Sunday, June 1, 2003
Jerusalem Baptist Church
1 Corinthians 2:1-5
1 When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 3 And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. 4 My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
Manuel was 11 years old. We were sitting cross-legged across from each other off to one side of the central plaza in the town of Orihuela, in the southeastern state of Alicante, Spain. It was close to 11 at night, and the place was packed. Though 11 PM is late for most of us here in the States, in Spain, in summer, it is the equivalent of early evening, where some restaurants don’t begin to serve dinner until 10.
The heat of the day keeps people indoors out of the sun for the better part of the afternoon, and things start to pick back up after 6 or even 7 at night. Our program, hosted by the local Baptist church, didn’t start until 8 or 9PM. I and my team mates had just finished performing a puppet show In which we had explained the meaning of each page of the little book without words, you may be familiar with it, where the color of each page represented something: black was sin, red was the blood of Christ, white stood for being washed white as snow, green represented our growth as Children of God, and Gold represented Heaven. Dozens of children who were playing in the plaza had gathered around as the guitars started up, listened to the choruses, and stayed for the puppet show. We each had a stack of the booklets, and were handing them out to the kids who had been paying attention and could tell us what each color meant.
We were supposed to be following up their explanation of what each color meant, getting to the core of what the message was – that they needed Christ. For the most part, I was just enjoying their good humor, joking, and encouraging them with hints about each color.
Manuel was different. He confidently stepped up to me, and I held up the book, open to the black page. He looked me right in the eyes and said “Pecado”. That’s Sin in Spanish. I asked him what “Pecado” meant. He explained it pretty clearly: anything that separates you from God.
I turned to the next page, the red one, and he gave me the explanation with almost no hesitation. I asked him if the sins that Christ died for included his, and he nodded his head.
I turned to the white page, and he went through that one, as well as the next two.
With each answer, it became obvious that there was more going on than a simple repetition of what he’d heard a few minutes earlier.
I asked him if he wanted to sit down, and as I did, a couple of his friends who had gone in line before him and had been running around playing, ran up to him and made as if to get him to chase them. I expected him to shrug, and run off with them. Instead, he shrugged them off, and motioned them away, and told them,
“No, esto es importante”
…
Paul says, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
What is it that is so compelling about Christ crucified? Is it the manner of death? The pain? The beating and torture he suffered?
All those details are arresting, and significant, but they pale in comparison to the reason that is at the heart of the matter: WHY did it happen? Why THAT death? Why the beating and the pain? Why the suffering?
In Luke, chapter 15, we find one of the best stories that helps us understand WHY.
11 Then Jesus said, "There was a man who had two sons. 12 The younger of them said to his father, "Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.' So he divided his property between them. 13 A few days later, the younger son gathered all he had and traveled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. 14 When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. 16 He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. 17 But when he came to himself he said, "How many of my father's hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! 18 I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands." ' 20 So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. 21 Then the son said to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.' 22 But the father said to his slaves, "Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23 And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; 24 for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!' And they began to celebrate.
The parable of the prodigal son is one of the most familiar stories of the New Testament. Most of us could retell the basic story with no hesitation.
Steve Shoemaker, one of my former Pastors, has a sermon on the parable, in which he describes the homecoming scene differently from what I had envisioned it in my mind:
The father lives not out in the wilderness, but on the edge of a town, at the end of Main Street. His son has to walk THROUGH town in order to get home. The younger son’s behavior has been an offense not only to the family but also to the village. He has broken the rules that help keep a community intact. The whole town probably condemned the boy. Their attitude was, “If he comes back, let him come back a beggar!”
In the parable, Jesus vividly describes how much the father loves the son. Rather than let him suffer the humiliation and abuse of the villagers, the father has compassion, and HE sprints to his son and hugs him and kisses him – the verb describes affectionate, repeated kissing, more like a mother greeting a long-lost child than a father’s formalized greeting.
The Father stepping into our place. Taking on our humiliation, our abuse, and our shame. THAT is why Jesus did it. God takes it upon himself to reconcile the world TO himself through the cross. God runs to us.
The gauntlet that we should have walked, all the shame and humiliation we so richly deserve, is taken and wiped away by the love of a sprinting, hugging, kissing father who wants nothing so much as to welcome us home.
…
“No, esto es importante”
“No, this is important”
I looked at Manuel, slightly stunned to be honest, not really knowing where to start, and finally asked him if he wanted to talk about what he’d just explained to me. Traditionally, Catholics in Latin America and Spain have a narrow perception of Christ, and it is mostly limited to how they see him most often: nailed to the cross, bleeding and in pain. The resurrection is celebrated at Easter, of course, but then Christ is taken into heaven. There is little immediate connectedness with a living person, and for the rest of the year, until Advent, the images surrounding them in church or hanging around their necks is the one of Christ Crucified. Over the next few minutes, Manuel and I talked about Christ being not just a man who died on a cross thousands of years ago, but of the fact that he is a living person, with whom we can enter into relationship, and who is with us every day. We can talk to him, and as we grow closer to him, we begin to recognize his voice. That July night in 1986, my new friend Manuel met my old friend, Jesus.
Paul continues,
4 My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power,
As the Rappahannock Baptist Association’s missionary to the Hispanic population on the northern neck, one of my activities is leading early morning devotionals once a week at History land Nursery, the site across the river and above Tappahannock.
I was somewhat nervous on the morning of my first one, and I greeted the men and went right into reading from the passage I’d chosen and then rattled through the devotional pretty quickly, and ended with prayer, wished them a good day, and headed on out into MY day. I realized later that I needed to make some adjustments.
The following week, I explained that catching them before they went to work meant that they HAD to be at the location, but they didn’t HAVE to listen to the devotional. I was there for THEIR benefit I went on to explain that I was also coming as ‘solo yo’, ‘just me’. I intentionally didn’t bring a Bible, stood before them and explained that if all I did was stand before them and read a passage and say a few words about it, but didn’t put those words into action, they would only BE words.
What I was there to do was to introduce them to Jesus Christ, and deepen their relationship with him.
What Paul was testifying to in Corinth and around the Mediterranean, what was radical then and is radical now, is that you can know Christ, “So that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” I believe that was what Paul was speaking of. A demonstration of the Spirit and of Power.
What more powerful way to demonstrate the Spirit than to introduce someone to a risen Lord and have that person respond? Christianity is not only a set of rules to live by. It is not only a set of teachings put down on paper by followers of a martyred leader 2000 years ago. It is a relationship with a living, risen Lord.
Though the parable does not end with the celebration, we do not know how the younger son went on with his life after being welcomed home.
How would you have reacted? Did he continue to live off his father’s generosity? Did he fall back into old ways of being, unable to overcome the force of habit?
Isn’t that the question for each of us today? We are confronted with a God who extravagantly, ridiculously, sacrificially rebuilt a bridge that we had burned, a God who loves us so much that, even though we have gone and squandered our inheritance, made selfish choices, with no thought of how it would affect others around us, when we get to the point of recognizing our mistake, and turn, and begin to walk through the gauntlet of self-recrimination, we are confronted with a sprinting, hugging, kissing, welcoming God who celebrates our homecoming with so much joy that it leaves no room for any other emotion.
It is in the person of Jesus Christ that the gauntlet has been run. It is through the humiliation of the cross, taken upon himself, that God has shown his love for us. It is ONLY through Christ and ONLY by his Love that we are once again being welcomed home.
How will we respond? Will we continue to live as we did before? Will we do the same thing tomorrow that we did
yesterday? Will we think the same way tomorrow as we did this morning? Or will we fully engage in that relationship, letting Jesus mold us, shape us, and make us who God intended us to be all along?
Just as the parable ends without telling us what happened to the prodigal son, my knowledge of Manuel ends that night. I left the next day. I entrusted him to the care and nurture of the congregation and the Pastor of the Baptist Church of Orihuela. I don’t know what Manuel is doing today. I think about him often, and pray for him, but I have not had any further contact with him.
Perhaps it is better this way. When we come face to face with Jesus, we each have to make our own choice, and no one else can make it for us.
Lets pray.
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