By
Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.
Flat
Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,
Sunday
June 7th, , 2020 (6/10. How Jesus Saves.)
A British reporter who works for the
renown newspaper The Guardian, decided to give up something for
Lent.
What she decided to give up was quite
shocking. For the 6 weeks she gave up
her middle-class life-style. This meant
moving into a an apartment located in a low income area. It also meant giving up her car and taking
public transportation. Most challenging
of all, it meant reducing her income to live only on minimum wage. Even
though, she says she did ‘cheat’ a little by going to stay on weekends with
family, it was an eye opening experience
she will not soon forget.
What that British Reporter resolved to do
can be compared to the Bible’s claim of what God did for us: ‘(God) emptied himself, Paul writes, ‘taking
the form of a slave, being born in human likeness...and found in human form’
(Phil. 2: 7). Or, as the rock singer
Joan Osborne once put it: ‘What if God was one of us’...just a slave like
one of us, just a stranger on a bus,
trying to make his way home’. But it is the gospel of John expresses it most
brilliantly: ‘...the Word became flesh and lived among us’ (Jn.1:14).
Biblical scholars call this the incarnation. The word comes straight from the Latin incarnere;
‘becoming flesh’. It’s the most
fundamental Christian teaching about God’s saving work. This God who is eternal
Spirit; in whose mind is the reason everything is, left the ‘glories’ and
‘perfections of eternity to become ‘one of us.’
THE LOGIC OF ETERNITY
The incarnation lies at the heart of
everything Christians believe about God, but what does it matter and what does
it mean for us?
Once
I invited a student to find faith in Jesus Christ. His response was: “Religion is worthless
for me”, he said. “Maybe its proper
for a museum, but Faith means nothing for the real world.” He was honest.
In his communist upbringing, Christoph learned that life is only
‘material’. There was no Garden of Eden,
no human fall into sin, nor was there ever a Creator to sin against. They only thing that matters is ‘matter’
because matter is all there is.
The current of our own culture is still flowing
in a materialistic direction. It is said
that humans are evolving toward the secular, not the sacred; toward high tech,
not high temples; and toward having materialistic success, not achieving spiritual
maturity. You know this. I know this.
But is this a form of moral
development, or a continuation of human moral depravity? The biblical revelation questions the overly
optimistic outlook of human progress. It
suggests that spiritually, life always flows in one of two directions; either toward
true faith or toward false idols. In
which direction do you think we are going today?
As you might recall, when Jesus was
praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, he prayed that ‘the Spirit is indeed willing,
but the flesh is weak’ (Mark 14:48).
Today, we are more likely to be ‘strong’ in our flesh, but
‘weak’ In our spirit. What
happened? Even that student I mentioned (Christoph)
admitted that people used to believe that there is more to life than ‘flesh
and blood’ but, he said, ‘we’ve
moved beyond all that’.
Now, that’s an interesting move, isn’t it? We used to believe there was more to the life
than what we see, but now we can only see what we see. We used to believe there was more to life than
mere physical matter, but now only the physical matters. We used to believe that life is more than we
know, but now we only know what we know. And when it comes to thinking about the eternity,
which we are headed toward at the speed of life, the only thing human knowledge
knows for sure is that ‘when your dead, your dead!’
THE LOGIC OF LIFE
Now to speak about ‘eternal’ and ‘spiritual
matters’ today takes a lot of effort because it doesn’t matter that much to
people who think they have more important things to do. As one young person said about spiritual talk,
‘It’s so boring’!
What that youth was saying is exactly the
same as Christoph. The only thing that
matters is matter; living in the flesh,
as we wish to live, is what really matters not living for unseen, eternal
matters of the spirit. Since life is
short, we want to enjoy every day to its fullest. Living for eternity, living for what we can’t
see and don’t yet know for sure sounds like a waste of time. So, we think we get more out of life by
focusing on self, on getting what we want now; living only with fleshly
pursuits and ignoring our spirits or our souls.
Recently, there was a report in the news that
“Americans are Dying Younger at Alarming Rates”. Suicides, drug overdoses, liver diseases, and
other preventable causes has been driving life expectancy down for the past
three years. Despite spending more on
Health Care than any other country, we Americans are not getting our money’s
worth. In a wealthy, civilized country
like ours, deaths rates are supposed to be going down, but they are going up,
up, up.
“Something is terribly wrong”, the
American Medical Association admits. What
is it? Drug Addiction? Distracted Driving due to cell phones? That’s part of it, but what is already
understood is that it’s not accidental, and it’s not occasional, but it’s a
systemic change in society. Ever since
1998 the United States has fallen behind other wealthy countries in Life
Expectancy and the downward trend is speeding up. We are fast becoming a culture of despair and
premature death, even among youth.
Rather than being a culture of hope and longevity of life, we’ve are
becoming a culture of weakness and early death.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/theres-something-terribly-wrong-americans-are-dying-young-at-alarming-rates/ar-BBXmP82.
I don’t believe it is accidental that in
the middle of John’s discussion about the ‘Word’ as the source of ‘all
things’ (v.3) also comes this conclusion: ‘in him was life.’ And this ‘life’ that comes from ‘him’
must also be sustained through him. Without
a constant life-flow from the the life
source living things die on the vine.
If you pull up the roots of a plant, it dies. If you cut off a plant from its roots, it
dies. Or, if you cut off the supply of
nourishment to the roots, the plant weakens and will die.
This is why John not only says that ‘life’
come from Him, he is also saying that ‘life’ continues to be ‘in him’. The words ‘Abide in me...as I abide in
you’ comes straight from this gospel of John (15:1ff.). In other words, just like the ‘sun’ is the
ultimate source of life to our physical world,
John is saying that human life depends upon spiritual light too.
Don’t make this more complicated than it
is. Behind everything physical is a
spiritual source that comes from God.
If you cut yourself off from God then you cut yourself off life’s
spiritual source. Do you think this
could also be part of the human problem today?
Do you think that the more wealthy, materialistic and physically focused
we become, the more we might cut ourselves off from the very spiritual source
of our lives and end up with less life, less joy, and less fulfillment than
with more?
It is ironic, isn’t it? When we deny or ignore our spiritual side,
not only do we lose our spiritual sensitivities, but we lose physical strength and
risk shortening lives of flesh and blood as well. Isn’t this why the Bible says ‘there is a
sin unto death’ or that ‘the soul that sins shall die’? Whether through intent or not, when we cut ourselves off from the source, like
a ‘cut flower’ we may stand beautiful for a few fleeting moments, but our days are
shortened, the source of our strength is blocked, and even in our prime of life,
we can wither away.
Many people, when reading John’s ancient,
poetic, theological language about Word and Spirit, life and death, or light and darkness, are overwhelmed with its
grandeur. But in reality, such lofty language
points to the most basic, fundamental ‘truths’ of everyday life. The world in which we live, move, and have our
being all goes back to the mind and heart of God.
And this God who is the source of our
lives, desires to give us more life, better lives, and even to redeem our lives
from corruption and destruction. By becoming
flesh, God wills to redeem our physical lives.
By overcoming the ‘darkness’ as ‘the true light’, who ‘enlightens
everyone, through Jesus Christ, the man perfectly attuned to matters of the
soul and spirit, even while living in the flesh, Jesus offers us the ‘way, the
truth and the life,’ so that we might have more life, not less.
THE LOGIC OF LOVE
This kind of spiritual logic should be
simple to understand, but in our materialistically distracted, preoccupied
lives, a lot of other fleshly pursuits get in the way. ‘The light has to come into the ‘darkness’.
John says. ‘The
true light’ came into the ‘world’ so that life could improve, would
continue—so life could go on.
However, as the spiritual, saving story reports:
“He came unto his own, but his own people didn’t accept Him. This saving story tells how the eternal
came to save lives, but again, the eternal and the spiritual was ignored, blown
off, and pushed aside in rejection. But the
story of God becoming flesh to redeem our fleshly lives is a story of a
spiritual, eternal love that not only never gives up, but will not and cannot
die. Do you see it? His own people didn’t receive him. They attempted to do away with him. They rejected his kingdom based on a
spiritually infused life. Still, this love
infused with eternal, spiritual light, does not die, but still offers life. To those who did recognize him, and who will
recognize him, ‘who (believe)
upon his name’, he (gives)... ‘power to become children of (the eternal,
redeeming, life-saving) God’.
This logic of God’s love points us to God’s
will for this world. Life is not
only about the will of the flesh.
Life comes from God’s will. And it’s
God’s will to love and give life. This
is a story of a spiritual love that redeems physical and spiritual life that
will not die, that cannot die, and it is very logic of eternal love that
overcomes the darkness and wills to enlighten every single human life with the
light of eternal, redeeming love.
This is what the ‘Word’ becoming flesh is
about. And this is the saving story that
eternal love wants us all to know, for our own sake, but also for the sake of
the one who loves us and wills to redeem both our physical and our spiritual life.
Can we, still understand such an
eternal, spiritual, life-giving, flesh-becoming love? Maybe a real-life story about eternal spiritual
love infusing human flesh will help.
Rita Snowden tells a story from World War
II. In France, some soldiers brought the
body of a dead comrade to a cemetery to have him buried. The priest gently
asked whether their friend had been a baptized Catholic. The soldiers did not
know. The priest sadly informed them that, in that case, he could not permit
burial in the church yard. So the soldiers dug a grave just outside the
cemetery fence. And they laid their comrade to rest.
The next day the soldiers came back to
add some flowers, only to discover that the grave was nowhere to be found. Bewildered,
they were about to leave when the priest came up to speak to them. It seems
that he could not sleep the night before. He had been troubled about his
refusal to bury the soldier in the parish cemetery. So early in the morning he left his bed, and with
his own hands he moved the fence in order to include the body of the soldier
who had died for France.
My friends, this is a picture of how and
why God’s love infused our broken, fleshly humanity with spiritual grace and
truth. God’s truth about our sin demands
that we remain outside the fence. But God’s
grace moved the fence of justice be moved redeem us. Jesus came in flesh to move the fence, to
show, not only who we can be in our flesh, but to remind us, as Paul wrote,
that ‘even while we were sinners’, and even in this life of brokenness
and rebellion in our flesh, ‘God proves his love for us’ (Ro.
5:8-9).
THE LOGIC OF TRUTH
In Jesus Christ (v. 17), John says, ‘...we
have seen his glory, as of the glory of a Father’s only Son, full of grace and
truth (v.14).’ Using our
‘fence’ analogy, Jesus entered human flesh, not only to reveal God’s love for us,
but also so that we can be restored to our best life in the flesh, because we
see ’God’s glory’ lived in Jesus Christ who also lived in human flesh. The ‘glory’ that can be lived our own lives
because Jesus lived this ‘ glory’ in his own life, is the life-redeeming glory
we must not miss,
An Atlanta pastor was rushing around,
trying to make it to Christmas, and was much too busy to take on anything
else. Then a request came from a church
member to visit a friend of a friend in the hospital. Frankly, it wasn’t a
welcomed request. The pastor had plenty to do, and it was just one more
interruption in an already hectic schedule.
But when the pastor stepped into that gloomy hospital room, there was an
unexpected gift awaiting, more precious than any other gift to be received at Christmas."
The man in that room was dying, but this dying
man had served as a pastor for many years.
In their sharing together, they both celebrated eternal life and hope in
death, but the visiting pastor received a unique for life. After the visit, that visiting pastor wrote: "When
I left the hospital, I stepped out into a night that vibrated with the promise
that God is more powerful than darkness, than even death itself. When I looked
up, the stars were demonstrating the truth: just enough light and glory to prick
the human experience to let us know that God is there behind the darkness—more
love, more glory that we can bear to look at now, but ready to receive us” (Margaret Gatter Payne, Christian Century,
Nov. 20, 1991, page 1085).
Into a world that becomes dark sin and
death, the Word still speaks God’s eternal truth and grace. But how could both the dying person and the
living person have understood this logic of eternal, life-giving love, had God not
spoken to the whole world through the ‘incarnate’, ‘made-real’, God in the
flesh, life-redeeming love, known in Jesus Christ? John
says ‘the Word’ that became flesh
‘was God’. Jesus made God’s loving, saving,
and redeeming truth ‘known’ to us because Jesus is God. As the early Christian thinker, Athanasius put
it: Through Jesus Christ, God “became what we are that we might become what
he is.” https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/study/module/athanasius/.
Now, that’s the Spirit of who God is,
made flesh for us. Amen.
No comments :
Post a Comment