Come to the Light


Sunday, March 26th, 2006
Lent 4B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
John 3:14-21

14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21 But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

I really didn’t realize how fast I was going.

Honestly.

I was in our minivan, and had, over the previous few months, pretty much ONLY been driving the Mazda; you know, the smaller, older, NOISIER car.

That morning I had been contacted by a sister church in the association that had let us know that they’d collected donations for the Hispanic ministry, and they wanted to know if they needed to run them down to us or could I come by and pick them up. I told them I could be there in just a few minutes. It wasn’t until a few minutes LATER that I actually walked out of the house to head up there.

I pulled out of the driveway and headed up route 3. The dip here down to Folley Neck Road is sort of like the take off ramp for a rollercoaster ride. You get up to speed REALLY quickly, and if you’re riding in a car that you’re not used to being in, and IT rides much smoother and quieter than the one you ARE used to riding in, well … it makes it really easy to lose track of just how fast you are going.

Radar guns are great at detecting just how fast THAT is.

It’s all about choices. I chose to accelerate pretty quickly that morning. I chose to not look too closely at the speedometer once I got to the top of the rise on the other side of the dip. I chose to let the car just cruise along, enjoying the smoothness of the ride and the quietness of the functioning muffler.

*******

Our passage this morning speaks to choices as well, both human and divine. As we’ve moved into and through this season of Lent, we’ve had opportunities to choose … to select what to dwell on … whether it has been to dwell on the fallen-ness of the nature that surrounds us, thus producing a world that is full of pain and conflict, or on the brokenness of a world at large, that would take a man who has dedicated himself to be a literal peacemaker in the name of Christ and kill him, only to turn around just a few weeks later and release his fellow team members relatively unharmed, or on our own fallen nature, that which is within us against which we struggle on a daily basis, sometimes with greater success than at others … but an ongoing struggle nonetheless … that gives us an idea of just what it was that Paul was speaking of when he spoke of the thorn in his flesh which he asked God to remove … a request that went unanswered, save for the admonition that God’s “grace is sufficient”.

What we are faced with in the passage, here now, today, but in truth, every single day of our lives, is the choices we make. It is not a one-time, set in stone rule that we will always make the best choice.

We know that third verse in by heart … how many of you repeated it with me in the King James version as I read it earlier? I was tempted to switch TO the KJV as I read it myself … I could even recite it to you in the Reina Valera Spanish version … but what does it MEAN???!!! That verse is probably the SINGLE most memorized verse of the New Testament, after ‘Jesus Wept’, maybe, but still … it would appear to be one of the most famous verses of the Bible. The reference – the name of the book along with the chapter and verse number, were made famous in conemporary American culture – or notorious, by a man who wore a rainbow wig and went to sports arenas back in the 70’s and 80’s – and made it a point to hold up a big sign that read ‘JOHN 3:16” – you could usually catch a glimpse of him at some point during the program if you watched the entire show … it was his way of witnessing to his faith in Christ. Whether you agreed with what he did or not, who can say how many people’s curiosity was piqued just enough to go look up the reference … and ultimately led to a relationship with Christ? The point is, to folks who’ve grown up in the church, that particular verse is not an unfamiliar one.

That carries its own risks, however, insofar as what is familiar to us also loses its power over us – we become immune to it. A very present example in our own congregational life is, perhaps, our congregational benediction … ‘to risk something big for something good’ … ‘too dangerous for anything but truth, and too small for anything but love’ … those are truly powerful statements if you stop and think about their implications, but we’ve been hearing them or saying them for the last two and a half years … maybe it’s time that we changed them up a bit … not that what they are saying isn’t valid, or true, or important … it’s a recognition that we can so easily be lulled into a sense of complacency about where we are and where we’re going that we lose sight of the fact that that road involves sacrifice. It will likely involve conflict, and trial, and tribulation … and may even involve the loss of something precious … something valuable, in exchange for the good that results … perhaps even the good that we have yet to discern …

The writer of John makes it clear, we choose, and God chooses. Light has come into the world, in the form of Christ. And the light is the light for all humanity. But does humanity, HAS humanity … taken the step to turn TOWARD the light? In some cases yes, thankfully. We see it, blessedly, every day, if we look for it … in the helping hand, in the gracious word, in the welcoming hug. In many, many, other cases, unfortunately, Christ has had little influence in the way people live their lives, in the daily living … in the moment-by-moment choices that ultimately determine the outcome of that particular life. We see it in the harshness, in the coldness, in the disconnectedness that can seem to be so prevalent today. The attitude of ‘that’s not MY problem’ … or … ‘and I should care because … ?’ it is in the compartmentalization of the human species as a whole that we lose sight of the fact that we are called to care for each other – whether the ‘other’ is across the room or across the border or across the globe -- that is actually irrelevant – we are still to express and practice the care of our fellow human beings.

*****

Have you ever wondered what the different colors of traffic signs are for - the yellow background with black lettering, versus the white background with black lettering? The yellow background is a warning of potential hazards … usually a curve or curves in the road, or an upcoming intersection – and the sign color is to advise that what it is saying is a recommendation – usually it is a speed indicator – 35 MPH or 45 MPH – as a RECOMMENDED safe speed … it is a suggestion, not a statement of law. That is reserved for the black and white signs. That’s how I made it click in my head when I saw a speed limit sign – if it is in black and white, I can tell myself – black and white, black and white. Force of law, force of law. Three words and three words. There’s a connection there that triggers a response, and … more often than not … I slow down. I remember that the sign isn’t just saying ‘this is a good idea, if you’d like to try it.’ – it is saying ‘this IS the LAW … follow it or ELSE you’re looking at $75.00 plus court costs, or a Saturday in traffic school.’

That day in December of 2003 I happened on an instance where my choice brought about a fairly quick consequence, but it’s not always that clear in other areas of our life. Some of our choices do present themselves in black and white – the options are that far apart – but in others, it’s not always that simple. We’ve heard others tell that life IS black and white. Life is lived in a universe where there is up or down, here or there, yes or no, and there’s never an allowance for the complications derived from living in a world that is experiencing both the pains of separation from God while at the same time groans towards a reconciliation that is in the making even as we speak. I would propose this morning that it is in SOME cases, an option to make a clear-cut decision, but not across the board. We’ve all been faced with situations where we’ve had to make distinctions between what would appear to be the lesser of two evils … or where the options we’ve had to struggle with have been so close together that the distinction really only comes into play internally – we long for the simplicity of being confronted with a choice as easy, as two-sided as observing the speed limit, but we are not promised that ease by Christ.

What does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

There’s an ultimate choice to be made. There are principles at stake, and we can BASE our decision-making on the principles that will carry us through the process. We find that principle spelled out by Moses, at the end of his life, in Deuteronomy 30:19 & 20 -

19I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, 20 loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

Jerusalem will be celebrating 175 years of life next year, and this challenge still holds true today – it is the life we as a family of faith choose TODAY that will determine how we will live into the next 5, 10, 20, or 175 years as a people of God. Will we live an existence based on LIFE, and BLESSING or of death and curses? When our community thinks of us as members of this congregation, as a church, are we considered a blessing? Are we considered a place of grace, or a place of bitterness? Do people associate Jerusalem with conflict, or with healing, with exclusion or with a welcoming spirit?

I spoke at the beginning of both human and divine choices – we must base our choices on the choice that God made – to become flesh and to dwell among us as Jesus. Our decisions, our choices will all stem from the way we respond to God’s choice in Christ – to give God’s self for us.

Will we indeed choose life?

Let’s pray.

What’s In YOUR Temple?


Sunday, March 19h, 2006
Lent 3B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
John 2:13-22

13 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 15 Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16 He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” 18 The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

The Grizzly River Rampage was just being built when I went to work at Opryland USA, in Nashville, in March of 1981. It was one of the first water raft rides in the region when it opened later that spring. The mechanics of the ride were pretty extensive. There was a central lake, a couple of waterfalls, a tunnel under a mountain, and fake boulders along a particular part of the ride. The action of waves over a riverbed was produced by laying – and bolting in – logs every few feet along the river’s course. The point of the ride was to give folks the sensation of riding a white-water raft, with no guide and no danger of anyone suffering anything other than a good splashing at a couple of spots along the way.

It was my first job, and as a YOUNG 17-year old, I was put in charge of 14 Cuban refugees, serving as both their supervisor and interpreter. At the time, I hadn’t had much experience dealing with the Cuban Spanish dialect, which is full of colloquialisms and slang words that were totally foreign to me, so I spent as much time trying to figure out what they were saying as I did translating it into English for our boss.

We were assigned the task of cleaning up the riverbed and lakebed before the water was actually pumped in and the ride primed. With landscaping and the normal runoff from the surrounding area, the lakebed, which was only about 6 feet deep, was almost a foot deep in watery, smelly, gooey mud.

After some discussion, our supervisor decided that, rather than trying to get a front loader or a mini bulldozer into the lakebed, the best way to remove the mud was by hand, using shovels and a palette with boards closing in three sides, making it roughly into another shovel, one which was suspended by the construction crane already on site, lying almost flat, slightly elevated on the open end, to hold several shovelfuls of mud, which was then lifted out and dumped elsewhere, away from where it might find it’s way back into the ride course. It must’ve been late April at this point, shortly before the Amusement Park opened, and it was already hot and muggy.

Working in the mud and trying not to slip and to maneuver a shovel quickly enough to not lose what was mostly water to begin with, and keeping the palette from lying flat and emptying that watery mud made for some pretty frustrating moments, repeating, seemingly endlessly, the same motions, basically trying to get muddy water onto the palette at a faster pace than it was running off … had it not been for the sheer industriousness of those 14 men, all working together and THEIR realizing early in the process that it was going to be a matter of speed as much as of effectiveness, the job might not have been completed that day.

It did take pretty much all day, but by the end of it we were able to look at a lakebed that only had a thin film of muddy water on it, which would soon be drying into a dusty cover that could be swept up over the next day or two to make way for the ride to be made ready for the first guests.

The first people to ride the Grizzly River Rampage were company executives, who willingly offered to test the ride. What had not been completely worked out was the motion of a loaded raft in the running water, especially if one side of the raft were loaded down with pretty big men. A couple of the rafts caught up against the boulders, and the water rushing behind them swamped them, the channel was only about two feet deep, but the waves poured over the sides, and the riders ended up considerably wetter than they had anticipated.

****

In our passage this morning, Jesus is similarly engaged in clearing out the gooey, clinging refuse of first century Jewish religious worship. While living in Spain, and a couple of times in Chile, I was able to witness pilgrimages to shrines. In both places, there were people who were selling amulets, or pictures. There were mementos, cards, trinkets to commemorate the trip, and in some cases, for the pilgrims to deliver at the place of pilgrimage. I’m sure there was some money to be made by the folks selling the items, but it seemed to have been an acceptable part of the experience. There was perhaps an element of devotion, foreign as it may seem to our Baptist sentiments and views of the practice of faith.

In the case of the money changers and sacrificial animal sellers at the temple, there was apparently a somewhat less spiritual motive to their practice. Corruption had become the order of the day in the temple, thanks to the collusion between the religious leadership and the Roman government. Everyone got a piece of the liturgical pie. Everyone, that is, except the worshippers and pilgrims themselves.

I suppose you could say that they DID end up complying with the necessary requirements for ritual cleansing, but at a cost that made it a less and less frequent event – and in a system built on the need to meet those specific requirements in order to BE righteous enough to reach heaven, the fear of not being able to MEET those requirements was palpable. Judaism became a faith governed by fear and extortion rather than by faith and hope.

Jesus went on his housecleaning rampage as much to clear that fear from the minds and hearts of the pilgrims and worshippers as to actually get rid of the profiteers and racketeers who were taking advantage of them and reaping the benefits from it.

******

There’s a commercial where two people are shopping or eating somewhere, and they get to the point of paying and one reaches in their wallet or purse and offers to pay for it with their credit card from such-and-such bank, the other person makes some comment concerning the interest rate wiping them out. The comment triggers the crashing appearance of a horde of raging, smashing, pillaging and plundering marauders from the dark ages, Vikings or Visigoths, or some kind of barbarians, swinging axes and swords, mallets and balls on chains. They get right up to the person paying, who is completely unperturbed by their storming towards them, and he or she shrugs and says, “That’s okay; I’ve got a such-and-such card”. The entire army of yelling and screaming plunderers comes to a screeching halt and, throwing their arms up in disgust, they turn away and begin to ride or walk off. The announcer comes on and explains that the card has an incredibly low interest rate; the idea is that the interest won’t wipe you out like the mercenaries were getting ready to do, had you HAD a credit card from one of the OTHER companies. The final scene is usually one of those barbarians looking straight into the camera and growling, sounding something like a pirate, “What’s in YOUR Wallet?”

*****

When Jesus was asked about the temple, and what right or authority he had to have done what he did, his answer was, again, one that could be read as ambiguous were it not for John’s further explanation (something which John is known for, which sets him apart to some degree from the other Gospel writers). Jesus’ answer is a blatant foreshadowing of his death. What the people with whom he is talking take as a very concrete reference to the temple in which they are standing, John tells us in his expository paragraph,

“21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”

That is a hallmark of Johns’, these expository passages, where he comes out and spells out for the reader what just happened. It is one of the things that set the Gospel of John apart from the other gospels.

Something else that sets it apart is the placement of the cleansing of the temple itself. In John, the scene is at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. He has just come from celebrating the wedding at Cana, where he performed his first miracle – the turning the water to wine.

In the synoptic gospels, the other three gospels, the cleansing of the temple takes place in the last week of Jesus’ life, right after the triumphal entry. Scholars have long debated a suitable explanation for that discrepancy. One school of thought, that would try to harmonize the gospels, in other words, merge them all into one continuous narrative, presents the possibility that there were actually two occasions on which Jesus cleansed the Temple. While it IS possible, each gospel only records it as having happened once during Jesus’ ministry. So the question becomes one surrounding the intent of the gospel writer. What was the writer trying to communicate? Was it chronology or theology? Was it more important to tell WHERE Jesus was WHEN or WHO Jesus was?

I would suggest to you that it was the second purpose that far outweighed the first in the minds of the writers of the gospels. It is much more important to communicate WHO Christ is than WHEN Christ was. The gospel word for us today is that, WHENEVER Christ WAS, Christ still IS WHO he is, our Lord, Master and Savior.

Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 6 that our bodies …

“Are a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.”

******

As we have been noting over the last couple of weeks, we are in the season of Lent, marking the approaching celebration of Easter, but going through the observance of Holy Week, the passion, crucifixion, death and resurrection of Christ. As the gospel writers – ALL the gospel writers – have written, Jesus cleansed the temple in Jerusalem. And in doing that, he redefined what the temple was. In John it is spelled out – “he was speaking of the temple of his body”. If we are to take our cue from Paul, then we need to make the jump from studying this as an historical event that Jesus took part in, to a spiritual event in which we are co-participants with Christ. He is in the process of cleansing OUR temple, MY temple. That is what being a disciple, a follower of Christ, means. Christ finds us cluttered, noisy with the incessant braying of the animals within us and the money changers who are only in it for themselves. His is indeed a righteous anger in light of what we have done, through our brokenness, to the temples that he intended us to be.

The Gospel of Grace is that he invites us to help in the cleansing. It is a free choice we make to open the doors of our innermost selves and let all the garbage out, in fact, we can help with the broom. We’ve all heard the joke – “I gave it up for Lent” – but behind the jest is a genuine desire to sacrifice and reflect on that intention and act of submitting to the Lordship of Jesus Christ – and what we are to be in the process of giving up is what Paul calls ‘die to self’ – we are giving up our brokenness and trading our sorrows for the joy of the Lord.

The question for us today, at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, is this: What’s in YOUR temple?

Is it envy? Is it unwillingness to forgive? Is it bitterness? Is it gossip? Is it gluttony? Is it racism? Or is it something darker, something smellier, something you dare not name in private, much less in public? Something that, as fast as you try to shovel it out, it always seems to leak back in – sometimes by drops, and sometimes gushing.

I won’t ask you to name it. I am responsible to name those for myself in front of God. We are each responsible for that act. And it is in the act of naming them that we are – HOPEFULLY – submitting them to Christ’s cleansing action. With some, like the doves, he may just need to wave his hand. Others may take some kicking and shoving to move out.

What’s in YOUR temple?

Let’s pray.

Profit, Gain, and Forfeit


Sunday, March 12th, 2006
Lent 2B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Mark 8:27-38

27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29 He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” 30 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him. 31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” 34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

He went into the war zone intentionally, purposefully, fulfilling what God had called him to do: to build bridges of peace in the midst of chaos. He and his team members knew the risks. They knew they would be stepping into harms’ way, but what they also knew was that, whatever else they were going to be about, they were going in the name of Christ to offer – and hopefully bring about – peace in the only way that it will really stick – one person, one family, one neighborhood at a time.

They all understood that it was not so much WHO they were up against as it was WHAT they were up against – a lifetime, for some, of terror and violence, of giving and taking death and destruction, of being indoctrinated with a view of the world and of the rest of humanity as being unalterably corrupted, unfailingly cruel, and unwaveringly false in deed versus word. There was little or no room to consider that others might be speaking truth, coming in humble gentleness and humility to share a common bond, because there was – and is – no point of commonality for those who are living and breathing their isolating and individual worlds of hatred and pain.

*****

We find Christ in this morning’s text, having just fed another, second multitude, this time of FOUR thousand, walking along the road to the villages in the area of Caesarea Philippi, engaging his disciples in THE pivotal conversation of the gospel of Mark.

The pivot, defined as a crucial person or thing that is essential to the success or effectiveness of something, is what we find in Peter’s confession found at the end of verse 29. The gospel according to Mark has been leading up to this confession, and it is from this confession forward that the story takes its energy and focus to the inevitable conclusion.

We’ve read, or heard, the story before – Jesus asks the disciples who everyone ELSE says that he is, and after they give him the answers they’ve heard – John, Elijah, or an unnamed prophet in the tradition of the big names from Israel’s past – Jesus turns the question into a personal one – the use of the personal pronoun ‘you’ is emphatic in the question – “who do YOU say that I am?” And from the mouth of Peter we hear the pivot – “You are the Messiah” in Aramaic, “the Christ” in Greek, the word might be different, depending on your translation, the meaning is the same.

Hundreds, if not thousands of books have been written about this confession, the subtlety of meanings, the layers of meanings, the gloriousness of it, the simplicity of it, the faith it required, the courage it demanded, the truth that was in it … there is no shortage of wordage when it comes to dissecting scripture, or the theology underlying it.

Personally, right now in my life, I take the confession as a given. What is continually intriguing to me is the swiftness with which Peter goes from proclaiming the single greatest truth of the Gospel to being called Satan by the very man he recognized AS the Christ.

You see, right after the confession of Peter, Mark tells that Jesus first told them to tell no one about him, again, that “hidden Messiah” we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and THEN he began to tell the disciples about how he, Jesus, would have to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed.

Peter, who would understandably be a little upset at being informed that his Messiah, his King from the line of David, the anointed one who had come to save ISRAEL, to say nothing of the rest of the world, from the hated oppressor, ROME, takes Jesus aside and starts to correct him – clarifying for Jesus what it is he is supposed to be about to do – conquer, of course – and literally five verses after declaring Christ the Messiah, Peter gets rebuked and called Satan by his very same Messiah, for setting his mind on human things, not divine things.

Jesus then goes on to explain what that distinction is about, sort of.

“If anyone wants to be my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?”

*****

Another man died this week, and the news of his death coincided with the news of the first man’s death.

This man had at one point in his life achieved what some would consider the pinnacle of power – he was president of his country. He presided over one of the most horrific civil wars in an area already known for its sanguine history. Pictures from internment camps taken in 1994 in Serbia could just as easily have been taken in Poland in 1945, during the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

This man had gained as much power as he was going to achieve, in earthly terms, and he made it to that point using every means at his disposal.

Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian philosopher and politician, who lived in the 15th century, wrote “The Prince”, a short pamphlet in an effort to gain influence with the ruling family of Florence. In it, the main character does anything and everything TO gain power – clever trickery, amoral methods, placing expediency over everything else in order to achieve his goal of ultimate power.

Waking up to the news of these two deaths yesterday couldn’t have better juxtaposed the point of what Jesus is talking about in the text – Tom Fox on the one hand, and Slobodan Milosevic on the other.

So how could the deaths of two men whom we’ve never met possibly affect our lives here, at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

On one level, granted, they do not affect us. We knew neither of them personally, we only knew of them at all through what news we heard or saw or read over the last few years or months.

How can we be expected to be touched by their passing?

As with the death of any other person, we would first do well to remember both of these individuals’ families – however radically different environments they might well be in at this moment, they have both suffered loss.

But on another level, we would also do well to take heed of the lives of these two men. Which of the two bears the likeness of Christ more clearly? Which would we be more inclined to admire and model our lives after, and WHY? It might be an easy question to answer, or it might not. Which side do we fall on?

John F. Kennedy said, in reference to the space program, ‘we do the thing not because it is easy but because it is hard’. Sometimes as Christians, we find ourselves doing the easy thing. Coming to church on Sunday morning is a relatively easy thing to do. Sometimes we find ourselves compelled to travel thousands of miles away to a place we’ve never been, to a people we’ve never met, and try to communicate the gospel, by whatever means we can. That might be a hard thing to do. Some of us find the harder thing to do to be walking out the back doors of our sanctuary and live as if what we practice in here means something to the rest of our lives. We are not in an overtly hostile environment. Our lives are not in danger, at least our physical lives. But ultimately that was not what Christ was concerned about – what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? The New Living translation reads “How do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?” it is the transcendent that Christ is talking about – not only the life we have while we are here on earth, but beyond.

So the question for us this morning is this: Are we willing to die for Jesus, if dying means death to self? That is, after all, who we would be up against if we were to surrender fully to the Lordship of Christ. We sing about it and proclaim it and read about it. But when it comes down to it, do we LIVE it?

Let’s pray.

About Suffering …


Sunday, March 5th, 2006
Lent 1B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
1 Peter 3:13-18

13 Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? 14 But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, 15 but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; 16 yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. 17 For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. 18 For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God.

A husband and 13 year old daughter are killed in a terrible car accident. Fourteen years later, in a seminar with graduate students, the widow, a professor of pastoral counseling, is asked by one of the students how long it took her to get over it. Her answer in the seminar room was ‘a long time’. Afterwards, walking down the hall with a fellow professor, she turned to her colleague and asked if she should tell the truth; that you never get over something like that.

A Minister shares her most difficult wedding experience: to perform the wedding of a parishioner who, at the age of 62, was getting married for the first time. The woman had headed the search committee that had called the minister to pastor their congregation, and had become a trusted friend. Barely a week before the wedding, the bride to be was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and given weeks to live. She and her husband-to-be insisted that NO ONE know of the diagnosis. They wanted the joy of the wedding celebration to be an undiluted, treasured memory.

A different pastor shares with another the experience of walking through the valley of the shadow of death with a couple who lost their 2 month old daughter to an unexplained illness, after having been trying to have children for over a decade. He tells of trying to comfort the sobbing mother and to convince her to let go of her daughter’s body in the emergency room. The story opened a window to sharing his own grief experience of walking through his and his wife’s three miscarriages, and of his nearly losing his wife after their oldest child, a son, was born. The retelling of the story is … smooth, but not without emotional weight. It stuns his listener, a new pastor just starting out in ministry.

Can we come up with an objective, comprehensive definition of suffering? Probably not.

Is everyone’s suffering the same? No.

Does everyone suffer over the same experiences? No.

What does it mean to suffer? You tell me.

The fact of the matter is, insofar as there are, say, somewhere around fifty people in this sanctuary today, there are at least that many different ways in which we would all deal with suffering. There is no established pattern, there are ELEMENTS of grief that we might each experience, but not in the same sequence, nor with the same frequency, nor with the same intensity.

The suffering Peter is speaking of in the passage this morning is in the same ballpark, but coming from a different source. If it is true that we all experience pain and suffering, and experience it differently, it is also true that those things that CAUSE us to suffer differ from person to person.

Have you ever been accused of something you did not do, and been held responsible for it in spite of your protestations?

Except for a couple of times as a young boy, being unable to look INNOCENT of something that I actually did NOT do, and getting punished for it, I can tell you that I don’t believe I have ever had that experience. So right off the bat, I’m a little behind the curve.

That was something early Christ-followers were easily susceptible to. Being the ‘new religion on the block’, Christians were prone to being stereotyped and misrepresented, and maligned and flat out lied about on a regular basis.

What Peter makes a point of noting here is that, first of all, it is to be expected, this suffering. Not in so many words, perhaps, but there is a simple presupposition that, as Christians, we can expect to suffer, just like anyone and everyone else in the world. Nowhere does Christ in the Gospels, or Paul in his epistles, or any of the other new testament writers, for that matter, tell us that in following Christ we will acquire a ‘get out of jail’ card when it comes to going through life and miss the hard parts.

It is in our suffering, especially, as we read in this passage, if it is because of our faith, that we gain a sense of what Christ lived through on our behalf. The radical – the ROOT – difference, of course, is that his suffering was by choice, willingly taken on for our sake, and ours is a fact based on our nature as part of a … fallen nature.

The first witness of the Christian church was not through best selling books, or power worship anthems, or power point presentations, or big-budget movies on which they hung their message. The first witness of the followers of Christ was through their lifestyles. Apparently, at that time and in that place, there was enough of a change between the way they lived before they decided to follow Christ and afterwards that people sat up and took notice. Their actions spoke louder than any words they might have used.

Peter exhorts them and us to go beyond words, though. There are going to be times when the noticing will turn to curiosity, and the curiosity will turn into inquiry, and the inquiry will turn into conversation. And that is where we can so often fall short.

A reporter for ABC News commented that people are perfectly willing to share the deepest secrets of their intimate lives with absolute strangers, but completely shut down when it comes to talking about their faith.

Why is that?

Peter urges us to be prepared to make our defense to anyone who demands (or asks) from you an accounting for the hope that is in you – in other words, explain why it is that you live the way you do, treat others the way you do, speak to and of others the way you do. Could we do that? Maybe the question would be more revealing if we were to ask, could we do that COMFORTABLY? Or Could we do that in such a way that we didn’t come across as insincere, without using church language, without painting an unrealistic picture of what it is like to follow Christ as a day-in-day-out Christian, rather than a Sunday-only Christian.

What faith in Christ has always been about, true faith, genuine faith, transforming faith, has been about pointing in the same direction – hopefully more often than not – Eugene Petersen entitled one of his books in that way – A Long Obedience In The Same Direction. We truly are to act as guideposts – not only to others, but to ourselves as well. Sometimes, even though we may be DOING the right things, we still have to stop and think a minute about WHY we are doing them, and put that into words. We are, after all, social and communicative creatures. We not only communicate through actions, but through the word – spoken or written.

The word for ‘defense’ in verse 15 is apologia. It is where we get our word ‘apology’, of course, but it is only distantly related to the connotation the contemporary word has acquired. In the first century, the word apologia meant a defense provided in a legal setting – in court, in fact. It was a carefully and intentionally crafted statement or series of statements that explain the reason and purpose of something. In this case, faith in Christ.

The reason for our faith in Christ is grounded not ONLY in his teachings, in the wisdom and gentleness from the sermon on the mount, in the head-on collisions he had with the Pharisees and Sadducees in and around the temple and over the issue of the Sabbath laws, not ONLY in the witness of his miracles and healings, but ultimately, in his sacrifice, in his death, burial, and resurrection.

And it is in that knowledge that we began a walk this past Wednesday through the forty days of Lent. During this season of the year we set aside a little more than a tenth of our year to contemplate that aspect of the Gospel that most intersects with us on a daily basis. What it means to follow Christ. Does it make a whole lot of difference in the way I act, in the way I talk, in the way I think, to call myself a Christian, or does it not really seem to have a significant impact on what I would be doing otherwise?

If I were removed from the northern neck, and plopped down in the middle of, say, Brisbane, Australia, would something about my behavior clue others into the fact that I am a Christ-follower? I wouldn’t look drastically different from anyone else, and though I might speak with a noticeable accent, my words wouldn’t be radically different from those that would be used regularly by the locals. If I were to go through the regular daily activities of living – going to the grocery store, getting gas, going to the post office … how would people know I was a follower of Christ?

It is that thought that compels us as Christians to engage the world, not withdraw from it, to invite the conversation, to open ourselves to others’ stories, to gain an audience for our own.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It means we can only do so much by lifestyle evangelism. People may know we come here, or are associated with Jerusalem, or are part of the Greater Jerusalem Community, but unless we have a way to share with them WHY we are like we are, why we do the things we do, WHY we participate in community fundraisers and meal deliveries, and Lenten services, and sunrise services, and offer a food pantry, and share in the meals on wheels program, it is not JUST because we are good neighbors, it is because we are God’s children and we recognize that we are not the ONLY ones who ARE God’s children. We are part of the inbreaking Kingdom of God, and as part of that, we welcome opportunities to gather with other members of the Kingdom and celebrate, observe, and usher in that Kingdom.

We will have that opportunity this evening as we host the first community Lenten service here at 7 PM, and over the next five Sundays, followed by the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services.

These are chances we have to be reminded of that wideness of God’s mercy that we sing about, to see ‘all the little children of the world’ the kids sing about, and to remember that Christ died for us all.

Let’s pray.