Are and Will Be

Sunday, April 26, 2009
Easter 3B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
1 John 3:1-7

1See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. 3And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
4Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness.5You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. 6No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. 7Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.

Reading this passage, there’s a term that comes to mind: mercurial. It is a direct reference to what we see happen with a thermometer … or, I should say, with the old-style thermometers – the kind that had mercury in them. This particular illustration wouldn’t work if I said ‘digital’ and tried to explain what I meant by using the example of a digital thermometer. Think back to what the mercury in an old thermometer used to do when the temperature changed – it would move up the tube inside the glass – up, up, up … or plummet down and down and down, depending on how hot or cold it was. There’s almost a physical break when we move from verse 3 to verse 4. In one breath, John is waxing eloquent about hope and purity, and in the next he seems to be digressing about sin and lawlessness. We will get to that.

But first, I’d like to explore a little about the imagery and terminology used in those beautiful first three verses.

John begins the thought in the passage with an expression that means in essence, ‘see what KIND of love the father has given us’ – in other words – ‘this is the way God has loved us – through Jesus he has shown us what it means to be children of God – because that is what we are!’. While that can be a precious and energizing thought, by the same token, it is a heads up for his followers – not just in late first century Turkey and Greece, but also in early twenty-first century Northern Neck Virginia.

He goes on to explain when he says ‘Beloved, we are God’s children now.’ The meaning of that sentence can change, depending on where the emphasis is placed. If we read it with the emphasis on the word “are” it means one thing: “Beloved, we ARE God’s children now” means one thing – the emphasis on the fact that through Jesus we have been adopted as children of God, and that the fact of our adoption is the principal point of the statement COULD be one way to read this sentence. Another way would be with the emphasis on the word “God” – in other words, “Beloved, we are GOD’S children now” would remind his readers and us as well of the fact of who we belong to – that we are God’s children – a precious and laudable point to be made.

I think John may have been writing to emphasize a different point … if we read the passage as a whole, both the sentence in question and the one following, we see there is a juxtaposition going on, something that is actually carried through the whole thought process in this passage. I think if we read it in the following way: “Beloved, we are God’s children NOW; --what we will be has not yet been revealed.”

In other words, he IS saying that we ARE GOD’S children, yes, but the thing is, we are God’s children NOW – in spite of not really knowing what we will be in the hereafter. Then he goes back, and says ‘even though we DON’T know what that will be like, we DO know THIS: when he DOES come, we will be like him, because we will see him as who he REALLY is.

It almost seems like a stream of consciousness flow going on in the next few sentences.

This promise that we have – that we will be like him one day, brings us hope, because it is a hope based on the knowledge that, just as Jesus was free from sin, we will also one day be free from sin. In that sense, we will be like him.

4Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness.5You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. 6No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. 7Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous

Frankly, this seems to be, in tone at least, contradictory to what John says at the beginning of the letter – what we saw last week – where he wrote that ‘if someone says they don’t sin, they are fooling themselves’. There seems to be a dissonance between the two passages. This seems a far cry from John’s assertion that Jesus’ sacrifice was sufficient for the sins of the WORLD.

That overwhelming, all-encompassing grace seems to have dried up in the space of the intervening chapter.

But let’s look at it a different way. Perhaps what John is saying ISN’T that followers of Jesus are incapable of sinning, but that when we DO sin, and as he said in chapter 1, don’t think we DON’T, when he says ‘no one who abides in him sins, no one who sins has either seen him or known him’, he may well be saying that we, who profess him as Lord of our lives, are in that moment of sinning, shutting him out, we are DISclaiming what we supposedly hold dear to our hearts. By our actions we are in effect negating our statement otherwise that we ARE followers of Jesus Christ. In that moment when we are committing that act, or harboring that thought, or allowing that twist to take root, we are closing our eyes to the Jesus we know, we are disassociating ourselves from the Lord who gave his life for ours, we are no longer abiding in him – and for that moment, at least, we are dimming the light of Christ rather than reflecting it.

But John doesn’t leave it at that – remember there is a pattern of juxtaposition running throughout the passage. He has just painted a fairly bleak picture of supposed believers failing in their faith. He reiterates on the positive at the conclusion of the thought:

7Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous

His concluding words are uplifting: if you DO what is right, you are righteous, and not just on your own merit, but just as Jesus is righteous. Again John reminds the believers that being in Christ means BEING CHRIST, that Jesus overlays US when it comes to consideration on the part of God.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It means we can’t pretend to in any way approach the throne of grace on OUR terms; that our only salvation IS through the gift and sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. That in that sacrifice we find our identity, our motivation, our reason for being CALLED children of God.

Let’s pray.

This Is the Message

Sunday, April 19, 2009
Easter 2B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
1 John 1:1-2:2

Note: When I stood up to begin, what had been emotions just underneath the surface boiled out in the form of tears. To stand with these folks whom we have grown to love so much and know that they are walking through this valley (Donald’s (Leslie’s father) illness) with us was simply overwhelming at that point this morning. I expressed our profound gratitude to them, to let them know that the knowledge that we were going through this together is making all the difference, and was finally able to gather myself enough after a few minutes to continue into the message.

1 We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— 3we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 4We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. 5This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. 6If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; 7but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. 8If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. 2My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; 2and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

This epistle, this letter to a church or a group of churches, is traditionally held to have been written by John, the apostle, towards the end of his life, as a response to a form of teaching that was on the rise that took the Gospel and twisted it and began to propose that living a … unified life … a life where the physical aspect reflected the spiritual – where there was a sense of cohesion between the two – was not required. We’ve spoken of it before: Gnosticism.

It took two very distinct forms as a result of the view that the physical body and the spirit or soul of a person were actually separate and distinct, and did not affect one another: the first resulted in people who ascribed to this understanding of Gospel choosing to live a life of extreme asceticism – in other words, they lived a life of extreme self-denial – depriving themselves of any number of comforts as well as some of the NEEDS that the body requires in order to function properly. On the other extreme were those who believed and practiced that, since the two ‘parts’ of the body cannot affect each other, living a life of physical indulgence had no bearing on the spiritual health of the person, and so gave themselves permission to engage in just about anything imaginable, according to the writings of the church fathers who argued and fought against the rise of The Gnostics.

John, by virtue of his apostleship and close relationship to Jesus, had over the years become something of an overseer of this group of churches in what is today Western Turkey and Eastern Greece, and as a loving father figure to them, he wrote to them to both warn and instruct them in regards to what this up-and-coming theology truly was.

If in the reading of the passage you heard echoes of the Gospel of John, you weren’t just hearing things. It is very evidently running through similar themes – about the Word, true Life, and Darkness and Light.

John first reminds his ‘children’ that what he has learned and taught them has been firsthand knowledge. “What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands” is a simple and straightforward affirmation that he didn’t come up with what he taught the followers of Jesus on his own – that it is from Jesus himself, because that is who John learned it from.

After laying that groundwork, John states his thesis: That God is light, and there is no darkness in God. Again it echoes the themes that we find throughout the Gospel of John.

Then he begins to elaborate some on what that means in terms of how it applies to those who call themselves followers of Jesus, or God-fearers: he says that if we say we know the love of God, but if the way we are living our lives doesn’t show that, then we really DON’T know the love of God,

Or at the other extreme, if we say we know God so WELL that we don’t SIN, we are lying to ourselves, because we have all sinned, and will continue to sin, until we are beyond this pale, and in the presence of God. Until then, he reiterates, the blood of Christ cleanses us from all unrighteousness IF WE CONFESS OUR SINS.

So John establishes a clear and strong link between living a life that is made up of harmonious action between the spiritual and the physical. The one cannot be had without the other. They are all part of the whole.

The beauty of it is that he doesn’t separate the love of God from the demands of the Gospel on how we should live our lives. He knows who he is writing to. He knows them well. He is able to express to them that he’s writing this letter to them so that they WON’T sin, and in the very next breath he tells us that IF WE DO SIN, we have an advocate before God in the person of Jesus Christ, ‘the righteous’.

Notice he doesn’t simply stop at that – as if to say ‘he IS righteous, but it’s yet to be seen how effective his righteousness is.’ Not at all – there is an immediate word of assurance as to the efficacy of Jesus’ sacrifice: ‘not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world.’ In other words, Jesus’ sacrifice is MORE than sufficient for you or for me – no matter WHAT we’ve done – again – NO MATTER WHAT WE’VE DONE. Sometimes we tend to gloss over those words – but they really are true. I don’t want to dwell on that necessarily, but it bears repeating – perhaps not just to ourselves, but to someone you know – someone who has not felt worthy to be in church? Someone who feels they might be judged if they came TO church?

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, on the Sunday after Easter, 2009?

I was talking with a local youth this week, and he began to share with me about his father – how he LIKED to go to church, but that he felt conflicted about going. On the one hand, he liked the sense of family he got from a small group of people, the sense of fellowship and care that can be found there, he didn’t like going somewhere where he didn’t know anybody. On the other hand, that same closeness made him at times more than a little uncomfortable.

The thing is, the one comes with the other. Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt, but rather caring. For some of us, that caring can seem constraining, cloying. John spells it out –

7but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship
with one another,

Leslie and the kids spent the better part of the day yesterday at the Little League fields. We went back yesterday evening for Hannah’s game – which turned out to be a double-header that lasted until well past 10:00. Over the course of the evening, Judson and Caleb and Elizabeth and Aaron and some of their other friends were playing various games around the area, and at some point Judson’s Crocks popped one of the plastic rivets that keeps the strap on. He came and got me and we explored a little, but it is a dark gray or faded black piece of plastic, and since by that time it was dark, the artificial lights were casting shadows in the grass. It was a nearly impossible task to try to find something that small and that dark in an area that was filled with small dark patches. I realized that it was going to be nearly impossible to find a little dark gray piece in a field of green and black and dark gray patches. I told him we would need to come back while the sun was out if we had any chance of finding the piece. We have yet to go back … we will probably just end up getting another pair of shoes for him.

**************** MANUSCRIPT ********************

But that is what it is like to live in fellowship. Living the message – living in community, caring for one another and loving each other intertwines our lives in a way that bonds us together and MAKES us the body of Christ. Some of you were here Wednesday evening when I shared about Uncle Lamar Tribble. He’s not my Uncle in the sense that we are related by OUR blood somehow … but he IS my Uncle insofar as we are bonded together through the experience of living and through his working alongside my parents as a missionary in Chile. It sometimes seems disproportionate, this connection I feel with my missionary aunts and uncles, but the more I look back on my life, and on who I am now, the more I realize that they were shining lights for me. They were the models and the influences that taught me what it means to live the message of hope, and of life, and of love.

The question becomes, do we understand that we here at Jerusalem can be – actually ARE that for our children, our youth and young adults – even for each other – no matter our age? I guess the word of warning would be that it can cut both ways – we can serve as examples of what it DOESN’T mean as easily as what DOES mean to be a follower of Christ.

That is why the invitation is to live the message – to live the Gospel and to live in THAT light. Because that light … casts no shadows.

Let’s pray


********************* ACTUAL ******************

But it’s that way when you are in close fellowship.

Close fellowship brings discovery, brings knowing each other well – to reality. In the best of all possible worlds, that fellowship is marked and branded by love, by caring, by selfless giving, by words of encouragement. Yes, part of it is accountability, and responsibility to the body, but it … how can I … some of you were here Wednesday night when I shared with you about my uncle Lamar Tribble. He is one of my missionary uncles. I know it can be sometimes be tiring to hear me reference growing up as an MK, and talking about missionaries, and my aunts and uncles, and you never can know if I’m talking about the brothers and sisters of my parents or of my aunts and uncles in the faith.

But what marked me growing up was the fellowship that I saw between my aunts and uncles – my missionary aunts and uncles – my missionary ‘cousins’ – well, we’d just as soon shoot each other at times (laughing).

But we had a group of 50 or so is what I have in mind, of faithful, dedicated, loving people who spanned the entire spectrum of Baptist theology. Uncle Lamar and Aunt Betsy are probably some of the most fundamentalist people I know, and yet, the love that they expressed to me, to my family, to my parents, regardless of those differences, marked who I am, had influence, had a formative effect on who I am. Getting through our adolescence with my fellow MKs, I think all of us, I don’t know of any of us who are not … who don’t have a “default setting” where we wouldn’t open our doors to any one of us, who happened to come through , who needed a place to stay, who needed a meal. Or we would go to get them if they were stranded somewhere, if they were in range.

See, that’s where I learned what it means to be in fellowship in Christ. That first hymn that we sang “He Lives” – it is one of those hymns that we always sang at the beginning of Mission Meeting, and … yeah. I couldn’t get through it, because it reaches down and pulls at the heartstrings, it pulls right at who I am. And the thing is, that fellowship … not because … it wasn’t because – and hear me say this – it wasn’t because they were missionaries, it wasn’t because they were special in any other way besides being obedient in living their faith – that same fellowship, that same impact that they had on MY life is what YOU ALL continue to have on me, and what you ARE HAVING on my family, and on the children and youth and young adults in this church…

Christ’s call to community is that bond, that … glue (?) that constrains us to love each other in the love of Christ, that calls us to care for each other in the care of Christ, that calls us to model to – not just each other – but to our children, our grandchildren, and the folks outside these walls what it means to be a follower of Christ.

Living the message of the Gospel is that, is making an impact on the lives around you by the way you live yours. And I mean ‘yours’ in the sense of a community, of a congregation – yes, also individually, that goes without saying – but the way we live our lives TOGETHER is what is going to make the difference. It’s what is going to make people hopefully sit up and take notice, and when you say you belong to or attend Jerusalem, that the response would be “I’ve heard that is a loving congregation.”

That’s the call, that’s the challenge, that’s the invitation; to be a loving family. Loving doesn’t mean not having disagreements; it means that in spite of the disagreements we continue to love each other. Disagreements are part of being human.

So, we have this task, ongoing. It is a task that we do not, by definition, do alone, that we, by definition get tired doing, but that we have … a resource, and I know that is a cold word … that we have this well that we can draw from, to use … I’m sure there’s a hymn that has that image in it, that we can draw from and drink deep of the water of life.

Let’s pray.

Lord in a world that is fractured, that is splintered, you have called us to grow together. You have called us to mend the breaks, to form one body. And even as our bodies work together, when we walk, when we run, when we lift, when we sit, when we stand, when we lay down, you call us as a body of believers to do the same – to work together in unity and in love. So we ask, Lord, that as we work toward that end, that you would not only bless our efforts, that you would infuse us, that you would teach us as days go by, as opportunities present themselves, what it means to love in the midst of disagreements, what it means to model your giving, your caring, both to each other and to the world around us, through Christ our Lord who gave himself for the whole world.

Amen.

This is the Message

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Easter 2B

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton

1 John 1:1-2:2

 

Note:  When I stood up to begin, what had been emotions just underneath the surface boiled out in the form of tears.  To stand with these folks whom we have grown to love so much and know that they are walking through this valley (Donald’s (Leslie’s father) illness) with us was simply overwhelming at that point this morning.  I expressed our profound gratitude to them, to let them know that the knowledge that we were going through this together is making all the difference, and was finally able to gather myself enough after a few minutes to continue into the message. 

 

¹ We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— ²this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— ³we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. ⁴We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

⁵This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. ⁶If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; ⁷but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

⁸If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. ¹⁰If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

2My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; ²and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

 

This epistle, this letter to a church or a group of churches, is traditionally held to have been written by John, the apostle, towards the end of his life, as a response to a form of teaching that was on the rise that took the Gospel and twisted it and began to propose that living a … unified life … a life where the physical aspect reflected the spiritual – where there was a sense of cohesion between the two – was not required.  We’ve spoken of it before: Gnosticism. 

 

It took two very distinct forms as a result of the view that the physical body and the spirit or soul of a person were actually separate and distinct, and did not affect one another:  the first resulted in people who ascribed to this understanding of Gospel choosing to live a life of extreme asceticism – in other words, they lived a life of extreme self-denial – depriving themselves of any number of comforts as well as some of the NEEDS that the body requires in order to function properly.  On the other extreme were those who believed and practiced that, since the two ‘parts’ of the body cannot affect each other, living a life of physical indulgence had no bearing on the spiritual health of the person, and so gave themselves permission to engage in just about anything imaginable, according to the writings of the church fathers who argued and fought against the rise of The Gnostics. 

 

John, by virtue of his apostleship and close relationship to Jesus, had over the years become something of an overseer of this group of churches in what is today Western Turkey and Eastern Greece, and as a loving father figure to them, he wrote to them to both warn and instruct them in regards to what this up-and-coming theology truly was. 

 

If in the reading of the passage you heard echoes of the Gospel of John, you weren’t just hearing things.  It is very evidently running through similar themes – about the Word, true Life, and Darkness and Light. 

 

John first reminds his ‘children’ that what he has learned and taught them has been firsthand knowledge.  “What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands” is a simple and straightforward affirmation that he didn’t come up with what he taught the followers of Jesus on his own – that it is from Jesus himself, because that is who John learned it from.  

 

After laying that groundwork, John states his thesis:  That God is light, and there is no darkness in God.  Again it echoes the themes that we find throughout the Gospel of John. 

 

Then he begins to elaborate some on what that means in terms of how it applies to those who call themselves followers of Jesus, or God-fearers:  he says that if we say we know the love of God, but if the way we are living our lives doesn’t show that, then we really DON’T know the love of God,         

 

Or at the other extreme, if we say we know God so WELL that we don’t SIN, we are lying to ourselves, because we have all sinned, and will continue to sin, until we are beyond this pale, and in the presence of God.  Until then, he reiterates, the blood of Christ cleanses us from all unrighteousness IF WE CONFESS OUR SINS. 

 

So John establishes a clear and strong link between living a life that is made up of harmonious action between the spiritual and the physical.  The one cannot be had without the other.  They are all part of the whole. 

 

The beauty of it is that he doesn’t separate the love of God from the demands of the Gospel on how we should live our lives.  He knows who he is writing to. He knows them well.  He is able to express to them that he’s writing this letter to them so that they WON’T sin, and in the very next breath he tells us that IF WE DO SIN, we have an advocate before God in the person of Jesus Christ, ‘the righteous’. 

 

Notice he doesn’t simply stop at that – as if to say ‘he IS righteous, but it’s yet to be seen how effective his righteousness is.’  Not at all – there is an immediate word of assurance as to the efficacy of Jesus’ sacrifice:  ‘not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world.’  In other words, Jesus’ sacrifice is MORE than sufficient for you or for me – no matter WHAT we’ve done – again – NO MATTER WHAT WE’VE DONE.  Sometimes we tend to gloss over those words – but they really are true.  I don’t want to dwell on that necessarily, but it bears repeating – perhaps not just to ourselves, but to someone you know – someone who has not felt worthy to be in church?  Someone who feels they might be judged if they came TO church? 

 

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, on the Sunday after Easter, 2009?

 

I was talking with a local youth this week, and he began to share with me about his father – how he LIKED to go to church, but that he felt conflicted about going.  On the one hand, he liked the sense of family he got from a small group of people, the sense of fellowship and care that can be found there, he didn’t like going somewhere where he didn’t know anybody.  On the other hand, that same closeness made him at times more than a little uncomfortable.   

           

The thing is, the one comes with the other.  Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt, but rather caring.  For some of us, that caring can seem constraining, cloying.  John spells it out –

 

⁷but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another,

 

Leslie and the kids spent the better part of the day yesterday at the Little League fields.  We went back yesterday evening for Hannah’s game – which turned out to be a double-header that lasted until well past 10:00.  Over the course of the evening, Judson and Caleb and Elizabeth and Aaron and some of their other friends were playing various games around the area, and at some point Judson’s Crocks popped one of the plastic rivets that keeps the strap on.  He came and got me and we explored a little, but it is a dark gray or faded black piece of plastic, and since by that time it was dark, the artificial lights were casting shadows in the grass.  It was a nearly impossible task to try to find something that small and that dark in an area that was filled with small dark patches.  I realized that it was going to be nearly impossible to find a little dark gray piece in a field of green and black and dark gray patches.  I told him we would need to come back while the sun was out if we had any chance of finding the piece.  We have yet to go back … we will probably just end up getting another pair of shoes for him.

 

**************** MANUSCRIPT ********************

 

But that is what it is like to live in fellowship.    Living the message – living in community, caring for one another and loving each other intertwines our lives in a way that bonds us together and MAKES us the body of Christ.  Some of you were here Wednesday evening when I shared about Uncle Lamar Tribble.  He’s not my Uncle in the sense that we are related by OUR blood somehow … but he IS my Uncle insofar as we are bonded together through the experience of living and through his working alongside my parents as a missionary in Chile.  It sometimes seems disproportionate, this connection I feel with my missionary aunts and uncles, but the more I look back on my life, and on who I am now, the more I realize that they were shining lights for me.  They were the models and the influences that taught me what it means to live the message of hope, and of life, and of love. 

 

The question becomes, do we understand that we here at Jerusalem can be – actually ARE that for our children, our youth and young adults – even for each other – no matter our age?  I guess the word of warning would be that it can cut both ways – we can serve as examples of what it DOESN’T mean as easily as what DOES mean to be a follower of Christ. 

 

That is why the invitation is to live the message – to live the Gospel and to live in THAT light.  Because that light … casts no shadows.

   

Let’s pray

 

 

********************* ACTUAL ******************

 

But it’s that way when you are in close fellowship. 

 

Close fellowship brings discovery, brings knowing each other well – to reality.  In the best of all possible worlds, that fellowship is marked and branded by love, by caring, by selfless giving, by words of encouragement.  Yes, part of it is accountability, and responsibility to the body, but it … how can I … some of you were here Wednesday night when I shared with you about my uncle Lamar Tribble.  He is one of my missionary uncles.  I know it can be sometimes be tiring to hear me reference growing up as an MK, and talking about missionaries, and my aunts and uncles, and you never can know if I’m talking about the brothers and sisters of my parents or of my aunts and uncles in the faith. 

 

But what marked me growing up was the fellowship that I saw between my aunts and uncles – my missionary aunts and uncles – my missionary ‘cousins’ – well, we’d just as soon shoot each other at times (laughing). 

 

But we had a group of 50 or so is what I have in mind, of faithful, dedicated, loving people who spanned the entire spectrum of Baptist theology.  Uncle Lamar and Aunt Betsy are probably some of the most fundamentalist people I know, and yet, the love that they expressed to me, to my family, to my parents, regardless of those differences, marked who I am, had influence, had a formative effect on who I am.  Getting through our adolescence with my fellow MKs, I think all of us, I don’t know of any of us who are not … who don’t have a “default setting” where we wouldn’t open our doors to any one of us, who happened to come through , who needed a place to stay, who needed a meal.  Or we would go to get them if they were stranded somewhere, if they were in range. 

 

See, that’s where I learned what it means to be in fellowship in Christ.  That first hymn that we sang “He Lives” – it is one of those hymns that we always sang at the beginning of Mission Meeting, and … yeah.  I couldn’t get through it, because it reaches down and pulls at the heartstrings, it pulls right at who I am.  And the thing is, that fellowship … not because … it wasn’t because – and hear me say this – it wasn’t because they were missionaries, it wasn’t because they were special in any other way besides being obedient in living their faith – that same fellowship, that same impact that they had on MY life is what YOU ALL continue to have on me, and what you ARE HAVING on my family, and on the children and youth and young adults in this church…  

 

Christ’s call to community is that bond, that … glue (?) that constrains us to love each other in the love of Christ, that calls us to care for each other in the care of Christ, that calls us to model to – not just each other – but to our children, our grandchildren, and the folks outside these walls what it means to be a follower of Christ. 

 

Living the message of the Gospel is that, is making an impact on the lives around you by the way you live yours.  And I mean ‘yours’ in the sense of a community, of a congregation – yes, also individually, that goes without saying – but the way we live our lives TOGETHER is what is going to make the difference.  It’s what is going to make people hopefully sit up and take notice, and when you say you belong to or attend Jerusalem, that the response would be “I’ve heard that is a loving congregation.” 

 

That’s the call, that’s the challenge, that’s the invitation; to be a loving family.  Loving doesn’t mean not having disagreements; it means that in spite of the disagreements we continue to love each other.  Disagreements are part of being human. 

 

So, we have this task, ongoing.  It is a task that we do not, by definition, do alone, that we, by definition get tired doing, but that we have … a resource, and I know that is a cold word … that we have this well that we can draw from, to use … I’m sure there’s a hymn that has that image in it, that we can draw from and drink deep of the water of life. 

 

Let’s pray. 

 

Lord in a world that is fractured, that is splintered, you have called us to grow together.  You have called us to mend the breaks, to form one body.  And even as our bodies work together, when we walk, when we run, when we lift, when we sit, when we stand, when we lay down, you call us as a body of believers to do the same – to work together in unity and in love.  So we ask, Lord, that as we work toward that end, that you would not only bless our efforts, that you would infuse us, that you would teach us as days go by, as opportunities present themselves, what it means to love in the midst of disagreements, what it means to model your giving, your caring, both to each other and to the world around us, through Christ our Lord who gave himself for the whole world.

 

Amen.                   

Terror and Amazement
(Unbound)

Sunday, April 12, 2009
Easter B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Mark 16:1-8

1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6 But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Would any of us have reacted any differently? Imagine for a few minutes what it would have been like to see your friend, your son, your beloved teacher beaten to that extreme, then nailed to a cross, and then propped up to die a terrible, agonizingly slow death.

We would have been close enough to hear the taunts of the guards, to smell the vinegar-soaked sponge offered up to him, to watch the drops of blood land in the packed, dusty earth at the foot of the cross from his wrists and feet. We would have been able to watch the spear cut into the flesh of his side and watch the blood course down his body and spread out over the place where there had just been drops drying in the dust before. And we would have watched the life literally drain out of him and heard his last cry.
Then we would have helped get the body down, wrap it in some cloth and hurried to get it to the tomb that had been provided before sundown. And that would have been it. End of story.

From that moment in the garden of Gethsemane it was pretty much a foregone conclusion what was going to happen to Jesus. He was bound – by the established procedures and the various interest groups involved – to end up dead at the other end. His fate was sealed. There was only one outcome. And it turned out exactly as any perceptive observer would have predicted. Jesus was arrested on Thursday and was dead by Friday afternoon. It just served to reinforce the idea that “that’s the way it was” for a subjugated people, a people who, for however much autonomy – freedom of self-government – they were granted, they remained under the ultimate control of an overwhelming force, a power great enough to wipe out their entire existence.

So I wonder if they had any idea of what they were starting, these women who loved Jesus and wanted to go properly prepare his body to remain in the tomb. Their lives, their hopes, their dreams had just been shattered. They were a couple of days out from having the rug pulled out from under them once again and they were making the motions necessary to begin to move on. I suspect they were in many ways accustomed to the routine of dream burial. I wonder what earlier dreams they had to lay to rest and turn to more immediate needs of their families, their children, their friends?

That they knew what came next – the bringing of the spices and oils to the tomb – would seem to be an indicator that they had been through this before. Perhaps with a brother or a sister or multiple brothers and sisters, a parent or other relatives … maybe even on a frequent basis, mortality rates being what they were in first century Roman-occupied Palestine.

There was a dreary predictability in it all. The people of Israel were bound by the power of Rome, and there was, once again, despite all the hopes they had placed on Jesus, little they could do to change the outcome. The women were bound for the tomb to repeat what they had probably done too many times in the past.

And then we get the twist in the story. Jesus dies; Jesus is laid in a tomb. A day and a night pass, Jesus is no longer in the tomb.

Of COURSE the first thought is that someone has taken the body. After all, Jesus HAD built up a following. It would stand to reason that, in order to quell any potential uprising by his followers, the body would be removed from the tomb and desecrated in some public way – either beheaded and the head displayed atop a pole at a city gate, or the body re-hung on a cross and left to rot in the sun on one of the roads into Jerusalem – as a warning to anyone who thought they might be able to incite an uprising against the Roman occupation.

That would be the way they were bound to do it. Surely. Certainly. Just as they had done with so many other rebels, rabble-rousers and supposed revolutionaries.

But there was no note from the proconsul left on the slab where Jesus had been placed saying that he had exercised eminent domain over the body. There was no seal posted at the entrance of the tomb to let family members know that they could now view the body at mile marker 3 on the road to Caesarea, northeast of Jerusalem.

Instead, there was a young man in white robes who had a message for them. And he kept it simple. You are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He’s not here. See? That’s where he WAS, right over there. Let Peter and the others know that he’ll meet you in Galilee, just like he told you.

This was the last thing they expected to see and hear. This was NOT the way things happened. You get nailed to a cross, you get a spear stuck in your side, you die, you get put in a tomb, and you STAY in a tomb. That’s just the way it GOES. There’s really no two ways about it.

But apparently, there ARE. But that third way is so far out there, so out of the ordinary, so unpredictable and scary that the reaction IS terror and amazement. How else can we respond when faced with the unimaginable?

In the resurrection, Jesus showed himself to be UNbound by mortal limitations. He DID die, but that was not the end of the story. And in the resurrection, Jesus unbinds US from OUR mortal limitations. We are no longer subject to that overwhelming force, that overpowering impulse to sin, as we were before. Sure, we’re still faced with it, and still will fall into sin, since we are accustomed to it in so many ways, but we are now, as Paul wrote, able to do all things through CHRIST who strengthens us.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton on Easter Sunday, 2009?

Look around this building. It is a nice structure, isn’t it? Padded pews, carpet, lights and indoor plumbing behind me here – and there IS the baptistery – we can even heat the water for you if it is cold outside. We’re able to heat and cool the air in here as well, depending on the time of year. The Fellowship hall downstairs is especially nice on those sticky hot summer days when we have committee meetings or family night suppers. The kitchen can handle a good bit of food preparation going on. It’s a bit dated, but it still serves the purpose. We’ve also got educational space – classrooms – for the different classes that meet during Sunday Morning Bible Study – Sunday School, if you will. It’d be wonderful to see us run out of room someday and find ourselves needing to add onto the building. But that wouldn’t be the reason that Jesus rose from the grave. Jesus rose from the grave to establish his body on earth in the form of his followers.

But if this all burned down tonight, guess what? Jerusalem Baptist Church would still be here. You see, it doesn’t have anything to do with a building. It doesn’t have anything to do with the bricks or the flooring or the pews or the history section downstairs, or the accumulated money in the bank under the Church account.

It has everything to do with us – you and me – the PEOPLE who call themselves members of this body of believers. The church is not and never has been about structures and organizations, associations or conventions. The church has always been about relationships; first and foremost, the relationship between the believer and Jesus, closely followed by the relationship between believers – between those who claim to be followers of Jesus. So how do we distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world?

Frederick Buechner writes in his book Listening To Your Life,

If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, Mind your own business, and Jesus says, There is no such thing as your own business. The world says, Follow the wisest course and be a success, and Jesus says, Follow me and be crucified. The world says, Drive carefully---the life you save may be your own---and Jesus says, Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love. The world says, Get, and Jesus says, Give. In terms of the world's sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks we can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.

So who are we bound by? Are we bound by the dictates of the world, or are we unbound by the power of the Holy Spirit to resurrect in us a Jesus who would call us to do ridiculous, unexpected, unpredictable things in his name? Are we going to let ourselves be fenced in by the perceptions that the world says constitutes a civil religion, or are we going to consider the possibility that what God is calling us to might not be completely in sync with what the world expects of a good little country church?

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last couple of months about how things are around us. When I meet with other Pastors or other believers, there is always some comment made about how things seem to be deteriorating, and how we need to get folks back into church. Over the last few years I’ve had multiple opportunities to sit in court with someone or one family or another, and the degree to which our society is seemingly disintegrating is directly related to the degree to which we individually neglect our spiritual health. I’m not going to belabor the point that coming to church is a start. It might be or it might not be. I’ve known plenty of people who have rarely missed a Sunday school class or a worship service in their entire life, but you wouldn’t be able to tell anything from their Monday morning conversations and attitudes. I’ve known people who are so in touch with Jesus that I am drawn to them almost like a magnet, but who have not set foot in a sanctuary in years. So going or not going to church is no guarantee of outcome. We DO have to say, though, that a central aspect of the Gospel of Jesus is a call to community – to live in and with others – to support each other through times of hardship as well as plenty. And that can’t really be done effectively if you are not on some level THERE with your brother and sister believers.

And that is what sharing communion is about. Sharing the bread and the cup from one same loaf, from one same bottle, speaks to the fact that we are drawing our life as a community from one same source – Jesus Christ. But it isn’t just a statement about the source, it is a statement about the fact that it is being SHARED. Sharing the bread and the wine or the juice speaks to the call of Jesus to share our LIVES, not just a piece of baked flour and pressed grape extract. But to share ourselves in such a way that we can make a difference – not just in each others’ lives, but in the life of the world around us.

(communion)

We CAN make a difference, you know. When the women ran from the tomb and took the gospel to the disciples hiding in that upper room, and THEY in TURN waited and wondered and eventually also got he opportunity to see the risen Lord, they didn’t do it with the expectation of establishing a little country church in rural Virginia that would last 175 plus years and have nice blue padding on the pews and cream colored hymnals and red and black pew Bibles and a budget of a little over $100,000.00.

What grew out of that was an understanding that what God wanted and provided through Jesus was relationship; a relationship that was both one-on-one with each individual as well as with a group of individuals who gathered together in Jesus’ name. But they didn’t just gather together, they WORKED together, they struggled together, they uplifted each other and encouraged each other, and they held each other accountable and prayed for each other. THAT is what Jerusalem Baptist Church is and is always working towards being even MORE.

Invitation to respond.

Let’s sing together our hymn of response, ‘I Saw The Cross Of Jesus’.

Then They Remembered

 

Sunday, April 5^th, 2009

Lent 6B

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

John 12:12-16

Theme: The value of re-living, re-visiting, re-experiencing the passion

 

“¹²The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. ¹³So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord— the King of Israel!” ¹⁴Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it; as it is written: ¹⁵“Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt!” ¹⁶His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.”

 

I remember the day I got the call telling me my father was flying back to the states because my grandfather was dying.  I remember picking him up at the airport in Nashville and driving to Paducah with him.  I remember going to the hospital a day or two before he passed away, and seeing granddaddy for just a few minutes, and hearing the doctor explain that the morphine drip would ease the pain he was in, and I remember standing outside in the hallway and listening as my father and my aunts and uncles spent the last couple of hours of his life with Granddaddy.  I remember the prayers and the crying.  And when it was all over, I remember as they each came out of the room and were surrounded in turn by my cousins and the rest of the extended family that had gathered.  My father had 6 brothers and sisters, so there were lots of people in the hall.  I also remember the date:  February 5^th, 1983.  And I remember going back into the room and looking at his body and thinking to myself ‘He knows.  Now he is face to face.’ 

 

Our cemetery here beside us is a testament to how we remember those whom we love, who have gone on before us.  There are any number of markers that are regularly either decorated or where flowers of one kind or another are placed on the anniversary of that particular loved one’s death.     

 

As a community of faith, we do the same thing every year at this time.  Not with regards to former members of this particular family, but with Jesus.  Whether you are here on a regular basis or whether you only come two or three times a year, the events surrounding the end of Christ’s public ministry on earth, his arrest, beating crucifixion and subsequent resurrection are parts of the story that are at the very least familiar, if not ingrained in your memory.  Beginning today, we remember that last week of Jesus’ life.   Today is called Palm Sunday to remind us of the palms leaves that were waved by the children and the crowd’s at what we call Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. 

 

As Christians, we believe that Jesus conquered death and came out of the grave, appeared to the disciples, and to ‘about 500’ other people, as scripture says.  We believe that because he was resurrected, it proves that Jesus was divine, was God incarnate, and that he DID, in fact, die in our place – once and for all, a little over two thousand years ago.  And we believe that living in the reality of that resurrection calls us to live lives that focus on the LIFE of Christ in and through us, that we become a part of his resurrection when we submit to Christ and accept him as our Lord and Savior.  

 

All that having been said, here’s the question of the day:  if living the life Christ showed us and called us to is about living today and tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next (in other words, into the future), why have we spent the last month-plus observing the season of Lent, focusing on something that happened nearly two thousand years ago?

 

As a nation, we have days set aside to help us remember specific events, or persons, or dates that are significant in our country’s history.  These dates or these people, whether leaders or otherwise, have become a part of the national fabric – the cloth that is made up of a vast number of colors and textures, coarse and fine threads, some smooth, some with lumps.  But for the most part, in spite of those differences, the majority of us choose to observe those holidays in some way.  In our present, consumer-oriented society, we can almost count on retailers of pretty much all kinds to take advantage of the date to build a sale of some kind around it.  For some days, such as Independence Day, or Veteran’s Day, or Memorial Day, there are specific ceremonies that are carried out both on a local and national level. The formation of our country and the ideals on which that forging was based are worth remembering, worth encouraging, worth promoting – it comes within the meaning of being a nation-state.  In order to perpetuate itself, there must be a sense of honor and value instilled in the idea of remaining a viable entity – a going concern.  And as a country, we’ve only been around since 1776.  A meager two hundred and thirty-three years.

 

Why do we set aside days for remembrance? 

 

We know that ancient man, through simple, patient, observation, grew to recognize patterns in nature – the summer and winter solstice, or the movement of the stars and the moon in the heavens, and marked them with rituals and celebrations.  So in part this marking of time by remembering recurring dates is part of our nature.  We need to do it as much for keeping track of the passage of time as we do to remind ourselves of what comes next. 

 

Some events are easy to understand as being of historic value.  The day the armistice was signed ending World War I was self-evidently historic.  For the first time in history, the world had witnessed the destructive power of modern technology, and the decision to end the carnage caused by the discrepancies between the advances in technology and the largely unchanged tactics of military engagement was in and of itself worth marking, worth remembering, and worth repeating.                     

 

Other days are not so obviously significant at first glance.  That was the case on that day when Jesus came over the crest of the hill and looked across at Jerusalem, with the crowds streaming towards it, and the sounds of singing and clapping and horses snorting and charioteers yelling to make way filling their ears, it seemed like the usual Passover anticipation building.  You see, when they arrived for the Passover feast, there was a general sense of excitement in the air.  There always was at this time of year.  It was the most significant celebration of the Jewish people.  It memorialized their deliverance from Egypt, and the beginning of their pilgrimage through the wilderness that ultimately led them back home.  Part of that celebration included the chanting of … slogans and sayings and the singing of songs that spoke of the hope of Israel, the long awaited Messiah.  

 

That the crowds were singing and chanting and waving palm branches was most likely no different from any other year’s Passover celebration.  What WAS different about this particular year was that Jesus was in the midst of them.

 

John signals the event by blending parts of two verses in two different books from the minor prophets – Zephania 3:16 for the first part, “do not be afraid, daughter of Zion”, and Zecharia 9:9 for the second part, “your King comes to you, sitting on a donkey’s colt!”     

Remember, the Gospel of John was the latest of the four Canonical Gospels written – probably in the years between 80 and 90 AD – over 50 years after the events being described, so there has been ample time for the significance of those events to begin to settle itself in the life of the early followers of Christ, and that is what is reflected here. 

 

In fact, that is why we DO what we do at this time of year.  

 

As a country, we are often characterized as having a short memory.  While we do study history, and to a degree incorporate lessons from it into our national psyche, there is a general sense that it is not that important if we are to move forward.  It presents us with a tension between two different worldviews.  On the one hand, we have those in our midst whose sole focus is forward. It’s all about what comes next, the past is the past, nothing is going to change it, let’s put it behind us and move on.  Then, there are those who believe that the past – with both successes and failures and the lessons that lie there, correctly understood and applied, are vital – critical even – to being able to move into the future and make the best decisions while doing it. 

 

What does all this have to do with Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

 

As a small part of the family of God in the United States, just by nature of being IN the United States, we are probably just as likely to fall into one of those two categories in terms of how we view our faith history as well as that of our nation. 

 

What we need to understand is that our remembrances of the events of the last week of Jesus’ life come from a different place than a simple look back at history, though that is a part of it.  What we are doing in reviewing the same texts, repeating the same hymns that have been part of the Easter Tradition among evangelical Christianity in America for decades if not centuries, is restating, refocusing our attention on the Salvation History of God’s work in the world.  In calling today Palm Sunday we are reminding ourselves that, even though it wasn’t evident at the time, when the first Christ followers thought back over the day that Jesus arrived at Jerusalem he was fulfilling a prophecy – one among many – that pointed to his being the Messiah, the Son of God, the Redeemer of Israel and Savior of the world.           

  

Let’s pray.