My Old Sermon Blog

During our visit to Greece 18 years ago we spent time in Thessaloniki (Thessalonica). One sight in the city that impressed was was a fairly new display at that time of Christian history in the Museum of Byzantine Culture. Not only were bits of Christian art and architecture displayed but also some re-creations of ordinary Christian life in cities of the 3rd, 4th, 5th centuries. Overall, we felt awed to stand in the presence of physical evidence for the continuation of a faith that has carried down the ages.

As I consider Paul’s commendation of the Thessalonians’ faith in this week’s text from I Thessalonians 1:1-10, it seems appropriate that such a museum display is found in modern-day Thessaloniki. The passage praises God for the faith exhibited by the Thessalonians and then states that they had become an example to believers in the surrounding area. What is more, verse 8 tells us that their faith had become known to “everyone,” even beyond that area of “Macedonia and Achaia.”

I noted in the first sermon of this series on faith that it is a gift. Along with the other two theological virtues, hope and love, one cannot set out to acquire the virtue of faith like one can some other virtues. One can become more courageous by doing brave deeds. One can become more patient by holding back immediate reactions and deliberately making oneself wait for things. However, it’s difficult to picture how one might form a habit of faith by, say, believing things more often. Instead, we must acknowledge our need for faith and then receive it as a gift from God.

Yet there is one way in which faith is acquired like other virtues and this text from the beginning of Paul’s first letter to Thessalonica highlights it. At least to some extent, we may learn faith by example. In verse 6, Paul notes how the Thessalonians “became imitators of us and of the Lord,” following both the apostles’ and Jesus’ own examples of faith. Then in verse 7 he tells how they in turn, as I’ve already said, became examples of faith for others.

Faith is a gift, but God often uses human instruments to give that gift. Our own lives of faith grow immensely as we look to the examples we have been given. And we must not overlook the role our own faith may play as an example to someone else, whether child, friend, co-worker or fellow church member. We talk about “sharing” a faith for a reason. It’s designed by God to be that way.

It’s interesting that the common lectionary pretty much skips over the text on which I will be preaching this Sunday. A version of the story appears in all three synoptic Gospels, but the lectionary only sneaks in the version from Luke in Year C as an optional addendum to the Transfiguration account in Luke 9. But I’d like to look at the way Mark 9:14-29 tells it, because so much is said there about faith.

It’s possible, though I’m not at all sure about it, that the lectionary leaves out this story because all three versions display a very uncomplimentary picture of the disciples. Jesus upbraids them for their inability to cast a demon out of boy who is experiencing something like we might call epileptic seizures. When a crowd gathers around the boy complaining to Jesus about the failure of the disciples, He says in verse 19, “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you.”

Matthew makes the disciples even less attractive in the story. There, when they come later to ask privately why they could not cast out the demon, Jesus says, “Because of your little faith.” Yet contrary to the lectionary leaving it out, it’s a surprising testimony to the authenticity of the whole account that three Gospels include despite how it portrays people who would have been important figures in the early church.

I’m focusing on Mark’s telling because it is unique for its inclusion of a conversation about faith between Jesus and the boy’s father. It begins with Jesus asking how long the boy had been suffering. In response, the father recounts the boy’s “medical history,” if you will, of falling into water and fire and imperiling his life, ending with the please, “but if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.”

Just now typing that father’s request, I realized how much it sounds like some of our own prayers, some of mine. “If you are able,” is the sort of thing we really ought never to say to God, but I think we often do. In any case, Jesus is a bit indignant and throws the man’s words back at him, “If you are able!” followed by something He said more than once, “All things can be done for the one who believes,” an assurance of the outcome of matters truly committed to the Lord.

The father’s response, cry, prayer, whatever you want to call it, is worth the price of admission here, “I believe; help my unbelief!” That tiny seed of faith mixed up with doubt has resonated with Christian experience through the ages. An awful lot of us can see ourselves in the trusting but wavering words of that poor father. Fortunately, it was and is enough. Jesus rebuked the evil spirit, leaving the boy lying still as a stone. But then He reached out His hand and “lifted him up.” That’s the Easter hope, the Easter faith, that just as Christ was raised, He can and will reach out His hand to raise us up.

The good news I find here is that it does not really take too much faith, because as other Scripture tells us, faith is a gift. If we only turn in the direction of Jesus and ask for help, even help to believe, He will reach out and lift us up into life, into true faith. We can belive it.

This is the Sunday we read the beautiful and well-known post-Easter text from John 20:19-31, the account of “doubting Thomas” encountering the risen Jesus. Yet I am going to focus on the epistle lesson this year, I Peter 1:3-9, which also speaks of faith, but in a more celebratory and fulfilled way. Part of my purpose is to kick-off a three part series of sermons on faith, which is itself a part of a longer series on the three theological virtues, faith, hope and love.

Both the Gospel of John and I Peter texts display a dual quality of faith that is sometimes overlooked and sometimes deliberately denied or discounted. Biblical faith includes both an orientation to some proposition or propositions and an orientation toward a person. All sorts of mistakes and misunderstandings about faith occur when these two facets of it are pulled apart.

When the epistemological attitude known as faith is severed from its connection with a person, it becomes simply, in a phrase that traces back to a famous/infamous essay by W. K. Clifford, “belief without evidence,” or belief with sufficient evidence, or even, if you take Tertullian a certain way (possibly incorrectly), belief because it is absurd. Mark Twain famously put this notion into the mouth of a schoolboy, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

So philosophers and theologians take great pains to remind us that we do in fact hold many beliefs without evidence, from Kant’s synthetic a priori truths to Alvin Plantinga’s “basic beliefs.” There seems to be, then, no great hurdle to regarding truths of the Christian faith as likewise candidates for epistemic commitment without reasons or proof. And thinkers like Plantinga do have a point in regard to our epistemic habits.

Yet there seems to be more to the kind of faith for which Jesus commends Thomas and to which Peter commends his readers than simply one more instance of beliefs to which we are entitled without marshaling good evidence. This has led some philosophers recently, like my friends Jon Kvanvig, Dan Howard-Snyder, and Dan McKaughn, all part of an endeavor dubbed “The Faith Project,” to work seriously at a philosophical understanding of faith which downplays or eliminates any propositional or intellectual component.

The attractiveness of the direction of “The Faith Project” is that it accounts for the fact that several instances of both biblical faith and faith as observed in contemporary life actually seem to have very little propositional content. One thinks of the thief on the cross or the “I believe; help my unbelief!” of the father of the boy with a demon in Mark 9. What seems to much more constitute faith in these cases is the individual’s attitude of trust toward Jesus rather than any well-formulated beliefs, even about Jesus.

Nonetheless, as Josef Pieper argues, faith is irreducibly both, “to believe something and to believe someone… the reason for believing ‘something’ is that one believes ‘someone.'” So that’s my starting point for discussing faith in the next three sermons. You can see it in this Sunday’s texts. Thomas believes something, “He is risen,” when he actually encounters the living Jesus. Likewise Peter’s audience in Asia Minor is commended for their precious faith because of their orientation toward Jesus Christ who will bring them their salvation. Faith is not either/or, propositions or personal relationship. It only makes sense as deep conviction of truth based on a living and dynamic connection with a divine person.

Astronomers and lovers of celestial phenomena had high hopes for a comet nicknamed “Atlas.” It had been heading toward a near pass by Earth and was hoped to produce a nice show in May. Now recent observations suggest it has broken up and may not even be visible with the naked eye when it comes by this vicinity of the solar system. It probably will not survive to turn around and come back again.

Turning around is the key for comet longevity. A comet is a big ball of ice and dirt. Beyond the orbit of Pluto, there is a huge collec­tion, about a hundred billion, of these big dirty snowballs. It’s called the Oort Cloud. Mostly the Oort Cloud stays where it is, way out where ordinary folks do not notice it. But every once in awhile, one of these snowballs gets bumped or nudged and it is captured by the sun’s gravity and begins to fall into what we call the solar system, toward the sun.

By a marvelous trick of God’s design, the huge force of the sun’s gravity can pull a comet in for all that distance — a trillion miles or more — and then, in one beautiful cos­mic moment, turn it around on a dime and send it speeding back out again in a blaze of glorious light. The sun acts like an anchor for the turn. It is like someone on roller skates whipping around a sign pole, letting the pole anchor her for a spin into a whole new direc­tion. A comet falls within cosmic inches of the sun, whips around it, and soars back out again. If it has fallen just right, it is now in an orbit, drawn by the sun’s gravity into a huge elliptical path that will bring it back now, again and again.

Sometimes we hope for big turnarounds like a comet makes, for our favorite team to quit losing, for the stock market to go back up, and painfully now, for the number Covid-19 cases and deaths to quit going up and turn and go down. These turnarounds are important to our happiness and well-being, but there is one turnaround which, brighter than any comet, outshines them all.

In our Gospel reading for this Easter, John 20:1-18, verse 14 says, “she turned around.” On the first Easter Sunday morning, Mary made a turn that reversed a fall she began on Friday afternoon. Though she did not expect it at all, she met again the person around whom her whole life had turned for the past few months. She turned and saw Jesus.

This week as we desperately wait for a turnaround in the national news, for a more promising outlook on health and the economy, let us remembered that Jesus has already turned everything important around for us. He has turned defeat into victory, sadness into joy, and death into life.

Right now, then, while our Lord definitely cares about our national health and economic condition, what He most wants to turn around is, like Mary, our own selves. As we spend so much time watching screens or listening to radios filled with bad news, He would like us to turn from all that and turn to Him, to be renewed with faith, hope and love for Him and for each other. Our Lord who has already turned death around, now wants to turn you and me around, to head with Him into life eternal.

I’m going to take what may feel like a bit of an odd turn (particularly for we Protestants) in reflecting on this Sunday’s sermon text, which contains the last of the seven last words of Jesus from the Cross. In Luke 23:44-49, specifically in verse 46, we read, “Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Having said this, he breathed his last.” Matthew and Mark tell us about the loud cry, but only Luke gives us those last words which He cried out.

As I’ve read about this seventh last word, I find Christian preachers and even serious scholars often saying that those words, which echo Psalm 31:5, “Into your hand I commend my spirit,” are a Jewish bedtime prayer for children. Thus we are asked to imagine that Jesus is repeating a child’s prayer He would have learned from His mother as He fell asleep each night. While I was able to find at least one version of a current Jewish bedtime Shema (the core of which from Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and which Jews are in fact asked to say morning and night) that contains those words from Psalm 31, I was unable to verify that saying these words as one lay down to sleep was in fact the practice in Jesus’ time.

Nonetheless, there is something resonant about regarding this final word from the Cross as something like the bedtime prayer of a child. One thinks of, “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” All that the Gospels show us of Jesus’ intimate relationship with God the Father, including His use of the word Abba, which is a family familiar term perhaps something like “daddy,” shows us that it would be perfectly natural for God the Son to trustingly commit Himself to the Lord’s care at the moment of death.

However, as Richard John Neuhaus points out, Jesus does cry this prayer of committal in “a loud voice.” That makes it a bit more than a quiet, peaceful, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” In the face of His suffering and imminent death, it’s a kind of defiant announcement and witness of absolute trust in His Father.

Now for the possibly weird to some part. What came to mind as I contemplated all this was Michelangelo’s Pieta, the picture I put at the beginning of this above. There is lots to say about the imagery and beauty of that sculpture which now resides in St. Peter’s in Rome. But for this reflection on Jesus’ trusting commendation into the Father’s care, I find this image of His complete abandonment of Himself in death into His mother’s arms suggestive. With His Spirit/soul in the care of His Father between His death and resurrection, Christians imagined this tender reception by His mother of the body to which she years before gave birth. As the second Person of God began His human life trusting to the arms of a human mother, so He ends it, again in her arms.

So the One who taught us that to enter the kingdom we must become like little children, actually shows us how to do that when He dies. As another psalm, 131, suggests, the soul which hopes in the Lord is like a weaned, quieted child in the arms of its mother. So our Lord was and so we must be.

As I said, I can’t verify much about the Jewish use of “into your hands I commend my spirit” as a prayer, but it is abundantly clear that Christians have followed our Lord in making it part of our prayers. Catholic night time prayer includes this responsory for every day:

Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.
Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.

You have redeemed us, Lord God of truth.
I commend my spirit.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.

In the Anglican church and in at least one of our own Covenant liturgies at the graveside of a departed Christian, we say something like, “Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant,” naming that person. As adopted children of the Father through our elder brother Jesus Christ, we are bold to claim His dying prayer as our own.

In these times of daily death counts, it seems good to me that we say that last prayer of Jesus somewhat often, reminding ourselves to relax into the loving hands of the Father. Maybe we might even need sometimes to cry it out in loud, defiant voices, affirming to ourselves and those around us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we are in the safekeeping of the ever-gracious hands of our God.

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” said Yogi Berra famously during the 1973 National League baseball pennant contest. His New York Mets were far behind at that point, but managed to come back and clinch the division title that year.

Of course, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” is what logicians call a tautology, a statement which is true by the very meaning of its words, a statement which, logically, cannot help but be true. As such, it’s literal meaning does not really offer much in the way of encouragement for a losing team… or to a man dying on a cross. Nor, we might add, is the strict sense of Berra’s saying much hope in the middle of a pandemic for a world listening to reports of how many got sick and how many died each day.

As we come now to the fifth Sunday in Lent, the third Sunday on which we will not have gathered physically in one place worship, we turn to the word from the Cross in which Jesus declares, “It is finished.” This sixth last word of Jesus is found in John 19:30 and follows right upon last week’s fifth word, “I thirst.” From Luke 23:46 we may discern that in the same verse John also alludes to but does not quote the last last word, the seventh, about Jesus commending His Spirit to God the Father.

For the last two Sundays I have pointed forward to this week’s sixth saying from the Cross, noting that it is anything but despair. It’s meaning can be a little ambiguous in English, but not so in the Greek of the New Testament. To be “finished” in English can mean simply to have come to an end, to be over and done with in some final way. We say of a person with a terminal illness, “She’s finished,” or, as may also be on our minds right now, of a failed business, “It’s finished.”

But the word in Greek, tetelestai (again, like the fifth word from the Cross, literally a single word) does not mean at all the end of a thing or of a life. It means a completion, an accomplishment, even a perfection of something. It’s what an artist says after the last brush stroke on a painting or a carpenter exclaims after having driven the last nail in a new house. Jesus was not bemoaning the end of His life. He was declaring that the work He came to do was accomplished. He had triumphed.

It is paradoxical and important that Jesus uttered “It is finished” from the Cross. One would think He would have said it to Mary or Peter after the Resurrection, when He was once again standing there alive and whole. But, no, Jesus declared His work accomplished while He was still hanging there. That’s actually good news for us as we confront our present trials of all sorts. We need to remember that even in the midst of struggle and pain our Lord declares our salvation completed and sure.

Which all means I need to quote again Father Richard John Neuhaus, and his excellent book on the seven last words, Death on a Friday Afternoon. Jesus completed His work even before the whole story came to its glorious culmination on Easter morning. It was finished on the Cross, but it was not quite over, as Neuhaus says about us, “‘It is finished,’ but it’s not over.”

Thus we live in this strange in-between time enjoying an accomplished salvation that is often called, “now, but not yet.” Jesus has done everything necessary for us, but we still live and strive and sometimes suffer, waiting for what He has done in us to be completely done. As John would write later in I John 3:2, “Beloved, we are God’s children now [that’s what He accomplished on the Cross]; 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.”

Our salvation is accomplished. We are waiting for Jesus now to make us like Himself. That part’s not over till it’s over.

At the end of a long hike over a high pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, we were thirsty. The light was fading as we finally came down the trail to find a camp site beside a small alpine lake. Unexpectedly, we had crossed no streams and passed no other lakes during our day’s long trek. The full water bottles we started with were empty or all but so. We thirstily filled bottles and larger containers and looked forward to quenching our thirst.

Then someone shined a flashlight into one of our translucent bottles and we were dismayed to see tiny flecks moving there in the water we had drawn. They were probably mosquito larvae. We didn’t know. Some of us had already gulped down some of that murky liquid with life in it. The rest of decided to hold our thirst a little longer while the water was boiled. Fortunately, no one got sick, but it’s one of the few times in my life I can recall being really, really thirsty.

The fifth word of Jesus from the Cross, in John 19:28-29, shows us Jesus suffering from agonizing thirst and Himself being offered a questionable liquid to quench it. One good guess (we are not at all sure) is that Jesus was offered posca, a sour wine which was part of the rations given to Roman soldiers. It was often mixed with questionable water to hide the water’s taste and/or odor.

So, unlike the earlier offering of wine mixed with something else (myrrh, vinegar?), which may have had either a stimulant or narcotic intent, in the other Gospels, this offering and receiving of cheap wine just before Jesus’ death, as John tells it, may have been done with some kindness and mercy generally unusual in the process of crucifixion.

Once again I have been surprised that my reading about a word from the Cross has changed the direction of my thought about it. Like many of us, I had assumed that Jesus’ declaration of thirst was pretty much about a display of His total humanity in solidarity with us, a bit like what I said about the Cry of Dereliction this past Sunday. Yet I have found that there is a strong basis right in the text for thinking that this word from Jesus is about more than simply being physically parched and that there is long-standing Christian tradition giving this word a larger spiritual significance.

The part of the text I had not recalled before looking again is the beginning of verse 28, just before He says, “I thirst.” The lead up is, “After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture)…” That prelude to the fifth word suggests that we need to think both about how His thirst relates to the accomplishment of His mission and about the way in which it fulfills Scripture, particularly which bit of the Old Testament it might fulfill.

In answer to the latter question there are two main contenders for being an Old Testament passage which foreshadowed Jesus’ thirst on the Cross. Psalm 69:21 seems to fit the bill particularly well, with its second line saying, “and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” Yet once again Psalm 22, which seems almost to predict the crucifixion scene, comes into play at its verse 15, “my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.” Either psalm verse or both could be what John had in mind as he wrote.

I think I hear the larger significance of Jesus’ being thirsty expressed in the hymn found in our Covenant Hymnal as “O How Shall I Receive Thee.” The words are an English translation seemingly done by various folks of a portion of an Advent hymn in German by Paul Gerhardt. I cannot find any good basis for the English verse 3 in the German original, but this is how the first two lines of that verse go in the hymnal:

Love caused thine incarnation, love brought you down to me;
Thy thirst for my salvation procured my liberty.

Richard John Neuhaus writes that the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa, have put these words over the doors of their chapels around the world, “I thirst, I quench.” Mother Teresa said, “We want to satiate the thirst of Jesus on the cross for the love of souls.”

There is more to say about how that thirst expressed by Jesus as He died was also a thirst to drink completely the cup His Father has given Him. As He said to Peter when the disciple tried to fight to prevent His arrest, “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” Jesus’ thirst on the Cross was to drink to the dregs that cup of suffering which would accomplish our salvation. Thanks be to God for that holy Thirst.

When a certain praise song is sung at our church, my wife refuses to sing a particular line. It’s Stuart Townend’s “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us,” and the line is, “The Father turns his face away…,” sung about Jesus hanging on the Cross. Beth says that’s simply not true. The Father did not turn away from His Son Jesus as He died on the Cross. If that were true, the Trinity would be broken and God would not be God.

The understanding that the Father “turned His back” on Jesus on the Cross is partially motivated by an atonement theology which goes (this is admittedly a hasty and sketchy outline) something like this, drawn partially, but not wholly, from Anselm:

1) There is an infinite penalty for sin, which is death.
2) On the Cross, all the sins of all humankind were loaded on Jesus and He bore the penalty for them all in His own death.
3) Drawing on Isaiah 59:2 and Habakkuk 1:13, then, it is asserted, God cannot look on sin.
4) Therefore, as Christ bore all the sins of the world on the Cross, God had to turn away and not look at all that evil.

There are several problems with the theology outlined in 1) – 4) above. But this Sunday we take up what has typically been called the “Cry of Dereliction” as the fourth word from the Cross, found in Matthew 27:45-47 and Mark 15:33-35. That cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (which is the first verse of Psalm 22) is often taken to be direct confirmation of the notion that God the Father turned away from Jesus on the Cross. Jesus is simply expressing His actual experience of abandonment by the Father in those moments.

As Thomas Aquinas might say at this point, sed contra (“on the contrary”). Both the atonement theology and the understanding of the eloi, eloi cry which lead to Townend’s and others’ idea that the Father turned away from Jesus as He died are mistaken. It’s hard to know quite where to start in answer that idea, but Psalm 22 itself is as good as any. As the psalm describes many afflictions which seem to hauntingly foreshadow the crucifixion, Psalm 22:24 declares, “For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.” I’m tempted to say that’s enough right there for us to toss out that “the Father turned his face away” line. However, we can say more.

The most trenchant theological objection to the concept that God the Father had to actually abandon His Son on the Cross is the very nature of God as Trinity. Trinitarian theology is enormously complex, but all orthodox Christians agree that however Father, Son and Holy Spirit are related, there is a deep, essential, eternal unity between them. It’s not the sort of unity which can be abandoned, even for a short time, without God ceasing to be what God always is, three persons in one God.

We can also add that other Scriptures seem to tell against Jesus being abandoned by the Father on the Cross. In John 16:32 Jesus tells the disciples they will abandon Him and leave him alone, “Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me.” And several of the other words from the Cross imply that close relation with Father continuing even on the Cross. Jesus asks the Father to forgive those who crucified Him. Jesus promises the repentant thief a place in Paradise. At the end, in Luke 23:46, Jesus addresses the Father directly, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” It is hard to discern what that last prayer means if the Father has actually turned away and is not attending to Jesus.

What then does the cry of dereliction mean? If it’s not an expression of actual abandonment by God, then what is it? One alternative has been, as I implied by quoting a later verse from Psalm 22, to refer to the well-documented practice of invoking a whole passage of Scripture, particularly a psalm, by reciting its first line. We do much the same by referring to hymns by their first lines. Thus Jesus cry from an Aramaic version of Psalm 22, Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani, is actually meant to be His affirmation of the whole psalm, which ends on a note of vindication and victory and deliverance by God. So it is not a cry of abandonment or despair, but a confession of faith and trust like the psalmist’s own.

I think that first line invocation of the whole of Psalm 22 is a correct way of understanding this fourth word from the Cross. However, I also want to say that on the Cross Jesus experiences and then gives voice to the very human feelings of distress that anyone dying in such a way would feel. He enters fully into the emotional state of humanity as it confronts its self-imposed (the real meaning of the Isaiah and Habakkuk verses about God not looking on sin) distance from God.

Lastly, though, as Richard John Neuhaus writes in Death on a Friday Afternoon, the cry of dereliction must be read in harmony with what Jesus says in John 10:18, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” So Neuhaus says that abandonment in the cry of dereliction is self-abandonment. Jesus submits His life to the Father. Thus, “it becomes clear that the secret of the cry of dereliction is that the abandonment by God is the abandonment to God.” This is seen by the fact that even as He calls out God’s forsaking, to Jesus the Father is still “My God.”

Understood in Neuhaus’s way, the cry of dereliction becomes a great model for our own times of extreme suffering. As we cry out feelings of abandonment, even by God, we may also realize ourselves then so abandoned to the tender, everlasting care of the One who is also our God.

One of the old Saturday Night Live skits my wife and I still chuckle about decades later is Jane Curtin doing “Weekend Update” with guest John Belushi talking about “the luck of the Irish.” Near the end of Belushi’s wild rant about the “bad luck of the Irish” he declares, “One thing! One thing!!! They love their mothers, boy, oh they love their mothers.”

As we turn to the third “word” or saying of Jesus from the Cross, in John 19:25b-27, one wonders if the Irish, as John Belushi saw them, might want to claim Jesus as one of their own. The typical understanding, and I confess my own understanding for a long time, of this last word of Jesus is to see it as a demonstration of His deep love for His mother, a display of divine filial affection. Even in His dying agony, the good Son tenderly arranges for the care of His aging mother. As I have discovered in studying this saying further, all that is mostly true, but there is significantly more here than a simple commitment to human family.

In fact, as many others have noted, Jesus is not exactly a “family friendly” guy. He called several disciples away from their families, parents and even wives. Jesus’ relationship with His own immediate family is “different” at best. Like He does here from the Cross, Jesus at the wedding in Cana in John 2:4 addressed His mother as “Woman.” While not as rude as it sounds to our ears in English, it was not how sons addressed their mothers in Jesus’ time. And, of course, famously in Luke 8:19-21, when His mother and brothers come to see Him in the midst of a crowd, Jesus pays little attention and instead says, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” Which gives us a clue to the “more” that is going on in the third saying from the Cross.

This last Word is often labeled the “Word of Relationship.” Planning for these sermons, I almost changed that to the “Word of Family,” but I realize now that would have been a mistake. What Jesus teaches us about family is consistent with what He did and taught throughout the Gospels. All of our relationships, including our closest human relationships, are transformed and caught up into a new “family” which is the people of God, the Church.

So when Jesus on the Cross asked Mary to regard John as her son, and the disciple to regard Mary as his mother, He was not just making special arrangements for the mother He loved. He was graphically showing us all how relationships in His new order of things actually work out. Biologically unrelated people brought together as children of God by the grace of Christ now have a whole new set of “family” relationships to enjoy and to which they are accountable.

It’s all very good news in a day when the connections of family are strained by distance and when the very concept of family is challenged and broken by social changes beyond any immediate hope of redemption. Those who find themselves apart from biological family or in biological family situations which are only painful, are invited into a new family ordered by the love of God in Jesus Christ. It was for this reason that Jesus said those who hear and do God’s Word are mother and brothers to Him. He was in the midst of creating this new kind of family on earth. And there on the Cross He subsumes even His own close relationship with His mother to that new sort of relationship existing in the Christian community.

This third word from the Cross calls us all to rethink our conceptions of family and to think again about the new family in which we will spend eternity. There is hope here for those who have been hurt by family or lack thereof, and there is challenge for those of us who are a little too comfortable in always putting family above everything else, including our commitment to the Lord.

I’ve been known to object to what I call “thief on the cross” theology. Basically, I object to using what science might call a “limiting case” in order to draw general theological conclusions. Typically, an appeal to the thief on the cross is made in discussions of what is necessary for salvation. So, supposedly, baptism, communion, any substantive knowledge of christology (who and what Jesus is), or even any very substantive form of faith, are all ultimately superfluous and non-essential for the experience of salvation. Such arguments seem to be used by those who would like to downplay the role of the sacraments in Christian life or to downplay the significance of theological knowledge.

Yes, the thief did experience the grace of God in and through Jesus, but one might turn the whole argument around and suggest that he had what is not available (depending on your sacramental theology) to any of us: a direct, physical encounter with the incarnate Christ. Thus none of us has experienced a basic factor in the thief’s salvation, which might make us cautious about drawing too many conclusions from his case about what is necessary for and constitutes our own salvation.

Yet the thief was there, and Jesus did speak to him one of what are often called the “seven last words” from the Cross, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:39-43). At least one list of the seven last words calls it the “Word of Salvation.” In response to a recognition of Jesus’ innocence and a direct call to be remembered in Jesus’ kingdom, our dying Lord promised the man an immediate place with Him in Paradise.

Some conclusions we might truly draw from the case of the thief on the cross are verified from other texts in Scripture, like the epistle lesson for Sunday from Romans 5:12-19. Such as the fact that salvation does come through Christ and Him alone, and that it does not depend in any way upon our own selves, since we are all, like the thief, sinners who deserve the consequences of our deeds.

So, limiting case or not, the penitent thief (notice that adjective) shows us the marvelous availability of salvation in Christ, available to the worst of us and thus to any of us, along with the fact that such redemption is accessible from anywhere at anytime. That is good news for all of us who hope for more than we deserve.

Let me just say at the outset that the translation of Psalm 2 verses 11 and 12, from which I’m taking the sermon title this week, is very uncertain. Basically, no one really knows what the original Hebrew of verse 11b and verse 12a actually means. The NRSV translation I’m using, “kiss his feet,” is, at best, a better guess than the traditional KJV, NIV, etc. translation, “kiss the son.” Old Testament scholars are fairly well in agreement that whatever the phrase at the beginning of verse 12 means, it cannot mean “kiss the son.” You can only get the word “son” by reading the word as Aramaic, but it’s a Hebrew text and it’s highly unlikely a single word in Aramaic was part of it. However, other translations all involve deciding to “correct” (that is, change) a letter or two of the text in some way, making any translation of these phrases only an educated guess.

Nevertheless, the frequent Christian appropriation of Psalm 2 in the New Testament as applying to Jesus the Son of God is totally justified because the word “son” actually does appear in Hebrew in verse 7 of the psalm. This verse is quoted about Jesus in Hebrews 1:5, making it a prophetic statement of Jesus’ relationship with God the Father.

Psalm 2 pictures the rebellion of the kings and rulers of the earth against the Lord and his anointed (verse 2), envisions God’s derision (verses 4-6) for such rebellion, then affirms the dominion (verses 7-9) in the first-person voice of one whom the Lord calls “my son.” Thus a call for some abject act of submission at the end of the psalm, like kissing the feet of the Lord in the person of His Son, makes total sense in the overall context.

In company with the picture we have from Matthew 17:6 of the disciples falling to the ground before Jesus as He is declared “my beloved Son” by God, Psalm 2 pushes us to reflection on just what it means to accept Jesus as our Lord and King. It reminds us that all the authority and power of this world, whether our own or of some governing authority above us, must bow in repentance and submission to Jesus Christ. We must beware of setting ourselves or anyone else up above the authority of the Son of God.

As we prepare to begin Lent next Wednesday, February 26, perhaps a good discipline to consider for the season might be to consider how submissive we are to the Son. Are we struck enough by His majesty authority over us to fall down before Him, even kiss His feet? Or are we sold on having our own way or the way of some other authority who makes us attractive promises? Perhaps picturing ourselves kissing those nail-pierced feet would be an appropriate Lenten meditation this year.

In a scene in the 1996 film, Trainspotting, a heroin addict character named Renton (played by Ewan McGregor) begins and ends a much quoted (and reproduced as a poster) speech with the key words, “Choose life,” from verse 19 of this coming Sunday’s Old Testament text, Deuteronomy 30:15-20. Renton’s cynical, nihilistic tirade on the dreary particulars of ordinary life in the 90s was a riff on the fact that a 1980s anti-drug campaign used those two words as a slogan, suggesting that one choose life rather than drugs. He concludes, “I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?”

The Trainspotting character was disgusted with the emptiness of life endeavors such as job and family, consumer purchasing of washing machines and televisions, junk food and luggage, and the prospect of spending one’s last years as a senile embarrassment in a “home.” Any escape seemed better than such a pointless existence. So why not heroin?

With Renton’s deconstruction of the “Choose life,” slogan in mind, I turn to the Deuteronomy text in company with the Gospel reading from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:21-37. And I realize that Moses and Jesus are both also aiming at a deconstruction and alternative to life as usual. For Moses, like Renton, the great fear is that the Israelites will enter the land of Canaan and become just like everyone around them. Moses does not want them to serve their gods and do the things the Canaanites do. The difference is that Moses realizes that not being like other people is just, in fact, to choose life, to love God and obey Him (verse 20).

In the Gospel, Jesus is more specific about how the choice for life looks different from the ordinary. Choose forgiveness and reconciliation rather than the ordinary course of anger. Choose faithfulness rather than the easy paths of adultery or divorce. Choose straightforward truth-telling rather than impressive formal oaths which offer the illusion of honesty. He goes on in the verses beyond Sunday’s text to call for choosing patience over retaliation, generosity over protection of property, and love for enemies as well as friends. It’s all about life quite out of the ordinary mold.

To “Choose life” in this biblical, divine way, then, is to constantly make quite deliberate and conscious choices to live differently from those around us. To “Choose life” is to affirm and engage in conduct which departs radically from the dead, hopeless and meaningless ways in which the world invites us to live.

Let’s rehabilitate, therefore, a great biblical challenge, choosing that which sets us apart and makes us different as Christians. Let us refuse to live hopelessly in world that has lost its hope. Let us live good lives in a world that has forgotten what “good” means. Let us choose the side of our Lord who offers us abundant life both now and forever.

I am completely stymied on finding an origin for the common phrase stating that Christians ought to be “in the world but not of it.” Yes, of course there are biblical roots for the idea, notably John 17:15 & 16, where Jesus says that He is not asking the Father to take His followers out of the world, but that, like He Himself, they do not belong to the world. At some point in history, that prayer of the Lord, perhaps echoed in other New Testament passages about not loving the world and the things in it, became encapsulated in the slogan, “Be in the world but not of it.”

So our Gospel text for this Sunday, Matthew 5:13-20, seems like an excellent excuse, as good as any, for considering that phrase “in but not of” and what it means for Christian living. Jesus’ homely images of salt and light offer not just a negative interpretation of what it means to be “in but not of,” i.e., things like abstinence from the sins of the world or non-participation in worldly distractions. Being salt and light suggests that Christians live in ways that are visibly different from the ways of others, the ways of the world, and are positively attractive when doing so.

Here’s a quote from a second century Christian epistle, The Letter to Diognetus, which nicely captures an early grasp of the attractiveness of the Christian manner of life:

“Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.

They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life.”

What can we learn from that second century understanding of what it means to be salt and light, or to be “in the world but not of it?” Much, I think.

 

I’m going to talk about another Christmas gift from my sister this week, one which was deliberately weird. She gave me this strange looking winged-woman-with-a-bull statuette which she had received as a white elephant gift at a party with her own church. She re-gifted it to me just to see my reaction when I opened it.

It was one of those studied reaction sort of moments when I did not know if the gift was serious or not. Not wanting to hurt my sister’s feelings, I kept my eyes down, trying not to take too long to ponder what to say. She saved me by starting to laugh.

Our text for this Sunday, Matthew 5:1-12, the Beatitudes is one of the most well-known and most loved portions of Scripture, but thoughtful consideration of them can leave us feeling a little like I did holding my sister’s odd gift. We are not quite sure what to make of them, wondering if they have any practical application for us at all. If we are serious in our response to the Beatitudes, they can leave us feeling a bit guilty for how far short we fall of their ideals such as meekness, righteousness, purity and peacefulness.

So I was very grateful to discover years ago in Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy a different approach to the Beatitudes than taking them as virtues to which I do not measure up. They are certainly that, but they may also be seen as our Lord’s compassion and blessing on humble and wretched states which clearly characterize me and others: spiritual poverty, deep sorrow, lack of righteousness. Willard believes even the second half of the list, four more virtue-like characteristics, can be seen as recognition of less than perfect people whom the Lord nonetheless chooses to bless.

Like my sister’s laughter at my discomfiture, our Lord offers us the Beatitudes with a gentle smile on His face, not wanting us to sit too long in embarrassed contemplation of our failures, failure even to appreciate the blessings. Instead, these blessings are meant to reassure us of His love for us despite our shortcomings and to help move us toward deeper appreciation of how truly blessed we are by His grace and the new people we might be come by that grace.

Here’s a picture of one my Christmas gifts, a stocking stuffer. Not the cap, but the light clipped to the bill. It’s an LED light which presumably I would wear on a cap when fishing in the dark. It seems like a nice idea, handy for tying on a fly or whatever in low light. The problem is that I seldom fish in the dark (it’s illegal in Oregon to fish after dark for trout, salmon and steelhead) and I never wear ball caps when fishing. Be all that as it may, I thought of this gadget as I read the Gospel text for this Sunday, Matthew 4:12-23.

In the text, Matthew combines what he sees as the fulfillment of a prophetic promise in Isaiah 9:1-4 (our Old Testament reading) to the territory of Galilee, a “great light” dawning on “people who sat in darkness,” with Jesus’ call of fishermen disciples who are directed to follow and learn to “fish for people.”

As I thought of lights for fishing I also remembered how attracted fish are to light. Where legal (and sometimes even where it’s not) fishermen use lights on the water, submerged lights, and even lighted lures to attract fish. I remember going to a grunion run one evening on a beach in California. Though the little fish are afraid of light on the beach where they come up to spawn, lights shined out on the water were being used to attract them closer to shore.

Pondering the present darkness of our world (which I realize is not much different from many ages before), I think about how attracted people are to real light when they see it. It seems to me that if, with those first disciples, we are going to answer Jesus’ evangelistic call to fish for people, then we will need to shine an attractive light for those around us to see.

That’s exactly what Jesus Himself did in the last verse of the text, 23, as He is described going about the whole region, teaching good news and healing sickness. If we really want to emulate Jesus, then we must be light-filled, winsome people whose message is good news rather than condemnation, whose actions bring healing and health rather than dysfunction and disease. Seems pretty obvious, but it’s worth remembering and saying again. It feels like we still have a ways to go to get it right.