Valley Covenant Church: Recent Episodes
Valley Covenant Church
We apologize, there were technical difficulties resulting in the sermon being in 2 parts with some material missing.
We apologize for not having the entire sermon available for Sunday, October 30. We had technical difficulties as the sermon began and ended.
Listen as Dr. Melisa Ortiz Berry, Assistant Professor of History and World Christianity at Bushnell University, shares from Galatians 3:23-4:7.
Join us to hear from Rev. Gordon Ruddick as he shares about “Getting Through the ‘Slippy Parts’ of Life” from Psalm 73.
Listen as Dr. Terry Glaspey shares on 2 Corinthians 3:18 and how our spiritual life is a journey.
Hear about Jesus as our Good Shepherd from Dr. Agam Iheanyi-Igwe, Associate Professor of Bible and World Christianity from Bushnell University.
Hear from Grant Clay with ELLS International, speaking on Matthew 28:18-20, the Great Commission.
Hear a short message from our missionaries in Haiti, Johnny and Alison Aurisme. The main message is from Joy and David Dillon, Joy serves with OMF International.
The sound varies with the speakers, be ready to adjust your volume. Enjoy hearing from our missionaries in Colombia!
No sermon script this week. We apologize for the technical difficulties - the audio is blank for several minutes but then does come back on.
THE BEAUTY OF HIS LORDSHIP
Today we finish our series on “the beauty of the Lord.” We’ve looked at Christ from the perspective of his humanity, his wisdom, his mission, and his deity. And I am keenly aware of how utterly inadequate all of this has been when it comes to actually capturing Christ’s beauty. But ultimately, he is not really known through hearing a sermon or developing a particular theology, but through a faith that seeks to follow him in the struggles of everyday life, which is why today I want to conclude with the beauty of Christ’s lordship.
The phrases, “Jesus is Lord” or “the Lord Jesus Christ,” are two of the most common expressions in the New Testament. The single word “Lord” became a virtual synonym for Jesus. But what does it mean when we say Jesus is Lord? Does it mean he’s the “boss?” Is it a reference to his deity? Is it an expression of worship, or does it impact how we actually live?
When we look at the many ways the phrase is used in the New Testament, we discover that it captures all of this and more. Yes, there are many other titles for Jesus in scripture—he is the lamb of God, the Messiah, the Good Shepherd, the King, the light of the world, the Word make flesh, the Son of God, “the way, the truth, and the life,” the Alpha and Omega, and many other things. But when the apostles began composing their letters to young churches, they most often summarized it all with the single word “Lord.” Why?
When we remember that Jesus’ original followers were all Jewish and that the only scriptures they had were the Old Testament writings, we can begin to understand the profound connotations that came with the word “Lord.” In our English translations of the Old Testament, the word “Lord” is used hundreds of times as a title for God. When the letters are lowercase, they merely translate the Hebrew word “adonai,” which means “master,” and which could be a title for a person as well as for God. But when our English bibles put the word LORD in all caps, it is actually translating the Hebrew word “Yaweh,” which was the sacred, personal name of God.
By the time of Christ, most Jews couldn’t read Hebrew but relied on a Greek version of the Old Testament, which translated both of these Hebrew words with “Kyrios,” which in English is Lord. Consequently, it became the most common title for Jesus because it carried within it both the reality of his deity, as well as his role as our master. In other words, “Jesus as Lord” was a call to both worship and obedience.
Which is why understanding his Lordship is so important today. It seems to me that with many Christians, “Jesus as Lord” has been replaced by “Jesus my companion.” He has been recast into a pleasant but largely innocuous friend who is there to cheer us on or to offer us some modest advice. And should we choose to ignore his advice, well that’s okay, because we also see Jesus as a very long-suffering and non-judgmental friend. I hope that if you’ve learned anything from me over these last five weeks, it’s that such a view is a million miles away from the Christ we actually confront in the gospels.
Which is why Jesus himself took this title “Lord” so seriously. As he asked the crowds on one occasion, “Why do you call me Lord, and do not do what I say?” Or in the upper room on the night he was betrayed, after washing the disciples’ feet he tells them, “You call me teacher and Lord, and rightly so, for that is what I am.” Yes, later on that same night he tells his disciples that he does not view them as servants but as his friends, which is a crucial dimension of the Lordship of Christ. But we often forget that in that same passage he explains to them what he means by our becoming his friend, when he says: “You are my friends if you do what I command.”
In other words, by becoming our friend, Jesus does not stop being our Lord. Rather, he is a Lord who wants to be in a relationship with us that is not based on fear or an obligatory sense of duty, but on a deep, mutual, and voluntary love—and yet a love that recognizes the vast difference between Christ and ourselves, that ours is not a friendship of equals but one of a Master offering us a privileged status.
A half dozen times in that upper room Jesus tells his disciples, “If you love me, you will obey my commandments.” This means that warm feelings about Jesus or a distant admiration ultimately mean nothing. It is our obedience that counts. One of the most sobering warnings ever uttered by Christ comes at the end of the “Sermon on the Mount,” when he says:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!”
This is serious stuff. According to Jesus there are apparently a lot of people who have no problem calling Jesus their Lord, and yet who are not particularly interested in actually doing the will of his Father. Instead, they talk a good talk. They may even have profound theological insights and do spectacular things in Christ’s name, but in reality they have no vital connection to Jesus at all. They think they know Christ, but he clearly doesn’t know them.
You see, the Lordship of Christ is ultimately not about what we profess or some periodic gesture we may make. It’s not some vague, sentimental allegiance to Christ. It’s not about being connected to a church, or being engaged in charitable activities, or trying to be a good person. For Christ to be Lord, we must come to the end of ourselves—to wake up to the fact that we are blind, broken, and helpless apart from God. We have to come to a place where knowing God—which includes becoming like him—is the single most important desire in our life. All our values and perspectives and goals are now shaped by him.
It sometimes comes as a shock when people finally wake up to what the Lordship of Christ is really all about. Suddenly God doesn’t exist to do my bidding or to simply make life pleasant for me. God ceases to be a means to some other end (be it happiness or whatever), but he becomes an end in himself.
Suddenly we understand why Jesus kept telling people that becoming a follower of his involves a kind of dying—dying to our ego, our plans, our desires. Or to use a favorite metaphor of Jesus’, becoming his follower is to take up a cross and to begin a march upstream against the very currents we live in. But if his Lordship requires a dying, it also guarantees a resurrection that begins now, a resurrection to a whole new way of life—a life of deep peace and rest and renewal. To submit to Jesus as Lord is to allow him to make us into something new, something like him, something that begins on the inside, but shapes our outward life too.
And once we awaken to this basic reality, then so many of the difficult sayings of Jesus make perfect sense. When he tells us to take sin so seriously that if our right hand should cause us to sin it’s better to cut it off than to be cast into hell, we can hear these words as coming not from some cruel, controlling, and life-denying despot, but from a Lord who understands better than we do the crippling effects of our sin. He is a Lord who loves us too much to simply look the other way.
This also explains why the discipline of the Lord is such a big topic in the New Testament. Part of Jesus’ beauty is the utter seriousness with which he loves us. In fact, his discipline is love, or as the epistle to the Hebrews puts it:
My children, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his child. …God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
What all of this implies is that following Christ as Lord does not mean our lives will always be pleasant and easy. Not by a long shot. But this is precisely where “Jesus as Lord” can also be such a great comfort, for the scriptures declare, and his resurrection confirmed, that Jesus is not only Lord over those who turn to him, but he is actually Lord over all creation, including those forces of evil that at times seem to dominate our world. Jesus as Lord means that we can find shelter in the storms of life within his protective arms. Think of all those times in the gospels when the disciples became alarmed about something, and then suddenly they heard Jesus saying, “Don’t be afraid.”
As he assured his disciples just before his ascension, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” Christ is Lord and King over all the nations, even the ones who most flaunt his authority. This ought to be our hope and strength in those times when it seems evil is triumphant. As he told his disciples just before his own trial by fire: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome this world.”
So, how do we actually maintain this lordship of Christ in our lives? I would like to close today by offering you three ways through the use of three different prepositions. First, we need to learn how to live transparently before Christ. Ask yourself: Does Christ have any kind of presence in your conscious thoughts as you go about your day? Have you ever stopped in the middle of your day and simply said, “Lord, this is what I am feeling or thinking or struggling with right now”? Is self-examination and confession to God a regular part of your life? And if you do stop and simply try to be with God in silence and prayer, do you go the next step and actually give him the space to point out things going on in your life that perhaps you have conveniently overlooked? Do you find yourself growing ever more sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s promptings, whether it be a sense of what you ought to be doing, as well as what you ought to stop doing?
Without asking such questions, the image we have of ourselves may become a sham. For Christ to be Lord, we need to allow him to reveal who we really are and what he wants us to become. In human relationships, people who are completely closed or private are often people without a lot of close friends. If we want to be in close fellowship with God, we need to be ruthlessly transparent before him.
Second, not only must we live before Christ, we must learn to live obediently under him. I run into a lot of people today who prefer to stand over Christ, who are forever cherry-picking the New Testament for what they prefer to believe about him. Too many people keep the real Jesus at a distance. They prefer a vague role model, someone to admire from afar as you might admire a painting. They like all this Christian jargon about being loving and kind, but they prefer not to drill too deeply into what Jesus actually taught. He ceases to be their Lord and instead becomes a kind of spiritual backdrop.
Third, not only do we live before and under Christ, but his Lordship means living dependently in him or by him. Jesus once told his disciples: “Apart from me, you can do nothing.” Is this a reality in your life? Are you a self-confident person or a Christ-confident person? Do you find yourself turning to him when you make significant decisions, leaning on him when you are struggling, staying close to him when everything is going great and you are tempted to think you’ve got things under control? His Lordship means continually seeking to keep him in our conscious reality through all the means of grace God has provided: in prayer, scripture, worship, and fellowship.
Christian fellowship, in particular, is often the last thing we think of when we talk about Jesus as Lord, which is really tragic. Why is it that in the upper room, when Jesus is so intent on giving his disciples some critically important things to remember in his absence, that he gives the “new” commandment to love one another even as Christ loves us? Jesus didn’t come just to save individuals but a people whom he called his flock, his church, his bride. Christ can never be fully known unless we are deeply connected to other believers because other believers can display dimensions of Christ that we lack. They can also become a means for Christ to speak to us and hold us accountable. To have Christian friends is to be part of a bigger whole whose sum is greater than its parts. Mature Christian friends (and I emphasize that word “mature”) are among the greatest gifts God ever gives us.
Finally, let me say once again that Jesus as Lord means that I have discovered he is not a means to some other end in life, but Jesus in himself is the end, the goal, the fullness of life. To know him—to walk daily with him in the ebb and flow our ordinary days—is to find deep joy, peace, safety and wisdom; He is the way, the truth, and the life. Even in heaven he will be our window into the mystery of God, our means of being joined to God’s very life. In him and through him we will find everything we need. God in his essence will always be beyond our understanding, but in Jesus “the Lord God” is made visible, knowable, someone who has walked in our shoes.
So no matter who you are or where you are on this journey of knowing and following Christ, always remember that no matter how severe or difficult the road may get, Christ is right there in the midst of it, inviting you, shaping you, healing you, and drawing you to himself. Even in his discipline, his motive is always love. And over time, you will discover that the Lordship of Christ is your only place of real safety, peace, and rest. As he put it to the crowds that followed him:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Amen
THE BEAUTY OF HIS DEITY
Today is the fourth installment in our series on the “Beauty of the Lord.” In my first sermon I stressed the humanity of Christ, because that’s where we initially meet him, and it’s part of what draws us to him. He is truly one of us, someone we can relate to, understand, and learn from. But I also mentioned in that sermon that it became very obvious to his followers that Jesus was so much more than “just one of us.” In the end, those closest to Jesus found themselves actually worshipping him.
Today, most people are more than willing to accept the fact that Jesus was truly an historical human being. They even admire him as a great teacher or prophet, but they struggle mightily with the Christian claim that he was also, at the very same time, “God-come-in-the-flesh.” People assume that all the references in scripture to Jesus’ divinity were a later product of his overly devoted disciples, whose veneration of their master led them to invent this dogma. And to some extent, I can sympathize with where these people are coming from.
Yet when you read the gospel accounts, it was often the people closest to Jesus, those who loved him the most (including his own family), who were among the most blind or resistant to the reality of who he was. They were often just as baffled and confused about Jesus as the crowds that followed him. So where did this whole notion of his deity come from? Well, when you actually listen to the gospels, you discover that it came from Christ himself.
First, there was his overall behavior. As we have observed in this series, although his humanity was authentic, it was not broken like ours. He was someone the disciples could be with, talk to, enjoy, and yet for much of the time they were completely out of step with him. Jesus wasn’t crippled by their skewed perceptions and harmful behaviors. When we look at Jesus in the gospels and then take an honest look at ourselves, we can identify with Peter in Luke 5, when he pleaded with Christ, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
Second, there are those specific actions of Jesus that at first blush seem to usurp some of the primary functions of God. For example, he went around forgiving people of their sins, something that his enemies called blasphemous, since (as they put it) “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” And you know what? They were right. Now you might say to me at this point, “Well, didn’t Jesus command us to always forgive one another? So isn’t Jesus just doing what he taught?” No, he is not.
Let me explain. Imagine you are standing in your front yard and a neighbor becomes angry with you for something you didn’t do. Let’s say this neighbor really looses his temper and calls you some really bad things. But then the neighbor discovers his error, and apologizes. If you truly accept his apology and forgive him, you’ve done the Christian thing. But suppose that during his outburst of anger I should happen to walk by. I see what is going on, and when your neighbor apologizes, suppose that I suddenly interrupt and say to him, “I forgive you.” Now how would that sound to you? Wouldn’t it sound like the height of arrogance, since you’re the injured party, not me.
In fact, the only third party who could appropriately pull off such an act is God alone, for we all know that God is ultimately the offended party in all our sins. King David commits adultery with another man’s wife, then has her husband killed to cover it up, and then lies to the whole nation about it. He has injured a whole bunch of people from whom he needs forgiveness, and yet how does he express his repentance in Psalm 51? He says, “Against you [O God], and you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” This is why Jesus taught us in the Lord’s Prayer to daily ask God to forgive us for sins that we commit against other people. Yes, we need to ask forgiveness from those we hurt, but ultimately all our sins are an assault on God, since all moral goodness originates from him.
So when Jesus went around forgiving people of their sins, that was a very shocking thing to do. But that wasn’t all. He also went around declaring what was true and right without reference to anyone or anything other than himself. Even the prophets of the Old Testament were careful to preface their statements with “Thus sayeth the Lord…” But Jesus would simply preface his teachings with “You’ve heard it said, but I say to you…” And consequently we are told that the crowds were amazed at his authority, while his enemies kept asking, “Who does this guy think he is?”
But third, and most important of all, there is Jesus’ own self-disclosures about his relationship to God, which began early in his ministry. He used two very significant labels to describe himself. On many occasions he called himself “the son of man.” But at other times he called himself “the son of God.” And he didn’t use this second title in the universally generic sense of “a son of God,” but in the grammatically “absolute sense” of the (unique) Son. As he put it at the end of Matt 11:
All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
Probably one of the most helpful explanations by Jesus of what he meant by “the Son” is found in the 5th chapter of John’s gospel, where he lays aside all metaphor and talks in concrete terms about his relationship to God. He has just healed a cripple on the sabbath and his enemies are upset by this apparent violation of the law of Moses. And so we read:
…because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. In his defense Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.”
Even these orthodox Jews of Jesus’ day recognized that God worked every day—even on the Sabbath—holding the world together and sustaining it. They understood that Sabbath law was intended for human beings to keep, not God. But here comes Jesus claiming that he has this very same privilege as God. He doesn’t deny that he has just “worked” on the Sabbath by healing this man. Nor does he try to justify his actions by saying, “Hey, I’m just trying to imitate God by doing a little good on the Sabbath.” Rather, he asserts that because God is his father, he operates in the same way. This was a very shocking assertion that his enemies jump on in the next verse:
For this reason they tried all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
Now in one sense, their deduction was absolutely correct. Jesus was laying claim to some kind of equality with God. But in another sense, they completely misunderstood him. In their fiercely monotheistic view of God there were only two options left open for Jesus. He could either deny any equality with God, or, if he doesn’t, he’s setting himself up as another, rival God (much like the Roman emperors of that time often did). Either Jesus walks back from his claim, or polytheism has raised it’s ugly head once more in Israel.
What they could not see, and what Jesus goes on to describe, is a third option—the uniquely Christian, Trinitarian option. What Jesus tries to convey is that the Father and Son exist together in an organic, essential oneness. Listen carefully to his reply:
Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed.”
Jesus doesn’t back down, but neither does he operate on his own as another, independent god. His every move is dictated by what the Father is doing. And that includes two key aspects of the Father’s own deity. What are the two most common descriptions of God in the Old Testament? He is called the creator of all that exists, as well as the holy judge of all the earth, which is to say God alone has life in himself, as well as moral perfection. And so listen as Jesus lays claim to both functions in the next verse:
“For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it. Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son…”
As Jesus would say later in this same chapter of John, “the Son has life in himself”, and he will ultimately be the judge of all the earth. This is an extraordinary claim. It ought to arouse in us the thought, “Wow, it sounds like God has handed his core prerogatives over to the Son. Why would he do that?” The answer is given by Jesus in the next verse:
“…so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him.”
And in that one statement we have one of the most radical sayings of Jesus ever uttered. He is calling us to worship the Son together with the Father. Not as two beings, but as one. Indeed, later in this gospel Jesus will pull it all together by claiming, “I and the Father are one.”
We could explore other examples of Jesus’ own self-disclosure, but in the end it was the sum total of both Jesus own words and deeds that led to the great Christological claims of the New Testament, such as the apostle Paul writing to the Colossians: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.” Or as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews put it: “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.”
Now I would be doing you a disservice today if I were to imply that the deity of Christ is a simple and easy reality to understand and embrace. It most certainly is not. It’s a truth that has always been hard to understand, not to mention articulating. It took three centuries for Christians to come up with a way to express it that both preserved the profound mystery of God-in-Christ, and yet provided some boundaries that protected both Jesus’ very real humanity and his complete deity. The final formula (as expressed in the Nicene Creed) has been a wonderful buffer against all the erroneous theology that has plagued the church from the beginning, but it doesn’t make the reality any easier to grasp. As St. Augustine put it way back in the 5th century, we use frail, inadequate words to describe the God who came to us in Christ not because we want to, but because we have to. Human language and thought are all we have to work with.
But the very impossibility of fully capturing the incarnation of Christ is, in itself, a witness to the fact that it’s not a human invention. Otherwise a simpler story would have been settled on, with a simpler explanation. In fact, this is precisely what the early heresies of the church tried to do. In an effort to make Christ easy to believe in, they either violated his true humanity or his true deity. But as Jesus himself taught, we are called to hold both of these realities together in a seamless unity.
But if this whole topic is so difficult talk about, why am I claiming that there is a beauty in it? To put it simply, I run into a lot of people today who want nothing to do with organized religion of any kind, but who are still hungry for God. Yes, with some of them, their rejection of organized religion is a convenient way to enjoy the comfort of knowing that life is bigger than just this material world (which it is), but without all the bother of a God who might meddle or interfere in their lives.
But with many other people, there is a genuine hunger to know God up close and personal, but they don’t know where to find him. He remains illusive, mystical, distant—the great “whatever.” Their basic awareness of God is not wrong in itself, but the scriptures warn us repeatedly that God, in his essence, is beyond our understanding. And so the question that haunts these people is whether God wants to make himself know at all, and if so, how and where?
This is precisely where a mature, living Christian witness can be so powerful. By pointing people toward Christ, seekers are given the chance to see for themselves the beauty of God as revealed in Christ. The handful of dots they may have picked up in their search for God are suddenly connected as they witness the depth and breadth of God’s beauty in the person of Christ. As the apostle Paul put it:
We do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
Several weeks ago we reflected on the beauty of Christ’s humanity—how he reveals what a true humanity looks like. Today, in reflecting on the beauty of Christ’s deity, we discover what God truly looks like—all powerful and yet gentle, holy and yet approachable, just and yet merciful, a God whose heart is broken by our sin and suffering, who enters into our very suffering through Christ, so that he might rescue us from it.
In Christ we discover a God who is both infinitely beyond our comprehension, and yet who chooses to dwell “among us”—visible, knowable, and deeply approachable; a God who is both a holy mystery and yet a beauty we can know, draw near to, and worship, a God who invites us to become beautiful like he is.
On the night he was betrayed, Jesus was asked by Philip, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” Isn’t this the desire of all of us here today, to finally see God?
And how does Jesus answer? “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.”
If you want to see God, look deeply at Christ, and in that gaze you will discover the wondrous beauty of the Lord.
All praise and honor be to him, both now and forever,
Amen
THE BEAUTY OF HIS MISSION
Today we approach a third aspect of what makes Christ so beautiful. We have covered his humanity and his wisdom. Today I want to focus on his deeds. As we all know, talk is easy, but action is hard. The gospels spend as much time telling us what Jesus did as they do telling us what he taught, since in many respects “actions speak louder than words.” As Jesus himself taught, our actions reveal our true heart, and this was especially true in his own life.
Have you ever read the gospels with this question in mind: Just what did Jesus think he was actually accomplishing? Did he think he was creating a better world by giving it some good advice in his teachings? Was he trying to be a role model for people to emulate? Or did he think he was alleviating mankind’s suffering by going around doing a few good deeds?
Obviously people have approached this question in different ways, but let’s start by simply observing how Jesus spent his time. He wasn’t a recluse or a hermit. Yes, he regularly withdrew for brief periods to pray (sometimes all night). And toward the end of his public ministry, he seems to have spent more and more time focusing on a small band of his closest disciples. But generally he was a very public figure who was constantly surrounded by large crowds. Matthew’s gospel summarizes it well:
Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd (Matthew 9:35-36).
Teaching, preaching, and healing seemed to consume most of his time in all four gospels. But we shouldn’t overlook that even with such a public ministry he somehow found time to be available to individuals. For example, when a huge crowd was following him into the city of Jericho, he still managed to hear a desperate, blind beggar calling for help from the margins. Or when surrounded by a huge crowd and a sick woman came up behind him to merely touch the edge of his robe, he sensed her presence and responded accordingly.
Such examples are seen throughout the gospels and demonstrate the value Jesus placed on every individual. His parable of the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep in order to seek the lost one captures this very well. But not only did he value each individual, he always dealt with them as a whole person—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. He understood that human beings are multidimensional, and so he was just as attentive to people’s physical needs as their emotional and spiritual states. This is why the gospels dedicate so much space to how Jesus went around healing, feeding, comforting, and listening to people.
And yet, as we noted last week, he also understood very clearly that our spiritual center is really the controlling dynamic that shapes our life, and that our physical and mental well-being begins with whether God is at the very center of who we are. As he sat on the edge of a well near an outcast Samaritan woman, he put it to her this way: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.”
Or after miraculously feeding a large crowd, he tried to make them understand that physical food can only address a limited physical need, and that human existence requires so much more—the very life of God. And so he tells them: “For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. …I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.”
Because he understood this profound connection between a person’s spiritual core and their sense of well-being, he was able to diagnose with astonishing accuracy what a specific individual needed. And so, when a religiously pious and wealthy young man comes to Jesus and expresses an uncertainty about his spiritual state, Jesus doesn’t offer him some mystical remedy or religious activity. Rather, he makes a very concrete and practical suggestion. He puts his finger on what was really at the center of the young man’s struggle—his excessive attachment to his own personal wealth.
This pattern is repeated over and over in the gospels. With the confused Jesus was gentle and instructive, with the arrogant he could be confrontative, and with the complacent he would sometimes be uncomfortably shocking. And yet there was also a consistency about all his dealings. He didn’t treat the poor with condescension nor the rich with deference. He treated women as equals, children as valuable, lepers as approachable, and morally bankrupt people as redeemable human beings.
And especially noteworthy for the time and culture he was born into, Jesus treated non-Jews as equally worthy of God’s love as his own countrymen. For him all people were equally broken and in need of God’s forgiveness and renewal. Consequently, Jesus could be loyal to his friends and family, and yet still be willing to call them out when needed. And while he was always non-retaliatory toward his enemies, that didn’t mean he wasn’t willing to expose their hypocrisy and evil when he saw it.
But of all the recorded deeds of Jesus, the most numerous (and yet the most difficult to believe for many people today) are his miracles. They virtually fill all four gospels and are sometimes so astonishing as to overshadow everything else. And because human history is filled with examples of famous people being ascribed exaggerated powers by their ardent followers, it’s easy for a reader today to assume that this is what is happening with Jesus. And with this assumption, of course, is the collateral belief that rational, educated, modern people are too smart to buy into all these miraculous events.
But the actual fact is that many such people do.
In fact, millions of rational, educated, modern people today fully embrace the historical reality of the miracles recorded in the New Testament. The list includes scientists, philosophers, academics, and people of every professional walk of life. So the bigger question is why do they find such stories to be true? And when I ask them, the answer usually lies not in the miracles themselves, but in how the miracles are such an essential part of the whole “Jesus reality” as portrayed in the gospels.
For example, as far back as the 18th century, people have been trying to separate the miracle stories from the “historical Jesus.” But in every case the resulting Jesus has proven to be merely the imaginary creation of the individual who’s doing the deconstruction. This is because if you remove the miracles, what is left is a mere phantom—a vaguely disembodied Jesus who loses all historical credibility. He’s not even “the great teacher” anymore, since many of his greatest teachings are thoroughly linked to specific miracles.
In part, the reason people struggle with the miraculous today is due to the very large dose of scientism and materialism we have all been inoculated with. The assumption has been pounded into our heads since childhood that we are locked within a material world that is completely controlled by a relentless cycle of cause and effect, an assumption that makes it extremely difficult for us to appreciate that there might be larger dimensions to reality. And yet even in spite of this inbred skepticism, the recent explosion of “spiritual but not religious” people bears witness to how untenable this assumption really is. For once someone awakens to the reality of God, then the whole materialist myth collapses. Suddenly reality has innumerable possibilities, including the miraculous.
In the end, it’s only within the context of the whole story of Jesus that we become aware of why the miracles are not only believable but just what you would expect from a person like Christ. Yes, they certainly astonish us, but they don’t have to offend our sense of what is possible. As Jesus told his own disciples, “With God all things are possible.”
But it’s also important to note how extremely careful Jesus was in not allowing belief in the miraculous to become a substitute for a genuine, healthy faith. He would heal someone, and then instruct them not to broadcast it about (a request that was often ignored). He understood the difference between a miraculous intervention of God and the merely sensational. He didn’t want the crowds to follow him in order to see a traveling “miracle show.” For him the miraculous was always meant to solicit faith in God’s grace and not something that would merely astonish people.
What is noteworthy in the gospels (and often overlooked) is that Jesus’ greatest “miracle” was how he could transform people’s lives. A prostitute, a religious ruler, a Samaritan woman, a hated tax collector—no one was outside Jesus’ ability to impact in a deeply transformative way. None of the crippling struggles that are common to us all—unbelief, obsession, shame, moral confusion, destructive habits of all kinds—nothing was outside his ability to heal.
And for myself, this ability of Christ to change people continues to have a profound effect on me. For I am just as broken and in need of healing as all these people who fill the gospels. Their stories are mine. Their doubts, fears, guilt, and pathos are mine too. These accounts are not meant to entertain us. They are signposts of who we are and what we can become if we allow Christ in.
Finally, and most importantly, in the midst of all the preaching, teaching, healing, and ministering that consumed the vast majority of Jesus’ time, there was always in the background some kind of “mission” that he was on, a mission that Jesus became increasingly specific and vocal about toward the end. In Matthew’s gospel, as he begins his final journey toward Jerusalem, on four occasions he describes his mission in these terms:
From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on third day be raised to life.
In John’s gospel this mission is alluded to by the use of the word “hour.” On several occasions while teaching in the temple in Jerusalem, the authorities wanted to seize him but we are told they could not “because his hour had not yet come.” But when he journeys to Jerusalem for the last time, he announces: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”
In Luke’s gospel we have Jesus describing his ultimate mission in this way: “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is completed!” And what was the central purpose of this mission? Quite simply, is was the conquest of sin and death through his atoning sacrifice. As he said to his disciples: “…the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Although we do not have time in this sermon to explore this core mission with any kind of depth, let it be said for now that the death and resurrection of Christ are the central focus of all four gospels. 50% of John’s gospel, 40% of Mark, 28% of Matthew, and 25% of Luke cover just the last week of Jesus’ life. This was the consummation and goal of everything he taught and did, since his death and resurrection make possible the forgiveness of sins and renewal in the Holy Spirit. It is the central and most important theme to be found throughout scripture, the deepest insight we have into the very heart of God. As the apostle Paul writes: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself…he who knew no sin became sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”
In short, Jesus came to die so that we might live. He took upon himself the consequences that our sins deserved. He was called to endure death so that he might conquer it once and for all, thereby saving all who trust in him from death. He knew this from the very beginning of his ministry, as did others such as John the Baptist, who at the very beginning proclaimed: “Behold the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
But to have this mission and to accomplish it did not come easy. It required of Jesus the same kind of deep faith to which we are all called. And this is because Jesus was truly human, truly one of us. And nowhere is this seen as vividly than the events leading up to his death. Just prior to the last supper, as his enemies were circling ever closer, Jesus opened up to his disciples with a kind of vulnerability rarely seen before, as we read in John 12: “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.”
Here he begins to display two things at once—both a revulsion towards what lay ahead and yet a determination to see it through out of love and obedience to God. And what caused this struggle? Was it a fear of death? No, not at all. Many people throughout history have faced death squarely and bravely. No, what troubled Jesus so deeply was what the apostle Paul described in the passage I quoted above—“he who knew no sin became sin.” Although it’s impossible for any of us to fully enter into, by “becoming sin” Jesus suffered that very real separation from God that all sin produces, something the rest of know only too well. But it’s an experience Jesus had never known before.
There is a great mystery here, and we are entering holy ground, but we see this deep suffering of Jesus grow as the apostolic band traveled from the upper room to the garden of Gethsemane, as recorded in Matthew’s gospel:
Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” (Matthew 26:36-38)
For the first time in the gospels that we know of, he reaches out to his closest friends for their support in prayer. The physical arrangement of this scene captures well how increasingly isolated and alone he was becoming. He leaves the larger group and takes three disciples. Then he leaves the three and walks ahead to a place by himself. Then we read: Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
This moment captures so clearly what real faith looks like. These two opposing desires within Jesus are battling it out in the presence of God. Jesus doesn’t relish what lies ahead. He isn’t wanting to be separated from his Father, which is to experience hell itself. Even now—even at this late moment—he wants to know if it’s possible to take some other course. And yet, regardless of what happens, his most enduring desire is to do his Father’s will.
Soon Judas and a mob arrive to arrest him. He is dragged before the high priest, then Herod, and finally Pilate. Eventually he is beaten, flogged and sent off to be executed. They impale him on a wooden cross, while various groups stand around either mocking him or weeping for him. After about six hours he suddenly cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
This was his darkest moment. Death was very near, and God seemed completely absent. Like all of us, his faith had nothing to hang on to except the one thing he knew to be true. His words are a quote from Psalm 22, which is a psalm composed by King David at a time of great desperation. Jesus seized upon these words because they captured where he was at. But he was also fully aware of how this psalm concludes. After his opening lament, David seizes upon the one sure thing he can hold on to when he says: “Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast. From birth I was cast on you; from my mother’s womb you have been my God.”
Jesus knew, in spite of the present situation, that his Father could bring him through death, and so the last words of Christ recorded in the gospels are these: “It is finished! Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last.
Jesus had a faith that could see beyond its own suffering and distinguish between those two realities we face every day—between our immediate experience and what we’ve learned over a lifetime regarding God’s faithfulness. It was a faith that could even see beyond the grave. And ultimately, it was a faith that saved us all.
This is the moment when the beauty of our Lord shines most brightly. And in that light we see God most clearly.
Thanks be to God.
Amen
THE BEAUTY OF HIS WISDOM
It’s good to be here again. As I mentioned last week, for the month of July we are simply focusing on Christ—reflecting on various dimensions of his person that make him so beautiful. Last week we began with the beauty of Christ’s humanity, that he was truly, authentically human, and yet human in a way that is not broken like us. In him we see what our humanity was meant to be like and what he is calling us to become.
Now for people with only a marginal knowledge of Jesus, his humanity is usually not the first thing that comes to their mind. It’s his role as the “great teacher” that is often the first thing they mention, and for good reason. When you listen to his teachings, it quickly becomes apparent that Jesus had an acute understanding of life, as well as an ability to articulate it in memorable ways that have never left us. Think of the many phrases and idioms that people use in everyday speech that come directly from Jesus, even though they may be unaware of it: “judge not lest you be judged,” “consider the lilies of the field,” “don’t cast your pearls before swine,” “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” “blessed are the peacemakers,” and many, many others.
Then there are the memorable stories he told (the “parables”) that have become part of the world’s treasury of wisdom, such as “The Good Samaritan,” “The Prodigal Son,” “The Sheep and the Goats,” to name just a few. Finally, we are given a number of extended discourses by Jesus in the gospels, the most famous of which, the “Sermon on the Mount,” has been described by people from all around the globe (including many non-Christians) as the world’s most sublime description of how life should be lived.
But having said all that, it’s surprising how much of what Jesus actually taught has been either ignored or misappropriated, while his name has been commandeered for all sorts of political, social, and even military agendas. From 12th century crusaders to German fascists in the 20th century to the Ku Klux Klan in America, Jesus has been hijacked for all sorts of causes that have no connection whatsoever to his actual teachings, which is why it’s so important that we know what he really taught.
The specific content of his teaching covers a wide range of topics, but taken together there are several themes that dominate. Jesus was most unequivocal when it came to the place of God in our lives. As I mentioned last week, Jesus was a God-obsessed man. For him God was the center and foundation for everything—the essential reality that shapes everything else, the God who is both transcendent and yet close, overwhelmingly holy and yet approachable. And so when asked which was the greatest command, Jesus replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.” It’s easy to become distracted by the various threads of Jesus’ teachings and lose sight of this central motif.
For him God was the sovereign Lord and Ruler over all life, the Creator and Judge of all the earth. But at the same time, he saw God as our “Father”—the One who loves us beyond our ability to comprehend, who is always present, longing to rescue us from our self-imposed exile. All of these dimensions of God can be heard side by side throughout the gospels.
And so, like the Old Testament prophets, Jesus was emphatic that only by learning to trust in God’s care and submitting to his guidance can authentic life flourish. Only with God can we be fully known and become fully human. Jesus called the sphere in which this kind of life can flourish the “kingdom of God.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean that his followers will be spared all the everyday trials that people commonly experience—temptation, stress, injustice, accidents, sickness, or death. Rather, he taught that in the very midst of such times we can know that God is not only in control but working through these very events for our good, as mysterious and difficult as that may be to embrace. This is part of the paradoxical reality that Jesus taught—that out of suffering can come a quality of life that is far better. Think of the “beatitudes”: blessed are the poor in spirit…blessed are they who mourn…blessed are they who hunger and thirst…blessed are those who are persecuted...
Part of this paradox is that to love God before all else requires the death of our own self-absorption and ego-centric way of living. When we make God our central focus, we begin to shift from an existence that is all about me to one in which I begin to see the world through God’s eyes, a world in which other people become increasingly more important. Which is why, after giving us the first and greatest command to love God, Jesus quickly follows with the second command to love our neighbor as ourselves. And who is my neighbor? As he tells us in the parable of the Good Samaritan, my neighbor is whoever God puts in my path. Suddenly, my little, self-centered world is thrown open to the world around me.
Which leads to is another major theme in Jesus’ teaching. All this talk of loving God with my mind, heart, soul, and strength points to internal qualities, which is why Jesus emphasized so strongly that who we are on the inside ultimately determines how we live on the outside. This often runs counter to how we actually function. We tend to engage in outward behaviors that project an image of what we want other people to think we are. We usually assume that our outward image comes close to who we actually are on the inside, even though on closer self-examination we can usually see some degree of dissonance. But by and large, we dress, act, talk and respond either to make a certain impression on people or because of various social expectations. And this includes even situations when we behave in a morally admirable way. It’s common for us to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons, and as a result very little permanent good endures. As Jesus said to some of the most outwardly moral and religious people of his day, from the 7th chapter of Mar:
“What comes out of a man is what makes him unclean. For from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a person unclean.”
Now this is admittedly a very challenging truth, but if we reflect on it for a while, we have to admit that these inner impulses of ours ultimately control how we behave on the outside. We may work hard to project an image of ourselves to the outside world that is admirable, but these untamed inner desires and attitudes keep popping up at the most embarrassing moments, revealing who we really are. They may appear as merely a bit of gossip or a cold shoulder or an angry outburst. But what we truly need is a renewal that begins on the inside.
And so when a highly religious leader named Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night with the express hope of understanding what it was that Jesus actually taught, Jesus replies:
“I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” “How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!” Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.”
In the waters of Christian baptism we offer God our repentance and faith, and in the outpouring of God’s Spirit into our hearts we begin this journey of deep, inner transformation. Each of these two movements are found throughout the teachings of Jesus. Unfortunately, in many quarters of the Christian world today, all we hear about is the forgiveness of God. But you can’t listen to Jesus and not discover that this is only half of the gospel. What Jesus offers is forgiveness of sins coupled with renewal in the Holy Spirit. To truly know God’s forgiveness is to be radically transformed by it.
Consequently, Jesus had little tolerance for narrow moralists who perpetuate this myth that we can be fixed by a mere modification of our outward behavior. For example, the religious elite, who would harass him for curing someone on the Sabbath or for ministering to a prostitute, were themselves thoroughly pervaded on the inside by an uncaring, unfeeling, judgmental, and censorious spirits. They wanted Jesus to join them in stoning a woman to death for her adultery, and yet they were turning a blind eye to their own sinfulness. People like this, who often focus on a handful of hot-button issues, usually end up losing touch with what God is all about, as he warns us in Matthew 23:
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”
Such meticulous outward morality was the kiss of death to Jesus. He continually exposed hypocrisy, self-justification, pride, selfishness, and unbelief. The great virtues for him were humility, contrition, faith, honesty, justice, compassion, and an active, practical love.
But having said all that, this does not mean that Christ was morally permissive or vague about our behavior. On the contrary, he could be very specific and unyielding on a wide range of moral topics like the sanctity of marriage, the need for radical honesty in all our dealings, care for the poor and suffering, the pitfalls of wealth and anxiety, the call to love all people—even our enemies.
Another huge focus of his teaching involved his own unique relation to God, something I am going to save for two weeks from today. But at this point I should confess that a single sermon like this cannot come close to doing justice to Jesus’ teaching. There are numerous themes he employed that build on what I’ve mentioned. How do we live in this world without becoming like it? What does it mean to be members of his body, the church? What is the Christian’s relationship to the law of Moses? Jesus talked a lot about the final judgment, false prophets, as well as profound insights into marriage, prayer, work, and a host of other things. Indeed, as the apostle Paul put it, “In [Christ] are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”
But equally important to what Jesus taught was how he taught. For starters, Jesus was not a philosopher, in the sense of speculating on the nature of reality. As we read at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: “When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.”
In other words, he spoke with an authority that was striking and even dogmatic sounding. He spoke as if he had an intimate, first-hand knowledge of what was true and good and beautiful. His understanding of life was as clear and concrete to him as the earth beneath his feet. And in particular, he spoke as someone who had a direct and deeply personal connection with the most important reality of all—God. As he claimed just prior to his arrest and crucifixion:
“When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. When he looks at me, he sees the one who sent me. I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness. As for the person who hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge him. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day. For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it. I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.”
That’s an incredible claim, isn’t it? In an age such as ours, when any claim to “truth” is looked upon with suspicion, these words of Christ can sound rather extreme and even arrogant. And to many of his contemporaries, they even sounded blasphemous. But surprisingly, Jesus was never defensive or threatened by those who refused to listen to him. Instead he claimed that everything he taught would resonate with those who were genuinely seeking God. In other words, he claimed that the truth of his teaching was self-authenticating, or as we read in John’s gospel:
Not until halfway through the Feast did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach. The religious leaders were amazed and asked, “How did this man get such learning without having studied?” Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from him who sent me. If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. He who speaks on his own does so to gain honor for himself, but he who works for the honor of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him.”
You see, for Jesus, God is the one inescapable, foundational reality in life, a reality that presses in upon all of us from a thousand directions, beginning the day we are born. In the passage cited above, he claims that if anyone sets out to know and follow God, the journey itself will enable them to know whether Jesus teaches the truth or not.
In other words, it’s not the coffee-house philosopher who has access to real knowledge, but only those who seek God by seeking to live out what God is teaching them. Only by testing the thread of God’s truth in the crucible of real life can we ever discover whether Jesus has tapped into reality or whether he is deceiving us. In other words, truth can only be known in the living of it and not by abstract contemplation or debate. Jesus claimed to speak for God, and that we can validate whether he speaks for God by wholeheartedly pursuing God ourselves. In the end, what Jesus offers isn’t primarily a mystical experience or a religious philosophy or a set of rules or an ideology to mindlessly embrace, but a whole new way of life.
And I can honestly say this has proven true in my own life. I became an adult in the 1960s when my whole generation was questioning everything. Many of us didn’t want to be coddled by fantasies or controlled by social conventions or sheltered by affluence. We wanted to know reality up close and personal, even if that meant confronting unpleasant truths about ourselves. For myself, after pursuing a number of philosophic dead-ends, I began reading the gospels and hearing Jesus’ invitation to “know” the truth, to let it enter into my very bones. On the one hand, the choice was entirely mine—a journey that would require some painful honesty, as well as embracing some radically new perspectives. But on the other hand, what choice did I have when everything I knew to be real kept pointing to him?
But what gave me the confidence to even attempt to follow him was his promise to be there with me through it. And he promised that what I would discover along the way was freedom. Freedom from illusions and the pull of my own past. Freedom from all the mind-numbing influences of prejudice, materialism, and egoism. In the end, he promised the possibility of becoming human like he is human. I responded, and although I still have a long, long way to go, I would echo the witness of millions of people that Jesus is true to his word.
And for myself, what still draws me most to Jesus’ teaching is not simply how he reads the human heart in general, but how he reads my own heart. When I listen to his teachings with an attentive and open mind, he penetrates the false image I have of myself and exposes both who I really am and what he wants me to become. Most of the time the gap is enormous, but included with his searching insights are his equally abundant assurances that he is here with me—in me—working to create the very person he desires.
And over time I have actually seen his life slowly shaping mine, making it into something new, something better. He continually reminds me that even his most severe demands come from someone who has walked in my shoes, knows my struggles, and loves me unreservedly. He never compromises his demands; he still holds me accountable when I resist him, and he is more than willing to discipline me when needed. But love is always his motive.
And when I listen humbly, prayerfully, diligently, and with a heart of obedience, I am drawn into a living relationship with the Master himself.
May we all be shaped by the beauty of his wisdom, for he is the path to life.
Amen
THE BEAUTY OF THE LORD (His Humanity)
Well, here we are again. Over thirty years ago I was standing in this very spot while you began a search for a new pastor. I assume that those of you who were around back then are just like me—a good deal older and tad bit slower, but also excited to see what God has in store for Valley Covenant. What impressed me about this church back then was how everyone stepped up and helped out wherever it was needed—teaching, preaching, visiting, praying, whatever. In fact, you actually grew during that period. The experience taught me volumes about the maturity and giftedness of this congregation.
I once heard that in the Covenant denomination the average tenure for a pastor is seven years, so you’ve been very blessed to have had such stability with Steve and Beth. Over the last 40 years at Trinity Covenant Church in Salem, there have been six different pastors, which is fairly close to the average. I mention this because I lived through all six of those pastoral changes, and I learned a crucial lesson: pastors come and pastors go, but the one essential constant in the life of any congregation always remains the same, and that constant is Christ.
I know that sounds ridiculously obvious and even simplistic, but it’s actually a reality that we can easily take for granted, and by doing so we unknowingly reduce Christ to a mere backdrop—a kind of ecclesiastical wallpaper. But when he’s the vital, living center of a congregation’s life, then nothing—not even the loss of a beloved pastor—can shake its focus, joy, and confidence. And so, for the month of July, I thought I would offer you a series of sermons to help all of us center again on that one truth. I would like us to look at our Lord from the perspective of his humanity, his wisdom, his mission, his deity, and his Lordship. Taken as a whole, my prayer is that we might find a renewed awareness of Christ’s amazing beauty.
I realize that’s asking a lot from just a handful of sermons. But all preaching is ultimately an immense act of faith, and so I would appreciate your prayers during this month.
Now it might seem obvious that we should begin today with the humanity of Jesus, but this is actually a very neglected topic. Because we worship a living, resurrected Christ who indwells us individually and corporately—who is with us here, now—because we talk about Christ with such exalted language, we can unconsciously adopt the mistaken idea that, yes, the eternal Son took on human flesh at a point in time, but that’s over and done with. We treat the human Jesus as merely a temporary phenomenon, something we can read about in the gospels, but which is all in the past.
When we start thinking like this, we have unknowingly blundered into one of the earliest distortions of the Christian faith. Way back in the 2nd century there were people who claimed that Jesus’ humanity was just a temporary guise that he took on, and that the Jesus who had walked among us was primarily the divine Son masquerading as human. Some even claimed that his physical presence only “seemed” to be real, and that his body was a mere illusion. This view was called “Docetism,” from the Greek word δοκειν (which means “to seem”). All of these views were roundly rejected by the vast majority of Christians and officially condemned at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.
What the New Testament bears witness to, and what the early church defended so vigorously, was the simple fact that Jesus of Nazareth was fully, authentically, emphatically human and yet divine, all at the same time. He was not God masquerading as a man, or a mere man who somehow became super-charged with God. He was the unique, never-to-be-repeated phenomenon of God becoming authentically human, without ceasing to be God. What’s more, in his resurrection and ascension, Christ took this divine/human unity back into heaven with him, insuring for all eternity that humanity can indeed live in union with God.
Luke, the gospel writer who goes into the greatest detail about the miraculous circumstances surrounding Christ’s birth, also goes to the greatest pains to emphasize his genuine humanity—that Jesus had to grow and develop just like the rest of us do. As we read in his gospel:
And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him. [And then later he writes] …And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.
In short, Jesus had to develop physically, mentally and spiritually. The process involved the ordinary kinds of learning and maturation, including infancy, pubescence, and adulthood. He had to learn how to co-exist within a family, how to read, how to participate in a larger community (including learning his father’s trade of carpentry). All of this involved asking questions, wrestling with problems, and learning to tackle new responsibilities.
Admittedly, Jesus was exceptionally bright and perceptive. By the time he was twelve, he was already displaying an astonishing insight into spiritual matters, as we see when his family visited Jerusalem and Jesus astounded the rabbis with his understanding. Yet not only did Jesus have to develop like the rest of us, but he also experienced the same physical limitations we all face. Throughout the gospel accounts we witness Jesus enduring weariness, hunger, and physical pain. Three of the gospels describe an event where Jesus was so exhausted he literally slept through a storm at sea.
What’s more, his interactions with other people produced the same wide range of emotions we all know so well—surprise, joy, sadness, anger, humor, longing and disappointment. The New Testament does not give us a static, ghostly Jesus who hovers above our ordinary struggles. Instead, we read of Jesus weeping at the death of a close friend, enjoying a wedding feast, becoming angry at people who refused to admit they are wrong. Jesus knew loneliness and misunderstanding (even from his own family). He had a wide range of acquaintances, from all walks of life, and yet retained a coterie of especially close friends. And in his greatest hour of need he wasn’t ashamed to lean on them (as in Gethsemane).
But in order to really understand the humanity of Jesus, we first need to ask ourselves: What it is that makes us most human? What does it mean, in practical terms, to be human at all? Philosophers, scientists, poets, and theologians have labored for centuries to isolate key characteristics that separate us from mere animal life. Usually the list includes things such as our rationality, creativity, moral awareness, spirituality, and so forth. We are thinking, creating, praying, choosing, self-reflective beings. We have basic instincts that we share with the animal world, but we are also capable of critiquing and controlling them.
But does this capture the essence of our humanity? Another way to approach this question might be to ask: What is the opposite of being human? Or to use its antonym, what does it mean to be inhuman? Our dictionaries use adjectives like cruel, savage, heartless, which all describe how a particular (inhuman) person treats another person. These adjectives assume that being human (or inhuman) has something to do with how we relate to other persons.
Or take the word “person” that I just used, and which we often employ as a synonym for a human being. To be a person means that I possess certain qualities, but specifically I am one person among other persons. This explains why we often use the term “impersonal” to describe behavior that is detached, remote, cold, and less than fully human.
What all this language conveys is that a core dimension of being human is that we are beings who are designed to live in relation to others. We possess the gifts of language, perception, reflection and moral choice specifically for the purpose of living in meaningful way with others. Indeed, such relationships are essential to our very existence. There is ample medical evidence that people who have become disconnected from other people do not function well physically and psychologically. Without the participation of other humans in our lives, we begin to atrophy mentally and emotionally.
What all this boils down to is that we are beings who need to be known deeply by others and to know others deeply in response. And in this process of disclosure and discovery—this exchange of understanding—we hopefully develop what we call “love.” That is, we develop a deep and practical concern for the other person, as well as receiving that same concern back.
And we see this powerful impulse throughout Jesus’ life. He wasn’t some solitary hermit or mystic who lived primarily alone. He came from a large family and had numerous friends. He traveled with twelve very close companions. He enjoyed the company of people even in festive ways. In fact, his enemies called him a drunkard and profligate simply because he was willing to participate in gatherings where alcohol was consumed and people were sometimes of questionable morality.
But nowhere was this deep human need to “know and be known” as fully satisfied for Jesus than in his communion with God. This, for him, was the tap root that fueled his every waking moment. As he said to his closest disciples: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”
Jesus understood (far better than most of us) his utter dependence on God for every breath he took, every thought he had, every effort he made. Jesus was a God-obsessed man. This explains why prayer played such a huge role in his life. There was a profound “knowing and being known, loving and being loved” that existed between Jesus and God that shaped everything else in his life. Consequently, when asked what was the greatest of all the commandments, Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength. This is the first and greatest commandment.”
But having God at the center of his life didn’t protect him from experiencing temptation, conflict, misunderstanding, hostility, and a whole array of moral conundrums. As the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, Jesus was tempted “in every way just like us.” We instantly want to spiritualize that verse and assume that his temptations must have been on some exalted level, but the author of Hebrews was correct—his temptations were just as mundane as ours. For example, take his famous “temptation in the wilderness.” In Matthew 4 we read:
Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”
Now the setting here may seem overly dramatic, but it actually captures one of the most ordinary, mundane trials of human existence. Jesus was led by God to a desolate place in the Judean wilderness where food was not accessible. I have walked in this same locale in Israel, and it’s hard to imagine a more God-forsaken place on the planet. What’s more, Jesus was clearly directed by God to remain there for a long period of time. We have records of other people fasting for forty days, and the impact it had on their physical bodies was devastating. You are literally undergoing starvation, reduced to the barest level of existence. Various bodily functions are at the point of shutting down. So when the text says, “he was hungry,” we need to understand what an understatement this is. He was starving to death.
Consequently, it’s no surprise that precisely at this point the most common-sense, logical, and natural suggestion should present itself to him. “Jesus, if you are God’s son, if he truly loves you, then your suffering like this can’t possibly be from God, can it? Food is a God-given necessity. It’s a normal and essential ingredient to life. Consequently, there is nothing morally wrong with eating to sustain yourself. So in the name of all that makes sense, Jesus, feed yourself!”
Can you identify with this? I can. And in that powerful and yet subtle temptation we come face to face with the core temptation of our own human existence: Does God know what he is doing—especially when he takes something away from us that is perfectly normal, healthy, and innocent? Can God be trusted? Who really knows what is best for us—we ourselves or God? Is our physical existence the supreme good, or is life more than just this brief span of years?
And because Jesus was truly human, this temptation was intensely real. Which also means he possessed the capacity to make a free choice. And choose he did: Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
In short, Jesus chose to trust God in every aspect of his life, even in the hard times.
Now at this point someone might complain that the gospel accounts never show Jesus failing to do the right thing, and thus he isn’t truly “just like us.” For if there is one thing that characterizes our humanity as a whole, it’s our staggering capacity for committing all sorts of evil, large and small. And people are right that Christ displays an astonishing level of moral consistency. He shares in our basic humanity, but he also demonstrates a capacity for always doing the right thing at the right time. In fact, at one point he challenged his enemies to find any fault with him.
But does this make Jesus other than truly human? This question is crucially important, since it begs the bigger question of whether the essence of being human requires that we exhibit a propensity to do evil. Or is our own humanity actually a broken vestige of what we were intended to be?
There have always been people who justified their hurtful actions by claiming, “Well, I’m only human.” Such an attitude assumes that to be authentically human is to do hurtful things. And yet, if we happen to be the victim of that person’s hurtfulness, we might reply that such behavior is actually “inhuman.” And by doing so, we are indirectly bearing witness to the fact that words like good and evil are actually grounded in something real. Certain acts are intrinsically wrong, while others are right. And while virtually all of us are more than willing to admit that “none of us are perfect,” that very admission assumes that this is a flaw and not a virtue.
In other words, while it’s true that none of us are perfect, at the same time we know that we ought to be. In fact, our very humanity depends on it. The minute we allow our darker, hurtful impulses to control us and become the norm, we do not become more human but less. And so, when we run into someone like Jesus, who demonstrates an unblemished version of our humanity, we are shaken. We think, “Who is this guy? Is he for real?” This was precisely the reaction of those closest to him. But it’s also the very thing that kept them following him.
And here’s the best part. In spite of his extraordinary moral consistency, Jesus also demonstrated tremendous patience, compassion, and hopefulness toward his fellow human beings. The outcast, the morally confused, those crippled by their own awareness of how broken they were—these are the people Jesus sought most to reach and heal. The only people he reacted negatively toward were those who refused to admit how broken they actually were.
So what is my point in all of this—what does the humanity of Jesus actually mean to me and to you? At least two things. First, Jesus is not primarily a cosmic symbol or paradigm. He is not some religious ideal we’ve cooked up to inspire us. Nor is he an avatar, in the sense of a deity masquerading as a human. He was a fully historical person, and consequently, he is truly one of us. He knows the whole range of human experience and can relate to each of us as a human being. He knows our joys, sorrows, frustrations, and fears.
But second, his humanity is not crippled like ours. He demonstrates a quality of life that we are drawn to precisely because we see in him what our humanity should be. What makes Jesus beautiful for me is that he is human in a way that I long to be human. He displays a humanity that is complete and healthy, fully consistent within itself, a humanity that can display both mercy and justice, confrontation and tenderness, all at the same time and without any compromise; a humanity that is devoid of arrogance, greed, selfishness, fear, self-hate, and all the other ills we deal with daily. He displays a beauty that I long to know and share in.
Yes, Jesus was emphatically human. And yet, he was so much more. What this “more” involves we will explore in the weeks ahead. But ironically for some people, it’s his very humanness that often prevents them from taking him seriously. A tragic example of this can be seen in our gospel reading today, when he returned to his home town of Nazareth after having attracted a great deal of attention throughout the rest of the country.
The old saying, that “familiarity breeds contempt,” had come true. Because Jesus’ life was so patently human and ordinary in most respects, the people in his home town couldn’t see beyond that. They had seen him as a boy, they knew his whole family (who were certainly not perfect people). They were offended because they assumed his humanity was just as broken as theirs, and thus he had no right to act like their teacher. I can just hear them thinking, “After all, who does he think he is?” And the closing verse in that text captures the tragic result: And [Jesus] did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief.
And yet, for those who saw in his humanity something beyond their own brokenness, his beauty led them into a whole new way of life. And this is my prayer for us all. “Come, Lord Jesus—come and help us all to see your beauty once again.”
Amen
Jeremiah 33:14-16 “The Apple Tree” June 26, 2022 - Third Sunday after Pentecost
There once was a town with a Tree growing in the center of it. It was an apple Tree. It grew very tall, but some of its branches hung so low that when the apples were ripe even the youngest citizen of the town could reach up and pick one. And the fruit was certainly worth picking. It was scarlet red on the outside and snow white on the inside. The texture was crisp and the taste was sweet with just the right amount of tartness, and there was plenty of juice to run down your chin when you took a bite.
The town was very proud of its apple Tree. Though many of its residents had long since forgotten, the Tree was the reason for the town. The Tree had grown there before anyone ever lived there. It must have been planted by someone. Its branches were so beautiful and its fruit so sweet that it was certainly not a wild Tree. If anyone took a moment to think about it, she realized there must have been a Tree Planter. But after many generations, not many people of the town thought about it much. In fact, most of them assumed their own founders had planted the Tree.
“Made-in-the-Shade” was the name of the town. At first, the name reminded everyone that the town grew up under the shade of that wonderful Tree. But after awhile, “Made-in-the Shade” was simply a description of how people who lived there felt about their situation. It was, among the towns of earth, a beautiful little city. There was a nice green central park around the Tree, a main street with neat little shops that did good business, and well-cared-for homes with trimmed lawns and painted shutters. They had a fine school, plenty of jobs, and everyone had enough food. People were almost always kind to each other. And, of course, there were always plenty of delicious apples. So, folks who lived there thought they had it made.
One early fall day, however, some children were playing under the big Tree. Tired and a bit hungry, a boy reached up and pulled down an apple for a snack. It did not look quite right to him, a little smaller than usual and the skin was wrinkled. But the Tree’s fruit always tasted good, so he took a big bite. Then he made a face and spit it out. It was sour and dry and not at all crisp. He was surprised, but he simply dropped that apple to the ground and picked another. To his amazement, it tasted worse than the first. He tried yet another with the same result. The rest of the children watched him and then they too picked and tasted apples. Every one was terrible. They ran off to tell their parents.
Within an hour, almost the whole town gathered in the park. Nearly everyone took a bite out of an apple. They were all wretched. They propped several ladders around the Tree, hoping that fruit from the higher branches might be better. It was as disappointing as what they found lower down. No one knew what to do. They stood around in little groups and shouted at each other and tried to decide whom to blame for this disaster.
Finally, one old man waved his hand and shouted until he got everyone’s attention. Then he told them a Story he remembered from his mother, about a Tree Planter and about instructions for caring for the Tree. “We should have watered it,” he said, “and put fertilizer around it, and pruned its branches, and sprayed for insects. We neglected our Tree. So what can we expect?” What he said made everyone start shouting again. “Wait,” he tried to say, “there’s more to the Story!” But no one cared. They ran off in all directions.
Before you know it, a huge fire hose sprayed water on the ground on one side of the Tree and a dump truck poured manure on the other side. Men with pruning saws climbed ladders and hacked away at the branches. Women with garden sprayers coated every leaf and apple with insecticide. The Tree, taken for granted for so many years, was now the center of the most activity the town had ever seen! All the while, the old man stood off to the side, shaking his head, and wishing someone would listen to the rest of his Story.
They kept it up for a week, alternating water and fertilizer, and every once in awhile chopping off yet another limb or spraying an apple with poison. By the end of the week the Tree looked worse than ever. Much of its foliage was gone. The ground around it was knee deep mud and manure. What apples were left just fell off and laid there. No one wanted to eat apples soaked in bug killer. Eventually they all just went home and waited to see what would happen.
The Tree was never the same after that. Neither was the town. The Tree dropped all its leaves and no buds sprouted behind them. It stood bare in the sunlight and cast an ugly shadow over everything. People quarrelled with each other. Some moved away. To make up for lost business, shopkeepers raised prices. A few people began to go hungry. Several shops closed. Homeowners quit mowing their lawns and painting their shutters. Soon the whole city of Made-in-the-Shade looked as shabby as their Tree did now.
That winter was cold. The wind blew in great gusts and power lines came down as fast as they were repaired. To stay warm, townspeople lit fireplaces and wood stoves that had not been used for a long time. There was a shortage of firewood. No one knew who cut the first branch off the Tree. But soon everyone decided that a tree that no longer produced decent fruit was only good for one thing. Chainsaws buzzed in the park. Soon all that was left was the huge trunk. It was too massive for the unskilled woodcutters to fell. So it stood there with only the stubs of its once beautiful branches sticking out. It seemed like it was all over for the Tree and the town. No one even thought about apples. They were too busy trying to keep from freezing. It was a long, hard winter.
Then one rainy day in spring a man walked through the empty park and noticed something. There was a Branch on the Tree, and it had buds! Word spread swiftly and for the first time since that disastrous day of bad apples, the whole citizenry gathered again in the park. Almost everyone was sure that no branch had been spared from chainsaw and fire that winter. A number of them began to call it a miracle. But a few skeptics simply blamed the woodcutters and said that they were so stupid they had missed a perfectly good piece of firewood. One even called for a chainsaw to correct this oversight.
Too many people believed in the miracle to let them cut the Branch off right then. “Let’s see what happens,” they said. The old man whose Story had caused so much damage had tears in his eyes. “I told you there was more to the story.” he said, “This is the rest of it, this is the Promise.”
They waited on into spring. The buds on the Branch became delicate white blossoms tipped with pink. Pale green leaves grew behind the blossoms. One day a stiff breeze blew through the town and all the blossoms lifted away from the Branch and were carried into the air like a white bird soaring high. In a week or two everyone could see that the Branch was a true one. Nestled deep in the bright green leaves, tiny round fruit had set.
That summer was better than anyone expected. Some of the closed shops opened their doors again. A few old timers moved back to town. Children played in the park. Most everyone had enough to eat, and those who had more than enough shared with those who had little. Everyone watched the Branch.
By late summer, anticipation was running high. The Branch was covered with green apples. Streaks of red were just starting to appear. Those who had wanted to keep the Branch from being cut began to brag. “See,” they told the skeptics with excited optimism, “we told you. Before long we will all be eating apples again, just like it used to be.”
What the optimists did not reckon with, though, was the bitterness of the skeptics. No one likes to be shown wrong, and these folks were no different. So they proposed a test. “Let’s just pick an apple now,” the skeptics said, “and see if this Branch is really what you think it is.”
It was plain to see that the apples were scarcely ripe. Even those farthest along were still much more green than red. These folks had lived with apples all their lives and they should have known better. Yet they were all too eager, too full of anticipation to disagree much with the notion of tasting an apple now. A few quiet voices opposed the idea, but they were drowned out in shouts of, “Yes, yes, let’s have a taste!” You would have thought the old man would have stood up against the tasting, but all he would say is, “There’s more to the Story.” No one, though, was really listening to him.
Once again the whole town assembled under the Tree. It looked very strange, with its one green branch stretched out and loaded with fruit. The fruit itself looked delicious, large and smooth and shiny, though it was still clearly green and not yet ready to eat. A ladder was fetched and the spokesman for the skeptics (who was the same man who had called for a chainsaw in the spring) mounted it and grasped the largest apple he could reach. Of course, since it was green, it did not come easily. He twisted and pulled and almost tumbled off the ladder before it finally came loose in his hand.
From his pocket, the man on the ladder produced a pen knife. He opened it with his teeth, still holding the apple in his other hand. He plunged the knife deep into the apple’s flesh, and twisted it until he had dug out a bite-sized piece. Juice ran down his forearm, more juice than there should have been from a green apple. With a sarcastic flourish, he popped the bite into his mouth.
The sarcasm on his face became surprise. What he was chewing was the sweetest and best fruit he had ever tasted. Even green, it surpassed any other apple on earth. Yet he could not bear to admit it. He refused to be proven wrong again. He made his mouth pucker and twisted his jaw into a grimace. With all the force he could muster, he spat the delicious morsel onto the ground. “Sour!” he yelled, knowing it was a lie. “Sour and bitter and as dry as dust!”
How anyone could have believed him, especially the part about being dry—they all saw the juice—is hard to say. Yet most of them did. “Cut it off!” cried someone and others took it up. “Cut it off, cut it off, cut off that useless Branch!” The whole town was shouting and men were running for saws, while boys ran for axes. The few people who protested were drowned out in the hubbub.
In only a few minutes the largest chainsaw in town was oiled and gassed and ready. It started with a roar and the skeptic carried it up the ladder. There were two swift and careful cuts beneath and then the call of “Look out below!” as the saw descended upon the top of the Branch. There was a huge cracking sound as the Branch’s weight tore it free from the Tree. The man on the ladder was almost knocked off as it swept by him and then nearly toppled again as the Branch crashed down with such force that the ground shook.
Then the real mayhem began. More chainsaws coughed to life. Axes were swung. Even children’s pocketknives came out. In a few moments, the branch was merely firewood, splinters, and sawdust. Every leaf was crushed into the ground and every apple was smashed with an axe head. The chunks of wood were picked up and carried off. Though it was still summer, no few fireplaces were lit and the apple wood blazed up chimneys. Smoke filled the sky. Darkness covered everything, though it was still morning.
Unseen by anyone else, the old man and a few others lingered under the Tree. They searched among the crushed leaves and smashed apples and gathered a few seeds. They did not really know why. They just put them in their pockets or in their purses and went home.
That fall and winter were colder than the last, and most people left town for good. The power went out again and there was no wood left to burn. So the few who stayed huddled in blankets and waited and hoped for spring.
When spring came, the handful of people left in town came out to greet it with grim faces. Shops were boarded up and no children were to be seen. Made-in-the-Shade had fallen apart. It was not really a town anymore, and many houses were empty as the spring rains came down.
One morning though, a woman woke up to silence and light. The rain had stopped, and the sun came in through her bedroom curtains. She pulled them back and raised her window and a warm breeze wafted in. On the breeze came the scent of apple blossoms! She caught her breath with a gasp. Swift as the breeze had come, she gathered her friends. The women ran to the park and to the Tree. Beyond belief, it was there, the same Branch growing again in the same place on the Tree! Its leaves looked like emeralds and its blossoms were glowing white in the sun, but there was an even greater marvel. All over the Branch were apples! Ripe apples. Apples red as blood and shining as if lit from inside. The Branch had come again.
They did not pick any apples. They did not touch the Branch at all. They just stared and then turned and ran back to tell their men. At first they were not believed. The men were aggravated and angered by the silly story. But soon they themselves smelled the fragrance in the air. Persuaded, they and everyone left in town went to see. Gathered there around the trunk, several reached up to touch the Branch, just to make sure it was real. It was. But no one picked any apples. They did not dare.
Standing there, one man happened to reach into his pocket and feel a small smooth shape. He pulled it out and it was an apple seed, one of those gathered from the scene of destruction the year before. He held it up to look at it and others noticed. In a few moments, apple seeds were pulled from purses and pockets by almost everyone there. Those who had none discovered a few seeds still lying about on the ground.
No one told them what to do, but they seemed to know. Everyone went home, found a sunny corner of yard, and there dug a small hole and planted a seed. Then once again, they waited. Each day they went to the park to observe the Branch. They gathered beneath it, just looking. Then they went home and gently watered the little mounds of earth over their seeds. By the time summer arrived, green seedlings had sprouted all over town.
A day came when they all gathered in the park as usual only to find that the Branch was gone. So was the Tree. Only smooth green grass grew where it once stood. Not a few of them began to wonder if any of it really happened. But by then the seedlings in their yards were small saplings. All anyone needed to do was to look at the lush green of the leaves on those young trees to know the Branch was still alive.
They kept on meeting together in the park. Sometimes they just sat and remembered the Branch. Sometimes they listened to the old man, who would tell them the Story and how to care for apple trees. Every once in a while, though, he would simply stop and say, “There’s more to the Story.” Now they believed him.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church Eugene/Springfield, Oregon Copyright © 2022 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
Galatians 3:23-29 “One in Christ” June 19, 2022 - Second Sunday after Pentecost
Japanese Americans told stories and showed us mementos of their service in the American military even while their families were confined to internment camps during World War II. The next morning, we got on a bus and rode to a storefront church near an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention center in Tacoma. We heard a young South American tell of his struggle to come to the United States and gain legal status.
The following day, we got on the bus again and rode to central Washington and the huge Yakima Native American reservation. Indigenous people explained their struggles with prejudice and poverty. We went to a pow wow that night where, alongside their native dances and other activities, people whose ancestors and fellow tribes had suffered so much at the hands of white soldiers celebrated their own military service.
Our bus ride the last day took us to Portland where we had dinner in an African American church and heard the pastor tell us about that congregation’s work to revitalize their neighborhood and give young people there hope in a society where so much seems to be stacked against them.
If you haven’t picked up on it, the unifying factor in all those stops on our bus tour was that those we met were Christians, fellow believers. I was on what our Pacific Northwest Conference of Covenant churches calls, “Journey to Mosaic,” an in-person, direct exploration of what Paul says here in verse 28, “for all of you are one in Christ.”
I’ll come back to that idea of “mosaic” in a bit. For now, take a look at the whole of Galatians 3, maybe the entire letter. Paul was a little upset as he wrote to churches around what is now the central region of Turkey. The apostle was concerned that Christians there in Asia Minor had gotten off on the wrong track, were believing a false gospel, as he suggested right at the beginning in chapter 1, verses 7 to 9.
In Galatia some had decided that anyone who came to faith in Jesus needed to conform to the lifestyle, the religious law of those who first heard about and believed in Christ. The Gospel came first to Jewish people. So they thought that Jewish custom and practice set the standard for everyone coming later, whether Jewish or not. One huge part of that was the practice of circumcision for male Jews. Now the old guard was contending that the new folks, even Gentiles, must do the same. To follow Jesus, you had to live like a Jew, even if that was not your heritage.
According to some scholars, this is the first of Paul’s letters, the first epistle to people he had discipled in Jesus but was no longer near to give guidance. He’s worried, as he said in chapter 4 verse 11, that all his work preaching the Gospel to them may have been wasted. They’ve headed off, it feels to him, in some other direction. So, taking up a theme he will come back to as he writes to other churches, Paul tries to get them to see the difference between following some aspects of Jewish law and following Jesus, the difference between coming to God on the basis of customs which marked out their ethnic identity and coming to God on the basis of faith.
As you can see right at the beginning of our text, Paul’s worry was not that the law, the set of commandments God gave the Jewish people, was bad. Jesus Himself said that He did not come to abolish or overturn that Law, but to fulfill it. The problem was that those Jewish Christians had been brought up as Jews with the idea that their identity as people of God depended on certain very visible practices which were part of that law, things like circumcision, diet, and the observance of particular holy days.
Back up to verse 21 and you hear Paul ask rhetorically, “Is the law then opposed to the promises of God?” He immediately answers emphatically, “Certainly not!” The problem was not the law as a guide to righteous living and even for relationship with God. It was that some Jewish people imagined that those visible marks of identity God gave them in the law were the substance of what it was all about. Yet as Paul says about Abraham at beginning of the chapter, the substance was not about customs and ethnic identity. It was about faith.
So in the first verses of our text, Paul pictures the Jewish law, given through Moses, as a kind of stand-in guardian for children, keeping them safe and on good behavior. It sounds harsh in verse 23 when he says, “we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith could be revealed,” but verse 24 goes on, “Therefore the law was our disciplinarian.” But the word in Greek is pedagogos, our “pedagogue.”
Now “pedagogue” and “pedagogy” in English basically have to do with teaching and instruction, but in the ancient world the pedagogue was more. He was a slave assigned to a young boy from a wealthy family as something like nanny, tutor, and protector all in one. He went wherever the boy went, taught him good manners, accompanied him to school, and helped him practice his lessons when he got home. He watched over the boy and helped him stay in line until he grew into a man. That’s what Paul said the Jewish law was meant to do for His people, to guard and guide them until Jesus came.
The final purpose of the law’s protection, when “Christ came,” at the end of verse 24, is “so that we might be justified by faith.” In verse 25, Paul says that justification by faith in Jesus makes the “disciplinarian” that watchful, protective “pedagogue,” no longer necessary. The children are growing up now by faith in Christ. But that’s not just true of Jewish believers. Verse 26 goes on, “for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.” Jews and Gentiles together in Christ are the children of God.
That is Paul’s whole argument here in chapter 3 of Galatians. Earlier in verse 8, he wrote “the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the Gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’” In other words, Jesus leveled the playing field for coming to God, for what it means to be God’s child. Everyone gets there the same way, by faith.
Jewish marks of spiritual and ethnic identity were only accessible to some. That particular rite of circumcision, of which they were so proud, had always only applied to half the Jewish people. But now Paul in verse 27 begins “As many of you as were baptized into Christ…” Baptism in the name of Jesus is a mark of spiritual identity which is not just available to Jewish men, but to anyone who comes by faith to God through Christ His Son.
Notice Paul’s words, “baptized into Christ.” We often talk about inviting Jesus into us. We ask Him to live in our hearts, want to receive Him. And Paul in Colossians 1:27 does speak of “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” But much more often the apostle spoke of Christians as being “in Christ.” By faith, marked by holy baptism, we are incorporated in Jesus, brought into His Body, which is what “incorporation” literally means.
That incorporation, that bringing into Christ, is why verse 27 goes on to say those baptized into Christ “have clothed yourselves with Christ.” Paul may have been referring to the fact that, in early Christian baptism, as Debbie shared with our Confirmation students a couple weeks ago, the new converts coming out of the water were given white robes to signify their new life in Jesus. They literally put on a sign of the fact that their lives were now totally wrapped up in Christ and in the Body of Christ which is the church.
Which all sets the stage for the incredible statement of verse 28. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ.” In the early church, and in the ancient world as a whole, those were the three big differences: ethnic, social, and gender difference. They are still huge differences between people in our own time. And Paul suddenly says those differences no longer exist because “all of you are one in Christ.”
It should be obvious, but I’ll still say it. Paul did not mean verse 28 literally. Paul did not imagine that faith in Jesus had or would erase the differences between ethnicities and cultures, or that social differences between rich and poor, masters and slaves in his time, would simply disappear. He could not possibly have thought that human differences between men and women would vanish. What he did mean was that, in Christ, in the church, those differences would and should no longer matter in the same way. In Christ, all are to be equal. No one is to be regarded as superior and no one as inferior. All those differences are taken up into an overarching and overriding unity, like in a mosaic.
A mosaic is a piece of art created by placing bits of different colored, even different shaped, stone or pottery into a pleasing pattern. Individual and distinct pieces fit together in a relationship with each other that is beautiful. That’s why our conference called our bus trip “Journey to Mosaic.” We went to view and experience how God wants to fit together the human mosaic of all our differences into one whole and beautiful Body of Christ.
The oneness and unity of a Christian mosaic is different from other ideas of unity. One of the most vivid memories I have of actual mosaics was on our visit to Greece twenty years ago. Our daughter Susan was fascinated by Alexander the Great. So we went to his birthplace in Pella. Excavations there only in the last century had uncovered gorgeous mosaic floors still in place where buildings once stood. I think they’ve since all been moved into a new museum, but at that time many of them were still outside. There were abstracts and murals of mythical events, all painstakingly created by cementing down different colored stones.
Now as I remember those mosaics, I consider how Alexander went about unifying the ancient world of the Mideast. As he conquered, the different cultures remained. But the language and culture of his own people, the Greeks, the Hellenes, began to dominate languages and cultures of all the different places brought into his empire. It was what historians called “Hellenization,” the “Greekification” of the ancient world. It’s why our New Testament was written in Greek rather than Hebrew like the Old Testament.
Alexander may have played as a child on one or more of those incredible mosaic floors, but his empire did not reflect that experience. He saw his own culture as best and everyone else as “barbarians” who needed to be brought up to his level. He created unity, in part, by making people more the same, more alike than they were before.
Our own nation partly saw itself the same way. Instead of a mosaic of all the different languages and cultures that were here before and that came later, America was seen as the great “melting pot,” where all those distinctions were smelted down into a single culture and a single language and all the old differences disappeared. But that is not Paul’s idea about the Body of Christ, not the meaning of “no longer Jew or Greek,” in the Christian church. That’s why our denomination prefers the image of a mosaic.
No, the negation here in verse 28 is not the negation of difference, a disappearance Jewishness and Greekness or maleness and femaleness in some great apocalyptic fusion. It’s a vision of a people where those differences do not divide them, where our human distinctions do not make one group of people inferior to another.
The vision of the Body of Christ as unity in difference reflects that great Christian truth we celebrated last week. God’s own self is unity in difference. As the ancient formula goes, the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father. But the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. They are one God. Likewise, Jews are not Greeks, Black people are not white, men are not women. Yet they are all one in Christ, all children of God as Paul says here.
That vision for how we live together in Christ is one that keeps being renewed and deepened through the centuries. Those ancient mosaics in Pella had to be carefully uncovered and refreshed. Each little piece needed to be cleaned and preserved so that the whole could be renewed. For Christians, that is why it took so long for us to realize that slavery had no place among God’s people, that baptism into Christ did, despite early laws in America, make a slave absolutely equal to the one who supposedly was his master. And, finally, that there could be no more masters or slaves in the Body of Christ.
It took even longer for most Christians to begin to realize that in Christ women too are equal to men in status and respect, that they should be able to vote, and in the church that they should be able to teach and lead and serve as pastors. Some churches, like the Southern Baptists who wrangled about it a bit just last week and the Catholic church still haven’t caught up with Paul and Galatians 3:28. Our own denomination, the Covenant church, only figured it out in 1976, when we first approved the ordination of women.
Thank God we no longer have that master-slave distinction to worry about and incorporate into the mosaic of Christ’s Body, but we still have glaring social distinctions. Just last week our guests out in the trailer were verbally abused by someone who came onto our church property and berated them because of where and how they live, calling them names and saying they were inferior human beings. We as children of God, as the church and Body of Jesus, stand against all such division and hatred, whether it’s race or social class or gender that becomes the dividing wedge. We are all one in Christ.
In the final verse, 29, Paul returns to the ancestor of the Jewish people, Abraham: “if you are in Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” Some branches of theology will talk as if this new oneness in Christ, the unity of the Christian church, has somehow replaced the Jewish people as children of God. Not at all. What Paul says here and throughout what he wrote about these matters is that Gentile believers, all the rest of us who are not Jewish, have simply been added, “grafted on” like branches on an existing tree, in Romans 11, to children of God who are descended from Abraham.
And, like Abraham, we all now come to God in the same way, by placing our faith in Jesus Christ, trusting God to save us through His Son. That’s exactly how Abraham came, says Paul. Think about it. Abraham was not Jewish when God came and spoke to him. There was then no such thing. Abraham met God and responded in faith. That’s how he became the father of the Jewish people and now the father of all who trust in God by faith. That’s how we are Abraham’s offspring and now “heirs of the promise.” Part of that promise is the mosaic vision of differences brought together in Jesus.
So in this next-to-last sermon here, I want to urge you to keep being a mosaic, to be one in Christ in a way that incorporates and preserves important and beautiful differences between you and between the people God has yet to bring into the picture here. I’ll even tread a little toward what I’m not supposed to talk about and suggest that you don’t look for a pastor who is just like you or, God forbid, just like the old one. Instead, be open to difference, to the mosaic, to the true, reconciling gorgeous unity of Jesus.
Keep seeking and preserving that unity in relation to the differences of people not only within this congregation but around you. It’s one of the best witnesses we have for Jesus, that here in Christ all those differences which separate people can be important, even key parts of the picture, but with oneness and unity. When the opportunity for that Journey to Mosaic is offered by our conference again this fall, think about getting on the bus. Besides me, Debbie and Takayo have also taken that journey. Maybe you should too.
And lest this all sound like I’m scolding you for something you’re not, let me correct that impression if that’s what you heard. One of the huge joys for me of serving this congregation has been the overall spirit of unity and oneness in Christ here from the beginning. The pastor before me set that tone and helped encourage that spirit. You have been faithful to it ever since. Yes, there have been some conflicts, but there has also been here a blessed cooperation in Jesus. You have loved and honored people of all sorts, even, when given opportunity, of all races, young and old, men and women, well-off and unhoused. I thank God for how you have honored Paul’s vision for a mosaic community, a Body of Christ with many different parts but always one in Him.
May God bless now your faith and your faithfulness and keep you always one in Christ.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church Eugene/Springfield, Oregon Copyright © 2022 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
John 16:12-15 “Triple Truth” June 12, 2022 - Trinity Sunday
I can’t wait to teach our grandson to fish, but he’s not ready yet. There’s so much I’d like to share with him: how to bait a hook or tie on a fly; where to find fish in a stream or lake; how to cast a line; on and on. But at twenty months hold, he can’t handle it right now. All I can do is hold up a plastic fish puppet over Skype and listen as he responds, “Glug, glug, glug!” He’s just got that much so far.
In the hours before His arrest and death on the Cross, Jesus had much to say and teach to His disciples. John recorded a great deal of it here for us in his Gospel. Yet in it all, this fifth and final statement about the Holy Spirit begins with Jesus telling them, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
Like other times as we read the Gospels, our curiosity rises up here. What did Jesus have to say for which they were not yet ready? Was it more about the meaning of the crucifixion that was about to happen? Was it training for the mission to the world which He gave them? Was it more detailed doctrinal truth, like the concept of God as holy Trinity, which we’re celebrating today?
The simple fact is: we don’t know what the disciples didn’t know. Nor should we presume to guess what those things might have been. The truth is that there are still many things Jesus would like to say to us, but we are not ready to bear them. And that may be partly by our own fault and unwillingness to be guided by the Holy Spirit.
Verse 13 says, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” I love going out and exploring new fishing spots on my own. Last month while at the coast I did just that and found a beautiful little pond where the fish were fat and happy and willing to bite almost anything I flung at them. Yet other times I’ve driven to a huge lake or a rushing river and needed a guide to help me know where to start, to navigate me to the parts of the water that held fish and to show me what flies would work.
Jesus knew that you and I would need guidance in and upon the rushing waters of this life. As we said on Ascension Sunday, He departed just so that His Spirit could come and be everywhere and with anyone seeking that kind of guidance.
Yet talking about the Holy Spirit’s guidance can be a tricky business. It’s easy to imagine, and perhaps you’ve experienced it first hand, that sincere Christian people may claim the Holy Spirit has led them to conclusions about doctrine or about Christian living or even about politics which are diametrically opposed to each other. How are we to sort that out? How shall we adjudicate opposing claims to spiritual truth?
We need to begin with what Jesus went on to say right here, what guided early Christians from the beginning. Jesus said in verse 13 that the Spirit would lead them “into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears…” Then, at the beginning of verse 14, Jesus says, “He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” The Holy Spirit is not a free agent, not some independent spiritual force disconnected from Jesus Himself. The Spirit comes on behalf of and in the name of both Jesus and His Father. That’s exactly what the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is all about, that the three persons of God are, in heart and mind and will, One God.
So the first check on any movement or truth which claims to come from the Holy Spirit is just whether it lines up with what we know of Jesus. That’s the same test the apostles were given. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians about their various experiences of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, prophecy, he referred them back to Jesus, taught them that they were the Body of Christ, that the same love they received through Jesus was how the true Spirit would lead them to treat each other.
Yes, it can still be complicated. Just like two Christians can claim the Holy Spirit as their guide for going in opposite directions, we can claim to be doing what Jesus taught and end up doing very different things. But sometimes it’s crystal clear.
Last week a pastor in our country stood up and railed against homosexuality and said that gay people in this country deserve the death penalty, that they should all be lined up and shot in the back of the head. Friends, whatever you think about gay marriage, whether you believe it’s wrong or not, we all know that what that pastor said is not what Jesus would say. Whatever spirit guided that sermon is not the Holy Spirit. Sometimes it’s that simple and we need to say so.
Jesus will not contradict Himself. That means that any further truth into which the Holy Spirit leads God’s people will always be consistent with and come out of what we already know about Jesus. That’s how slavery came to an end first in England and Europe and then in this country. Christians realized that ownership of other people, particularly of other Christians. simply was not consistent with what Jesus taught. The Holy Spirit guided them into truth they hadn’t been ready to bear yet. The Spirit convicted their hearts to recognize a deeper consequence of what it means to follow Christ.
It might be tempting to limit what Jesus said here to the first generation of Christians. Some interpreters will do that. That “all the truth” which the Spirit would bring was given to those disciples only back then. They wrote it down here in the Bible. So there’s no more need to look to the Holy Spirit for guidance. We just read and study the Bible to find out everything we need to know because “all the truth” is right here.
Yet, just like those first Christians and all who came after them, you and I live in a constantly changing world. We cannot possibly just open the Bible and find direct and clear answers about all sorts of issues we face. There are no Bible verses about social media or wearing masks or democratic elections or guns or narcotics. Christians can do one of two things about such matters. You can simply ignore the Bible and do whatever you personally desire, whether it’s putting on a mask or voting or buying an assault rifle. Many take that route, believing that God has nothing to say about most of our personal choices.
Yet if we believe that Jesus’ words about the Holy Spirit are here for our benefit as well as for Christians long gone, then much of the way we live is not just a matter of personal choice. The Holy Spirit was sent to guide us into actions which reflect our commitment to Jesus, even if He said nothing specific about a choice we have. As Paul says in our epistle lesson from Romans, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit,” the love that we saw and learned from Jesus. If the Holy Spirit is guiding us, then that same divine love will guide both what we choose to believe and what we do.
On this Trinity Sunday, we also read from Proverbs 8. We hear the voice of “Wisdom,” personified as a woman calling out to be heeded. We skipped the verses where she asks those who hear to pay attention, to seek and follow wisdom. We focused on verses in which Wisdom says she was with God from the beginning, that she had a hand in creation, that it was by her that God shaped the mountains and set the limits of the sea and the borders of earth and sky. Hearing those verses today suggests something else about what Jesus told us about the Holy Spirit and the truth into which He guides us. He is at work in the natural wisdom and order built into the world from the beginning.
When Christians began to reflect on what they had learned from Jesus, and as the Spirit guided them deeper into that truth, one of the ways the Spirit led them was via God’s own ways of thinking built into our minds and hearts, by wisdom. Plain “common sense” would be one way of talking about it, but it’s larger than what we usually mean by that. It’s wisdom that allowed Christians to discern how to fit the truths they knew about Jesus together. The Holy Spirit’s gift of wisdom helped them see that if Jesus said things like He does in verse 15, “All that the Father has is mine,” then Jesus must be equal to the Father, that Jesus is God just as much as the Father is God.
So the Christian church has always used the gift of wisdom, common sense, reason, to understand and apply what we’ve been taught by our Lord. From the beginning, Christians were baptizing and worshipping in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. But they were slowly led into a clearer understanding of what that meant, that those three names were all persons in their own right, yet also one and only one God.
The Spirit had to lead the church through a time when others were saying something different, saying that Jesus was not quite God. In that time, they were ready for the Spirit to guide them into formulating the doctrine which we take for granted, one of the defining formulas of Christianity, that we worship three persons in one God. Jesus, in the words of the Nicene Creed, is “God from God, light from light, true God from true God.” And the Holy Spirit comes from both the Father and Son. He spoke to us through the prophets, and continues to guide us into the all the truth.
Jesus told us here that the same kind of consistent, reasonable leading of the Spirit will guide us deeper into truth. What the Spirit says will glorify Jesus. What Jesus says is what He has from the Father. God’s own self is internally consistent and united in thought and will. Inconsistency and contradiction does not come from God, and is not and cannot be the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Wisdom is still God’s gift to His people through the Holy Spirit. But wisdom is not limited to the Bible or to Christian doctrine. The phrase, “All truth is God’s truth” is based on what Augustine wrote, “let every good and true Christian understand that wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master…”[1] John Calvin said, “All truth is from God; and consequently, if wicked men have said anything that is true and just, we ought not to reject it; for it has come from God.”
“All truth is God’s truth” means that Christians have nothing to fear from science or philosophy or political theory or medicine. In fact, insofar as any area of study arrives at what is true or good or beautiful, that is also the work of holy wisdom, God’s Holy Spirit moving in the world. When such truth is fully understood it will all do just what Jesus said, glorify Him and point back to His Father.
Yes, it’s more than difficult to discern at times what the truth is, especially in our time as some of a consensus we took for granted has collapsed. Which news outlet is telling the truth? Which medical authority ought you to believe? To which preacher of the Bible should you listen? Yet God’s truth is all one and undivided. Jesus told us that the Spirit says what He says and that He says what the Father says. So any “truth” up for our consideration is going to need to be consistent with that, and consistent with itself. The Trinity does not offer us three different truths. God offers us one truth, triply guaranteed by Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all saying and teaching us the same thing.
The old “X-Files” television show used to repeat the slogan, “The truth is out there.” That’s a pretty Christian thought. Jesus assures us that the truth is there, and that it comes to us from the Father, through Him, by the Holy Spirit. Most importantly, it’s the truth of the Gospel, that Jesus died and rose again for the forgiveness of our sins and for the transformation of our lives. But it’s also all the truth, all the true and good facts about our world and about our own selves.
As I said from the beginning of the text, we don’t know what the disciples did not yet know. And, most assuredly, we do not know what we do not yet know. We should never imagine we already have all the truth. The Spirit keeps guiding us into it. Yet it is there. Our Lord is constantly directing our thoughts and connecting it together for us.
Our grandson is making some connections. He learned to say, “glug, glug, glug” looking at a plastic fish, but now he goes to the botanic gardens, sees goldfish in a pond, and says, “glug, glug, glug.” He’s being led deeper into the truth, not just about fish, but about the world around him. We are all like that, children who do not yet know, but are always headed toward more and more knowledge. Paul said in I Corinthians 13, “When I was a child… I thought like a child… For now we see in a mirror, dimly… Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” We are all children in Christ. We often think like children and see only a little, only dimly.
Yet we do know a little. We know that Christ has died and Christ has risen and Christ will come again. We know that He has taught us how to live and to love each other. We know that He has given us the Holy Spirit to continue our education and understanding of what that means today in 2022 and through the rest of our lives. As we read in verse 15, the Spirit takes what Jesus said and declares it to us. And we know that, in eternity, it will all be told, that we will grow out of our childhood and see clearly.
May you and I always admit to what we do not know. May we always be open to what the Spirit has yet to teach us. And as we learn and grow, may we always be faithful to that which we do know, that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one God. Jesus has taught us to be one with each other as They are one. That will be our topic for next Sunday. So may that one God be the truth on which we base everything else.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church Eugene/Springfield, Oregon Copyright © 2022 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] On Christian Doctrine, II.18.
On Pentecost Sunday we also celebrated Confirmation Sunday for Lydia Kane and Nathan Reeder. The audio file here contains a description of Nathan's project depicting events on Pentecost and Lydia reading her Confirmation paper. To best receive Nathan's project, you may want to view the video of the service on our YouTube channel.