On Being a Lamb

Sunday, April 29th, 2007
Fourth of Easter
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Psalm 23

I’d like for our scripture reading to be a little different this morning. There are a few isolated verses that I’d feel comfortable doing this with, but there are not many passages of the Bible that I’d ask a congregation to recite together and expect to hear the majority of the room join in without having the words in front of them. Our text, as you can see in the order of worship, is the 23rd Psalm; if you would, in the version that I suspect most of us have it memorized:

KJV
1 The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not
want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the
still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of
righteousness for his name's sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and
thy staff they comfort me.
5 Thou preparest a table before me in the
presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I
will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

However I feel about the King James version of the Bible in other areas, it still has the ability to touch those memories from my childhood where I first learned the ‘restoreths’ and ‘leadeths’ and ‘runneths’ … it reminds me of how beautiful the English language can sound.

Now, onward.

Just how much do we want to be compared to sheep? I mean, when it comes down to it, the animal is not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, right?

I loved my high school. I REALLY loved my high school. One thing that I especially enjoyed was the physical setting of the school; on the outskirts of Santiago, in the foothills of the Andes, looking out on Cerro Manquehue directly to our west, with a view of the Andes to our southeast.

The schedule of classes during my last couple of years there usually ended up giving me a free hour here and there during the week, and if we weren’t troublemakers, we were allowed to either hang out in the library, or if the weather was nice, sit on the front lawn of the school and study, read, or do homework.

Or do other things … like wander around the school property. There were the caretaker’s buildings – both the Paz family’s home as well as their shop and tool sheds up behind the classroom building, and at the time there was a ravine separating the academic campus from what had been the athletic area of the school; the Tennis courts and the Soccer field. Today, there are houses and even, I think, apartment buildings on the hills below, above, and beyond what was then the Soccer field, but is now the baseball diamond, but at the time, it was open rangeland. There were herds of goat, occasionally cows, and sheep. Sometimes the goats and sheep would wander onto the soccer field and give it a good clipping. In the spring of the year, there would be several ewes along with their lambs wandering around. And I would walk over and sit on the field to see how close they would come to me. (I also regularly carried puppies or cats into class with me… but that’s another story.) A few times the lambs came close enough that I was able to … let’s call it ‘pick up’ one and hold it … not that it came WILLINGINLY exactly, but it settled down after I’d held it for a couple of minutes, and it knew I wasn’t going to hurt it.

That was the first thing I thought of when I was given this sketch. I remembered holding this little lamb – almost newborn – not more than a couple of days old – it still had the little bit of its umbilical cord attached. And I remember thinking how vulnerable it was… and how … gentle it was. It was soft, and made these little sounds that were actually more like those a baby would make … not exactly animal-like at all … and it was trusting.

Frederick J. Gaiser, a professor of Old Testament at Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary, in St. Paul, Minnesota, puts it this way:

“Psalm 23 is a[nother] psalm of trust. These apparently spring from the psalms of lament, which regularly include a confession of trust (e.g., Psalms 13:5; 22:3-5, 9-10). Those confessions function something like our creeds, (speaking from the Lutheran perspective) remembering and professing who God is and what God has done. They “talk back” to the lament, refusing to allow it the final say, even though those who pray them know full well that they walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

This setting is important to understanding the psalm. It is no romantic idyll where God and I walk untroubled through fields without thorns and dandelions. The psalmist’s trust is hard-won, tested by the reality of death and the threatening beasts that make rods and staffs necessary.

So it is with Easter. What we proclaim is life in spite of death, life in the teeth of death. The appropriate facial expression is eyebrows raised in wonder, not a forced smile which dare not admit the ongoing reality of chaos and pain.

It is no accident that Psalm 23 is frequently read or sung at funerals. At the coffin death cannot be denied, but precisely there, in the midst of our questions of “why?” and “how long?” the psalm speaks of the presence of God. The psalmist said more than he knew, for God was never closer to humanity than in the suffering of Jesus Christ. "

So we have this deeply familiar Psalm in front of us, and for the most part we associate it with only one event in our daily routine – the reading at a funeral. But there is more to this Psalm than the comfort of knowing that God is with us in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Gaiser goes on to say:

The shepherd was a frequent royal image in the ancient Near East. Biblical and traditional royal language is not popular these days because it is generally seen as both sexist and hierarchical. But if we forget that the Bible proclaims God as king, we can never understand the subversive claims of texts like Psalm 23, which fundamentally alter the way kingship is to be understood. Kings have real power, but here it is exercised in gentleness. The God of Israel gathers lambs in his arms (Isa 40:11). .The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. (John 10:11). It is on the cross that Jesus is finally identified as King of the Jews. This is what biblical kingship looks like. Thus, all seats of power are challenged by these texts, but only if we are willing to hear that they do indeed speak of power.”

And this is where we get the other shade of meaning from the Psalm, the one that echoes Jesus’ words regarding his own role, who HE was … and what HIS reign would look like.

The neat thing about this is that the psalm was written hundreds of years before Jesus was born. But in the sense that it presented a picture of a servant King, in the guise of a shepherd, it points to Christ.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

We are compared to sheep for a reason. Not because of the comment that can be rendered about the general intelligence quotient of sheep, but because of that trust that they place in the voice of their shepherd. The biblical image of a shepherd laying down his life for his sheep, of going in search of the single lost sheep when 99 are safe and sound, of the shepherd keeping watch over his flock … those are all relational images, not quantitative statements on the relative worth of the sheep.

So what DOES it mean for us here at Jerusalem?

We are called to relationship. With Christ, and with each other. That can be easy to say, of course, but it is in the practice of that relationship that we find out what it means to be sheep who have gone astray. I know what it feels like to fall among brambles or thorns, I know what it feels like to be standing on the edge of a cliff and to be looking down into the abyss. And I know what it feels like to have the arms of the good shepherd wrap around me and pick me up and pull me back and hold me close. Those arms WERE his, but they came across in the person of friends and family who were there when I was so lost I didn’t know where to turn. And for that I will be eternally grateful. That is why I love to sing ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness’ … because I know what it is to know the faithfulness of God.

Let’s pray.

None Dared Ask

Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
Third of Easter
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 21:1-19

1 After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. 2Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. 3Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. 4Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. 5Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” 6He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. 7That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. 8But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off. 9When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. 10Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” 11So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. 12Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. 13Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. 14This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. 15When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” 16A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” 17He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. 18Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” 19(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

There’s a Far Side cartoon that stuck in my head several years ago, two men are in a fishing boat on a lake. There are mountains in the background, and looming over the mountains is the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. The caption is what one of the men is saying to the other man: “What does this mean? I’ll tell you what this means, Bob! It means no limits and no license requirement!’

There’s a part of us that longs for normalcy – especially when we’ve been through some event that is so totally ABNORMAL that it just completely throws us out of whack. Knocks us off our routine, unsettles us. That’s been our experience this week, hasn’t it? Even though we are hundreds of miles away, and thankfully have suffered no immediate loss in the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech, we are still overwhelmed by the tragedy. Our world has been shaken. And our hearts go out to the families of ALL those who died on Monday.

The disciples’ world has been turned upside down for the last three years, what with hanging out with Jesus and all, slowly oh so slowly, beginning to learn what Jesus meant when he told them that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, or that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, and just in the last couple of WEEKS, they’ve gone from sharing in a triumphal entry into Jerusalem to denying that they even KNOW Jesus in order to save their own skins.

And here they are, contemplating what their lives have been and what they are to become. Jesus had sent word to them through Mary Magdalene at the tomb that they were to return to Galilee, and he would meet them there. And here they are. It’s not exactly spelled out how long it’s been. But it’s been long enough for the reality to sink in that Jesus IS no longer dead. That he REALLY IS resurrected.

So the disciples are faced with figuring out what that means for the rest of THEIR lives. They would have been familiar with the concept of resurrection, but only in a specific context – the one that goes with life after death – the heavenly resurrection, if you will.

Jesus is confronting them with what it means to be resurrected to new life while there is life all around them.

And isn’t that what we are faced with every day? Isn’t it the same dilemma we have to figure out as we continue to live out our earthly existence after our rebirth into life in Christ?

What do we do? We go back to the ordinary, to what we know best. We go back to what it is that gets us from morning to evening throughout the day. For Simon Peter and six other disciples, that was fishing.

On one level, it seems that they were retreating, doesn’t it? Running home to the routine, away from the crowds and the Roman forces, and the high-powered leaders in Jerusalem, back to their backwater lakeside town in Galilee. But on another level, maybe it wasn’t so much that they were running away as it was that they were running TO what Jesus had called them to to begin with. What Christ called them to was to realize the holy in the daily. It might not have been a conscious, intentional move on their part, but more of a gut reaction to what they had been through.

For all the jump we can get from an especially powerful retreat, or from a mountaintop experience, or from … even from a good set of messages from former pastors during a spring revival, we don’t live out the dailyness of our faith by what nourishment we receive from those interspersed events, but rather, from what we do on a daily basis.

The meal Jesus shared with his disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee that morning was nothing special in and of itself; broiled fish and bread. Eugene Petersen has Jesus calling them to the table like any self-respecting cook would – “breakfast is ready!!” Aside from the fact that Jesus, who by the way, had only recently been scourged and beaten, crucified and killed, was serving the meal, the meal was just that – a meal. It was the first meal of the day. After a hard night’s labor on the boats, the men would have been pretty hungry. I know on the few occasions we’ve gone out fishing or just riding in a boat, something about being out on the water does make you hungry. I can only imagine how loud the disciples’ stomachs would have been growling after spending the whole NIGHT out on the water trying to catch some fish.

The miracle catch foreshadows what the disciples would soon begin to experience as they began to share the gospel message of the risen Christ – and began to gather more and more followers.

Isn’t it interesting that John remembers exactly how many large fish they caught that morning: one hundred and fifty-three? The distance the boats were from shore – no more than a hundred yards. Again, it’s that sort of detail that makes the Gospels believable – the little details that don’t have anything necessarily to do with the main point of each story, but which are thrown in anyway.

Why is it that the disciples at first didn’t recognize the Lord in his resurrection appearances? Why is it that they still did what he told them to do? The text says ‘because they knew it was the Lord’. And I’m sure they DID know … but I wonder if part of them was wondering if it really TRULY was the Lord – yes, he LOOKED like him, and he TALKED like him, but … am I REALLY HERE WITH JESUS, or am I dreaming? Will I wake up and find that he is still in the tomb?

I think they were still adjusting to the new reality – the resurrection reality – that they were going to be living in for the rest of their lives, and the question of ‘who are you?’ just seemed unnecessary to them. And yet, John uses the word ‘dared’ ask … as if they were afraid to know who Jesus REALLY was… they knew him to be their teacher for the last three years, but they were seeing and experiencing a Jesus they had only seen a PART of, now in his fullness.

What does that mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

What does it mean to say that it is important to find the Holy in the daily? What does it mean to say that it was around meals that Jesus made so many of his points to his disciples?

It means that for whatever we endeavor to accomplish in the name of Christ in the broader stage of our world, whether we end up going on a mission trip to the gulf coast or even beyond, whether we touch the life of a whole community in Chile, or Spain, or Mexico – and as a family of faith we are called to DO that – to reach beyond our local community and somehow touch the world for Christ – we are still and always called to do what can SOMETIMES be the much harder thing to do – to witness to the very people who know us best, who’ve seen us at our worst, who’ve seen us in moments of weakness and disregard, who knew us before we knew Christ, perhaps, who have the stories to tell that we would rather not have known. It is into that dialyness of existence that we are called to live our NEW life.

It’s easy to live as someone without a past when you are surrounded by people who don’t KNOW your past. It’s entirely something else to try to live a resurrection life among people who knew you before you died to yourself and began to live for Christ.

Let’s pray.

Weeping Outside the Tomb

Sunday, April 8th, 2007
Easter
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 20:1-18

1 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” 3Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. 4The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10Then the disciples returned to their homes. 11But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; 12and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). 17Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” 18Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

For some strange reason, there is a rule written somewhere in the performance guidelines for early and middle childhood that requires children between the ages of about 4 and 10 to be all over the map on how easily they get up on any given morning except for Saturdays. Saturdays is the ONE day in which they have absolutely NO problem jumping out of bed wide awake the moment they first open their eyes.

I used to think there had to be some correlation with what Saturday morning cartoon was on. I remember waking up and being all excited about loony tunes – bug bunny, the roadrunner, those characters. But I’m not so sure any more.

Hannah, for better or worse, takes after me in this regard – she LIKES to sleep. Enough said.

Judson can be quick to wake or not. He goes back and forth.

Caleb is the one that holds to the rule. Weekdays, he seems to be a little difficult to get out of bed, but, come Saturday, he’s Johnny on the spot and ready to go at 6:30 in the morning.

Yesterday was no different in THAT regard. We heard him come to the top of the stairs from the basement, walk down the hall, slip into Judson’s room to make his first attempt to wake HIM up, and then pad over to the bathroom.

The shades in Judson’s room were drawn down. The shade in the bathroom was up. There was a momentary pause, and then we could hear Caleb’s voice, with rising excitement “OH MY GOODNESS!! OH MY GOODNESS!!!

Of course, he ran into our bedroom to let us know that there were 3 inches of snow on the ground, that the trees were loaded down with snow, and could he go out to play in it?

Snow is one thing that ALL the kids get excited about. We do too, usually. It’s a nice thing to happen. In WINTER.

Not that it’s a BAD thing, don’t get me wrong. But it is what you expect some of in December, then some in January and February, MAYBE a little bit in March, but by the time the season changes, you pretty much EXPECT things to gradually but more or less consistently, start to warm up.

As we looked out the window in wonder at the mounds of snow that had fallen, our thoughts were not only on the beauty of the scene, but also on the events scheduled for the day. Leslie was officiating a wedding for some friends. The CATCH was, it was going to be at Belle Isle State Park, on the grounds of the Mansion there, on the banks of the Rappahannock river; OUTDOORS.

The prospect of slogging through snow and sitting or standing in what would certainly be a blowing wind off the river was a little daunting … but it was something that, oddly enough, we were prepared to get through to see the couple married.

As the day warmed up, we could tell that a lot of the snow was going to be gone by the time the wedding ceremony was to take place. And it was, at least, the area where we were going to be sitting and standing. The trickier part was trying to dodge the falling snow that was being blown off the trees that were up closer to the house, where the dance floor and the music and the food was being served.

So the wind would gust, and you might here an occasional scream as some snow found its way down someone’s neck, and occasionally the dining tent would sound like it was being pelted with a truckload of pebbles.

The day was memorable not only for the importance of the vows that were exchanged, and the setting, but for the simple fact that the weather played a trick on us. Yesterday the kids were flying kites in the backyard and playing in the dirt, today they were having snowball fights with the sisters of the bride. Go figure.

There was a moment before the wedding, when the DJ was playing the music pretty loudly, and we could hear the friends of the couple already getting into “party mode”, chatting – and chattering – and carrying on, trying to have a good time in spite of the cold, when we were commenting on the fact that it was Holy Saturday. We had learned earlier this year that our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters do not hold weddings during the season of Lent, and as we have become more observant of the church calendar, AND the season of Lent and what it entails – the reflection, the sobriety, the introspection leading up to the passion week – and yes, Today – Easter – it is a jarring incongruity to hold such a celebration of LIFE as a wedding IS in the midst of a time of … solemnity, of self-denial, of remembering the suffering and death of Christ, of self-abnegation – practicing delayed gratification, so to speak, until today’s sun rises.

While I was watching the afternoon progress, I realized that this was probably not terribly different from what was going on in Jerusalem almost two thousand years ago. The Sabbath was over by sunset on Saturday, so people went about their business once the sun came up on Sunday. There was work to be done, business to be conducted, forms to fill out, places to be, people to talk to … in short, the whole range of activities that are entailed in normal daily living. There might’ve been some conversation around the weekend’s events – that triple crucifixion that wrapped up before sunset on Friday was sad, of course, but it was a necessary evil. It certainly wasn’t going to affect how the rest of the week went. If we let THAT happen, we’d spend all our days wailing and gnashing our teeth for those who may have been unjustly executed. It’s a tough world. Get used to it.

And then the rumors began to circulate. One of the men, who’d been dead and buried by Friday evening wasn’t where they’d left him this morning. Odd, yes, but not really … unHEARD of … people were robbing tombs all the time. Especially if you were dead and wealthy … what? You say this man was only buried with the burial shroud and nothing else? Why would anyone want to break into his tomb and steal him away then?

Then we get the rest of the story. The women who had come to prepare his body – to wrap it better, surround it with fragrant herbs to offset the smell of decaying flesh while they waited for the body to get to the point where the bones could be buried … Mary Magdalene was her name … she’s telling the story that she was sitting outside the tomb crying and leaned down to look inside, and to her amazement there were two angels sitting in the tomb, where the man, Jesus was his name, where his head and feet were. And they supposedly told her he was not there. Asked her why she was crying. When she tried to answer that they where they were SITTING was the reason she was crying, she turned to find someone behind her.

You know how it is when you run into someone you know in an unexpected place? Well, that seems to be what happened to Mary Magdalene.

You see, it was Jesus behind her. I imagine she just cut a quick glance at him at first, what with two angels sitting in the tomb in front of her, I imagine her mind was trying to adjust to THAT idea before jumping on to the next reality-defying concept.

But she recognized him when he called her name.

She was crying outside the tomb. She was still in shock from the events on Thursday and Friday. Still reeling from seeing Jesus hanging on the cross, bleeding and beaten, crying out to God in heaven asking why had he been forsaken. Still adjusting to the idea that Jesus was gone from her life forever.

And God surprised her like an April snowfall.

Jesus was there. Alive. Talking. Breathing. Calling her by name.

Jerusalem was carrying on just around the bend as though nothing had happened … well, maybe not quite NOTHING … but nothing to get all worked up about …

Or should we?

The tomb was empty. Nobody came up with the body. Nobody except the women who went to the tomb – and THAT wasn’t the DEAD body, but the risen Lord.

We live today in the knowledge that Christ rose from the dead and lives even today – James Cameron notwithstanding.

We live today in the victory that Jesus held over the grave.

Or do we?

Do we live as though there really IS something beyond the grave, or do we live weeping outside the tomb, seeing in it the end of all that we strive for, the cessation of existence, the ultimate end of all our earthly struggles?

How empowered would we be to stop weeping outside the tomb and move THROUGH the tomb WITH Christ, and jump into new ways of doing church, new ways of BEING church, of reaching out and welcoming the otherwise unwelcome, those who live on the edges of society, those outcasts who Christ welcomed as he did Zaccheus, the woman caught in adultery, or the woman at the well?

We have before us a table set with bread and juice, reminders of the body and blood of Christ… reminders of the sacrifice HE offered in our place. His standing invitation is to take the bread and eat it, take the juice and drink it – but to remember that in so doing, we are proclaiming HIS death until he comes – BACK. That’s not a small thing we do. Because in sharing the bread and the cup we are proclaiming that we DO, in fact, live BEYOND the grave.

(Communion)

Let’s pray.

This Mind in You


Sunday, April 1st, 2007
Sixth Sunday of Lent,
Brief devotional after Choral Musical Performance

following the Baptism of Karen Parr and Caleb Park
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Philippians 2:1-11

1 If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, 2 make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.

3Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.

4Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.

5Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form, 8 he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.

9Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

We have heard the words of the central story of our faith related in song, and now through scripture. As we move through this next week, this week of remembrance, and reflection, this week during which we remember the events of the last week of Jesus’ life – his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his cleansing of the Temple, the Last Supper with his disciples, his arrest, trial, beating, crucifixion, death and burial, let’s please also try to remember the perspective from which we are viewing history.

Our Gospel is not an easy Gospel. It comes with a price. You’ve seen that price reflected in this service in the observance of the ordinance of baptism, which reminds us that WE are to die to ourselves and be born again into a new life in Christ, just as he died and was buried and rose from the grave on the third day to the life he lives now Glorified and through us – because you see, in simply calling ourselves ‘Christian’ we are claiming – and PROclaiming – something about the person of Jesus Christ – that he is Lord over us – our lives, our thoughts, our actions. That is to be understood as a daily endeavor, not a completed action. We know too well from our own individual experience that claiming Jesus to be Lord and LIVING the REALITY of the Lordship of Christ can be two VERY different things.

But our Gospel IS a free Gospel. Free in the sense that it is intended FOR everyone – no matter what their background, no matter what their baggage, no matter where they are on this road that we travel together – it is not for US to decide who ‘gets in’ – it IS for us to obediently and diligently proclaim the good news that God so loved the world that God came to us in the person of Jesus, so that whoever believes in him will have eternal life. It’s that simple. It’s that hard, and it’s that easy.

Paul tells us to have the same attitude in US that was in Christ, realizing and understanding that we ARE a little lower than the angels, do not take that and exploit it, but HUMBLE ourselves … become slaves … and obediently follow God throughout our lives, in every aspect … to the point of death … we do THAT today by identifying that part of our lives, our makeup, our personality, if you will, that we consider to be inviolable – that is, that we let NOTHING touch … and surrender it to the Lordship of Christ.

It can be anything, really. Our sense of accomplishment in some particular area of expertise. Our pride in being completely self-reliant. Our dedication to our work – WHATEVER THAT WORK MAY BE – and I include myself in that – as well as anyone who fills their week with church activities. Those of us who are so engrossed in church activities can very easily drift into the mindset that of COURSE what we are doing is the will of God because it is FOR THE CHURCH, when in reality that devotion that may have started out pure has now replaced in our hearts our relationship with Christ. And it is weighing our spirits down just as any other idol would.
We need to always remember just exactly who IS Lord – WHO it was that God exalted and gave the name that is above all names – that at the name of Jesus every knee will bend, no matter WHERE that knee is – above, on, or beneath the earth – did you catch that? Every single one of our knees will bend – arthritic, replacement or otherwise.

And not only will we find ourselves bowing, we will find ourselves speaking, shouting, yelling, whispering, singing, sobbing the words we heard earlier – all of us, together: JESUS CHRIST IS LORD.

But we DO need to get through Thursday, and Friday, and Saturday before we get to Sunday.

Let’s pray.