Sunday, April 28, 2013
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Who Are They – Whose Are They?
Who
Are They – Whose Are They?
John 10:22-30
Revelation 7:9-17
Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Fourth Sunday of Easter: April 21,
2013
Suppose
you are a great sports buff, one who follows every Mariner and Blazer game with
the fierce intensity of a true and loyal fan. But imagine that you were to be
called out of the country for the week of a final game, tending to business in,
say, Thailand, where you couldn’t expect much coverage of American sports in
the local newspapers even if you could read
the local newspapers. But you are a real fan, so you had set your home TV
system to record the upcoming game before you left.
And suppose, on your return, before you had a
chance to watch the recorded game, one of your friends saw you in town and said
to you, “Welcome home! Say, how about those Blazers!” in such a way that you
thought maybe they had won the critical game. Now, as you watched the recorded
game unfold, you would have a different level of anxiety after a bad call from
a referee or when one of the front line players fouled out of the game, wouldn’t
you? You could still get excited about the action, but in the end, you would
think you knew who the final winner would be. It would be something like
reading a detective novel backwards. Come tribulation and hardship, you would
be secure in your knowledge. As they struggled to prevail on the screen, you
would know that in reality, your team was already victorious.
That’s something like the purpose for reading
Revelation in the church. If we take Revelation 7 seriously, we will know that
come this or come that ordeal or setback, victory has already been declared in
heaven, God’s salvation is already a fact, and the woes through which we go are
the mopping-up operation of a battle that has already been won. So no matter
what, from the testimony of John in Revelation we know that the salvation of
God is victorious. Set in the middle of the strife that believers knew then,
reminding us of the strife we may know today, John’s witness never lets up on
the ultimate victory of God, the final security in which believers may rest.
And, like a pre-recorded Blazer game, John records
a victory of God which is already accomplished, not just some reality that
awaits us in the future. While many television preachers may be preoccupied
with some calendar for God’s future intervention in the world, John gives us a
vision of God’s triumph that has already broken in upon the human scene. In
Revelation, the future is determining and creating the present.
But who are these saved ones in John’s vision? Who
are those folks he saw gathered around the throne of God in heaven?
WHO ARE THEY?
One thing is certain. John looked into heaven, and
the people he saw surrounding the throne of God outnumbered his personal circle
of acquaintance. Who are the people that Jesus – the Lamb – has in mind for his
church, as members of his flock, his sheep who will know his voice and follow
him? Our friends and neighbors, certainly. But more than that, just as
certainly.
In Genesis 15, God promised Abraham that his
descendents would be as countless as the stars in the heavens. In the new
Israel, the Church, John’s vision in Revelation demonstrates that God’s promise
to Abraham is fulfilled. The multitude in the chorus in heaven — from every
nation and language – is so large that no one could count them all!
So often, we are preoccupied with questions about
who may and who may not be numbered among the elect, who may and who may not be
the apple of Jesus’ eye just as much as we are. One of the worst tendencies of
many church fellowships is this inclination to presume to know who belongs to
the host of heaven. This scene from Revelation should startle us any time we
are inclined toward that presumption. Apparently, the way to be numbered among
the elect has little to do with knowing who else
is saved, and everything to do with knowing the one doing the saving. The main
thing is to know the Shepherd; we may never know the name and number of all his
other sheep, all his other flocks.
This is hard news for those of us who can only find
pleasure in having when others have not, in knowing when others are ignorant,
in receiving love when we are certain others are loveless, in triumphing when
others are defeated.
John’s admitted ignorance about the “ins and outs”
of heaven ought to be a lesson for the community of faith. John, in looking
upon the multitudes in heaven, when asked who they were, was struck not by
their familiarity but their diversity. The fellowship of the saved is destined
to be greater than we expect. Remember the final scene in John’s gospel, when
Jesus told Peter that he would be imprisoned for his faith, and Peter saw John
walking along behind and asked, “What about him?” Jesus said, “What is that to
you? Follow me!”
This reminds me of a wonderful little poem I read
once and which has stayed with me through the years:
I
dreamt death came the other night,
And
heaven’s gate swung wide.
An
angel with a halo bright ushered me inside.
And
there! to my astonishment
stood
folks I’d judged and labeled:
As quite unfit, of little worth, and
spiritually disabled.
Indignant
words rose to my lips
but
never were set free
Who will we find in heaven? The only way we will
know is by following Jesus. The task of the disciple is not to sort the sheep
from the goats but to obey and follow the Shepherd...
WHOSE ARE
THEY?
...which helps us know that the main issue in
determining the population of heaven is not in finding out who they are, but whose
they are. To whom do these folks belong?
When the day of the festival of Hanukkah came
around and Jesus was in the temple, those who remembered the last big victory
they had known – the victory still celebrated at Hanukkah, commemorating the
time the Maccabee family drove the Syrians out of their homeland — they looked
to Jesus and demanded a final answer from him. “Are you the Messiah?” Are you
the one to whom we need to belong for a new victory?
If we’re honest about it, we all struggle with this
“Who is Jesus?” question from time to time. Should I throw my lot in with him,
or should I wait and get more information? Jesus seldom responds to his
questioners just the way we wish, because he may not be just the Messiah for
whom we wish. If we want to know who Jesus is, our best opportunity to know is
in asking the ones who are following him. They are part of that uncountable
multitude who have come out of great ordeals. To follow Jesus is to know him. “Those
who stand back, arms folded, waiting to be convinced” will never receive the
final proof concerning Jesus’ lordship. “Those who enter the flock are the ones
who hear the Shepherd’s voice.”[2] They are the ones over whom the Shepherd will
watch eternally.
When we were very little, if we were blessed with a
good home, one of our parents — very likely it was our mothers — spent a good
deal of time watching over us, literally.
As we lay sleeping in our cribs, we were observed 0and cherished. As we
took our first steps, said our first words, celebrated our first birthdays, we
were watched and treasured. I seldom hold an infant at the time of baptism when
I don’t think of the eyes of the congregation as well as the eyes of God
watching over, guiding that child. Young children don’t mind it when we watch
over them. In fact, they often feel an immediate sense of panic and uncertainty
if a familiar face is nowhere to be found in a crowded room.
But that comfort under the watchful gaze of others
begins to give way, ultimately, to an adolescent desire for freedom from
observation, for privacy. Children make a game of it initially, closing their
eyes in an effort to make others disappear. As we mature, we want to control
when we will be seen, and who will see us. And we want to hide many things from
anyone’s observation. We may have come to believe that no one, not even God,
watches over us any more. But it is not true. At the center of the very throne
of heaven, the center of life itself is the Lamb, watching over us like a
Shepherd, because we are his.
“Salvation belongs to our God and to the Lamb!”
Some of these saints pictured in John’s vision have sacrificed everything, even
their lives, for the sake of the gospel. Now, even acknowledging their
sacrifice, they continue to recognize that salvation is a gift of God in every
way. No amount of self-sacrificing will bring them their salvation, nor will
any failure to measure up take it away. That is because of who we are and whose
we are: We are the followers of the Shepherd and our lives mirror the salvation
we have found in him. And we are his.
We are they
who have come out of great ordeals;
we have washed our robes
and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
For this
reason we are before the throne of God
and worship him day and night within his
temple,
and the one who is seated on the throne
shelters us.
We will
hunger no more, and thirst no more;
the sun will not strike us,
nor any
scorching heat;
for the Lamb
at the center of the throne will be our shepherd,
and he will guide us to springs of the water of
life,
and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Keeping in Touch
Keeping in Touch
© copyright 2013 Robert J. Elder
John 20:19-31
Robert
J. Elder, Pastor
First
Presbyterian Church, Vancouver, Washington
Second
Sunday of Easter: April 7, 2013
In
1899, Congressman William Vandiver coined a phrase when he said, “I come from a
state that raises corn, cotton, cockleburs, and Democrats; and frothy eloquence
neither convinces nor satisfies me. I’m from Missouri. You’ve got to show me.” The bit about frothiness
didn’t stick, but that “I’m from Missouri ... show me” business sure did.
People who require evidence have been saying, “I’m from Missouri” ever since.
Probably Thomas was the one disciple who could be said, in Congressman
Vandiver’s sense of it, to have been “from Missouri.”
“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and
put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not
believe.” Sermons are often based on this episode by focusing on the doubts
which Thomas harbored. I have heard Thomas’ doubts compared to everything under
the sun. Frederick Buechner once called doubts “the ants in the pants of
faith,” because, he said, “they keep it alive and moving.” Talking of
ants-in-the-pants leads me to think on the equally stimulating value of fleas.
The chief character of Edward Noyes Westcott’s late 19th century
novel, David Harum, declared, “A
reasonable amount o’ fleas is good fer a dog – keeps him from broodin’ over
being a dog.”[1] Which goes well with the observation of Sir Francis
Galon, the nineteenth century English scientist who said, “Well-washed and
well-combed dogs grow dull; they miss the stimulus of fleas.” All this has
reminded many preachers of a similarity between the stimulating effect of fleas
on a dog and doubts in a person.
Today, though, I have found my eye returning to a
different aspect of the story from John’s gospel. It has to do with Jesus’
wounds and his invitation to Thomas – to all of us – to touch them.
Every so often, it seems almost on a daily basis, we
hear reports about a roadside bomb going off somewhere in the world, sometimes
right here at home, killing and maiming X number of innocent bystanders. A
couple of decades ago, we would have been shocked reading such reports. Now
they seem as common as a morning cup of coffee. We have become awfully
calloused to the suffering that human beings visit on one another. To the weary
world, these must seem to be just more wounds on an already much-wounded
planet.
I don’t know about you, but every time I read the
story of Thomas, I am shocked at his desire to touch Jesus in his wounded
places. Yet I am equally undone by the fact that this does not seem to bother
the risen Jesus all that much. He invites Thomas’ probing fingers into his
wounds, into the places where he was injured, battered, killed for the sake of
the gospel. The week before, when Thomas wasn’t with them, Jesus invited all of
the other disciples to see his hands and side. Jesus invited Thomas, as he
invited all of them, as he invites us, to touch his wounds.
“Unless I touch your wounds, I will not believe.” If
finding wounds to touch is the problem, then the solution is as near at hand as
the latest disaster, the nearby suffering of innocents. Pictures coming across
our TV screens on a daily basis remind us that wounds are near at hand indeed.
I believe that we can touch Jesus’ wounds today. Indeed, I believe we must.
Remember in John’s gospel how the disciples reacted
to the news of Jesus’ resurrection? They heard the report from Mary Magdalene,
that she had met the risen Jesus. Did they suddenly sing out for joy, begin
praising God in the streets, challenge the authority of the Scribes and
Pharisees? No, John reports what they did: “When it was evening on that day,
the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had
met were locked out of fear...” The resurrection of Jesus did not embolden the
disciples, nor did it grant them faith. It sent them scrambling to the safety
of a retreat to the room where they had last eaten with him. Thomas is called
the doubter, but looking around that chilly upper room, I don’t see anything
passing for faith on the faces of those fear-filled disciples that Easter
evening, do you? Thomas, when he found his voice, merely said what everyone
else was thinking when they first heard that Jesus had risen. “How can I know Jesus is risen?” He sought some
tangible assurance. Why is it that he thought of contact with Jesus’ wounds as
the way to receive that assurance?
Thomas, always the practical one, thought he found
the other disciples deep in the denial stage that some folks go through when
they lose a loved-one to death. Practical Thomas, who tried to keep Jesus from
traveling to Judea to be with the family of Lazarus – after all, the last time
he was there they tried to stone him! – Thomas, who finally agreed to go along,
but with his eyes open: “Let’s go, then, so we can all die with him,” he said.
When the end came, Thomas ducked for cover like the
rest, but he was also the last to emerge from hiding. He was, as I said, the
practical one. He found the others in denial. “We have seen the Lord!” they
said. “Unless I ... put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his
side, I will not believe.” The translators may be too tame, out of deference to
our tender sensibilities. It’s a pity. The original word for “putting” his hand
means to thrust or jab. “Unless I thrust (Gk.: Balo) my
finger in the mark of the nails ... unless I jab my hand into his wounded side...” Ouch. Thomas seems to need to
observe Jesus wince in pain to believe that what was human and very much dead
had now become immortal. I am undone by this whole scene, but especially by the
fact that Jesus responded to Thomas’ words by inviting his probing touch. It did not seem to bother the risen
Jesus. He invited Thomas’ to jab at his wounds, the places of deadly injury, if
that’s what he needed. Jesus invited Thomas, invites us, to touch him in his
wounded places, just as for so many in Galilee Jesus had touched wounded places
to make them well.
Somehow this moment, this knowing of Jesus’ wounds,
transformed Thomas – and all of them – so that fear melted into joy. But this
is more than an arrival at the condition we call faith. It is also a story
about a commissioning:
“‘Peace be with you. As the
Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them
and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any,
they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’”
Having invited them to participate in his own wounds,
suffered for their sakes, Jesus commissioned them, the wounded, fear-filled
disciples, to show their wounds to the world, to touch the world in its wounded
places. The world says in reply to all our pontifications on faith and
doctrine, about resurrection and the ministry of Christ, “Unless I thrust my
hand into the church and find real wounds, no way I’ll ever believe.”[2]
I am often asked about the decline of members in the
Presbyterian church nationally. I am afraid I have no really good answers to
the question. The sum of what I know about the church as a denomination is that
if its individual churches fail to be faithful, no amount of conversation about
faithfulness as a denomination will suffice. Ask any group of gathered
Presbyterians to raise their hand if they have grown children who are not
active in any church. Dozens of hands will go up. It is our own people we have
lost, more than people who have left in a rage over some obscure point of
doctrine. We don’t lose members due to strife over big issues of dogma. We lose
our own children when they are bored with what the church isn’t doing. The
world is broken and wants to touch
our wounds to see if there can be healing. But when we dress up our wounds to
hide them from the world, we do a disservice to the gospel.
I read once about a psychiatrist who said, “‘Good
mothers tend to be a little bit messy. At least their grooming isn’t perfect.’
He knew that the touch of the small child, seeking assurance of safety and
love, should not be hampered by warnings not to spoil makeup or displace
carefully arranged hair. Jesus, our good Lord and our good friend, would pass
[the] test for a loving, embracing presence.”[3]
I think Jesus always moved, and still moves, toward
the wounded ones. Like fire fighters weeping over children they cannot save, or
physicians and nurses pausing solemnly in the ER over a patient they can’t
manage to resuscitate, Jesus moves toward the wounded places on the earth,
touches the wounds of those who suffer, and brings healing where there had been
despair. When we touch the wounds of others to bring healing, we are touching
the very body of Christ.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Changing Course in Mid-Sentence
Changing
Course in Mid-Sentence
Acts 10:34-44 Easter
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Before
I can really get underway with this sermon, I really need to say a word or two
about the scripture passage for the day, especially on a day when we might have
thought we would be hearing about tombs and frightened disciples and stones
rolled away and Jesus’ missing body, and Mary standing, weeping asking the
gardener in the cemetery where they had taken Jesus. Of course, there have
been, and there will be, other Easters for the reading of those passages. Inasmuch
as this is likely to be my last Easter in this pulpit with you, I thought I’d
choose for today a lesson that concerns one of the outcomes of those first
sightings of the resurrected Jesus, as the disciples began to make their way
into the world with the word about his resurrection and all that it promised.
The very first disciple to move beyond the Jewish
people with this new saving word about salvation through the risen Christ was Peter,
who found himself drawn to a Roman centurion’s house, a man named Cornelius. He
wasn’t sure why he was going but he felt called to go, and once there, he was
welcomed and he began to preach to them. Then Luke tells us,
While Peter was still speaking,
the Holy
Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.
I just love this verse from Acts. It was a moment in
which everything about our faith was made new, and made available for the whole
world. Any preacher who thinks he or she is in charge of worship, or in charge
of much of anything in any ultimate kind of sense, is always taken aback by the
Spirit that came storming in “While Peter was still speaking...” I imagine
Peter, in mid-sentence, Peter who had delivered a 500 word sermon earlier in
Acts about the living Christ, Peter was only getting warmed up here in this
story from his visit to Cornelius’ house, Cornelius: the first non-Jew to be
converted to Christianity. He didn’t even get to deliver any clever sermon
illustrations. He had no more than started to speak, when WHAM! the Holy Spirit took over, and what could he do but step
aside?
This kind of work of God, which interrupts us in
mid-sentence, brings on the surprising news that is really new, not the tired old stuff of human invention. I once read a headline
on the front page of our Presbytery’s newsletter that declared boldly,
“Presbytery Approves Discovering God.” Now, where was the controversy in that decision? Was it a split vote? But
when I read on, I discovered that the story had to do with an upcoming design
for the Presbytery’s work, called “Discovering God’s Call.” Oh. Well, that’s
not quite as funny. I am always in hopes that God’s surprising word will
intervene in the mundane places in our lives with a sort of newness that
interrupts us mid-sentence, especially if the sentence was about to say some
bland and predictable thing about a God who is author of something completely
unbland and non-predictable, like resurrection of the dead, something we don’t
just see every day.
Late in the life and ministry of one of those folks
who was sometimes called a “preachers’ preacher,” Pastor Edmund Steimle was
working up a sermon on one of the scripture passages for Holy Saturday, the day
before Easter. He read from Lamentations chapter 3, which declares: “God’s
mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.” As he worked his way
through the passage Dr. Steimle thought to himself, “At my age, this promise of
newness every morning is at best a mixed blessing. I have come to the point in
life when I really don’t want anything
new in the morning. I want my slippers right beneath my bed where I left them
the night before. I want my orange juice and bran flakes for breakfast, as
normal. In my advanced years, I can do without a lot of newness, especially in
the morning.”[1]
Maybe he would have sounded like an old crank to some
of us, but to others of us, he declares the sort of thing we may have said just
this morning. And, of course, Easter is the ultimate in total morning newness.
How can we cope with it? We may think we have something to say about it, but
just as we begin to speak, the Spirit may intervene with the kind of new thing
that saves a day we thought could never be saved.
One fact of Easter that is inescapable is that God is
forever demonstrating something new God has in mind, something that it is
likely we did not expect. When it was created, did the earth expect dinosaurs,
orangutans, poison oak, Boeing 737s, $5.00 cups of coffee at Starbucks or that
there had once been water on its next-door neighbor planet? With God, as
Roseanne Rosanadana used to say, it’s always something. We might like to be in
our accustomed place, slippers on the floor next to the bed right where we left
them. We Presbyterians like to have votes and debates about whether we should
approve discovering God, if only God would stay put where we could get a bead
on him. We might have preferred sameness, we like things to stay where we put
them, we like to think we have the world under control, but things have a way
of getting rearranged by a God who, at the very least, seems to have a unique
sense of inventiveness if not humor.
Roman guards dozing beside Jesus’ tomb expected a
dead body to stay where it had been deposited, and their slippers to be right
where they left them the night before. Peter, who grew up in an orthodox
household, expected non-Jews always to be where they belonged in his
thought-world, on a lower rung in the kingdom of God than those who were
children of Abraham. But then along comes this shake-it-up God, and BAM! Even a
pagan Roman officer of the occupying army receives the very Spirit of God,
along with everyone in his unclean, non-kosher household.
I imagine Peter, standing slack-jawed, mid-sentence,
when, as the scripture said, he “was still speaking,” and “the Holy Spirit fell
upon all who heard the word.” All.
All as in every single person, Jew, Gentile, clean, unclean, tall, short, fat,
skinny, the one who just passed the bar exam on her first try and the one who
can’t pass a bar. God seemed to be making no distinction, showing no partiality
as Peter had begun to understand when he started his little speech about Jesus,
who was crucified and then rose from the dead to call forth disciples in his
name.
Isn’t it just like God, when we have no sooner found
our slippers and stocked up on orange juice and bran flakes, to pull the
breakfast rug out from under us and declare a new thing? Here are two poems, both by a modern English poet, Steve
Turner, who, as is generally the task of poets, takes us to a place where we
may receive fresh views on seemingly tired subjects and make them new every
morning. First, this take on Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ crucifixion:
The Nail Man[2]
by Steve Turner
Which
one was it
that
held the nails
and
then hammered them
into
place?
Did
he hit them
out
of anger,
or
a simple
sense
of duty?
Was
it a job
that
had to be done,
or
a good day's work
in
the open air?
And
when they
clawed
past bone
and
bit into wood,
was
it like all the others,
or
did history
shudder
a little
beneath
the head
of
that hammer?
Was
he still there,
packing
away his tools,
when
‘It is finished’
was
uttered to the throng,
or
was he at home
washing
his hands
and
getting ready
for
the night?
Will
he be
among
the forgiven
on
that Day of Days,
his
sin having been slain
by his own savage spike?
Secondly, Steve Turner’s take on Easter Day, the Day
of resurrection:
Poem for Easter[3]
by Steve Turner
What
came first
Easter
or the egg?
Crucifixion
or daffodils?
Three
days in a tomb or four days
in
Paris? (returning
Bank
Holiday Monday).
When
is a door
not
a door?
When
it is rolled away.
When
is a body
not
a body?
When
it is risen.
Question.
Why
was it the Saviour
rode
on the cross?
Answer.
To
get us
to
the other side.
Behold
I stand.
Behold
I stand and what?
Behold
I stand at the door and
knock
knock.
Can
you even resist wanting to call out “Who’s there”? And the instant you say it,
even in your mind, you know the answer: “Jesus.” Ever new, ever alive, ever
willing to save the nail-driver who filled his body with pain as readily as
saintly people who feed the poor in a soup kitchen. All. Christ will have all.
God shows no partiality, that’s what Peter said he was beginning to realize. We
can realize it too. It’s a good Easter Sunday realization.
The
account of Peter’s visit to a Gentile soldier’s home in Caesarea is filled to
the brim with newness, it has the newness of grace for all, fairly bursting
from the page as we read it. Especially in this day as we see the resurgence of
tribalism and clanism in places like Iraq and American politics, Peter’s very
first words in Cornelius’ house are startling. An impartial God? I don’t know,
I might like to find my slippers right where I left them.
Then
again, I might like being found even more.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Something to Hold Onto
Something
to Hold Onto
Isaiah 50:4-9a
© copyright 2013 Robert J. Elder
Sunday, March 24, 2013
It is the Lord GOD who helps me;
who will declare me guilty?
Every
time I hear this line from Isaiah, I think of several things. The first, of
course, is that these are words of an innocent man. Secondly, I also see Jesus,
having recently made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, hanging on the cross,
also an innocent man, holding onto the Lord God with an innocence that no one
in the mob that day seemed to recognize. And then I hear in my mind the words
of Paul in Romans 8, uttered at so many services held at the time of death:
“Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.”[1]
Palm Sunday and Easter are so very different,
separated by a wide week of suffering and death. The difference between Palm
Sunday and Easter is something like the little boy who had a ticket to the
circus, who went into town and saw the great parade of wagons, clowns and
exotic animals, and then went home because he thought that having seen the
parade, he had seen the circus. We know this isn’t so. And if we think about it
at all, we know Palm Sunday is not a little Easter. In some churches where folks
receive palms to wave, they fold them into litte crosses. This is where Palm
Sunday is headed, toward the cross.
The justification of God, given to us, free of charge
in Christ, that is something we can hold onto.
Why is this so? The apostle Paul had an answer to
that question. He said that though Jesus was in the form of God, he set that
aside in order to empty himself, take the form of a slave, and be born as a
human being. He said Jesus became the sort of servant for whom a call to face
death was not regarded as too great a task for one seeking to be faithful.
What does it mean to be a slave or a servant – they
are the same word in the original language – what does it mean to be a slave or
servant who is willing to be obedient even to death? Few of us would have any
idea. The “Suffering Servant”[2]
depicted bythe prophet Isaiah is the prime Old Testament witness to a calling
to pursue freedom through servanthood. And as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on Palm
Sunday, he was preparing to perform the greatest service ever done for
humanity.
Hearing the
Word of God
Speaking the words of God’s suffering servant, Isaiah
said, “Morning by morning he wakens – wakens my ear to listen as those who are
taught. The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious...” Have you
ever thought about the need for our ears to be “wakened”? I have often been
asked by friends and family, on workcamps, retreats, and vacations, how I can
sleep through my own snoring. It’s easy for me, I say, my ears are asleep along
with the rest of me! What a great image Isaiah uses for preparing to hear the
Word God has to say to us: that God wakens our ears to hear. Before telling,
God makes us ready to hear. We may think our ears work fine already, but reflect
on how often our pre-set opinions can block out a new thing, especially a new
thing God would have us hear. We are so accustomed to listening for what we
already think that a new word might well pass us by, it’s just not familiar
enough.
Remember the old story about the man with beans in
his ears. His friend tells him, “You’ve got beans in your ears,” but he
responds, “What?” So his friend repeats his words a little more loudly, “I
said, you’ve got beans in your ears.” But the man responds again, “What?” So
the friends shouts now, “YOU’VE GOT BEANS
IN YOUR EARS!” and the man responds, “Sorry, I can’t hear you, you see,
I’ve got these beans in my ears...” It’s a silly story that points out two
things: our need to hear, but also that often the very thing we need to hear is
something we already know. Like an old commercial for corn flakes that urged us
to taste them again for the first time, many times the words of our faith are
something we need to hear again for the first time.
I once got a letter from a young friend of mine who
is a pastor. He was preaching his way through the lectionary, the three year
cycle of scripture that many of us use to organize our preaching. By the time
he reached his seventh year of ministry, he had been through the readings twice
before. He wrote to ask what I thought he should do. This was going to be his
third time through the same readings. His question made me think, “How many
times have I heard the parable of the prodigal Son? How often have I been
instructed by the incomparable words of the Sermon on the Mount? How important
is it to remind ourselves of the truth of John 3:16, that God loved the world
enough to send a savior to us?” I think I remember writing to him something
like, “The difference between hearing and hearing again is not as great as you might think. Those very same
worshipers have heard most of those Bible passages many times, long before you
began reading them with them.” When God opens our ears, as Isaiah said, it may
not be something entirely new that we are to hear, but something familiar that
strikes us in a new way this time around.
One of the significant aspects of discipleship
involves hearing the Word of God, even if, as in the traumatic events of Holy
Week, that Word seems destined to shake us up.
Doing the
Word of God
You may recall that the letter of James is the one
that declares that “faith without works” is just about as good as no faith at
all. One of the jokes that perpetually makes the rounds in churches depicts a
person dying and finding himself in hell. He looks around and sees Martin
Luther and John Calvin standing nearby. He is deeply troubled. His own life was
not that exemplary, but how can these two great figures of the Protestant
Reformation have found themselves on the wrong side of the Pearly Gates? So he
asks them. Calvin responds, “I’m afraid it’s some bad news, really. Apparently
works do matter.”
That story may seriously overstate the case for the
importance of the doing of the Word
of God, but it highlights the fact that coming to church, hearing about the
content of our faith is only part of the disciple’s task. It is good to know
the content of the truth about salvation. But knowing the work of salvation rightly leads to doing the work of salvation. Isaiah wrote words concerning the work
of discipleship which line up so readily with our anticipation of the events of
Holy Week: “I have set my face like flint, and I know that I shall not be put
to shame.” Jesus set his face like flint – to give his life away.” Jesus has
been described in many ways, but one appealing way is as “a man for others.”
How does that square up with a descriptive phrase like, “I have set my face
like flint”? It means that his course to the cross, though made in humility,
was undeterred. He was a self-emptying servant who taught and lived the truth
that greatness comes only in service, that true greatness resides in those who
give of themselves without thought of return.
In one of his books, concentration-camp survivor Elie
Wiesel recalled the day when he, still merely a teenager, along with his fellow
inmates, was finally liberated from the Auschwitz death camp by allied
soldiers. On that day, powerful, strong men broke down the hated fences of the
camp, and released the emaciated prisoners. Wiesel remembers being struck by
the reaction of one African-American soldier who, upon seeing Wiesel and his
fellow prisoners, was overcome with grief. He fell to his knees, sobbing at the
sight of them. At this, the newly-released prisoners walked to him, put their
thin, starved arms around his burly shoulders, and comforted him.
I have seen people have such reactions to Michaelangelo’s
statue of the Pietá in Saint Peter’s cathedral in Rome, the statue of Mary,
holding her dead son in her arms. They weep at the sight of the dead Jesus, and
yet, at the end of the long, horror-filled week, it is Jesus who puts his
bloodied arms around us, to comfort and restore us.
Doing the Word of God involves an attitude of
self-giving service which itself is an unequaled gift of God to those who would
follow Christ.
This
coming week represents the church’s annual celebration of the greatness of the
gift of Christ to the world. The tragedy of it is that many will not hear. On
Good Friday evening, when we worship here together and recall the cost of the
servanthood of Jesus, there will be but a handful of us present compared to
those on the bandwagon on Easter morning. It is so hard to fully comprehend and
live the life of resurrection – to receive the embrace of the crucified and
resurrected Christ – unless we have first heard the truth about the cost of
salvation.
If
you are planning to come to only one service this coming week, I would pray it
would be on Friday, and if you can come to but two, make it Maundy Thursday and
Good Friday. I will pray for you in your knowing
and doing God’s Word this week, as I
hope you will pray for me, so that we may come to know that the faith we hold
onto, in reality holds onto us.
Copyright © 2013 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserve
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