For most of us, if we found ourselves in danger and were in absolute control of the situation, we would stop the danger from coming to pass, we would assert our dominance over those who would seek to do us harm and we would laugh in the face of those who would dare to oppose us. Why wouldn’t we do this? Why would we even begin to think about suffering the evil of others if we were had the power to prevent it? This is what we think that Jesus would do. We would expect Jesus to prevent the cross, but that is precisely what He does not do. He allows the evil of humanity to rise to its highest heights and does something that only God can do; He takes the real evil of human beings and uses it for His holy purposes, the forgiveness of sins and the re-creation of the world.

But let us look at what actually happens in this scene, so we can understand the sheer control that Jesus has over His enemies. “After Jesus had spoken these words, he went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to a place where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered. Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, because Jesus often met there with his disciples.” This, according to the thinking of the world, is Jesus’ first mistake. If there was reason to believe that He was going to be betrayed that night, why in the world would He have gone to a place where He and His disciples went all the time? It is the perfect place to find Him if someone was looking for Him, and this is exactly what happened. If Jesus had not gone to that place, Judas would not have found Him there. Jesus has not struck us as naïve before, so we cannot think that He was unaware of the danger He was walking into, but He did it anyway. Danger did not spring upon Him by surprise. He deliberately went to confront it.

“So Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons.” If we just read this and don’t have a hint from the historical context, we will miss the sheer amazing nature of this statement. The word translated here as “detachment of soldiers” is the word that is consistently used in Greek to refer to the “cohort.” At the very least, this word would have referred to a group of two hundred soldiers but most often referred to a group of six hundred. So Judas has brought out several hundred trained, disciplined Roman soldiers, along with the official Jewish police from the religious authorities, all of whom are armed. Think about what a sight this must have been. Hundreds of people, a small army has been sent to arrest someone, but whom have they come to arrest? A dangerous criminal? No. Someone who has exhibited violent tendencies in the past? No. They are going to arrest a Rabbi, a teacher. It is not as though it would have taken this many people, even if we include His somewhat impulsive band of followers. After all, they had no military training, they were just a ragtag group of fishermen, tax collectors, and others who were at the bottom of their society.

Keep this image of this huge group of people who have come to get Jesus in your mind, because it makes what follows even more amazing. “Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to Him,” remember How Jesus is completely aware and in control of the situation, “came forward and asked them, ‘Whom are you looking for?’ They answered, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus replied, ‘I am he.’ Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them.” Literally, Jesus’ response is not “I am he,” but simply “I am.” That might not sound like a big difference, but it is very significant. In the Old Testament, when Moses asked God what His name was, the answer was a word that, in Hebrew, meant “I am who I am,” but also carried with it the idea of “I will be who I will be.” This word, which so powerfully expressed the essence of God, the one who truly exists and whose existence does not depend on anything or anyone else like ours does, was considered to be so holy that people refused to say it out loud. The point is that, when Jesus says “I am,” He does not use the ordinary phrase, but one that is intensified, one that would have been understood to be His taking the divine name upon His own lips. Every time Jesus has said “I am,” in John, it has been this powerful phrase. Jesus is not just saying that He is the one they are looking for, but He is declaring that He is the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who spoke from the burning bush.

“When Jesus said to them, ‘I am he,’ they stepped back and fell to the ground.” When Jesus responds with the name of God, not as a blasphemer, not as one who uses the name of God as a curse, but as the one who bears it rightly because it is indeed who He is, it quite literally knocks the people over. But who are the people who fall to the ground? Weak willed peasants who are easily impressed? No, they were Roman soldiers, trained and strong. Not only that, but they are not Jewish, which means they would not have been in awe at the name of God being spoken to them, but they were knocked down, nonetheless. The very power of the presence of God was enough to take all the strength out of these skeptical professional soldiers. Hundreds of armed men were overcome with nothing more than a word from the mouth of this poor traveling preacher.

“Again he asked them, ‘Whom are you looking for?’ And they said, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’ Jesus answered, ‘I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.’” Look at the control that Jesus has here! He has demonstrated quite clearly that He has more power in a word from His mouth than this entire cohort of Roman soldiers. Nobody is pushing Him into anything. Nothing is happening to Him that He did not foresee and welcome. Even when His mere presence overpowers His captors, He reminds them of their business. He doesn’t say, “See how I can knock you over with nothing more than a word? Perhaps you should think twice about arresting me because I am more than a match for you.” Instead, He reminds them that they are there to arrest Him and take Him to the religious and secular leaders. He did not run away, hiding from those He had left in confusion, but entered as fully as possible into the danger that faced Him. Jesus knew exactly what He was doing.

However, not all of His followers knew exactly what He was doing. “Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus.” Peter did what most people in his situation would have done. He saw His master being attacked and mistreated and so he was going to fight. In the face of danger, Peter’s response was natural. He was not going to be pushed around; he was going to fight and resist, even if it meant that he would be killed. So far, he is keeping his promise that he had made, that he would stand strong, even if everyone else abandoned Jesus. Remember this because next week we will see that, in the very next passage, Peter denies the one he was so bold to defend here. Peter wants to defend Jesus by worldly means. The problem with this is that he presupposes two things; that Jesus needs to be defended in the first place and that this defense can be achieved by violence. Neither of these is the case.

“Jesus said to Peter, ‘Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?’ So the soldiers, their officer, and the Jewish police arrested Jesus and bound him.” Now Jesus is being taken out to be tried. Now the Lord of the universe is going to be interrogated by human beings. The first step is to be taken to the religious authorities. “First they took him to Annas, who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest that year. Caiaphas was the one who had advised the Jews that it was better to have one person die for the people.” Jesus was brought to the one person who should have understood the work of God in their midst. If even the high priest does not recognize God when he sees Him, how much trouble are the people in?

But in any case, we need to remember where we have heard the name of Caiaphas before because John felt it was important to remind us. After Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and the leaders were getting particularly excited about this troublemaker, Caiaphas, who was the high priest that year, suggested that they capture Him and put Him to death because it is better for one person to die than to put the whole nation in danger. We read that, even though Caiaphas did not realize he was saying it, he was speaking the very truth of God, because Jesus was going to die, not just on behalf of the nation of Israel but on behalf of the entire world. The time for that amazing act to take place had come.

So, in light of these events, these dramatic times two thousand years ago, how should we live? Do these things actually have anything to say to you and me in modern America? Indeed they do. We need to remember that, when we look at the big picture, the center of the universe is Jerusalem two thousand years ago. Everything that happens in all of creation looks to that point for its meaning. At that particular time and in that particular place, the Son of God was betrayed by a human being, who had seemed to be one of His best friends. He had willingly walked into danger and suffering, while protecting those who belonged to Him. He showed us just how powerful He really is in the midst of this difficult time.

If Jesus were nothing more than a great human teacher, this passage would simply give us a profound example of compassion and courage in the face of death. However, Jesus is not just a man who lived once upon a time and has been dead and gone for millennia. Instead, Jesus is the risen Lord, who is alive today and forevermore and we are able to meet Him in our daily lives. And He is the very same Jesus now as He was then. He is no less powerful, no less courageous, no less in absolute control than He was then. It is true that this control looks a little different than we might expect. Just as Jesus does not prevent the crucifixion, He does not prevent other events that we might think He should. And yet, even though these things are not prevented, we are not presented with a Jesus who is overcome by those events, but one who maintains His sovereignty, even while suffering and dying.

The power of God is not like the power of human beings. We have seen over the years that, when human beings get power, they tend to use it in a selfish way, protecting themselves and getting themselves more power at the expense of others. This is not the power that we see in Jesus. We see an incredible power of suffering love, a power that is not afraid of the brokenness of this world and life, but a power that, through suffering, death and resurrection, proves itself to be stronger than the greatest fears that we have.

We live in a country where, thanks be to God, there is not much persecution for our faith. Sure, some people have been convinced that faith in God is intellectually shallow, some are prepared to make fun of the kid in school who talks about actually liking church, but it is not like in other places where people are attacked and cruelly treated because of their faith in Christ. Because our lives are not in danger every time we meet together to praise the Lord, we might forget how amazing it is that God has endured all these hardships on our behalf and in our place. And yet, the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ reminds us that God is not overcome by human cruelty, but stands strong above the worst treatment that we can ever imagine. Even though we may not ever have to experience that in this country and at this time, surely the God who can overcome such evil can give us strength to live in this world with confidence and joy in spite of the fact that things don’t always go so well. This Jesus that we see in the Gospels reminds us of what really matters, fills us with joy and gives us an inward drive to go forth and share what we have received with the rest of the world. Jesus does not just offer us some wise teaching or some ethical code where doing more good than bad is all that is asked of us, but takes our place in our relationship with God, offering what we never could. Let us give thanks to God and allow Him to fill us with the passion, the excitement and the joy that He is and let the Holy Spirit fill this place and transform us. Let us pray.

AMEN