PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE:  “AFTER-CHRISTS…IN TEN THOUSAND PLACES!”

     When Jesus breathed His last breath, and Joseph of Arimathea and Nikodemus claimed His body and buried it in that borrowed tomb everyone-followers and enemies thought that was the tragic end. The Jewish leaders thought they had squashed the crisis that was the greatest threat to Judaism, as they knew and loved it.  The Romans were glad that they had quelled what might have been the greatest of all rebellions against Imperial Rome.  The disciples were devastated.  They expected Jesus’ ministry to conclude in an overthrow of the Romans, Him ascending the throne of His father David, and two of the twelve, still undecided, would sit at His right and left hands in this new invincible Kingdom.  But those expectations had been crushed on a Black Friday afternoon, that later would be designated Good Friday.  It wasn’t very “Good” in their eyes at that time. You can read of their devastation and disillusionment in the narrative of the two disciples who encountered the risen Christ, on the road to Emmaus. When the unknown Stranger quizzed them on their sad demeanor, they honestly responded, that they were sad because Jesus of Nazareth had been delivered by the rulers, and had been crucified.  Then they said, “We had hoped that He would have been the one to redeem Israel. i.e., The Messiah” (Luke 24:21).  Philip Yancey, in his book, The Jesus I Never Knew, wrote about what might have happened if Jesus had never been raised from the dead.  He wrote, “Sometimes I think about how different the world would be had Jesus not been resurrected from the dead.  Although the disciples would not risk their lives trumpeting a new faith in the streets of Jerusalem, neither would they forget Him! They had given three years to Jesus.  He may not have been the Messiah, (if He had not risen), but He had impressed them as the wisest teacher ever and had demonstrated powers that no one would explain.  After time, emotional wounds began to heal, and the disciples would seek some way to memorialize Jesus.  Perhaps writing His sayings down in written form, akin to one of our Gospels…or build a monument to Jesus’ life.  Then we who live in modern times could visit that monument and learn about the carpenter/philosopher from Nazareth.  We could sift through His sayings, taking and leaving what we liked.  World-wide Jesus would be esteemed in the same way Confucius or Socrates is esteemed”.

     But that is not what happened.  John Masefield’s play “The Trial of Jesus” has Longinus, the Roman Centurion, come back to report to Pilate.  Pilate’s wife, Procula, asks, “Do you think He’s really dead?”  The centurion replies, “No, my lady, I do not!”  “Where do you think He is?” she asks.  He replies-“Let loose on the world, my lady, where no one will ever stop His truth”. We have no historical record of Longinus, or anyone saying that, nor even thinking that!  Not even His disciples!  But Masefield gave a good description of what actually did follow.  Jesus was still alive, and through the Holy Spirit, incarnated and invigorated His disciples to take His message and ministry throughout the entire Roman world in one generation!  Frederick Buechner says that is the real message of Easter- “we can never nail Him down, not even if the nails we use are real and the thing we nail Him to is a cross!” Walter Wink, in Naming the Powers, says, “Killing Jesus was like trying to destroy a dandelion seed by blowing on it!”  St. Augustine, in describing the Ascension, said, “You ascended from before our eyes, we turned back grieving, only to find you in our hearts!”.  What Augustine was describing was more than a metaphor.  It was a real incarnational transforming of those who would carry on the ministry of Christ in the world-as His body-the Church!  The great author and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his writings saw Christians as a seconding of the kenotic incarnation of the living Christ.  He coined the phrases “After-Christs”.  In his poem, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame, He wrote:

     “for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

      lovely in eyes, and lovely in limbs not his,

      To the Father, through the features of men’s faces”

     Jesus had promised His disciples that after He left, that He would still be with them by the Presence and Power of the Holy Spirit.  He told them it would be even better for them because they would do “even greater things than He did!” (John 1412).  We know the early Church saw the fruition of that promise.  But overall, how has that worked out for the Church?  Frederick Buechner points out this has not always worked out for the best.  He writes, “The Church at Corinth were in fact Christ’s body, as Paul wrote to them one of his most enduring metaphors-Christ’s eyes, ears, and hands.  But the way they were carrying on, that could only leave Christ blood-shot, ass-eared, and all thumbs to carry on God’s work in a fallen world”. (The Magnificent Defeat).  Philip Yancey speaks to that failure of the Church to successfully function as the body of Christ, in the fallen world, when he writes quite eloquently, “I could fill several pages with colorful quotations, all of which underscore the risk involved in entrusting God’s own reputation to the likes of us.  Unlike Jesus, we do not perfectly express the Word.  We speak in garbled syntax, stuttering, mixing languages together, putting accent marks in the wrong places.  When the world looks for Christ it sees, like the cave-dwellers Plato wrote about in one of his allegories, only shadows created by the light, not the light itself!”

     Flannery O’Connor, in his book The Habit of Being, answered a critic of the Church by explaining that the critic did not understand the role that sin plays in the failure of the Church.  He wrote, “All your dissatisfaction with the Church comes from an incomplete understanding of sin.  What you seem actually to demand is that the Church put the Kingdom of Heaven on earth right now, that the Holy Ghost be translated into not all human flesh.  The Holy Spirit rarely shows Himself on the surface of anything. You are asking man to return at once, to the state God originally created him in. You are leaving out the terrible radical human pride that causes death. Christ was crucified on earth and the Church is crucified in time…The Church is founded on Peter, who denied Christ three times, and couldn’t walk on water by himself.  You are expecting his successors to walk on water.  All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful…to have the Church be what you want it to be would require continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs!”  Before you and I use O’Connor’s words to excuse our failures, let me tell you the New Testament emphasizes that such miraculous meddling of God in human affairs is exactly what God has done by sending His Spirit to empower us to live as Christ’s body in the world.  Paul said, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, but not I Christ liveth in me!” (Gal. 2:20). 

Robert Frost wrote a poem describing this process…he wrote in Kitty Hawk:

“But God’s Own Descent

Into flesh was meant

As a demonstration…

Spirit enters flesh, and for all it’s worth,

Charges into earth, and in birth after birth,

Ever fresh, Ever Fresh”

     Malcomb Muggeridge wrote, in Jesus the Man Who Lives, “Future historians are likely to conclude that the more we knew about Jesus the less we knew Him, and the more precisely His words were translated the less we understood and heeded them”.  He may be right.  The goal is not to understand Jesus and imitate Him, (something we do not have the power to do).  The goal is to know Him experientially by the power, presence, and performance of the Holy Spirit and incarnate Him in our lives, as His body.  That is miraculous meddling in the affairs of men.  That is exactly what God wants to do through us-His Church!

SERMON: NOTHING IN MY HAND I BRING

                                Matt. 5:1-2

                   “Blessed are the poor in spirit”

                     I.     ONLY WAY OF SALVATION

                     II.    ONLY WAY OF SANCTIFICATION

                     III.   ONLY WAY OF SERVICE

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “The Most Perfect Hope-Out of a Public Execution?”

     Our world has learned that civilization has failed.  Six thousand years of world history tells us on every page that our situation is hopelessly without answers.  It is only when history intersects with the Road of Calvary, and the Christ of the Cross-does that picture change for the better.  God has chosen to take the most horrible day of history and transform it into the most glorious.  Malcolm Muggeridge, the brilliant English journalist, who surrendered his life to Christ, spoke very poignantly on this subject.

     “We look back on history and what do we see?  Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counter-revolutions succeeding one another; wealth accumulating and wealth dispersed; one nation dominant and then another.  As Shakespeare’s King Lear puts it, ‘the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon’.  In one lifetime I’ve seen my fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, and the great majority of them convinced-in the words of a favorite song-‘that God has made them mighty and will make them mightier yet’.  I have heard a crazed Austrian announce the establishment of a German Reich that was to last for a thousand years; an Italian clown report that the calendar will begin again with his assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Ashoka, and more humane than Marcus Aurelius.  I’ve seen America wealthier than all the rest of the world put together, and with the superiority of weaponry that would have enabled Americans, had they so wished, to outdo an Alexander or Julius Caesar in the range and scale of conquest. 

     All in one lifetime-gone with the wind.  England now part of an island off the coast of Europe, threatened with further dismemberment; Hitler and Mussolini…buffoons; Stalin a sinister name in the regime that he helped to found and dominated totally for three decades; Americans haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluids that keeps their motorways roaring and smog settling, by memories of a disastrous military campaign in Viet Nam, and the windmills of Watergate.  Can this really be what life is about-this worldwide soap opera going on from century to century, from era to era, as old discarded sets of props litter the earth?  Surely not!  Was it to provide a location for so repetitive a production as this that the universe was created for homo sapiens, as he likes to call himself-heaven knows why-came into existence?  I can’t believe it.  If this were all, then the cynics, the hedonists, and the suicides are right; the most we can hope for from life is amusement of our senses and then death.  But it is not all!

     Thanks to the great mercy and marvel of the Incarnation, the cosmic scene is resolved into a human drama.  God reaches down to become a Man and man reaches up to relate himself to God.  Time looks into eternity, and eternity into time, making now always, and always now.  Everything is transformed by the sublime dream of the Incarnation-God’s special parable for fallen man and a fallen world.  The way opens before us that was charted in the Birth, Ministry, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The way that successive generations of believers have striven to follow, deriving themselves the moral, spiritual, and intellectual creativity out of which have come everything truly great in our art, our literature, our music, the splendor of the great cathedrals, and the illumination of the saints and mystics, as well as countless lives of men and women serving their God and loving their Savior in humility and faith.  It’s a glorious record-not just of the past, but continuing now.  The books are open, not closed!

     The Incarnation was not a mere historical event like the Battle of Waterloo, or the American Declaration of Independence-something that’s happened, and then was over.  It goes on happening all the time.  God did not retreat back into Heaven when the fateful words-‘It is finished’ were uttered on Golgotha.  THE WORD THAT BECAME FLESH HAS CONTINUED AND CONTINUES TO DWELL AMONG US FULL OF GRACE AND TRUTH.  There are examples on every hand; we have but to look for them.  For instance, the man in Solzhenitsyn’s labor camp who scribbled sentences from the Gospels that he pulled out of his pocket in the evening to keep himself serene and brotherly in that terrible place.  Then Solzhenitsyn himself-a product of this world’s first overtly atheistic materialist society who can tell us in shining words that ‘it was only when I lay there, on rotting prison straw, that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.  Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either; BUT RIGHT THROUGH EVERY HUMAN HEART AND THROUGH ALL HUMAN HEARTS!  So bless you prison for having been in my life’.  What insight, what wisdom, acquired in a Soviet prison, after a Marxist upbringing!

     It may well be that Western man has turned away from the cross in favor of some illusory pursuit of happiness.  YET THE PREACHING OF THE CROSS IS INDEED FOOLISHNESS TO THOSE PERISHING, BUT IT IS STILL THE POWER OF GOD TO THOSE WHO BELIEVE IT.  OUT OF A PUBLIC EXECUTION, (THE CROSS), COMES THE MOST PERFECT HOPE!  IT IS THEN THAT CHRIST’S HAND REACHES OUT SURE AND FIRM AND LIGHT BANISHES DARK FOREVER”.  (The Crisis Of Our Time-Malcolm Muggeridge 1985). 

     Peter would agree with that.  The only hope for the world of his day, and ours, Is the message of the cross, embraced by the first century followers of Christ.  While those pilgrims suffered the persecution and mocking of the society they dwelled in, and the government that ruled over them, he reminded them that their living hope was to found only in the death, resurrection, and soon return of Jesus Christ.  Muggeridge reminds us of that same truth!

SERMON: THE SERMON OUR EARS WERE MEANT TO HEAR

Matthew 5:1-11

                   I.    THE ACCLAIM OF THE SERMON

                   II.   THE AIM OF THE SERMON

                   III.  THE AUDIENCE OF THE SERMON