Know Christ and the Power of His Resurrection

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Philippians 3:4-14

Imagine if you had the power to actually change things.  If we had that power, we would probably use it to make our little corners of the world exactly the way we want them to be so that we and those we love are healthy and comfortable and the people around us don’t rub us the wrong way.  Things are good.   Yet, we tend to assume that what is good for me is good for everybody.  So that if I have the power to change things, I should rightfully change the things around me that would make life better for me and everyone will benefit.  Unless of course, I’m a sociopath or psychopath who likes making others suffer, then I will create chaos for the heck of it and revel in the addictive thrill of having power.  Rarely, do we humans exhibit the wisdom to presume that if we had the power to change things, what needs to change first is me. 

If we want to change the world, the change must begin with ourselves.  In our passage today, Paul is spending some time reflecting on the change he himself was going through having encountered the resurrected Jesus.  His birth lineage was a cut above.  He was very zealous in his faith; exceedingly mindful of keeping the Law of Moses.  He was so zealous that he was adamantly attempting to quell a big change that was happening among his people as the result of what he believed to be a lie, that God had raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead.  Paul believed that Jesus was a treasonous blasphemer who deserved death by crucifixion for claiming to be the Messiah and the Son of God.  But he had since come to call all that vainglorious zeal dung since coming to know Jesus and the change meeting Jesus was working in him.

Paul was on a trip to Damascus to round up Christians, when in a prolonged flash of light seen by all in the party, Jesus confronted him.  Paul responded to this confrontation with a question, “Who are you, Lord?”  Thus began Paul’s desire to know Jesus and the power of his resurrection. 

The question Jesus confronted Paul with was “Why are you persecuting me?”  Paul was persecuting Jesus by persecuting Jesus’ followers.  It’s likely that this question created a desire in Paul to want to know what it was about himself that made him want to persecute Jesus and his followers.  I say that because it’s interesting that in our reading the means that Paul choses to get to know Jesus Is to step into the shoes of Jesus’ persecution, the shoes of suffering as Jesus suffered, and walking a bit more than a few miles.  If you want to know someone, walk a mile in his shoes so they say.

  Paul’s very to-the-point encounter with Jesus on the Road to Damascus was for Paul the evidence that God had raised Jesus from the dead.  This meant that according to Old Testament prophecies God had poured out his Spirit upon the followers of Jesus and that through them God was bringing in the kingdom of God and changing the world by calling people to loyalty to Jesus.  This changed Paul.  His goal was no longer rising to power in the midst of the Jerusalem Pharisees by Law observance and persecuting the followers of Jesus, but rather to know Jesus, to personally know Jesus, and the power of his resurrection – a power that changes people – a change that is nothing short of being born into a new life in which you know yourself to be a beloved child of God.

If you take Paul’s letters and suss out his metaphors, his images for what salvation is, at the top of the list would be that salvation is that I was once an estranged God-hater, but through what God has done in, through, and as Jesus the Christ in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, I now know myself to be a beloved child of God as Jesus is.  I am a beloved member of God’s family here on earth.  To know Jesus is to know ourselves to be beloved children in the family of God.  The power of Jesus’ resurrection, though powerful enough to create this Creation, raise the dead, heal the sick, and cast out demons, now works powerfully in us by bringing us to want to know Jesus himself more and more in order to grow to be more like him in his selfless love. 

We get to know Jesus when we live according to that one commandment he gave us, that we love one another as he has loved us.  Unfortunately, loving the way Jesus loved doesn’t come apart from suffering.  It is costly to love.  I remember a song from back in the 70’s done by a band called Nazareth entitled “Love Hurts.”  It does.  To love the way Jesus loves means we will always be feeling empathy for others as we join with them in their struggles, so through what this world calls happiness out the window.  But it’s not all doom and gloom.  There are moments of celebration, moments of victory when God powerfully answers prayers.  There’s a contentment, a joy in knowing that God is for us, with us, and will work all things to the God of his beloved children.  Seek to know Jesus and to experience that power of his resurrection.  I am wholeheartedly convinced that as Paul says everything else is dung.  Amen.

 

The New and Living Way

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Hebrews 10:16-25

Charles Wesley wrote a hymn in the late 1700’s that became quite popular during the American Civil War.  Its first line is “And am I born to die?”  That was quite a pertinent question back then.  Wars abounded.  Plagues.  Sicknesses for which there were no cures.  You could die at sea on the way to that new land where you were hoping to make a new start or get killed by the inhabitants once you got there.  Kicked by a horse.  Attacked by a wild boar.  Childbirth.  Life expectancy then was around 30 yrs.  Life was short and Death (capital D) abounded.  Wesley wrote:

And am I born to die? To lay this body down?
And must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown

A land of deepest shade. Unpierced by human thought.
The dreary regions of the dead, where all things are forgot?

Soon as from earth I go, what will become of me?
Eternal happiness or woe must then my portion be;

Waked by the trumpet's sound, I from my grave shall rise,
And see the Judge with glory crowned, and see the flaming skies,

 

Well, one doesn’t need to be in the midst of a war or a plague to wonder if the sum total of your life is simply death.  The question should hit us every now and then but we tend to be occupied with other questions.   When we are young, we ponder and dream of what we will do with our lives.  The middle years make us wonder if we’re really doing anything useful because we’re beginning to realize how fast the years go.  The elder years hit and we look back wondering what part in the grand scheme of things we played?  Did we make a difference?  All along the way we are confronted by the harsh reality of the death of friends and family.  One doesn’t have to look too far to garner the awareness that life in all its wonder and goodness has a monstrous beast lurking about that cannot be tamed - the futility of death.  One must either wear the rose-coloured glasses of denial or gird up with the hope of resurrection that God gives us in Christ Jesus.  If we don’t, we will perish in the despair of Wesley’s pointed question – Am I born to die?

Well, are we?  Are we just born to die?  The answer to that question is an emphatic “NO!”  Death was not what God created us for.  We are fearfully and wonderfully made as the Psalmist says, fearfully and wonderfully made to praise and to bring praise to our awesome God who loves his creation with a love we cannot begin to comprehend.  We can appreciate the beauty of a flower, smell hope wafting from the mud in Spring, understand the wonders of a Black Hole, feel delight watching a baby smile, cure diseases, play, and feel joy.

Yet, something is dreadfully wrong in God’s very good creation.  With the same hands that can build little rovers that explore the surface of Mars, we build weapons of mass destruction.  We can write wonderful works of literature but also the propaganda that leads to genocide.  That’s how we to tend treat people different from us.  Do I really need to go into how we lie to, hide from, blame, manipulate, betray, and disappoint those we love the most.  I believe it was the fifth century theologian Augustine who was the first to say that the line between good and evil runs through the middle of everyone.  So, therefore, there’s no use in calling another person or their actions evil until we’ve sorted through ourselves and our own actions and miraculously found ourselves guiltless and without shame.  Guiltless and without shame doesn’t describe anybody I know much less myself.

This dreadful wrongness in God’s good creation is the insidiously deceptive Power which we in our language call Sin.  It is a disease affecting everyone, a disease that leads to Death.  Like addicts we are powerless over it.  We are both its victims and culpable of it.  It is a disease that affects the mind.  It blinds us to seeing, perceiving, and knowing the way things are supposed to be in a world where humans are to live in the image of God.  It turns us inward with a compulsion to serve our own wants and needs.  It makes us want to be our own gods and to serve false gods in sick efforts of self-preservation.  It subtly makes Good seem Evil and Evil seem Good and with even more perversion it can turn the Good we do into Evil and make doing Evil the means to doing the Good.

What does God do about this perversion of his very good Creation?  Well, it was God’s plan all along that at the right time God the Son would become the man, Jesus of Nazareth, and crown God’s good creation with his very self.  Also in this plan was God’s pouring the Holy Spirit upon all humanity and upon his creation perfecting it so that what Isaiah prophesied long ago would be true, that “the Earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9).  But, with God’s good creation infected with the disease of Sin and powerless against it, God’s crowning and perfecting of his creation with the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit had to take the horrific form of crucifixion and death. For now, the power of God’s glory and love is seen, perceived, and known by us by the death on the cross of Jesus, the incarnate Son of God and Lord of all creation.  

If we can say that anyone was born to die, it was Jesus.  In this act of incomprehensible love God took upon himself our Sin diseased nature by which we are all victimized in order to heal us of it.  He took upon himself His own judgement of condemnation against us for our culpability in Sin and suffered the sentence of the most publicly humiliating form of criminal execution humanity has ever devised in order deliver us from our deserved condemnation and sentence of death.  

How perverted!  How twisted!  How wrong!  We humans in our blindness took the one who was God’s crowning and perfecting of us and crowned him with a crown of thorns, and enthroned him on a cross, and mocked him, and spit on him.  We judged it preposterous and blasphemous that he claimed to be the Son of God come to deliver us.  We, in the blindness of our Sin may say, “No, it wasn’t me.  I wasn’t there.”  But, as Jesus taught, whatever we have done to harm even the least of us, we have done to him.  We are liars if we say we have not hurt, harmed, and broken the trust of others, especially those closest to us whom we say we love the most.

Well, we will have to wait for Easter for the full details of this story but by his death Jesus opened a new and living way to God.  It was on this day that Sin and Death were condemned and sentenced to death.  This is why we call it Good.  The great mystery of this tragic event is that God the Son become human as Jesus of Nazareth somehow experienced death himself, death on the cross.  God the Father and God the Holy Spirit somehow suffered the death of God the Son.  These are things too big for this small mind to comprehend.  It is enough to say that God the Trinity knows in his very self what it is to die.

In the wake of the horrific event of our crucifying Jesus what needs to be said is that through the death of Jesus, the Christ, God the Son, God the Trinity has established in our hearts a new covenant, a new way to live in response to him, a new and living way of coming to him.  The result of our Death going into God is that the life of God, the Holy Spirit is now poured upon us.    

God is flooding us with his very life and being and thereby recreating us to bear forth the living image of Christ Jesus and his self-giving love that he modeled on the Cross.  He calls us to live according to the Way of the Cross.  If there is a sense in which we are born to die, it is that we have been born anew to live the cross-formed life of denying ourselves and laying down our lives for others in the war against Sin, Death, and Evil; a war that Jesus has already won.  In this new life we do not simply live as good people who live according to higher standards of morality and altruism.  We rather live forth from the new life of faith, hope, and unconditional love that we find God has gifted to us, life filled with God’s continual presence with us bearing our old life away and transforming us with Jesus’ life.  Jesus' once and for all death has made it possible for us to be a part of God's life-giving, dignity-restoring work of healing this broken, hurting and indeed, dying world.  We call this day Good because by Jesus’ death, God gives us life.  Let us gratefully live it for him.  Amen.

 

Do We Understand?

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John 13:1-17, 34-35

When I was a child, my dad would on occasion say to my siblings and me, “Do you understand me?”  I can hear his voice in my head as clear as a bell.  “Do you understand me?”  He said it in what were usually situations where we kids had messed up royally and he had had to explain what was so wrong about what we had done and what would happen if we ever did it again.  “If you ever pick a skunk up by the tail again, I’ll duct tape your hand to your nose and you’ll be smelling skunk for the next 15 years.  Do you understand me?”  “Do you understand me?” was always the last word for life’s greatest lessons. 

It is hard for me not to hear Jesus in the same way here saying to his disciples after washing their feet, “Do you understand what I have done to you?”  In essence, “Do you understand me?”  “Do you know me?”  Jesus, the Teacher, at the last meal he would share with his disciples…his last opportunity to teach them…his greatest lesson…he stood up from the table, stripped down to his undergarment, took a basin and a towel, and washed their road dirty and probably fungus and hookworm infected feet.  They, the students, laid around on pillows while he silently worked his way around the table.  

Only Peter spoke up and objected…and maybe rightly so.  A teacher should never humiliate himself like that before students.  “Are you going to wash my feet.”  Jesus gently responds, “You don’t get what I’m doing, but you will soon understand?”  That wasn’t a good enough answer for Peter so he objects all the more strongly with an answer that sounds more like the voice of his own pride rather than an effort to protect Jesus’ honour.  "You will never wash my feet."   Well, Jesus put him in his place, “Unless you let me wash you, you have no place in me!”  This foot washing was apparently the pass or fail lesson.  Do we understand this!?

Jesus finished up, reclined on his cushion, and began to explain, “Do you understand what I have done to you?...If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”  Humility is the lesson.  Jesus finishes his last lesson by saying to them, “I give you a new Commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, so also you should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  Do we understand this!?

You may not have noticed that in John’s Gospel chapter 13 follows chapter 12.  No duh, eh?  Chapter 12 begins with Mary anointing or more like washing Jesus’ feet by wasting a bottle of very expensive perfume.  She poured it on his feet and used her hair to scrub and dry them.  The whole house was filled with the fragrance of that perfume, indeed, the beauty of the act.  Mary got it.  She understood who Jesus is and that he had to die.  In an act of extravagant, wasteful love she modelled to the disciples the heart of God and the humble, unconditional love by which the disciples were to live their lives as followers of Jesus.  Chapter 13 rolls in with Jesus humbling himself to wash his disciples’ feet also in an effort to model humble, unconditional love to them. Do we understand this!?

Between these two acts of foot washing lay Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  Jesus the Messiah mounted on a young donkey like a king at his inauguration.  The people threw their cloaks in front of him shouting, “Hosanna!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord—the king of Israel.”  Presumably he went to the Temple.  Some Greeks came to him.  For the first time in John's Gospel some Greeks, some non-Jews come seeking Jesus.  They understand who he is or are at least curious.  Oddly, after their visit Jesus began to talk about his death.  The voice of God the Father speaks from heaven.  Then Jesus noted how the Israelites, despite all his miracles and signs, despite the obvious, just didn’t believe in him.  Do we understand him!?

King Jesus, the nature of his character and of the way he reigns is humble, unconditional, indiscriminate, even wasteful love, indeed sacrificial love.  He laid his life on the line.  He gave himself over to death, a horrible, horrible, horrible death that we may live and find our life when we share in his humility, in his love.  Do we understand this!?

There’s an election coming up here in Canada in a couple of weeks, an opportunity for a new "king" to ride into town so to speak.  In Canada, a candidate’s religious background doesn’t come up in the campaign and get scrutinized the way it does in the States.  Up here, party platform and campaign promises (that have the shelf life of a New Year’s resolution) are what seem to matter most.  As a minister, I can’t tell you who to vote for but I can suggest that if humility expressed through humbly serving by expressions of unconditional love is the nature of Jesus, the Lord of history, who will return to put things right; then, as this is Jesus’ nature, we should look for the light of it to shine through in the actions and moral character of those we elect to office.  Humility and the courage to express unconditional, sacrificial love should top the list for why we vote for a candidate.  If a candidate just seems to be seeking power, has difficulty being honest, only wants to make the wealthy wealthier, sees no need for feeding the poor, healing the sick, clothing the naked, giving shelter to the homeless, and does not have a heart for the refugee and the migrant or for the needs of those who have served their country particularly in war…well, maybe it is something else that is shining through them.  Maybe they have no share in him.  Do we understand this!?

Jesus modeled humility.  In unconditional love he washed the dirty feet of those who deserted him, denied him, and betrayed him.  The crowd who ushered Jesus into town as king just hours later were yelling…yelling “Crucify him!”  One might be led to say that love has no place in politics, in the kingdoms of this world.  Regardless, King Jesus said to us who do have a share in him, “I give you a new Commandment, that youlove one another.  Just as I have loved you, so also you should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  Do we understand this!?

   

Wasteful Love

 John 12:1-8

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How does one define waste?  One way is to say waste is something that has served its purpose and is ready to be thrown away.  A used tissue is easily defined as waste.  Then again, the conversion of trees into disposable paper products to be used for human hygiene is a huge waste of a tree when you consider that trees are the largest producers of the oxygen we breathe.  There are tree farms for this very purpose.  We can pride ourselves on buying such products made from recycled paper for this purpose, but the chemicals used in producing such paper are never fully extracted and eventually wind up in our water.  And since we are on the topic of waste, if you have ever attempted to wipe a baby’s bottom with toilet paper, then you may have concluded that this particular Modern convenience doesn’t really do down there what we believe it does down there thus making the killing of trees for that purpose all the more just an utter waste.  

So, you may have noticed our definition of waste just expanded from something that can no longer serve its intended purpose to using something for useless, futile purposes.  In that line of thinking we can waste food and natural resources.  We can waste money.  We can waste time.  Above all, we can waste the lives that God has so wonderfully entrusted to us.  There’s the Prodigal Son kind of wasting of our lives where we spend ourselves and everything we have on “desolute living.”  But, we can also waste our lives in the pursuit of what many would call a successful life.  We can work day and night for that nice house, those nice cars, that fine dining, all the stuff that wealth affords.  Yet, is being “wealthy”, being “successful”, really the purpose for which God gave us this “life”?  The fact that there are more poor people in the world than there are Middle Class and wealthy combined should tell us that something is askew with our definition of success or at least with how we go about getting it.

The topic of waste comes up in our reading today.  Judas, the keeper of the disciples common purse from which he was known to dip, asked why Mary had wasted this quite expensive bottle of perfume but pouring it out on Jesus rather than selling it and giving it to the poor.  On the other hand, all the Gospels tell the story of a woman anointing Jesus for his burial in the days following his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  In Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s version Jesus speaks highly of this woman saying that she had done a beautiful thing and that everywhere the Gospel was proclaimed what this woman had done for him in anointing his body for burial would be told also.  It should peak our attention that what Judas the Betrayer, the Keeper of the Purse, called a waste is remembered by the Church wherever the Gospel is proclaimed as a beautiful thing.  Every year in the weeks before Easter, this woman and her beautiful act is remembered.  Personally, I try to at least read this story if not preach on it at least once a year.  What is so special about this waste of expensive perfume?

Well, as Jesus said, this woman had done a beautiful thing.  In the Jewish faith one could say she performed an act of Chesed, an act of loving kindness that truly reveals the heart of God; which is unconditional, arguably wasteful, and one could even say broken-hearted love.  The perfume she wasted on Jesus in an extravagant act of wasteful love was worth upwards of one year’s salary for any of us here.  That would indeed feed a lot of people.  Yet, in Jesus’ opinion, she had done a beautiful thing that revealed the very heart of God.  

You may ask, “How does wasting perfume on Jesus’ feet reveal the heart of God?”  And also, in light of Judas’ question, we may want to ask how does wasting expensive perfume reveal the heart of God any more than selling that perfume and giving it all away to the poor.  Well, her wasteful act of anointing Jesus feet with this perfume corresponds to Jesus’ wasting his life by dying for a humanity that didn’t deserve it.  There’s a Good Friday Sermon here that we don’t have time for this morning, but it must be said that Jesus wasted his life over to death in order to destroy death and its cause, which is the disease of Sin.  Then, by raising Jesus from the dead God created a new humanity that would bear his Spirit and in essence bear the honour of being his Temple, the Body of Christ.  The followers of Jesus are now the place on earth where God chooses to dwell.  The end result is that Jesus’ wasting his life to death restored value to human life which we have wasted in Sin.  We are now also reconciled to God in an organic union kind of way; united to the Son of God, the Living Christ, by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us making us to become Jesus’ sisters and brothers and beloved children of the Father just as he is.  With the wasteful gift of his Spirit, which God poured upon us similar to the way Mary wasted expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet, God has truly united us to the love which God is as the communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  By anointing us with the perfume of the Holy Spirit, God has made us partakers of the relationship which Jesus the Son shares with God the Father in the Holy Spirit.

Well, enough of this theology stuff.  God has wasted the perfume of his very self on us.  He has wasted the life-giving blood (the life) of Jesus the Son on us in the gift of the Holy Spirit to us.  I have said "wasted".  This is not a very nice thing to say of us, especially as we know that God loves us dearly, indeed loves all people dearly even the most evil of us who have ever lived.  Yet, when we look at the whole condition of human existence – the wars, the poverty, the diseases, the way we betray and abuse one another, our pride, our self-involvement, our self-indulgence, our self-righteousness, the way we judge one another – it would make more sense for us in like manner to Judas the thief and betrayer to turn to God and say, “Why have you wasted the gift of yourself on us. You should destroy us all and start again!”

Well, here is how Mary’s act is so significant, why it was such a beautiful thing.  Of all the disciples, only Mary seemed to know who Jesus is and understood that her beloved friend was going to die.  Knowing no other way to express her overwhelming grief at knowing Jesus would die, she rather spontaneously took a bottle of very fine, very expensive, very pure perfume and wasted it on Jesus’ feet.  An act that simply says, “My heart is broken, but I understand that you must die.”  All she could do with her grief was this futile, wasteful act of preparing his feet for burial.

Mary’s beautiful act mirrors God’s understanding and deep grief over our wasted-ness and the inescapable fact that we, God’s beloved children, must die.  God is a grieving God not so much an angry God who demands “obey me or else”.  We are God’s beloved children and we, God’s beloved children, are dying by our own demise.  Of course, he’s upset about that.  God’s response to this isn’t to mope about barking out “They’re getting what they deserve”.  But rather, like Mary, God anoints us for our death and burial. Yet not with just any old perfume, but rather with his very self, the Holy Spirit, so that being made alive in the new life he created by Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection we also will live through death and be healed of Sin in our own resurrection.  

Instead of destroying us God the Father in an act of wasteful love sent God the Son who in an act of wasteful love gave his life as one of us and died so that God the Father and God the Son might wastefully give us their very life in the gift of God the Holy Spirit that we might live through death.  Praise be to God!  Praise be to God!  God understands us.  God understands that the end result of the dung of our lives is that we must die so that the disease of Sin will end, but out of his love for us he will raise us just as he did his only begotten and beloved Son, Jesus, because he has poured upon us the same Spirit that lived in him so that he may live in us and we may live through death.  

Just as we will live by the power of Jesus’ resurrection, we must now live according to it.  We who know Jesus must waste our lives just as he did, just as Mary demonstrates, we must waste our lives doing acts of extravagant love.  In gratitude, we must live our lives doing beautiful things.  True and abundant life is lived through acts of extravagant generosity and extravagant hospitality and extravagant service to others.  So, Go forth live a life of wasteful love.  Amen.