Text: Luke 9:15-62
My son William just turned six three weeks ago and I guess he's a big boy now who can do big boy things. A week ago I got the mower out and he ran up to me saying, “I wanna mow. I wanna mow.” This would be his first time. Our yard is so small that I use an electric mower and we even got it done without hitting the cord. I had to walk along with him to help with the cord and a bit of the steering. I told him to follow the line where he had just cut and to keep whichever of the front wheels in the cut grass. Well, seeing that pushing the mower was for him a bigger task than steering he focused on that instead by staring at the mower and looking around to see who was watching him. He inevitably kept veering off a bit which met with me saying “We're getting off” and grabbing the mower to right it. You see, when you're mowing getting off course means you have to go back to where you left course and start over. All this backing up and starting over meant a lot of extra work for William in his single-minded task of pushing that mower which to him weighs a ton. Nevertheless, he mowed the whole yard. I was very much the proud daddy.
Mowing is not unlike ploughing. When ploughing you have to keep an eye on where you're going or your rows get off and you don't want that because your neighbour farmers will think you don't know how to farm because you're just a lazy city-dweller trying to have your own personal Green Acres. Actually, if your rows are off you waste soil and more importantly water does not course evenly through your fields especially if you are irrigating. Uneven rows leads to reduced crop yield. So, you keep not only your eye but just to be safe your face set on a target ahead that will keep you parallel to the row beside you. This is particularly true if you're ploughing behind a horse or an ox as in Bible times. They are sensitive to very subtle changes in steering commands and if the driver even glances off course a horse in particular will know it and head that way.
So, it should be no surprise to us that Jesus uses the analogy of ploughing to describe our relationship to him in this arduous task we call discipleship or living under the reign of God (kingdom of God) in this world which is more or less what the Bible means by the word faith. He says, "No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God." The life of faith or living under the reign of God must have Jesus Christ and his mission and ministry as its aim or guide or focal point. If we are going to call ourselves Christians we must hone in on knowing him otherwise we are not fit for his work.
The Greek word that we translate there as “fit” is a bit of an obscure word. It is used in only three places in the Bible and all three very pointedly have to do with discipleship and faithfulness to Jesus. Luke uses it a chapter earlier. “Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, 'If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” He then talks about building a tower and not counting the cost to see whether you have enough to complete it and he points out how shameful it would be if you laid the foundation and then couldn't complete it. He also talks about a king with 10,000 soldiers not counting the cost of going to war with a king who is coming to attack with an army of 20,000. He would fail to see that surrender and making peace is the better option. Jesus then continues, “So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use (it is not fit) either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear." So, if we are claiming to be disciples of Jesus and yet have our faces set on something other than Jesus and knowing him and rather hold on to relationships and values that are not founded on him even if it is family and family values then we really are useless for the purposes of his kingdom.
Next the word shows up in the sixth chapter of Hebrews where Paul is addressing a situation where people who have been Christians for many years have begun to turn back to their former ways of life as pagan idol worshippers because Jesus had not yet returned to give them their reward for following and so they were not seeing the benefit of living non-indulgent lives patterned after his particularly as it brought persecution down upon them. They had built a foundation for the tower but weren't going ahead and completing it. Concerning these Paul writes, “For it is impossible to restore again to repentance those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they then fall away, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful (there's our word) to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned.” These folks had indeed put the hand to the plough knowing the new life that is ours in Christ Jesus by the gift of the Holy Spirit and instead of focusing on this new relationship to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and growing in it they were returning to being more concerned about immediate pleasures and pursuing the goals and the values of their culture which could not be separated from idol worship. They had taken their eyes off of Jesus and his mission and ministry and rather and probably under persecution set their faces towards the immediate concerns of their own lives. They were making themselves worthless in looking back.
Looking at our passage from Luke this morning, we find Jesus realizing that the time had come and so he sets his face towards Jerusalem and the cross. He was resolutely putting his hand to the plough and there was no turning back. He was surrounded by what was probably a sizable crowd and making their way towards Jerusalem this crowd needs to stop for the night. They are in Samaria. Samaritan Jews and Judean Jews didn't get along for matters of race, religion, and politics. The Samaritans saw that he was resolute on leading this crowd into Jerusalem to set up his kingdom which he was calling the Kingdom of God. I suspect the Samaritans wanted nothing to do with him because it looked like a revolt and they wanted nothing to do with that. Harbouring a band of revolutionaries would have had both the Jerusalem Jews and the Romans raining fire down upon them.
Along the way people were joining or should I say attempting to join the movement either by their own initiative or by Jesus summons, “Follow me”. We never learn whether these people actually get on board. We just learn of the radical cost of following Jesus. Unlike soldiers in a crusade who get promised the world, to a man who wants to follow him anywhere he goes we learn that in following Jesus in his ministry and mission there is no promise of material comfort and certainly not wealth. To those whom Jesus himself calls, there is nothing more important than leaving everything behind right there and then and proclaiming the Kingdom of God; not even burying your family or saying goodbye to friends and family.
Arguably wealth, comfort, and the roles we play in our families and communities are the most powerful distractions for us in following Jesus in his ministry and mission. We tend to set our faces towards these things and make Jesus and his kingdom subservient to our pursuit of them and call it being faithful. We believe that if we pursue these tasks honourably and morally he will bless us when in fact it is these very things that stand so prevalently in the way of our getting to know him. We forget that Jesus had no place to lay his head and that his own family and community thought he was crazy. We might do well to seek him among the disenfranchised.
Yet, Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life and our faith needs to be based on knowing him and that brings me back to the question I sent you home with last week. “Who are you, Lord?” I asked you to try praying that as a prayer and to try to do it without ceasing. I hope you gave it a shot. If not, there's always this week. Indeed, this day. You've got this day. Pray your way through it. Prayer and praying without ceasing is the first step in setting our faces towards Jesus and getting to know him and what his ministry and mission is. I can tell you right now that without prayer the plough don't move. The only way we can really trust this Jesus whom we follow is to get to know him. He came that we might have eternal life and if you remember from a sermon several weeks ago, Jesus said at John 17:3, “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Salvation is that by Jesus and his birth, living life, death, and resurrection and in the power of the Holy Spirit we have been adopted by the Father to be his children. Prayer is our participation now in our own salvation. Getting to know Jesus and the Father through him is foundational to the life of faith. So, keep on praying “Who are you, Lord” and he will answer. He wants us to know him. I have no doubt of that. Amen.
Saturday 29 June 2013
Saturday 22 June 2013
A Trip to Be Remembered
Text: Luke 8:22-39
I've taken two trips in the course of my life that have had profound life-changing effects on me. Experiences of other cultures will do that particularly if you're not just going for a vacation but actually going to learn something. Your travelling companions make a big difference too. In university I went to Mexico and in seminary I went to the Middle East. Both trips changed my views politically, my lifestyle. They made me question my wealthy, white, Western, American values. I saw first hand that how “good” I had it had profound negative consequences all over the world. Learning other peoples, who they are, their struggles, their joys brings us out of ourselves and gives a glimpse of how big and wonderfully different humans are. I am thoroughly convinced that a lot of the worlds problems could be solved if we took the politicians and the corporations out of the picture and got common people like you and me to sit down with common people from all over the world and share a meal. But, I guess that's what the Marriage Supper of the Lamb will be when Jesus returns and that's what we Christians are rehearsing for when we gather together for the Lord's Supper...but, I digress.
Here in Luke's Gospel we find Jesus and the disciples going on a day trip. The purpose of which was never stated. They just all got into a boat and Jesus said, “Let’s go to the other side of the lake.” To give you a little perspective, if their starting point was up in the northwest corner of the lake around Capernaum, then it was about a twenty kilometre trip to the southeast corner of the lake to the land of the Garasenes, a very Greco-Roman non-Jewish area where they ate pigs. It would definitely not have been an easy row and would still have taken several hours with a sail. And, if they were in the middle of the lake when the storm arose it would have been a five kilometre swim to get to shore if the boat capsized. Needless to say, getting into a boat with Jesus is risky.
Well, they are out there in the lake. The windstorm comes up and in this instance their lives really are in danger. The storm was getting the best of them. The waves were filling the boat. So, they went to Jesus who was very unconcernedly asleep and they shout at him, “Master. Master. We're going to die.” In Mark's Gospel the add “..and don't you care?”. Yet, they don’t ask him to do anything. They don't seem even to expect that he can do anything in the face of this terrible storm. Then, to their amazement he stands up and rebukes the storm. The wind stops and the lake immediately goes peacefully calm. Then he turns to them and asks, “Where is your faith?” That had to hurt.
The trip then grows even more complicating. On the other side of the lake there's a man possessed by a legion of demons. A legion was a Roman battle group of between four to six thousand soldiers. This man embodied evil like we cannot imagine. The thing that is amazing here is that the demons cower before Jesus because they unlike the disciples know exactly who he is and what he can do. You know, it is more than an interesting bit of trivia that in all of the Gospels it is only the demons who know exactly who Jesus is. Everybody else has trouble figuring him out. So, Jesus cast the demons into a herd of pigs that flocks like lemmings into the lake and drowns. The townspeople come and are astounded to find the man seated, clothed, and in his right mind. Yet, the extent of Jesus' authority scared them so much that they begged him to leave. So, he and the disciples get back into the boat and return from whence they came.
This not so little day trip across the Sea of Galilee must have been truly life changing for Jesus’ disciples. They had taken a huge step in leaving everything behind to follow Jesus, but on this trip he confronts their doubts about him and reveals himself to them to be more than just some prophet who was a likely candidate to be the Messiah. The Jesus the disciples meet out on this day trip is none other than the Son of God, the Lord of all creation whom nature and even the demons recognize and have to obey. This Jesus says things and does things that only God himself can say and do.
I think we often forget just how big Jesus really is as Son of God and Lord of all creation. We so often tend to consign Jesus to the private realm of personal religion, the realm of “me and my faith” when he is in fact the Lord of all creation and “everybody oughta know”. Did you know that thus far astronomers have counted over 500 billion galaxies? It takes light from the furthest of those galaxies 13.7+ billion years just to get here for us to see. I don`t know about you but I get truly awestruck whenever I see the pictures of space that the Hubble and Chandra telescopes are gifting us with. The whole creation is alive with and shining forth praise to its Maker. Jesus, our Jesus, is Lord of it all. He`s huge and...he cares about us each in our puny little lives that we tend to blow completely out of proportion. The Psalmist writes in Psalm 8 “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” One of my favourite paraphrases of that verse sings, “When I look up and see the skies which your own fingers made, and wonder at the moon and stars each perfectly displayed; then must I ask, 'Why do you care? Why love humanity? And why keep every mortal name fixed in your memory?”
Well, it's this really, really big Jesus the Lord of all creation who cares about us each in particular who stands before the disciples having calmed the storm that moments before had threatened their very lives and not only does he stand before the disciples but indeed us and confronts us with the life-giving question, “Where is your faith?” He's pointing out to his disciples that they really don't know him. They don't know who he is so as to truly trust their lives to him and that's even taking into consideration that they had left everything to follow him. Faith is incomplete, indeed it really is not faith, until we know Jesus personally as the Son of God who is Lord over all creation and are able to live accordingly.
The disciples' problem was similar to the problem that Christians have today. We have beliefs about Jesus that get in the way of our knowing Jesus. We turn being a disciple of Jesus into a day trip about “me and my faith” where we allow Jesus to be involved in our lives only on our terms and only in the ways we want him to be. “Jesus loves me still today, walks beside me on my way.” Yet, the way of “me and my faith” is littered with doubt and will fail us. Just as the disciples faith failed them in the midst of the storm. Salvation does not depend on our faith. It depends on grace. It depends on who Jesus is as Son of God and Lord of all creation and his faithfulness to us and it is comforting to know that when our faith fails us, he is still Son of God and Lord of all creation and he is faithful and he will act to save us in ways that we cannot imagine to be possible. It is to his faith and faithfulness and obedience as Son of God and Lord of creation that we must cling not to our own faith. Faith in our own faith leads only to disillusionment. Thus, the clichéd responses of “You’ve just got to have faith” and “You just got to believe more” are not valid. It is the simple fact that Jesus, the Son of God and Lord of all creation is with us in the boat that matters.
I can’t help but believe that Jesus took the disciples on this trip to point out that they truly did not know who he is. You see, being in the boat with Jesus, being his disciple involves one very important question that I think we in our anxieties just don't think to ask. The question – “Who are you, Lord?” Like the disciples in the boat we will be quick to point it out to our Lord when we sense ourselves in danger. Yet, we don't think to pull back and ask “Who are you Lord and why have you brought us here?” That's a very good question for us Canadian Presbyterians to be asking as the majority of our congregations are dwindling off into obscurity and it's not just us. The whole of Christianity in Canada is perishing. We run around like headless chickens looking for something that we can do to save our churches. Where is our faith is a relevant question as we seem to presume that the church belongs to us and it is up to us to save it because that's our duty as disciples of the Lord Jesus whom – let's be honest – we simply do not know. We forget that the church even this church belongs to Jesus Christ the Son of the Most High God and the Lord of all Creation. The really big Jesus. It belongs to him. If a church, a building, an institution, or a cultural manifestation of religion is standing in the way of his people actually, personally knowing him, have no doubt that he will take it away making us to realize that we can't have faith in someone we do not really know.
“Who are you Lord?” We must preoccupy ourselves with that question. Prayer and devotional exercises, Bible study and meditating on Scriptures are what we must do in this little boat on this perilous sea. When the disciples realized their predicament Luke says what? They started to bail? They jumped ship and swam? They raised the sail? They did a demographics study and a gifts inventory to determine how they might minister to the sea in which they are going to drown? No, Luke says the first thing they did was they went to him and they woke him up. They went to him. Jeremiah in the last verse of Lamentations looking out over Jerusalem as it lay in utter destruction by the hands of the Babylonians prays, “Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored.” Who are you, Lord?” Let me give you some homework this week. Try to pray this simple prayer as often as you can. Just keep saying over and over to yourself “Who are you, Lord Jesus?”. Do that and see what happens? I suspect that you will find yourself on a day trip that changes you profoundly. Amen.
I've taken two trips in the course of my life that have had profound life-changing effects on me. Experiences of other cultures will do that particularly if you're not just going for a vacation but actually going to learn something. Your travelling companions make a big difference too. In university I went to Mexico and in seminary I went to the Middle East. Both trips changed my views politically, my lifestyle. They made me question my wealthy, white, Western, American values. I saw first hand that how “good” I had it had profound negative consequences all over the world. Learning other peoples, who they are, their struggles, their joys brings us out of ourselves and gives a glimpse of how big and wonderfully different humans are. I am thoroughly convinced that a lot of the worlds problems could be solved if we took the politicians and the corporations out of the picture and got common people like you and me to sit down with common people from all over the world and share a meal. But, I guess that's what the Marriage Supper of the Lamb will be when Jesus returns and that's what we Christians are rehearsing for when we gather together for the Lord's Supper...but, I digress.
Here in Luke's Gospel we find Jesus and the disciples going on a day trip. The purpose of which was never stated. They just all got into a boat and Jesus said, “Let’s go to the other side of the lake.” To give you a little perspective, if their starting point was up in the northwest corner of the lake around Capernaum, then it was about a twenty kilometre trip to the southeast corner of the lake to the land of the Garasenes, a very Greco-Roman non-Jewish area where they ate pigs. It would definitely not have been an easy row and would still have taken several hours with a sail. And, if they were in the middle of the lake when the storm arose it would have been a five kilometre swim to get to shore if the boat capsized. Needless to say, getting into a boat with Jesus is risky.
Well, they are out there in the lake. The windstorm comes up and in this instance their lives really are in danger. The storm was getting the best of them. The waves were filling the boat. So, they went to Jesus who was very unconcernedly asleep and they shout at him, “Master. Master. We're going to die.” In Mark's Gospel the add “..and don't you care?”. Yet, they don’t ask him to do anything. They don't seem even to expect that he can do anything in the face of this terrible storm. Then, to their amazement he stands up and rebukes the storm. The wind stops and the lake immediately goes peacefully calm. Then he turns to them and asks, “Where is your faith?” That had to hurt.
The trip then grows even more complicating. On the other side of the lake there's a man possessed by a legion of demons. A legion was a Roman battle group of between four to six thousand soldiers. This man embodied evil like we cannot imagine. The thing that is amazing here is that the demons cower before Jesus because they unlike the disciples know exactly who he is and what he can do. You know, it is more than an interesting bit of trivia that in all of the Gospels it is only the demons who know exactly who Jesus is. Everybody else has trouble figuring him out. So, Jesus cast the demons into a herd of pigs that flocks like lemmings into the lake and drowns. The townspeople come and are astounded to find the man seated, clothed, and in his right mind. Yet, the extent of Jesus' authority scared them so much that they begged him to leave. So, he and the disciples get back into the boat and return from whence they came.
This not so little day trip across the Sea of Galilee must have been truly life changing for Jesus’ disciples. They had taken a huge step in leaving everything behind to follow Jesus, but on this trip he confronts their doubts about him and reveals himself to them to be more than just some prophet who was a likely candidate to be the Messiah. The Jesus the disciples meet out on this day trip is none other than the Son of God, the Lord of all creation whom nature and even the demons recognize and have to obey. This Jesus says things and does things that only God himself can say and do.
I think we often forget just how big Jesus really is as Son of God and Lord of all creation. We so often tend to consign Jesus to the private realm of personal religion, the realm of “me and my faith” when he is in fact the Lord of all creation and “everybody oughta know”. Did you know that thus far astronomers have counted over 500 billion galaxies? It takes light from the furthest of those galaxies 13.7+ billion years just to get here for us to see. I don`t know about you but I get truly awestruck whenever I see the pictures of space that the Hubble and Chandra telescopes are gifting us with. The whole creation is alive with and shining forth praise to its Maker. Jesus, our Jesus, is Lord of it all. He`s huge and...he cares about us each in our puny little lives that we tend to blow completely out of proportion. The Psalmist writes in Psalm 8 “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” One of my favourite paraphrases of that verse sings, “When I look up and see the skies which your own fingers made, and wonder at the moon and stars each perfectly displayed; then must I ask, 'Why do you care? Why love humanity? And why keep every mortal name fixed in your memory?”
Well, it's this really, really big Jesus the Lord of all creation who cares about us each in particular who stands before the disciples having calmed the storm that moments before had threatened their very lives and not only does he stand before the disciples but indeed us and confronts us with the life-giving question, “Where is your faith?” He's pointing out to his disciples that they really don't know him. They don't know who he is so as to truly trust their lives to him and that's even taking into consideration that they had left everything to follow him. Faith is incomplete, indeed it really is not faith, until we know Jesus personally as the Son of God who is Lord over all creation and are able to live accordingly.
The disciples' problem was similar to the problem that Christians have today. We have beliefs about Jesus that get in the way of our knowing Jesus. We turn being a disciple of Jesus into a day trip about “me and my faith” where we allow Jesus to be involved in our lives only on our terms and only in the ways we want him to be. “Jesus loves me still today, walks beside me on my way.” Yet, the way of “me and my faith” is littered with doubt and will fail us. Just as the disciples faith failed them in the midst of the storm. Salvation does not depend on our faith. It depends on grace. It depends on who Jesus is as Son of God and Lord of all creation and his faithfulness to us and it is comforting to know that when our faith fails us, he is still Son of God and Lord of all creation and he is faithful and he will act to save us in ways that we cannot imagine to be possible. It is to his faith and faithfulness and obedience as Son of God and Lord of creation that we must cling not to our own faith. Faith in our own faith leads only to disillusionment. Thus, the clichéd responses of “You’ve just got to have faith” and “You just got to believe more” are not valid. It is the simple fact that Jesus, the Son of God and Lord of all creation is with us in the boat that matters.
I can’t help but believe that Jesus took the disciples on this trip to point out that they truly did not know who he is. You see, being in the boat with Jesus, being his disciple involves one very important question that I think we in our anxieties just don't think to ask. The question – “Who are you, Lord?” Like the disciples in the boat we will be quick to point it out to our Lord when we sense ourselves in danger. Yet, we don't think to pull back and ask “Who are you Lord and why have you brought us here?” That's a very good question for us Canadian Presbyterians to be asking as the majority of our congregations are dwindling off into obscurity and it's not just us. The whole of Christianity in Canada is perishing. We run around like headless chickens looking for something that we can do to save our churches. Where is our faith is a relevant question as we seem to presume that the church belongs to us and it is up to us to save it because that's our duty as disciples of the Lord Jesus whom – let's be honest – we simply do not know. We forget that the church even this church belongs to Jesus Christ the Son of the Most High God and the Lord of all Creation. The really big Jesus. It belongs to him. If a church, a building, an institution, or a cultural manifestation of religion is standing in the way of his people actually, personally knowing him, have no doubt that he will take it away making us to realize that we can't have faith in someone we do not really know.
“Who are you Lord?” We must preoccupy ourselves with that question. Prayer and devotional exercises, Bible study and meditating on Scriptures are what we must do in this little boat on this perilous sea. When the disciples realized their predicament Luke says what? They started to bail? They jumped ship and swam? They raised the sail? They did a demographics study and a gifts inventory to determine how they might minister to the sea in which they are going to drown? No, Luke says the first thing they did was they went to him and they woke him up. They went to him. Jeremiah in the last verse of Lamentations looking out over Jerusalem as it lay in utter destruction by the hands of the Babylonians prays, “Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored.” Who are you, Lord?” Let me give you some homework this week. Try to pray this simple prayer as often as you can. Just keep saying over and over to yourself “Who are you, Lord Jesus?”. Do that and see what happens? I suspect that you will find yourself on a day trip that changes you profoundly. Amen.
Sunday 16 June 2013
The Christian Faith: It's about the Love of God the Father
Text: Galatians 4:1-7; Luke 15:11-32
The two oldest statements of what Christians believe are the Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed. They both begin basically the same; "We believe in God the Father Almighty Maker of heaven and earth." This is a simple statement meaning we place our trust in God, a God who has revealed himself through Jesus Christ as Father and who is almighty and Maker of heaven and earth. It should tweak our ears just a bit that the first thing we Christians have to say about God is that he is our Father. Indeed, that God is Father shapes everything else we have to say about God and creation, salvation, the Kingdom of God, the Church, the resurrection from the dead, and the world to come. When we Christians talk about God, we are talking about our Father, who art in heaven. We aren't just talking about the One who is the Maker of heaven and earth like he's some all-powerful clock-maker who set everything in motion to let it run on it's own. Rather, he is Father and he's very interested and involved in our lives.
The Christian faith is about the love of the Father and our coming to share in the relationship that Jesus has with his Father. That is the biggest of the big pictures that I can give you of the Christian faith. What Jesus has done for all of humanity is that he in, with, and through himself has given us access to the Father (Eph 3:18) in the Holy Spirit. As our reading from Galatians says we are now the adopted children of God. This means that what Jesus is by nature, we are and are becoming by grace the children of God the Father who willingly trust and obey him. The inheritance that is his, the kingdom of God, is also ours. We can now be in communion with and pray to God who is our Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.
As God the Father's children, the presence of the Holy Spirit in us is changing us to be like Jesus, his only begotten Son, begotten not made, being of one Being with the Father. This change happens now in a change of heart and mind in us to want to be and to do what our Father wants of us and it will become complete after we have been raised from the dead into a new heaven and a new earth. This is what we mean by salvation. We have been saved by the Trinity's own initiative and action from the deathly implication of hearts and minds that are bent on self-destruction through doing and being what we want to be do and be. We were created to live in communion with the Trinity and one another but instead, like cancers we instinctively and by choice do what pleases us and this has broken the communion. From this brokenness, God the Father has saved us by sending his Son to become one of us. The very fact that God the Son has become human and how that played out in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth has healed humanity and he shares this healing with us now by including us in himself by giving us the Holy Spirit. As the Father's children we can now call out to the Father in devotion saying Abba or "dear Father" and sit in his presence and make requests of him and in grateful praise and adoration, we can worship God our Father. God the Father in his great love for us has given us access to his love through Jesus Christ the Son in the Holy Spirit and it's transformative, indeed healing, effect on us. That's the Christian faith in a nutshell. The Father loves us and has adopted us to be his own by bestowing his nature upon us and that heals us.
Now, saying that the Christian faith is really about the love of the Father may sound new to you. I think that many of us have been churched into a Christian faith that is defined by the conversion experience of the Prodigal Son as it is in the parable of The Prodigal Son. Here's this rebellious little snot wanting to break off from the family and go and make it on his own. So, he demands his inheritance (an act which in essence was wishing his father dead) and leaves for the far country. Yet, he winds up grossly wasting it all and after hitting rock bottom decides he'll just go make things right with his father. He has his little prayer of repentance all ready so that when he sees his father he can convince his father that he just might be sincere (which if you're really paying attention here, he's not. He's just looking for a guaranteed meal.) He goes home only to find that his father has all the while been watching for him. His father runs out to meet him and surprisingly, no interest in the little prayer of repentance nor with what the man has done with his inheritance. He's just happy his son has come home.
I have heard too many sermons from this parable based on how we are supposed to be like this prodigal son and come to our senses and come home when the parable really is about the love of the Father. The love of the Father is so great that he sees past the wasted life of the prodigal and the hypocrisy of the brother who stayed around. They are still one family. Too many sermons I have heard telling us to get right with God and come home so that we can enjoy his love when the fact of the matter is that Father never stops loving us and there is nothing we can do to earn it. We can blow it with respect to our inheritance but not with respect to God's love. The immeasurable love of the Father and our inclusion in it by his grace is what the Christian faith is about. No decision or repenting on our part could ever make us right with God. We are already right with God through Christ Jesus. We just have to show up for the inheritance, start living into this new reality. Too much of Christianity says you are not a Christian until you've had a conversion experience meaning you've come to your senses about the cruddy life you've been living and are now going to live so God can use you. That's not a conversion experience. Deciding to get it right with Jesus by cleaning up your act so you can go to heaven is not conversion. Please note that the Prodigal Son does not go home because he's realized his father's love for him. He goes home because he knows it's a guaranteed decent meal. He's not converted either. Conversion is God's work of grace in us that comes by way of his revealing his great love for us however that might happen. But most assuredly, that cross hanging up there is the proof of the Father's amazing love for us. God the Son became as we are and did what we could not do, which is live in perfect trust and obedience to the Father, and by his faith we are saved. He suffered betrayal and a horrible death to heal us. God the Son in all his power suffered our sin and our death and the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit raised raised him and humanity in him to new life, to a new existence with Christ's resurrection, a new life and existence we share in because he freely gives us his Spirit who helps us to hear and believe this Good News, the Good News that we now have access to the Father.
I'll get off that, and close with a thought about calling God Father. I am aware that in our day many have great difficulty associating God with the concept of father. There have been too many fathers who have failed and failed miserably and even maliciously at being a father. They have been so hurtful that many people are not able to associate the word father with any concept of love. On top of that, it's not a very inclusive term. There are many who think calling God Father only reinforces patriarchal systems that have plagued humanity from the beginning of time with the abuse of women. Yet, we do not confess God as Father to reinforce misogyny nor to ignore the pain that so many have suffered at the hands of a father or because of the absence of a father. We confess God as Father because Jesus did and Jesus did so to describe a particular kind of relationship he had with his God and Father, a relationship which he brings us into and by which we are healed. I am not a Fundamentalist. I have come a long way around on this. Needless to say, if we monkey with the names it changes the nature of the relationship God has brought us into with himself and each other. Calling God Great Spirit or Mother or Parent or Creator truly changes the nature of how we relate to God and ultimately how we wind up relating to each other. What we believe about God has a profound effect on how we live our lives. In the coming weeks I will say more on what Jesus meant by the word Father. It will help to understand what being a father was in his day and time and that will help us to understand why God has revealed himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The two oldest statements of what Christians believe are the Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed. They both begin basically the same; "We believe in God the Father Almighty Maker of heaven and earth." This is a simple statement meaning we place our trust in God, a God who has revealed himself through Jesus Christ as Father and who is almighty and Maker of heaven and earth. It should tweak our ears just a bit that the first thing we Christians have to say about God is that he is our Father. Indeed, that God is Father shapes everything else we have to say about God and creation, salvation, the Kingdom of God, the Church, the resurrection from the dead, and the world to come. When we Christians talk about God, we are talking about our Father, who art in heaven. We aren't just talking about the One who is the Maker of heaven and earth like he's some all-powerful clock-maker who set everything in motion to let it run on it's own. Rather, he is Father and he's very interested and involved in our lives.
The Christian faith is about the love of the Father and our coming to share in the relationship that Jesus has with his Father. That is the biggest of the big pictures that I can give you of the Christian faith. What Jesus has done for all of humanity is that he in, with, and through himself has given us access to the Father (Eph 3:18) in the Holy Spirit. As our reading from Galatians says we are now the adopted children of God. This means that what Jesus is by nature, we are and are becoming by grace the children of God the Father who willingly trust and obey him. The inheritance that is his, the kingdom of God, is also ours. We can now be in communion with and pray to God who is our Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.
As God the Father's children, the presence of the Holy Spirit in us is changing us to be like Jesus, his only begotten Son, begotten not made, being of one Being with the Father. This change happens now in a change of heart and mind in us to want to be and to do what our Father wants of us and it will become complete after we have been raised from the dead into a new heaven and a new earth. This is what we mean by salvation. We have been saved by the Trinity's own initiative and action from the deathly implication of hearts and minds that are bent on self-destruction through doing and being what we want to be do and be. We were created to live in communion with the Trinity and one another but instead, like cancers we instinctively and by choice do what pleases us and this has broken the communion. From this brokenness, God the Father has saved us by sending his Son to become one of us. The very fact that God the Son has become human and how that played out in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth has healed humanity and he shares this healing with us now by including us in himself by giving us the Holy Spirit. As the Father's children we can now call out to the Father in devotion saying Abba or "dear Father" and sit in his presence and make requests of him and in grateful praise and adoration, we can worship God our Father. God the Father in his great love for us has given us access to his love through Jesus Christ the Son in the Holy Spirit and it's transformative, indeed healing, effect on us. That's the Christian faith in a nutshell. The Father loves us and has adopted us to be his own by bestowing his nature upon us and that heals us.
Now, saying that the Christian faith is really about the love of the Father may sound new to you. I think that many of us have been churched into a Christian faith that is defined by the conversion experience of the Prodigal Son as it is in the parable of The Prodigal Son. Here's this rebellious little snot wanting to break off from the family and go and make it on his own. So, he demands his inheritance (an act which in essence was wishing his father dead) and leaves for the far country. Yet, he winds up grossly wasting it all and after hitting rock bottom decides he'll just go make things right with his father. He has his little prayer of repentance all ready so that when he sees his father he can convince his father that he just might be sincere (which if you're really paying attention here, he's not. He's just looking for a guaranteed meal.) He goes home only to find that his father has all the while been watching for him. His father runs out to meet him and surprisingly, no interest in the little prayer of repentance nor with what the man has done with his inheritance. He's just happy his son has come home.
I have heard too many sermons from this parable based on how we are supposed to be like this prodigal son and come to our senses and come home when the parable really is about the love of the Father. The love of the Father is so great that he sees past the wasted life of the prodigal and the hypocrisy of the brother who stayed around. They are still one family. Too many sermons I have heard telling us to get right with God and come home so that we can enjoy his love when the fact of the matter is that Father never stops loving us and there is nothing we can do to earn it. We can blow it with respect to our inheritance but not with respect to God's love. The immeasurable love of the Father and our inclusion in it by his grace is what the Christian faith is about. No decision or repenting on our part could ever make us right with God. We are already right with God through Christ Jesus. We just have to show up for the inheritance, start living into this new reality. Too much of Christianity says you are not a Christian until you've had a conversion experience meaning you've come to your senses about the cruddy life you've been living and are now going to live so God can use you. That's not a conversion experience. Deciding to get it right with Jesus by cleaning up your act so you can go to heaven is not conversion. Please note that the Prodigal Son does not go home because he's realized his father's love for him. He goes home because he knows it's a guaranteed decent meal. He's not converted either. Conversion is God's work of grace in us that comes by way of his revealing his great love for us however that might happen. But most assuredly, that cross hanging up there is the proof of the Father's amazing love for us. God the Son became as we are and did what we could not do, which is live in perfect trust and obedience to the Father, and by his faith we are saved. He suffered betrayal and a horrible death to heal us. God the Son in all his power suffered our sin and our death and the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit raised raised him and humanity in him to new life, to a new existence with Christ's resurrection, a new life and existence we share in because he freely gives us his Spirit who helps us to hear and believe this Good News, the Good News that we now have access to the Father.
I'll get off that, and close with a thought about calling God Father. I am aware that in our day many have great difficulty associating God with the concept of father. There have been too many fathers who have failed and failed miserably and even maliciously at being a father. They have been so hurtful that many people are not able to associate the word father with any concept of love. On top of that, it's not a very inclusive term. There are many who think calling God Father only reinforces patriarchal systems that have plagued humanity from the beginning of time with the abuse of women. Yet, we do not confess God as Father to reinforce misogyny nor to ignore the pain that so many have suffered at the hands of a father or because of the absence of a father. We confess God as Father because Jesus did and Jesus did so to describe a particular kind of relationship he had with his God and Father, a relationship which he brings us into and by which we are healed. I am not a Fundamentalist. I have come a long way around on this. Needless to say, if we monkey with the names it changes the nature of the relationship God has brought us into with himself and each other. Calling God Great Spirit or Mother or Parent or Creator truly changes the nature of how we relate to God and ultimately how we wind up relating to each other. What we believe about God has a profound effect on how we live our lives. In the coming weeks I will say more on what Jesus meant by the word Father. It will help to understand what being a father was in his day and time and that will help us to understand why God has revealed himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Saturday 8 June 2013
I Say to You, Arise!
Text: Luke 7:11-17
Usually on Saturday morning I will get up and fix pancakes and bacon for the kids. William loves pancakes but Alice would rather have bacon. I make them from scratch and had been doing this for a year or so all the while perplexed as to why sometimes they would be fluffy and other times be flat. I thought I had figured it out once. I would mix milk, two eggs, and melted butter in a bowl and whip it by hand. I thought that more whipping made them fluffier, but it turned out to be coincidence. So, I went back to rethinking the ratio between the ingredients. Then, one Saturday morning I came down to the kitchen and Dana had usurped my role. I entered the kitchen just at the moment when she had the handmixer out and was whipping the egg whites. I said, “You always do that?” and she said, “Yeah, says it there in the recipe.” Having watched her make pancakes a handful of times, that was the first time I could remember seeing her do that. So, I looked at the recipe which I had actually read several times and right there it said separate out the egg whites and whip them until they are slightly stiff and then as the last step fold them into the batter...fluffy pancakes every time...well, almost every time.
Separate out the egg whites, whip them full of air, and fold them back in—who would have ever thought there's a sermon in that? Well, I will apologize beforehand for what I am about to do. Friday a week ago, I was reading from a book entitled Movements of Grace: The Dynamic Christo-realism of Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the Torrances by Jeff McSwain, a theology PhD who makes his dime doing youth ministry. At the top of page 52 he delivered a gobsmacker of a summary of what the Trinity has done for us in through and as Jesus Christ. McSwain is wanting us to recall Paul's benediction to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 13:14: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” He will refer to this grace, love, and fellowship as the trinitarian environment where each person has been placed by the Trinity by God the Son becoming Jesus Christ and sharing our humanity. Paul says as much in his sermon to the philosophers in Athens in Acts 17. He speaks of our basic human need to seek God that we might find him for, in Paul's words vv. 27-28 “he is actually not far from each one of us, for 'In him we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we are indeed his offspring.'” We all have our being in the Trinity and are indeed his children as I've said in the last two sermons. The gist of Romans chapter five is that just as Adam's transgression brought sin and death to all people, so the Trinity's righteous act as and through Jesus has brought reconciliation to God for all people. Just as Adam's transgression wrought a fundamental change in human “being” for death so also in, through, and as Jesus Christ the Trinity has wrought a fundamental change in human “being” for life. This is the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
So back to McSwain, he writes: “We must recall that the purpose of the incarnation and the atonement is to fold humanity into the trinitarian relations—sharing by grace in the sonship of the Son, the love of the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Paul's benediction cited above is essentially the description of the trinitarian environment, where each person has been placed via the incarnational union and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.” So, by the person and work of Jesus Christ God is folding us (remember the egg whites) back into his very being where we live and move and have our being and are his offspring. This is grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. The father who loves us as much as he does the Son sent the Son to become one with us in our humanity and he has not ceased to be human and one with us even though he died, was raised, and now sits at the right hand of the Father. That bonded union between the Trinity and humanity in and as Jesus Christ is the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ something which God has wrought and applies to all humans whether we want it or not. Now through the work of the Holy Spirit God is separating some people out this is you and me and is whipping us full of the the air of the Holy Spirit that we might live as the living prove that the Trinity has, is presently, and will ultimately save his entire Creation from the futility of Sin and Death. Here we are talking about the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The Father and the Son have sent the Holy Spirit who bonds us to Jesus so that we share and will share in his risen humanity and in his relationship with the Father. We are children of the Trinity and in the Trinity we live and move and have our being so that we, the whipped up egg whites are the living proof of the Trinity's plan for his Creation. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are folding us at present back into the trinitarian environment of their life, their loving and life-giving communion, a life that is indestructible. Death cannot separate us from the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we will be raised and now must live as those who have been brought from death back into life. We must now live prayerfully in the name of Jesus working for him and with him in his putting us and the world around us to rights.
Let me come at this another way, Jesus really was God visiting his people. Every where he went by the things he said and the things he did the life of the trinitarian environment broke through. The Kingdom of God, the end of time reign of God broke forth in earth as it is in heaven speaking a judgement that restores things to rights. You see, Death ain't right. A widow loosing her only son to death ain't right. Back in that day people would have believed that woman was cursed by God because of some hidden sin. They would have believed that God was getting her for that sin first by taking her husband and then by taking her son. Back then women could not live honourably on their own. They had to have a man providing for them whether it be their father, a husband, or a son. Outside of the sheer compassion of another man, kin or stranger, a woman on her own would have been forced to beg or to go into prostitution to live.
That day it was Jesus who was moved with compassion. God truly had come to town and he was not the judging God who smites the wicked sinner with the life of the cursed. Indeed not. Jesus comforted the woman. Then he stopped the funeral touching the bier incurring the curse of death upon himself. Then he said, “Young man, I say to you, (in the Greek text the emphasis is on the I.)...I say to you, arise.” The young man sat up and began to speak and Jesus, Jesus gave him back to his mother. He put things to right. He judged death. He judged their false ideas about God. In so doing he raised the young man from death and restored his mother to rights. Never would anyone ever say again that she must be cursed by God for her sins for she was obviously blessed. The trinitarian environment had manifested. Jesus came into their lives and they were brought into his. Things were righted.
Paul says this has happened for each of us at Colossians 1:13-23 writing: “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities - all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven...”.
Jesus has come to us each and said “I say to you, arise” and has folded us into the trinitarian environment. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness into his kingdom where we are beloved children, loved by the Father just as much as he is. We are reconciled, by his blood and his cross and folded into the trinitarian environment. For some of us this may have been quite a dramatic event, for others of us its just day to day living and knowing the Lord or a combination of both. I have friends in AA who are seeking a spiritual solution to a physical problem. It is amazing to hear the stories of not only how their compulsion to drink mysteriously got taken away like the dead man rising but how by sticking with the program God puts their lives to rights just like he did for the widow. An integral component of anyone seeking to know God the Trinity in whom we live and move and have our being is daily devotion, seeking the closer walk, simply wanting to live closer to Christ and praying for it. Letting your life find its direction in that desire. I'll bring this to a close by sharing with you an old Gospel song Just a Closer Walk with Thee.
Usually on Saturday morning I will get up and fix pancakes and bacon for the kids. William loves pancakes but Alice would rather have bacon. I make them from scratch and had been doing this for a year or so all the while perplexed as to why sometimes they would be fluffy and other times be flat. I thought I had figured it out once. I would mix milk, two eggs, and melted butter in a bowl and whip it by hand. I thought that more whipping made them fluffier, but it turned out to be coincidence. So, I went back to rethinking the ratio between the ingredients. Then, one Saturday morning I came down to the kitchen and Dana had usurped my role. I entered the kitchen just at the moment when she had the handmixer out and was whipping the egg whites. I said, “You always do that?” and she said, “Yeah, says it there in the recipe.” Having watched her make pancakes a handful of times, that was the first time I could remember seeing her do that. So, I looked at the recipe which I had actually read several times and right there it said separate out the egg whites and whip them until they are slightly stiff and then as the last step fold them into the batter...fluffy pancakes every time...well, almost every time.
Separate out the egg whites, whip them full of air, and fold them back in—who would have ever thought there's a sermon in that? Well, I will apologize beforehand for what I am about to do. Friday a week ago, I was reading from a book entitled Movements of Grace: The Dynamic Christo-realism of Barth, Bonhoeffer, and the Torrances by Jeff McSwain, a theology PhD who makes his dime doing youth ministry. At the top of page 52 he delivered a gobsmacker of a summary of what the Trinity has done for us in through and as Jesus Christ. McSwain is wanting us to recall Paul's benediction to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 13:14: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” He will refer to this grace, love, and fellowship as the trinitarian environment where each person has been placed by the Trinity by God the Son becoming Jesus Christ and sharing our humanity. Paul says as much in his sermon to the philosophers in Athens in Acts 17. He speaks of our basic human need to seek God that we might find him for, in Paul's words vv. 27-28 “he is actually not far from each one of us, for 'In him we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we are indeed his offspring.'” We all have our being in the Trinity and are indeed his children as I've said in the last two sermons. The gist of Romans chapter five is that just as Adam's transgression brought sin and death to all people, so the Trinity's righteous act as and through Jesus has brought reconciliation to God for all people. Just as Adam's transgression wrought a fundamental change in human “being” for death so also in, through, and as Jesus Christ the Trinity has wrought a fundamental change in human “being” for life. This is the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
So back to McSwain, he writes: “We must recall that the purpose of the incarnation and the atonement is to fold humanity into the trinitarian relations—sharing by grace in the sonship of the Son, the love of the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Paul's benediction cited above is essentially the description of the trinitarian environment, where each person has been placed via the incarnational union and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ.” So, by the person and work of Jesus Christ God is folding us (remember the egg whites) back into his very being where we live and move and have our being and are his offspring. This is grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. The father who loves us as much as he does the Son sent the Son to become one with us in our humanity and he has not ceased to be human and one with us even though he died, was raised, and now sits at the right hand of the Father. That bonded union between the Trinity and humanity in and as Jesus Christ is the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ something which God has wrought and applies to all humans whether we want it or not. Now through the work of the Holy Spirit God is separating some people out this is you and me and is whipping us full of the the air of the Holy Spirit that we might live as the living prove that the Trinity has, is presently, and will ultimately save his entire Creation from the futility of Sin and Death. Here we are talking about the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The Father and the Son have sent the Holy Spirit who bonds us to Jesus so that we share and will share in his risen humanity and in his relationship with the Father. We are children of the Trinity and in the Trinity we live and move and have our being so that we, the whipped up egg whites are the living proof of the Trinity's plan for his Creation. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are folding us at present back into the trinitarian environment of their life, their loving and life-giving communion, a life that is indestructible. Death cannot separate us from the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we will be raised and now must live as those who have been brought from death back into life. We must now live prayerfully in the name of Jesus working for him and with him in his putting us and the world around us to rights.
Let me come at this another way, Jesus really was God visiting his people. Every where he went by the things he said and the things he did the life of the trinitarian environment broke through. The Kingdom of God, the end of time reign of God broke forth in earth as it is in heaven speaking a judgement that restores things to rights. You see, Death ain't right. A widow loosing her only son to death ain't right. Back in that day people would have believed that woman was cursed by God because of some hidden sin. They would have believed that God was getting her for that sin first by taking her husband and then by taking her son. Back then women could not live honourably on their own. They had to have a man providing for them whether it be their father, a husband, or a son. Outside of the sheer compassion of another man, kin or stranger, a woman on her own would have been forced to beg or to go into prostitution to live.
That day it was Jesus who was moved with compassion. God truly had come to town and he was not the judging God who smites the wicked sinner with the life of the cursed. Indeed not. Jesus comforted the woman. Then he stopped the funeral touching the bier incurring the curse of death upon himself. Then he said, “Young man, I say to you, (in the Greek text the emphasis is on the I.)...I say to you, arise.” The young man sat up and began to speak and Jesus, Jesus gave him back to his mother. He put things to right. He judged death. He judged their false ideas about God. In so doing he raised the young man from death and restored his mother to rights. Never would anyone ever say again that she must be cursed by God for her sins for she was obviously blessed. The trinitarian environment had manifested. Jesus came into their lives and they were brought into his. Things were righted.
Paul says this has happened for each of us at Colossians 1:13-23 writing: “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities - all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven...”.
Jesus has come to us each and said “I say to you, arise” and has folded us into the trinitarian environment. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness into his kingdom where we are beloved children, loved by the Father just as much as he is. We are reconciled, by his blood and his cross and folded into the trinitarian environment. For some of us this may have been quite a dramatic event, for others of us its just day to day living and knowing the Lord or a combination of both. I have friends in AA who are seeking a spiritual solution to a physical problem. It is amazing to hear the stories of not only how their compulsion to drink mysteriously got taken away like the dead man rising but how by sticking with the program God puts their lives to rights just like he did for the widow. An integral component of anyone seeking to know God the Trinity in whom we live and move and have our being is daily devotion, seeking the closer walk, simply wanting to live closer to Christ and praying for it. Letting your life find its direction in that desire. I'll bring this to a close by sharing with you an old Gospel song Just a Closer Walk with Thee.
I am weak, but Thou art strong; Jesus, keep me from all wrong;
I’ll be satisfied as long as I walk, dear Lord, close to Thee.
Refrain: Just a closer walk with Thee. Grant it, Jesus, is my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee. Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
When my feeble life is o’er, Time for me will be no more;
On that bright eternal shore, to Thy shore, I will walk, dear Lord, close to Thee. Refrain.
I’ll be satisfied as long as I walk, dear Lord, close to Thee.
Refrain: Just a closer walk with Thee. Grant it, Jesus, is my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee. Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
When my feeble life is o’er, Time for me will be no more;
On that bright eternal shore, to Thy shore, I will walk, dear Lord, close to Thee. Refrain.
Saturday 1 June 2013
Seeing the Father in Jesus
Text: John 14:6-21
John 3:16 is without a doubt one of those key verses we keep close at hand. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." We tend to read this verse as a conditional statement, an if/then statement which holds out the proposition that if one wants to have eternal life or rather go to heaven as opposed to hell after death then one must meet the condition of believing in the Son. Yet, there are some problems with this way of interpreting John 3:16 and believe it or not John himself is the first in line to point them out particularly by how he defines eternal life and how one gets it later in his Gospel.
Chapter 17 of John's Gospel is Jesus' great prayer to the Father on behalf of his disciples. The first three verses read, "Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." As we see here eternal life cannot be attained by one's own personal decision to believe in the Son, but rather Jesus gives it to whomever the Father has given to him. This means that eternal life comes utterly by means of grace. Faith is the way we live it, not the way we attain it. Paul's key verse Ephesians 2:8 says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,..." Grace is the means. Faith is how we participate in what the Trinity has done for us.
So, eternal life is a gift Jesus gives to those whom the Father has given him and, as we just heard from Jesus, eternal life is knowing the Father and Jesus the Anointed One whom the Father has sent. Therefore, eternal life is a relationship with God the Father and Jesus, God the Son, which we receive in the present from Jesus by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Faith, then, is our participation in this relationship.
Adoption is Paul's word for this: by the gift of the Holy Spirit we are made one with Jesus so that in him we share in his own relationship with the Father. The implications for this are staggering. It means in the first place that the Father loves us each, the adopted ones, as much as he loves his own one true Son who is one with him. Ponder that. The Father loves us each as much as he loves Jesus his own Son. Speaking candidly, whenever my life, or should I say my interpretation of my life is out of kilter, this is the one thought I have learned to come back to in order to restore perspective. More over, I will be the first to stand and testify that when my life really has gotten out of kilter with the stuff that just happens and those bad things that happen to good people in a world governed by Murphy's Law and my own stupidity, God the Father has been unyielding and relentless in his faithfulness to me to work all those things to the good for no other reason than he loves me. Faith, then, is learning to live with the fact that God the Father loves me, each of us, as much as his own Son.
So, who is this Father? Phillip's request and Jesus' response is an appropriate stop along the way for us to get out and have a Grand Canyon moment. You see, I think (I know) we all have our own ideas of who or what God is and couple that with how Western Christian culture has conditioned us to think of God in terms that are not so loving-fatherish. Speaking for myself, the God of this Western Christian culture that I was raised with in the Bible-belt in the southern United States is a hard one for me to accept as loving me as much as his own Son. The God I picked up from the “Christian” culture that I grew up in was this aloof old man exalted on a throne who sits as our judge...and he is impossible to please. He supposedly gets us if we go too far astray so we live in fear of him. He's patient to the extent of being altogether uninvolved. He helps those who help themselves and pick themselves up by their own bootstraps. He's all powerful. All knowing. He knows if I've been sleeping. He's knows when I'm awake. He knows when I've been bad or good. So, I better be good for goodness sake. But, I'm not good enough. Even when I'm doing my best to follow Jesus, I just don't feel good enough to be called a child of God with whom he is well pleased. As a husband, as a father, as a friend, as a pastor, as a neighbour, as a person I fail miserably. It's a good thing I got my “get out of hell free” card in believing Jesus died paying the penalty of death I deserve for my sins and made restitution to the Father whose honour I have so offended by my failure to be perfect as he is perfect and holy as he is holy and just as he is just. I'm sorry if I have offended anybody with that rant but is the God I grew up with.
Philip had a similar almighty judge God image to deal with in his culture. The Pharisees were the dominant form of Judaism back then. They believed that the God who established them as a people and a nation was coming any day to kick out the Romans and return the land the righteous and establish his kingdom. He was an almighty God, holy, righteous, and just and was faithful to those the obedient. The Pharisees taught that if you wanted to be one of those still standing in that day then you had better start keeping the letter of the Law. They were so good at this that they had laws that kept them from breaking the Law yet allowed them to get around the Law. Jesus used to hammer them on that.
That almighty, holy, perfect, just, get the wicked God that the Pharisees imagined was probably haunting around in Philip's mind and I think Philip just wants to make sure that there is no hidden God behind Jesus who ultimately is different than Jesus. Jesus had been telling them all along that he and the Father were one and that Father judges no one but has entrusted all judgement to the Son (Jn. 5:22) and that the things he was doing were the things that he saw the Father doing and the things that he was saying were the things the Father was saying. And that those who are his will do greater things than he has done because he will be in them.” So, in a last ditch effort of holding on to his false image of God Philip says, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” “Jesus is there a God hidden behind you that is other than you are?”
Well, Jesus comes back on Philip in a very personal way. “Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?” Sometimes when dealing with the New Testament things get lost in translation. In the Greek of the New Testament, Jesus asks Philip “Don't you know me” in such a way as there is an implied “yes” to it. Philip does know Jesus and for that reason has been with him through thick and thin those three years of Jesus ministry. In John's Gospel he was the third disciple and the only one to whom Jesus says, “Follow me” and he up and does. In a great act of assurance Jesus says “Anyone, anyone who has seen me has seen the Father, but Philip you know me. Philip, how can you say, 'Show us the Father'?”
There is no unknowable God hidden behind Jesus that is other than Jesus in nature. There is no Deus Absconditus as is said in Latin and I throw that in here just because it sounds so cool. What this means is that the Father like the Son gets involved in the nitty-gritty of our lives in loving, gracious, and healing ways. Jesus befriended the outcast and the sinner, touched the leper, let a whore wash is feet at a proper meal, healed the son of a Roman centurion (the enemy), raised the dead. He was crucified and died for us all. Such is the Fahter. Jesus is our judge and as Paul asked at the end his magnum opus on the love and righteousness of the Father, “Who can condemn us? Only Jesus and he died for us.” He didn't even condemn a woman caught in adultery though he literally gave judgement and Hell to her good, church-going accusers. I have only found one instance in the Gospels in which Jesus brought up the topic of Hell that it wasn't directed at the self-righteous, religious people of his day.
The Father and the Son are one. The way Jesus is and the things he does is the way the Father is and does. The is no unknowable God hidden behind Jesus. By the Trinity's gracious sharing of himself through the Holy Spirit, we share in their loving communion of unconditional love. You are a beloved child of the one true and living God with whom he is well pleased. You just better get used that fact. It is who you really are. Jesus lives in you. You are a beloved child of God. Go and do likewise. Amen.
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