Account for the Hope In You

Account for the Hope In You

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder
Sixth Sunday of Easter: April 27, 2008
I Peter 3:13-22

Always be ready to make your defense
to anyone who demands from you
an accounting for the hope that is in you.

What are you afraid of? People are afraid of different things and have different reactions to their fears. There was a story told about a couple fleeing in their night clothes to a bomb shelter while their block was being flattened during the blitz in London in World War II. They had just reached the street when the woman turned to go back to the house, and the husband, frantic at his wife’s erratic behavior given the circumstances, shouted at her, “Where are you going?!

“Have to go back,” she replied, “forgot my false teeth.”

To which her husband replied, just able to make himself heard above the din of falling bombs, “For God’s sake! They’re not dropping sandwiches you know!”

Different people fear different things. One man’s fear of German bombs was matched only by his wife’s fear of being seen in public without her teeth in place. Different priorities, yet one thing in common: Fear.

What are you afraid of?

There is no sense claiming to be fearless people. We know fear, and we have fears, some that haunt us only on occasion, others that are with us hour by hour. Some may live with the fear that the business will go badly this year, that the medical bills will not get paid, that there might be a continuation of the economic downturn into next year and money in the family kitty will dry up. We may have a gnawing fear that we’ll not have enough money to live on throughout retirement, that we won’t get into the college we choose, that the fan belt we have nursed through four years of our car’s life will finally go bad on the next trip through the Mojave desert.

There are big fears and little ones.

A big fear usually involves things beyond our control, like the state of the economy, or violence in the streets or the fear of world-wide political chaos, some clinics failing to provide a level of medical care we had assumed we could expect, random shootings on city streets.

Little fears have their day too. But at least they appear to be in some ways within our control, or nearly so. We may be afraid:

• that we won’t get the promotion we want...
• ...or that we will, and we’ll have to pack the family and move a thousand miles again;
• that since we missed the deadline for filing form 1040, we’ll have to pay a penalty;
• that the car won’t start;
• that the refrigerator will need replacing;
• that the roast will be burned;
• that the water didn’t get shut off before we left home on a trip.

The list of things the human mind can fear is limited only by the amount of time we have for tallying it.

When Peter wrote, “Do not fear what they fear,” he was echoing the prophet Isaiah1 who wrote to the people in Israel during a fearful time. Nations around them were allying together against tiny Israel. Yet Isaiah wrote, “Do not fear what they fear.” He reminded the people of Israel of the very thing we all need to remember but often forget: that God is Lord over all possibilities; God — not the Syrians, Romans, Americans, or Al Qaeda warlords — God is the true ruler of history, no matter how things appear in the short term.

In I Peter, the hard thing for us to swallow may not be that we should avoid fearing all the things we do fear, but that we should save a holy emotion like fear for the one who has real power over life. Peter said, “Do not fear what they fear...but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.”

Dethrone fear of the contingent, the temporary, and instead reverence Christ who rules the world for ever. Don’t reverence, fear, or stand in awe of your tormentors more than you fear God. That certainly is blasphemy. When others seem to have more power to destroy us than God has to save us, it is an overwhelming fear. Peter told his readers and he tells us, decide ahead of time not to give in to such unholy fear. Then, if the time comes, we will be prepared to account for the hope that lives in us because of our faith that Christ truly is Lord of all life.

A sermon which dwells this way on fear may come as a surprise. We believe in a loving God, and this sermon was to have been about hope, if we can judge by the title. Yet fear, paradoxically, is the essence of hope. Knowing what we fear gives us information about the thing upon which we base our deepest hopes.

Lots of famous people have uttered equally famous words on the subject of hope. Miguel de Cervantes best-known character, Don Quixote, said, “Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.”

Elie Wiesel, survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, once wrote, “…just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.” Christians believe this has come to pass for us in the person and work of Christ among us, human as we are human.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.”

Theologian Reinhold Neibuhr wrote, “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime, therefore, we are saved by hope…”

Poet Václav Havel, arguably one of a handful of true twentieth century political heroes, who managed to outlast the crumbling Soviet empire and bring his native Czechoslovakia into the family of free nations, said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

How do you envision the essence of hope, how do you account for the hope that the love of Christ places in you?

Biblically speaking, there are two types of fear about which we often hear: The first fear relates to the love God has for us, yet the second often characterizes the response we make to that love. These are fears born of love: of Christ’s ultimate love for us and our inadequate response to his love.

For believers, then, the word hope deals with the deepest longings as well as the most desperate fears within us. It is not a mere sigh, a whim, a casual wish: we hope it won’t be too hot today, that Santa will get to our house next year, that we’ll make the green light at the next intersection; these have nothing to do with biblical hope and aren’t really hopes at all, but fleeting wishes.

“Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.” Dr. Scott Hahn2 in his book, A Father Who Keeps His Promises, shared a story from the deadly 1998 earthquake in Northwest Armenia, which claimed 25,000 lives in a single day. After the quake a distressed father ran frantically through the streets to his son’s school. He had always told his son “No matter what, Armand, I’ll always be there.” His heart sank when he got to the school and found nothing but a pile of rubble. Even so, he ran to the corner where he knew his son’s classroom had been and began to dig with his bare hands. A bystander told him, “Forget it, mister, they’re all dead.” Any of us, in the same situation, might have tried to help a grieving father simply face reality. But that father looked up and said, “You can criticize me or you can help lift these bricks.” A few people of generous spirit helped move bricks for a while, but the situation seemed so hopeless, they soon wandered away. Still the father continued to dig. 12, 18, 24, 36 hours went by. Still he dug. Then he heard a muffled groan. He pulled a board back and cried out, “Armand!” From the hole in the wreckage of the building came a weak, shaking reply, “Papa?” They managed to find 14 of the 33 students still alive. When Armand was finally freed he turned to his friends and said, “See, I told you my father wouldn't forget us.” Our hope is like the hope of that son, only more so. Armand’s father is but a small example of the kind of Father we know through Jesus Christ.

The essence of biblical hope — if the words of I Peter are to be believed — rests in a decision. A decision for the Lord. And that decision remains even when our emotions or our failed circumstances might carry us away from it. It is a conviction that the future and all that will take place in it are already being redeemed by Christ. No matter where our lives may take us, Christ is there ahead of us already, redeeming the times and the seasons in which we live.

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 Isaiah 8:12.
2 A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God's Covenant Love in Scripture, Charis Books, © 1998 by Scott Hahn. Dr. Hahn is the founder of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.

It's a Big, Big House

It’s a Big, Big House

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder
Fifth Sunday of Easter: April 20, 2008
I Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14

Home. It is a recurring theme in I Peter. The idea that the household of faith is the new believer’s home runs throughout the letter. An old friend of mine once gave me a unique definition of home. He said it is the place where you can make it from the bedroom to the refrigerator in the dark. A couple of weeks ago, I was reminded of Robert Frost’s poetic line that home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in. It comes from a poem in which a man comes home to die, though his real family has moved away. Nevertheless, the family living in the house takes him in, proving the New Testament’s frequent observation that home is sometimes more a matter of a chosen family than a biological one.

I think Yogi Berra once said, in his original way of stating the unmistakably obvious, that “Things are more like they are now than they have ever been before.” That’s a little like one of my favorite definitions of home. To me, home is where you feel more like yourself than anywhere else. Some people prove this in a backward way by going to any lengths to keep away from their houses at night, so little do they feel at home there. The cast of characters in the old TV series, Cheers, dramatized that sad fact. Of course, the corner bar isn’t the only substitute for home. Many people feel more at home at work than in their houses. Others may be more at home at the ball park where they are free to say loud and obscene things to players and umpires, behavior frowned upon in many homes but not at many sporting events I have attended.

If our ideas of home are varied, so are the limitations on those who are able to be at home around us. Remember the family or families in the neighborhood where you grew up who always seemed to have 3 or 4 extra children with their feet under the dinner table at night? In my neighborhood, they were the people who could never feel at home unless everyone else in their neighborhood felt that way too. I also remember the cool white house across the street and a few doors down from my family home. From my childhood memory, it was inhabited by pasty-skinned people who always wore starchy-looking clothes. My parents said it was an immaculate home, though I couldn’t verify that. Children, as far as I know, were never allowed inside.

Some folks think of home as a place where ancestors are celebrated. I remember a high school history class in which we were each asked in turn to say something about one of the ancestors in our families who were celebrated by some well-worn family story. I told a few details about the only truly famous ancestor I know, my great great great grandfather Tompkins, who was Vice president when James Monroe was president. The boy seated next to me followed my story with a strange sort of one-upmanship. His great grandfather had been hung for stealing horses. You’ll never guess which story made a bigger impression on the class.

Even though Matthew and Luke go to some trouble to list extensive genealogies for Jesus, I think they knew in the backs of their minds that Jesus was the Son of God whose real family, as he himself said, were not related to him by blood, but rather were those who heard the will of God and went about doing it.1

In John 14 it appears that in Jesus’ view it isn’t human fathers or mothers that matter when it comes to salvation. My friend with his horse-thieving great grandfather and I with my blue-blooded ancestor each have equal access to the only parent that matters, our Father in heaven. It is no wonder that people have found John 14 to be such a source of comfort for centuries. When folks gather following the death of a loved one, as often as not, John 14 is read to comfort them. Why do you suppose that is?

These were the first words spoken by Jesus to his disciples after he had told them that it was necessary that he die soon. Harsh words of reality were then followed by words of comfort about the household of God. “Don’t be worried and upset,” says one translation of these famous words, “believe in God, and believe also in me.” If they believed in God, Jesus said, then believing in him should be as simple as falling off a log. The God who had taken the slaves of Egypt and brought them through the Exodus to the renewal of the promised land, the God who had seen his people carried off to Babylon in exile yet returned to the land he had given them, for this God, redemption seemed to be his hallmark. If we believe God is capable of bringing life where there had been death, redeeming what we had feared was hopelessly lost, time after time making new that which we were certain was done for, if we believe in the God of the Exodus, then we can believe in Jesus. If we believe God brings dead nations, people, ideas to life again, then we can believe that there is more to the life of Jesus than that short 33 years of it which he knew in first-century Palestine.

“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” Jesus told us that we are his true brothers and sisters. There is ample space, then, for the whole family in the great household of God. If we want to see how big the family is, then we need only to look around. These are our brothers, these are our sisters. If we are in Christ, we are at home with one another, whether our grandaddy was a horse thief or a politician — or both.

In John 14 Jesus said, “there are many dwelling places.” There is no housing shortage for this home. Our home is the wide heart of God — room for plenty more than the ones who have made themselves at home already. All those bad and sometimes tasteless jokes about Saint Peter at the gates of heaven administering a final exam, or asking folks to wait, or placing some high and some low in heavenly condominiums, all these are just that: jokes. They bear no resemblance to the picture Jesus painted of God’s kingdom as a place of endless spaciousness.

We may be like Thomas. We want to know the way to this place Jesus describes. We lack a road map, a compass. How do we get there, Jesus? Like Thomas, we fail to see the forest for the trees. Jesus said, “I am the way.” No need for a map. If you are with Jesus, you are there. So we want to know how to be with Jesus that we may be there already. For this we need only remember the household of faith. If we are in the company of brothers and sisters in faith, we are in the very presence of Jesus. That is his promise.

Over a decade ago now I helped build houses on a mission trip to Mexico with the youth from our church, and they introduced me to a song, popular at the time, by a Christian rock group called “Audio Adrenaline.” Their music, I can testify, more than lived up to the name. But while their music might not be for everyone, the lyrics to the song they taught me struck me as clearly true for the Christian community of faith. The chorus goes:

It’s a big, big house — with lots and lots of room
It’s a big big table — with lots and lots of food;
It’s a big, big yard — where we can play football.
It’s a big, big house — it’s my Father’s house.2

Do you feel the spaciousness of it? Big house, big table, big yard. Big house for worship; big table for the Lord’s Supper; a big yard: a big world in which to live and serve. Plenty of room for everyone, plenty of family for everyone, plenty of work to give everyone’s life meaning. That’s our Father’s house. Welcome home.

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 Mark 3:33-35.
2 Don’t Censor Me, “It’s a Big, Big, House,” Audio Adrenaline, © 1993, Up in the Mix Music, BMI.

Caring for those Perishables

Caring for those Perishables

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Mountain View Presbyterian Church, Las Vegas, Nevada

I Peter 1:17-25
Third Sunday of Easter: April 6, 2008

We don’t have to be green grocers to know about perishables. Anyone with very much experience in life knows that life itself — for all the strengths we see in living things — is a fragile thing, perishable and, ultimately, perishing. Maybe you remember the old Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. Once Calvin asked his mother to sniff a milk carton to see if the milk was spoiled. He didn’t want to sniff it himself because he thought the expiration date on the carton had to do with those who used it after the date, not with the milk itself, and he didn’t want to take any chances. Isn’t Calvin on to something true there? Aren’t we all more or less aware that every human being, every living thing comes to this world with an expiration date of sorts? Some insects can be expected to live twenty-four hours; barring accident or unforeseen illness, people can expect to live somewhere near the biblical expiration date of “threescore and ten.”1 It doesn’t take a wizard to figure out that life is a perishable thing.

We also don’t have to have a Phd in theology to believe God is beyond this perishing world, that God is eternal, is the Creator who made all the world we see around us, and so, is not subject to its laws concerning decline and death. Any god who was not much more than just a larger version of a human being would not be much of a god. It would be more like the gods of the Greek pantheon, petty little deities with expiration dates of their own which caused them to perish once the people of the Mediterranean world turned themselves over to Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedism. No, we would have to agree that any God worthy of our wonder and especially any God worthy of our worship must be a God who is not subject to the decay and death that the created order experiences. God could no more be part of his creation than a painter can decide to climb into the world of one of his paintings or a novelist can begin making her home in the story line of her latest book.

Once at a Bible study, I asked everyone to think about their own definition of the word “holy.” I Peter makes a good deal of use of that word, so it must be important. But for the life of me, I don’t think I hear that word anywhere but in church. It rolls off our tongues pretty easily because we have ghettoized it into a religious word. We could sing the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy” with a yawn, because we have forgotten what it means to call something holy. But if God is really the Creator, and so is responsible for all the world we see around us and a good deal we don’t see, and if one of the best words we can think to describe God is to call God “holy,” then maybe we ought to know what holy means. Do you know the first word someone suggested as a definition for the word “holy”? Separation. Absolutely. God is separate from the creation, outside of it. It’s a difficult concept on which to focus our minds. But clearly, if living things of earth are perishable, expiring, dying, as we know them to be, and we affirm that God is imperishable, eternal, immortal, then God is separate, different, differentiated from us. The Bible goes so far as to say in several places that God is so distinct from the created world that the unshielded presence of God is even dangerous to creatures.

Moses in Exodus, Isaiah before the throne of God in Isaiah 6, the disciples in the boat on the sea which Jesus calmed, all knew that they were in the presence of God and all had the presence of mind to know that God is different, and dangerous, HOLY, and they had the presence of mind to feel what any sensible person would feel: they were afraid because God is holy.

Here is what we know to be true about our own humanity and the holiness of God: we are perishable, but God is everlasting. We are not holy. God is.

If we left the matter there, there wouldn’t be much good news in it, just statements of blunt dogma. We could think of ourselves as the existentialists did, as tragic, doomed creatures living lives void of any lasting meaning, adrift on a dying planet in an accidental solar system, while God remained an observer from a distant heaven.

But the witness of the Bible attests to something that we might not ever have dared to hope if left to our own hopes alone. The Bible, from one end to the other, witnesses to God’s unremitting desire to call the people of the earth into the holiness which characterizes God’s own being. In calling the Hebrews from Egypt to freedom, in calling Israel from faithless practical agnosticism to a faith that was alive, in sparing not even the very Messiah — Jesus — but sending him to die for us, in these ways God has called people to be made holy by actions not their own.

On CBS radio, Charles Osgood once told the story of two elderly pianists who found themselves in a nursing home, survivors of strokes. One was paralyzed on the left side, the other on the right. Both despaired over the loss of their music, and had no hope of ever playing again. But an alert member of the nursing home staff sat them down together at a piano and encouraged them to play solo pieces together, one with her good left hand, the other with her good right hand. As they began playing together, over time, a beautiful friendship developed.

This is a human illustration of the way God has made his people holy. Were it not for the member of the nursing home staff, both women would likely have lived out their days without the joy of making music. Yet someone set apart, someone separate, no piano player himself, worked their musical redemption. This is just the way God has acted to redeem his people and make us holy. God steps into our hopelessness and grants to us what we had no hope of receiving.

I Peter uses the poetry of Isaiah to make the point plain. “All flesh” — that is, all living things but especially all people — “is like grass...” If you no longer maintain a lawn mower or never cared to, you may have had a more direct experience of the living nature of grass than you would like. But even in the desert we cannot fail to know the truth of Isaiah’s words by the time Autumn arrives. The grass in our yards and parks which thrives so in the Spring will be parched by August, and in no need of mowing by November. Some early Spring flowers are already fading. That is what we are like, though we may last a few more seasons. But then, here is a piece of good news. Amid all this fading and falling and withering, something is eternal, and it is the word of God.

What is more, that word has become our very own word in Christ, and not by any doing of our own. The worship of the church is an essential for us because it is here that we learn the holiness of God, and God’s desire to make his word our own word.

People come to me and say they want to know how to experience the presence of Christ, and I want to say to them — and sometimes do — that the answer of most of scripture is not about how but about where to experience the presence of Christ. Where do I go to know that Christ is alive? The Bible says I go to the sanctuary, to the community, I place myself in the midst of the worshiping people of God. It is in our worship together that we are to know the presence of Christ, as he promised when he said that he would be with us “where two or three are gathered in my name.”2

So Peter also says, “You have been born anew (and here he uses the Greek for actual birth, not the “born from above” of John 3), not of perishable but of imperishable seed.” How? “Through the living and enduring word of God.” If our faith makes us new, what kind of newness is it? Like the newness of life Lazarus found when Jesus brought him to life from the grave, only to die again one day, or is it some kind of newness that really is new? Like a sort of life that has at its core something imperishable?

Two more bits of good news here: God’s Word is living — John’s gospel goes to great lengths to declare that Jesus and the Word are one and the same, a living Word — and this word endures.

So God’s word is described by Peter as living. Fine. But all things that move and have being are living, and they are, like our own fragile lives, doomed one day to die. But the other adjective further describes the word of God: enduring. That is something that cannot be said about any other living thing we know of, not in any ultimate sense. No living thing endures, not finally. But the living word of God endures. How long? The prophet Isaiah answered that centuries before Peter: “the word of the Lord endures forever.” Moreover, that is the very word Peter says was announced to us. It is unlike the perishable nature of the living things we see. This living thing endures, lasts, does not fade, wither, fall like the grass and the flower. Eternity and humanity touch in the space of these few verses, and we learn that our faith in Christ has brought us the very life of God, eternal, enduring, and very, very much alive.

So, finally, what difference does all this make — holiness, perishable and imperishable, living and enduring, being born anew? Finally, the difference this makes in this world is that we have the only reason worth having, as Peter says, to “love one another deeply from the heart.” Make a brief recollection with me of Charles Manson or Jim Jones or Idi Amin, or Al Qaeda for a different view of what it means to be born anew to a different sort of word, a different sort of messiah, where self-proclaimed saviors force-march their disciples into the death house.

Two contrasting ideas of what it means to be holy, to be born anew of imperishable seed are starkly contrasted: the one is based on fear, on loveless separation from the world that the Bible declares God loves. The other declares salvation by a true Messiah who dies to save others. Jesus is the Messiah because now and always he beckons but does not coerce, gives new birth so life may be lived with a new view, not fiery death so that disciples may turn their backs on life and living.

In Christ is our imperishable hope. Having been granted eternity, what prevents us from loving one another and God’s good world without reservation? That’s now the eternal business of our imperishable faith. May God empower us to be his eternal church.

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1. Psalm 90:10.
2. Matthew 18:20.

Leaning on Jesus

Leaning On Jesus

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder
Mountain View Presbyterian Church Las Vegas, Nevada
Second Sunday of Easter, March 30, 2008
John 13:21-30

Once, at a Bible study I led on this scripture lesson, there was a sort of universal moaning response to this passage from John. It was something like, “I thought we had already been through this in Lent, do we have to do it again?”

This is an understandable reaction. Lent seems to be the right time for thinking on the ways in which Jesus gave himself for us, and the realities of our own shortcomings in trying to live up to his gift. But now we are in the seasonal weeks of Easter, the season of the resurrection. Why this return to dreary consideration of betrayal and denial?

We might start our answer by considering whether there is a difference between those who deny and one who betrays. When I spent a summer month studying art in Italy one year, I recall seeing a large, room-sized Renaissance fresco in what had once been a monastic dining room. The theme of the Last Supper is a common one for such ancient dining halls, and that was the subject here. I found it particularly fascinating that each disciple seated at the table was on the side opposite from the person viewing the painting, so that they faced into the room; all except one. The odd man out was dressed in dark colors, had a brooding and calculating look on his face, and, while all the others seated with Jesus in the painting sported tiny golden halos, this fellow’s head was shadowed by a dark circle. He was placing his hand into a bowl in which Jesus’ hand was also placed. It didn’t take too long for anyone familiar with John 13 to figure out who this was meant to represent. But who really is the villain in this little drama? Is it Judas? John says that Satan entered into him. Isn’t the contest here really between Jesus and Satan, not Jesus and Judas? Why is he so easy to single out, so that the shortcomings of the rest of the disciples fade from memory?

In the translation I read, John says that the disciple “whom Jesus loved —was reclining next to him.” Literally, the phrase is “was reclining on Jesus’ bosom.” In other words, he was very close to his master, reclining in him, in the same way that Jesus later says that he is in the Father and the Father is in him.1 Seating arrangements at meals were very important in the dining rooms of the ancient world, as reflections of status. Even Jesus spoke about it once at length.2 Two of his disciples once went so far as to ask to be seated to his right and left when he came into his glory.3 He encouraged them through his teaching not to try to sit too high in the pecking order, but instead to take a lower seat. One highly respected scholar4 of John’s gospel has suggested that the beloved disciple was seated, reclining, on Jesus’ right, so that when he tilted his head back, it was at Jesus’ chest. And it may very well be that the other place of honor, next to the master, on his left, was reserved for another important disciple, one whom the others trusted so fully that they made him their treasurer: Judas, the keeper of the common purse.

That whole scene at the table is filled with subjects for contemplation. Think on the towel that Jesus used to wash the dusty feet in the gospel just prior to our reading; the ironic contrast between that act of selfless love and the self-absorption characterizing betrayal. It is one thing to betray, but to do so in light of self-giving love describes a treachery we hardly wish to see. Jesus saw it. He knew that if he was to save humanity from what we are capable of being, he had to face the darkest and most treacherous parts of us, and offer that same selfless love no matter what the consequences for himself. Think of the common dish into which bread was to be dipped, a symbol of community, of shared resources and common bonds, broken by treachery. But who was it that was treacherous?

What was the night like after the betrayal? There had been other betrayers-in-waiting sitting at that table, they all abandoned him. We are so blessed, as a nation, as people of the church, I’m afraid that sometimes we are tempted to think it means we are also blameless, beyond culpability. Judas is not meant to present a figure beside whom we all may feel relieved at our relative innocence. Maybe you recall Eddie Murphy’s rather somber comic routine years ago when a terrorist in Rome shot the Pope. Murphy shouted, “You really want to go to hell? Shoot the Pope!” The implication seemed to be that was something that could get you a front row seat in hell, like many of the editorial cartoons I remember following the events of September 11.

People of all times have frequently named their children after biblical figures, yet we never name our children Judas, though we might name them Peter, Andrew, Mary or Thomas. Why is this? Well, it seems obvious, doesn’t it? Who wants their child named after someone with a front row seat in hell? Judas betrayed Jesus, of course, while the others did not. Or did they? In the end, none were to be found with Jesus in his hour of need at trial, none. They all denied him. Jesus even warned Peter beforehand that he would deny him, and despite his strong protests to the contrary, that is exactly what he did. What is the point of trying to establish a pecking order of badness? The figure of Judas is immensely popular for preaching because he seems to provide a level of wickedness about which we much less-wicked people can be usefully warned. While it may feel good to have a scapegoat, someone worse off than we are in some way, the fact is, all the disciples can be counted among Jesus’ betrayers in one way or another. John is not particularly hung up on Judas as a villain, Satan seems to occupy that place, and Satan works through a weak person in order to do battle with the Savior of all.

The point of this sermon is not to drag us backward through Holy Week and Lent. It is to help us look forward through the eyes of the cross and the resurrection to see in Jesus’ words of farewell to his disciples that new life in him was a gift which came at a cost; and that new life is meant to be lived in a community characterized by the sort of grace-filled giving that Jesus modeled when he washed the disciples’ feet. In the end, Jesus is raised to save those who betray him, no matter how they have done it, nor how often, nor under what circumstances. In the end, we all lean on Jesus, as his beloved disciple did in the scene which John painted for us, because, in the end, all are equally dependent upon him for a grace-filled love that saves us.

Jesus summons believers in the community not to the giving up of life, but the giving away of life. The grace that Jesus embodies is grace, not sacrifice. Jesus gave his life to his disciples — and not just in his death but in washing their feet and myriad other ways — as an expression of the fullness of his relationship with God and of God’s love for the world. Jesus’ death in love was not an act of self-denial, but an act of fullness, of living out his life and identity fully, even when that living would ultimately lead to death.5

What price would someone need to come up with to entice us to betray him? How would Satan enter into our hearts and make us instruments of opposition to Jesus? How has it happened already? What would Jesus say to us?

Well, in the end, our focus today is meant to be an Easter focus. We are not meant to look mournfully at the shortcomings of disciples but rather at the persistent gracefulness of Christ. He persisted in grace, in giving, even though it came at a tremendous cost, an ultimate cost.

One preacher said about this passage,

“Whatever Judas’ degree of guilt and whatever his motive, it is important that we note how Jesus identifies the traitor. He points no fingers, mentions no names, doesn’t even try to talk him out of it. All he does is feed him. When we would expect condemnation and rejection, Jesus is nurturing. Jesus dips into his cup and offers it to Judas, whose feet he has just washed and dried with a towel wrapped around his waist. It’s not what we would expect from somebody who is being betrayed, is it?”6

No, it’s not. But then, Jesus was never the Messiah that many people thought he should be. It’s only in knowing him after he was raised from the dead that we have come to recognize him as the only Messiah we would ever want.

John concluded his account of the dismissal of Judas, into a time in which all the others would abandon him as well, with the chilling sentence, “And it was night.” But it would not always be night. That is why the celebration of resurrection is real, because while the night seemed to have come to hold sway, the very opening lines of John’s gospel come true in Jesus’ resurrection with astounding force: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”7

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1 John 14:11.
2 Luke 14: 1-11.
3 Mark 10:37.
4 The Gospel According to John, Raymond Brown, Anchor-Doubleday, 1970, p.574.
5 New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume IX, Abingdon, 1995, p.734.
6 “Judas and Jesus,” a sermon preached April 2, 2000 by Dr. Dan Ivins, First Baptist Church, Silver Springs, Maryland.
7 John 1:5.

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

Footloose

Footloose

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder
Mountain View Presbyterian Church, Las Vegas, Nevada

Easter Day, March 23, 2008
Matthew 27:62—28:15

One of my favorite Sherlock Holmes sayings usually comes early on in those stories. After some build-up about a case which the famous detective may at first seem to reject as already closed, there comes a point where something happens which gets the mystery of the story underway, and he is heard to say with some delight, “The game is afoot!”

Closed is exactly what the Jerusalem officials thought the case of the Jesus movement was after his humiliating death. Closed, done, over with, of no further interest. Yet the God of creation is never really closed out of our world, no matter how things may look to us. What appeared closed was opened. A plot the officials worried the disciples might hatch by stealing Jesus’ body turned out to be the explanation they themselves offered for his disappearance from the cemetery. While it appeared that all had been said and done about him, it turned out more had been said than done, and the game was afoot, Jesus was loosed in the world in a way that was beyond comprehending.

In John Masefield’s imaginative drama, The Trial of Jesus, there’s an interesting exchange between two legendary persons. Longinus, the traditional name of the Roman centurion who was in charge of the crucifixion, the one who is supposed to have said, “truly this was the Son of God,” (Mt 27:54) returns to the court of Pilate to give his report. There he is drawn aside by Procula, Pilate’s wife. She asks him, “Do you think he is dead?” Longinus replies, “No, Lady, I don’t.” “Then where is he?” she asks. He says, “Lady, he’s let loose in the world.”

Footloose, that’s what Jesus was, and is, defying all our attempts to keep him in some safe place.

I have sometimes been puzzled by one hymns that many of us often mention as one of our favorites, titled “In the Garden,”1 which includes lines like this: “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses...” It makes the resurrection sound like a sort of ode to Springtime and contemplation, to peace and tranquility. Not in this gospel: we may well come to the garden tomb seeking Jesus, but we are likely to miss the condition of the roses when God delivers an earthquake!

The scenes in today’s gospel are filled with irony.

• The religious leaders are afraid the disciples will form a plan to deceive others, yet by the end, it is the very deception they feared which they themselves employ to discredit the anticipated testimony of the disciples;
• they, along with the Roman governor Pilate, are obsessed with security: “Make it as secure as you can!” he instructs them. Yet it turns out that Pilate’s arms are too short to box with God, who turns human attempts at security into keystone cops farce.
• The very guards who were supposed to secure the tomb shook as violently as the earthquake itself and “became like dead men.” So that they, who were supposed to be living, became more dead than the former occupant of the tomb.

Several years ago a German movie was produced, telling the story of the role of St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig in the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Over the years, freedom prayer meetings at the church crescendoed until the night of October 8, 1989, when 70,000 people filled the streets with candles and prayers. In the movie the security officer testifies about his desire to use force, but his inability to do anything other than stare out at the immense crowd in front of his headquarters in frozen amazement: “We were prepared for everything,” he said, ... “everything except for candles and prayers.”

While Jesus was footloose in the world that thought him dead, the guards whose job it was to keep death secure and in place were dead in their tracks in a world which thought them to be alive.

When Clarence Jordan died, he had to be buried in a plain box on a hillside near his farm. Jordan, Civil-rights crusader is also known as the author of the Cotton Patch Gospel, a Southern dialect version of the New Testament. In the 1960s Jordan, a white pastor, founded an interracial community in Georgia called Koinonia farms. He was shunned by the culture all around him for his trouble. Threats were made to his life. In 1969 he died of a heart attack. No local funeral director would help, so he was buried in a plain box. His friend, Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity, officiated at the funeral. When he was finished, it was time to lower the casket, and Fuller’s two year-old daughter stepped up to the grave and began to sing the only song she knew. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you...” Later, Fuller reflected on the appropriateness of that birthday thought on that particular occasion. Jordans work has outlived him and is still footloose in the world.

It’s not that we don’t have to take death into account. The truth of it is, there will come a day for each of us when death will take us into account, whether we take it into account or not.

I remember walking into the kitchen in the home of some friends, and seeing these words taped on their refrigerator door: “Eat right, get exercise, stay slim, die anyway.” In our health-obsessed society, a column in the newspaper about weight loss or exercise or reducing stress will always find a broad readership. Yet still we die. Unless we have done something about death, what have we accomplished? Longer lives? So we can spend more time in nursing homes, or additional years struggling to survive on Social Security?

Once, when he was traveling by car in the South part of England, Will Willimon, pastor of the chapel at Duke University, discovered his car was having mechanical difficulties. As he awaited the arrival of a mechanic, he wandered into the cemetery of the nearby village church. He described his experience there this way:

“Over in one corner of the cemetery there was a beautiful, low, brick wall enclosing fifty graves. The grass had nearly choked the plot. A large granite slab, set in the wall, bore the words, ‘WE SHALL NEVER FORGET YOUR SACRIFICE.’ Here were fifty graves of young men from New Zealand. They were all around the ages of 17 to 25 and all from New Zealand. Who were these and why did they die here, in this little English village, so far from home? There was no clue at the churchyard as to who they were or the circumstances of their deaths. I wandered down into the village. I found the town’s museum and inquired there. The attendant at the museum told me, ‘Strange that you should ask, I have no idea, but given a few days I could certainly find out.’ As I was not going to be there for a few days, I asked a couple of other people in town. No one knew. I surmised that they were soldiers who were stationed in this little town during World War I. Victims of the flu epidemic in 1918. And no one knew. The impressive inscription in granite was a lie. We had forgotten their sacrifice. No one could remember.2

No matter how we may promise not to do so, we forget. If someone’s name is on a building or on a chair at a university or on a monument or buried in session minutes or locked away in a vault along with their last will and testament, given enough time, we will forget. Who can list even one of the important people in the world in the 7th century? Standing here right now, I can’t think of one, although I am sure there were many. But we forget. The present business of the living is more pressing.

I wonder if, as they made their way to the cemetery that early morning, the women were speaking of Jesus, trying to recall for each other the way he phrased things, the sound of his voice, a certain look in his eye. I wonder if they recalled how he ate, and the way he greeted his friends. I wonder if, for them, as for so many of us, they found that their dead friend’s memory was already starting to slip through their fingers. I remember trying to recall the look on my own mother’s face the night that she died, and sometimes I can just about see her, but most of the time it is a blur. We forget, not because we are bad or faithless, but because neither our memories nor our very own selves are made of eternal stuff.

We require something outside ourselves to remember us, something outside of friends and family who will also perish one day, along with their memories. Jesus needed this too. Matthew says the angel spoke to the women, “He is not here; for he has been raised...” Been raised, as in, he was really dead and God acted to bring him out, to raise him up. This is not some linguistic hair-splitting, but an important theological distinction. Jesus was truly dead, had given himself to death, and passed beyond any ability to raise himself. God raised him, and it is in that which our hope lies.

Raised, and loosed in the world. That is the miracle of it. Footloose and already handing out marching orders to those who would follow him. “Go to Galilee,” he said. It turns out that if we want to continue to see him, we can do so only by following him, by doing his bidding, by becoming his disciples. It is in the going and doing that we come to know Jesus. We don’t have videotapes of his eloquent speeches or photographs of his healed patients, just the fellowship of those who follow, and it is in our fellowship and in our ministry in his name that we know him; and in which he sets our feet free too.

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 C. Austin Miles, 1913.
2 “He has Been Raised,” a sermon preached by William Willimon at Duke University Chapel Easter Day, 1996.

The Best Things In Life Are ... Borrowed?

The Best Things In Life Are...Borrowed?
© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder
Palm Sunday: March 16, 2008
Matthew 21:1-11

Today’s gospel brings back a specific memory to me. From our time in Israel, I remember the narrow, winding path from the Mount of Olives down toward Jerusalem which is the traditional trail along which generations of Jews made processions into the city and Temple courtyard on great feast days. The gate through which they passed on their way into the city — the Golden Gate — is now bricked up and permanently closed, but it is easy enough to see which way the procession used to go into the area of the Temple courtyard. On our way down that little narrow road we saw one feature that I suspect every tourist sees there: Men seated on donkeys along the way, eyeballing the passing tourists. Some unsuspecting travelers will immediately snap a picture, only to find that donkey-sitting is, for some, a career, not a hobby. Posing for pictures for tourists is a cottage industry all its own. It is done for money. By offering enough money, the tourists themselves can be photographed sitting on one of those donkeys. But if you go, don’t try to click off a picture without offering to pay a little something. These donkeys aren’t part of the scenery, they are part of a family’s annual income.

Recall with me for a minute the items in our Palm Sunday reading which were borrowed. First of all, Jesus instructed his disciples to borrow a donkey on the Mount of Olives, where they were to offer the rather limp explanation to anyone who objected that “the Lord has need of it.” I’d hate to be told to try that line if I was preparing to borrow one of those modern-day Mount of Olives donkeys, much less the first century version of someone’s automobile. Of course, for the disciples, the explanation worked.

But a donkey is not the only thing borrowed by Jesus for the occasion. He also borrowed the words of the Old Testament prophets as an explanation for the reason he needed a donkey: “This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying, “Tell the daughter of Zion, ‘Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey...’” He borrowed the cloaks of the crowd on which to ride, he borrowed the hosanna songs which belonged to the original Messiah — king David — whose title he also borrowed for the occasion and ever after. Then, he borrowed the crowds to announce his arrival in town, those who answered the questions of the city dwellers about the man who came to town on a donkey by saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.” When he went to eat his last supper with his disciples, it was in a borrowed room. Finally, he was crucified under the borrowed title “King of the Jews,” a title that did — as it turned out — truly belong to him more than to any other human being, but which expressed far too little about him. Even so, his borrowed title was good enough to sustain a trumped-up charge justifying his execution, but far too little to describe who he really was and is.

It has been said that the best things in life are free. I think Jesus demonstrated that some of the critical things in his ministry were borrowed, and none of them were free at all. The donkey was someone else’s cherished possession; the borrowed words of Old Testament prophets were spoken by the prophets at great personal cost, and remembered by Israel also at great cost; the cloaks belonging to folks in the crowd may have been the only outer clothing they owned; the first man called “messiah,” King David, in his time had been the apple of God’s eye, but his messiahship came at tremendous personal cost. No, these things were borrowed, but they were far from free. They came at great cost.

Ultimately, Jesus’ own use of these symbols of his messiahship was anything but cost-free. He paid for his calling with his life, and that life turned out to be the purchase price of salvation for all of us. In the beginning of his life, he was laid in a borrowed manger, and at the end he would occupy a borrowed tomb. In between he said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,”1 as he spent his ministry relying on borrowed quarters, borrowed beds, borrowed food. Clearly, Jesus chose to own little or nothing of the world in order to carry out his God-given mission without distraction. That was certainly the case on Palm Sunday.

One person has written, “When the crowds cry, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ and ‘This is the prophet,’ they use the right words, but they still miss the point. They have all the notes and none of the music. They have the theology straight, but they still end up rejecting Jesus and calling for his death.”2

Knowing the truth and doing the truth are clearly two different things. Some only borrow the truth they need for the time they need it, abandoning it once it becomes too costly or makes too many claims on them. Though Jesus borrowed the things he needed to sustain himself and his ministry materially, he never abandoned those things which he owned: his sense of calling, his determination to carry out his ministry, his love for those he met, his perfect obedience, even when that obedience called for the sacrifice of his life. These things he did not borrow, and these things he owned in every sense of the word.

If it is true that when we look at Jesus we will see the face of God that human beings are permitted to see, we will recognize from Jesus’ own lifestyle that “[he] manifests a God whose very being is not acquisitive, but is self-giving...[that] the ultimate power is the power to renounce power.”3

We may be given to the sort of thinking that goes: “If only I had control over my life, my education, my family, my employees, my boss, my situation, my mortgage, my possessions, my career, if only I were in charge of a few more aspects of my life, then things would be perfect, or if not perfect, at least better. But then we see the example of Jesus, who owned no bed, no donkey, no title, no educational credentials, who did not control his disciples in any sort of external way or with any compulsion, who had to be born in borrowed quarters and be buried in a borrowed cave. We see Jesus owned nothing, borrowed only what he really needed, and since he came along, nothing on earth has ever been the same. What use, then, is our compulsive, endless need to be in control?

This sort of reflection may serve to remind us that it may be a mistake to memorialize the parade held in Jesus’ honor on Palm Sunday, inasmuch as it paid homage to someone who strikes us as the antithesis of the American dream. On this big day, he wore something borrowed, rode something borrowed, received a borrowed title, and went to a borrowed room. It may also serve to remind us that at times when our lives are clearly out of our control, when we seem to have lost the rudder by which we thought we had been steering our own existence, when our borrowed lives are nearing their end, when we recognize at long last that our possessions — which we had begun to believe were ours — have never truly belonged to us but only been at our disposal for a time — borrowed, as it were — just when we are filled with the dread feeling that life is reeling out of our control, then we are close to Jesus, so very close that we know what it is to let go and live as he lived. We may at long last recognize that we are dependent creatures, and that it is OK, that God can be trusted to have plans bigger than our abilities to control them.

The best things in life may not be free after all. But at best, it appears, they are borrowed. Borrow this and make it your own: Jesus went into Jerusalem during that week of weeks and died for you and for me. More than that, he went there to give glory to God, and as it turns out, God gave glory to him for his trouble.

May our own praise of God be so productive! Hosanna to the Kings of kings!

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder,all rights reserved

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1 Matthew 8:20.
2 The New Interpreter’s Bible: Volume VIII, Eugene Boring, Abingdon: 1995, p. 404.
3 The Death of Jesus, by Raymond Brown, p. 27.

Dead or Alive

Dead or Alive

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Mountain View Presbyterian Church, Las Vegas, Nevada
Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 9, 2008
John 11:1-45

Jesus began to weep.

Today is the fifth Sunday in Lent. Does it feel like Lent to you? It does to me, I can tell you, as I look over the events of Holy Week to come, the Last Supper, the trial of Jesus, the crucifixion. Most years in Lent I have found myself running through scripture dealing with death, its anticipation and its aftermath. Last week I read where the Psalmist encouraged us to “number our days” so as to recognize that they will eventually end. Today we have the story of the death of Jesus’ friend Lazarus, whose day numbering appeared to be finished, an extended story taking place all around tombs and mourners and sounds of weeping. It’s Lent for sure in a passage like the story of the death of Lazarus.

There are so many striking things about this story, but here is something that strikes me about our gospel reading today. It is the connection between two verses that stand side by side; we often read them as though the first belongs to the material that went before, and the second belongs to the material that comes after, but that’s not the only way to read them:

When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping, and the people who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.”

Jesus began to weep. So the people said, “See how he loved him!”

We most often connect his request for directions with the phrase “come and see.” Then we connect “Jesus began to weep” with the comment “See how he loved him.” But there is a good chance Jesus’ weeping is brought on by the phrase “Come and see.” Here’s why:

“Come and see” is a phrase used four times in John’s gospel. The other three times they were words used to invite others to join in the call to discipleship, to take up that calling. In the first chapter of the gospel,1 Andrew and another person -- some say it could even have been Lazarus himself, others say it might have been John -- anyway, Andrew and another person approached Jesus for the first time, calling him rabbi, asking where he was staying. Jesus responded “Come and see,” and they were brought by that phrase into their calling as disciples. Then, the next day, after Peter and Philip had joined up, Philip ran into Nathanael and told him about Jesus of Nazareth. Nathanael uttered the famous “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” to which Philip replied “Come and see.”2 And he did, and he entered into the circle of discipleship with Jesus. The third time happened when Jesus had been speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well at Sychar, and she ran back into the city saying to everyone who would listen, “Come and see...!”3 and John says that many people from her city believed. Discipleship was breaking out all over.

So “Come and see” is an invitation-to-discipleship phrase that in the story of the raising of Lazarus turns the invitation back to Jesus. “Where have you laid him?” Jesus asked, and the people replied, “Come and see.” And he wept. They took it as a sign that Jesus loved Lazarus, which I am sure is true, but John invariably operates on two or more levels of meaning in his gospel. I am equally sure that another reason Jesus began to weep, perhaps the main reason, was that a tomb containing a dead man along with an invitation to “come and see,” that is, to complete his calling, was for him a concrete realization of the coming death and entombment that he would face. And he began to weep. It is, as one great preacher once said, as strong a commentary on “And the Word became flesh” as can be found.4

Anyone who wonders if God knows what it is to be frail dust need only reflect on the Christian assertion that Jesus was God in the flesh, who wept at the tomb of his friend, and wept at the prospect of his own coming death. Hundreds of years before Jesus’ time, the psalmist recognized this quality in the very nature of God:

For he knows how we were made;
he remembers that we are dust.5

God knows. God remembers. The old translations made John’s famous phrase even more compact than we find it in our modern version. Where most newer translations say something like, “Jesus began to weep,” the old versions said simply, “Jesus wept,” instantly providing every English-speaker on earth with at least one scripture verse we could quote from memory. And if we can know only one verse, this one isn’t a bad choice. “Jesus wept.” Just think how broadly applicable it is. Jesus was reminded that he too must one day die: “Jesus wept.” On a sign at a roadside location where a loved one perished in an automobile accident: “Jesus wept.” Painted on the side of a building that burned, claiming the lives of those inside: “Jesus wept.” Nailed on posts along the roads homeless refugees must take when fleeing from fighting or famine or both: “Jesus wept.” A note included along with the latest college or job rejection letter: “Jesus wept.” Alongside empty streams once filled to the banks with fish, now poisoned by human carelessness or greed: “Jesus wept.”

But Jesus’ weeping was about something other, or at least more than his grief over the death of a friend. Remember, he delayed an additional two days going to see him. Is that what a friend does, wait until days after a friend has died and then go to the tomb in order to weep for him? Something else is going on here.

It is typical of John’s gospel to use stories as signs, events pointing to truth larger than the stories themselves. Jesus wept immediately after those all-important words were uttered, “Come and see.” The very call to trust that had been extended to others, to those who became his disciples, to the people of Samaria, is now extended to Jesus himself. Jesus truly became as we are, aiming to live in faithful obedience amid the overwhelming presence of suffering and death. Lazarus is in the tomb, actively decaying. Come and see how you too will be one day, dead and decaying. At the prospect, Jesus did what any human person would do. He wept.

For Jesus to call Lazarus out of the tomb, for him to call any of us out of death, is for him to enter into it. A few verses later he will say of his coming trial and death. “And what should I say —‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.”6 It is for the tomb that Jesus came. Come and see, Jesus, come and see how it will be for you. He was invited to consider his own tomb, and Jesus wept.

The death of anyone we know is an unhappy, even tragic circumstance. But the death of the obedient Jesus is a gift of God to the world that “received him not.” It is the gift that has made our faith possible. And it was born in tears, Jesus’ own love-filled tears. He went to raise Lazarus knowing, as John discloses a few verses later, that the raising of Lazarus from death was the last straw for the religious authorities, who determined after that that they would have to have Jesus killed. And possibly Lazarus too,7 lest he tell the tale more broadly.

Once, years ago in another city, I was called on to do a funeral service for a non-church member. The circumstances surrounding this death were horrible, each worse than the one before as I heard about them one by one. A young woman, mother of two small children by her former husband, had found the grief of living too overpowering to bear for whatever reasons, and had chosen to take her own life. She died with a photograph of her two children in her arms. That is how her current husband found her. He not only was robbed of his wife, but also of her two children whom he had cared for as if they were his own, since the court returned them to the custody of their father who had abandoned them in the first place. Tragedy compounded.

The grief of that family was overwhelming. How could it not be? Not even knowing what a church really was, they nevertheless turned to the church in abject need of some ministry, some word of hope however bare that hope might turn out to be.

And Jesus wept. He did. I believe he wept as he received that woman in the loving embrace of heaven, and I believe that no matter how strong their grief, it could not surpass the grief of Jesus over the tragic loss of that life. Why did he not spare her? Why did he not go to Lazarus two days earlier and prevent his dying in the first place? Why doesn’t God step in front of speeding cars before they run people over, fix all the illness and death we see in the world around us?

We don’t know. We do know that God created a world in which people are at liberty to do what they will do without God stopping them, and a lot of what we do to each other is not very pretty. We may sometimes question the wisdom of this plan for our free will; still, it is the world we live in whether we question it or not. Yet we also know something else. We know that Jesus’ own life was a total and perfect gift he chose to give, his crucifixion providing the bridge by which we may cross into the life of his resurrection.

Apart from trust in God, wrote one preacher,8 the world is a cemetery. But because of the gift of the life of this one man, there is in the world the power of resurrection to eternal life.

Copyright © 2008 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 John 1:39
2 John 1:46
3 John 4:29
4 "Jesus Wept," by Fred Craddock, Journal for Preachers, Easter 2000, p. 36, source of several core ideas behind this sermon.
5 Psalm 103:14
6 John 12:27
7 See John 12:9-11
8 Fred Craddock, John Knox Preaching Guides (Atlanta, John Knox Press, 1982), p. 85.